Asakiyume mita

A Christmas story by Aster Glenn Gray that I only got to reading now, in February--but just two days until Valentine's Day, and it's a romance, so that fits! And it's very wintery where I am right now, which fits in with the setting of the story, a snowed-in chateau.

George and Nikolai have been rivals (and secret lovers) in a US-Soviet game of spy-versus-spy for 20 years, but it's December 1991 now, and the jig is about to be up for those sorts of games ... but not before the two find themselves thrown together at a chateau, rented out to a toff Englishman (he goes by the name of Biffy) who's hosting the most massive of Christmas parties there. The chateau was supposed to be abandoned; they've both come looking for compromising letters...

The touch is light and the atmosphere is comfy (so much good food!), but the mood, while never heavy, is nostalgic, with a touch of melancholy. Maybe two or three touches. But there's humor, too, as when they have a race back to the Rudolph Christmas sweater that George has been lent (all houseguests are given a Christmas sweater for the duration), and Nikolai gets there first:

George chased after [Nikolai] and tackled [him] just a hair too late: Nikolai had already flung himself on top of the sweater. They tussled briefly, George trying to distract Nikolai by kissing the side of his face. But Nikolai, giggling, slipped away like an eel, and he danced away and pulled the sweater over his head before George was back on his feet. ​

George gave in gracefully. “You look hideous,” he informed Nikolai. ​Nikolai proudly smoothed the sweater “You are grieving the loss of your pompom,” he replied, giving Rudolph’s [pompom] nose a gentle squeeze.

It's a quick read and good fun--and it had a great eleventh-hour plot twist with regard to who-all is after the letters, which I enjoyed.

I've been daunted by the idea of trying to do justice to Aster Glenn Gray's The Sleeping Soldier here on Dreamwidth. Somehow I did manage, finally, to say a few things on Goodreads, but when I think about writing a DW post, I think about saying more, or making it more personal, or something. And then I wilt. And that's a shame, because I love this book. All of AGG's books are fun, thoughtful tales, but this one really nails a central theme of hers, which is what friendship means or has meant for people at different points in time, and what romantic love means, and what sexual attraction is and how that fits in.

The scenario is that Russell, a young Civil War soldier, was cursed, Sleeping Beauty style, by a fairy, and has now awakened 100 years in his future, in 1965, where he's guided through his new life by Caleb, a miserably closeted gay college student. The story has plenty of the fun you'd expect from that setup, as Russell encounters the wonders of life in 1965--and also enlightens the college crowd about which things were, in fact, present in 1865 ("I know what ketchup is," he says haughtily at one point). But it also probes the grief and loss that would go with waking up 100 years in the future, and touches on how we understand history--or don't:

Caleb nodded. "It's hard for people to let go of their preconceived notions [about the past]."

"They don't really want my opinion on anything," Russell griped. "They just want to draft the whole nineteenth century into supporting what they think. As if we all agreed with each other! We had this whole Civil War, you might could remember."

And then there's that theme of friendship and romantic love, and what's appropriate to express and what's considered by society to be deviant at any given time. I knew some of this, but not much, and very little about how same-sex attraction has been understood. In fact, what little I know is mainly thanks to AGG's earlier stories. I'm humbled to say that her writing in this book made me understand the situation of a gay friend of mine (Caleb's contemporary) in new ways. On that note, I really love the character Michael in this story. What a good and patient friend.

I came across this in someone's Goodreads review of the book:

I felt sad because I honestly never knew how it was in the past (men being open with their affection to each other).

And this, from an Amazon reviewer:

I came out in my teens, in the Midwest in the mid-70s, and the novel captures that sense of isolation and self-discovery: reading The Charioteer, Giovanni’s Room etc. anything with gay characters while feeling like you’re the only gay person in the world and trying to figure out how you’ll make a life. I never would have expected this book to capture the profundity and comedy of this forgotten world so well.

Those comments say so eloquently what's important and special about this book.

... But past-meets-nearer-past moments were also great, honestly. I enjoyed the explanations of things like hot dogs ("Hot dogs are... um. A kind of sausage") and Russell's encounters with items such as escalators a whole lot too.

A new Aster Glenn Gray novel is out today, Tramps and Vagabonds, and people, this one holds a special place in my heart. I beta read it, for one thing, but it's not just that. It's a very tender story, right in that place where friendship bleeds into romantic love and sexual attraction, and the characters are so, so finely drawn. And on top of that, it's a wonderful window onto a time and place that's fascinating: the world of young people on the road during the Great Depression. Aster Glenn Gray absolutely nails the combination of the romance of the road and the awful realities of it, without having "awful reality" crush out the romance. In the summertime, it really can be glorious. If, like me, you've ever wondered what it would be like to ride the rails, WELL HERE YOU GO. She shows hobo camps ("jungles"--probably the people who read here already know that term, but I didn't), she shows the protective/exploitive relationships that develop, and just--she's really good at showing all this without passing judgment and without giving you a sense that she's withholding judgment but boy could she lay it on you if she wanted. Things just are presented. Or okay, because you're seeing things from experienced James's point of view, you do get *some* opinions and judgments, but they're the opinions and judgments of an adolescent who doesn't even know who he is or what he's feeling or what he's going to do with himself.

And the details of 1930s middle America are just to die for. There's a scene early on where James is drawing soap art on a diner window in trade for a meal--wonderful.

And then into all that, there's what it was like to be gay in such a setting (very different from what it was like to be gay in mainstream society, but still with all kinds of nastiness and rule and hierarchies because, heh, humanity, you know?)

I'm very demanding when it comes to romance tropes: I need them to feel organic to the story (and what feels organic depends on the story: in a comedy like Enemies to Lovers, being chained together for a writing exercise feels organic! It probably woudn't in this story). So I am happy to report, they feel very organic here.

There are some emotionally intense moments that I had to read quickly through, but some readers will adore those moments most of all. And there's some surprisingly hot sex--surprising for me, that is, because I don't have any of the bits. Human desire is such a weird thing!

The book is out in e-version now, but I am pretty sure paperback will follow; it usually does.

The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball is a wonderful, unique story. Its protagonist, Piper, is eleven, and I think it has the potential to be a beloved favorite of readers of that age, but it's also a very rewarding story to read as an adult.

I've been calling it a time travel story, but really it's a friendship-between-times story, in that the focus isn't really on traveling through time so much as it is having a friend from a different era. Piper's friend from a different era is Rosie, who's from approximately fifty years in her past. I say approximately, because Piper encounters Rosie when Rosie is different ages, and that's part of what makes this story so very cool: for Piper, the friendship is an intense one that unfolds over three months; for Rosie, Piper is a figure in her life from the time she's four years old up until shortly before her thirteenth birthday.

My recollections of stories of friendships between times are that they progress chronologically for both parties--but why should they? And in The Time Traveling Popcorn Ball, they don't. Piper's first encounter with Rosie is not Rosie's first encounter with Piper, and Piper doesn't experience Rosie's first encounter (if you follow me) until well into their friendship.

Because of the difference in how they experience each other, they play vastly different roles in each other's lives. For Rosie, Piper is a life-long guardian and secret friend, a big sister who's better than her real big sister, a magical person who gives her glimpses of the future (iPods! the end of Communism!). For Piper, Rosie is also a secret friend, but a secret friend in a lonely, hard time, after Piper's mother has died and her father, who has been rendered a zombie by grief, has packed up Piper and her sister Angela and moved them to a new town, where live in much reduced circumstances. For Piper, Rosie is a blessed escape from all that.

Not only do the two girls have the sorts of conversational exchanges that you can count on in any Aster Glenn Gray story,** their friendship is also suffused with random, unobtrusive, delightful magic, which they discover and revel in just the way you knew you'd revel in it if you were lucky enough to find it. The magic exists without commentary or explanation and is entirely wonderful.

The end is also daring and satisfying--the eleven-year-old in me loves it, and so does the fifty-six-year-old. This book exists as a paperback! I'd love to see it get into the hands of some eleven-year-olds. But I also think there are a lot of twelve-to-seventy-year-olds (and beyonnnnnd!) who will love it.

**For example, Rosie says this at one point to Piper:

“Sometimes I think growing up is just erosion. Like we start out as igneous rocks. The volcanoes spew out magma and it hardens in the air and becomes rock. And these rocks start out all spiky and odd shaped. But then they fall in the sea and it washes away all their rough edges, and they all end up smooth at the end, all boring and just the same. I see it happening to my sister, and…” She shuddered, shaking her head as if she could shake away bad thoughts, and skipped quickly up the steps to the next porch.

And at another point, talking about books, Piper says this to Rosie:

I frowned. “I do like Charlotte’s Web,” I said.  “I mean, I like the talking animals, and Charlotte, and Templeton the Rat. But I don’t get the end – I don’t see why Fern gives up the talking animals. Why can’t she be interested in both animals and boys?”

Amazon purchase link--it's the paperback, but you can switch to the Kindle version.

I've finished the second novella in A Sinister Quartet--Jessica Wick's "An Unkindness." It's fabulous in a completely different way from "The Twice-Drowned Saint," and isn't that what's great about a good anthology? This is a good anthology.

Ravenna is the younger sister of Aliver, the heir to their peninsular kingdom, which has a bloody past and still has things like bride tasks to win a hand in marriage, but also has tourists and lawyers--a sort of early twentieth century, maybe? Aliver has always been a sterling brother, affectionate and lively, who would love to have the family motto changed to "Never satisfied, always curious." The actual family motto is "Loyalty is true," and both mottos come into play when Ravenna realizes her brother has changed--much like Kay in Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. He's slipping away to a fairy realm underneath a garden fountain. Well. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a brother palely loitering in fairy realms is in need of a rescue, or he may find himself paying a teind to hell.

Fortunately, Ravenna is up to the task. She is a wonderful combination of indomitable and self-deprecating, able to affect the manners of her station but often quailing within--a delight, as here, when she describes lurking:

The last thing I wanted to do was dance, especially in case the owl-woman saw and asked how my oath had been concluded so quickly, and so I lurked. I am quite good at lurking at balls. The key is to be in constant motion, always on the periphery. I found a refreshment table and lurked there, but touched none of the food. I found a table with a game of cards and lurked there until the players made noises as if I should join them. The cards they used looked nothing like any deck I have ever seen. I lurked beside a little silver bear who I mistook for a statue at first, until she asked me for the name of a color.

And the fairies and fairy realm is wonderful. About a third of its denizens are creatures out of Remedios Varo's paintings, beings with animal or plant heads. As for the human-seeming ones...

another third went about with their eyes closed, as if blind or sleepwalking. The final third seemed to be human, but human in a tugging sort of way. They weren’t necessarily beautiful, but they were difficult not to look at.

... And they are cruel and decadent, as often fairies are.

Ravenna's quick wits as she goes up against this story's fairy queen are a joy to read, but there's another, more understated strength in that story, and that has to do with why Aliver has put himself in this situation and what it means that Ravenna sees things through to the end. If you've ever dealt with the depression of a loved one, or ever been the one suffering from depression, with your family hovering around, that element of the story will speak to you.

Denizen of Jessica Wick's fairyland, as portrayed by Remedios Varo




That's one-half of the sinister quartet! Hoping to finish the other two tales before the collection goes live, next Tuesday. If you're interested, you can preorder here.

I also want to call your attention to Aster Glenn Gray's The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball, which went live yesterday--unfairly overshadowed by our on-fire country's news shit show. It's a wonderful story, unique and satisfying. It all begins when a popcorn ball appears on the stand where Piper's dad keeps his treasured baseball. One minute the popcorn ball is there.... next minute it's gone. But then when Piper and her big sister Angela step are walking to the store, there's the popcorn ball again. Angela gives it a kick...

It wasn’t a very good kick. She caught it at a bad angle, mushing in one side and only kicking it forward a few feet.

But – and I saw this specifically – there was a little rose quartz pebble lying on the busted up sidewalk. The popcorn ball rolled over it, and it picked the pebble right up.

“Angela!” I yelled. “Did you see that?”

“See what?” she asked. And then I remembered she hadn’t seen the popcorn ball in Dad’s room at all. She didn’t know that it already had the pebble on it then – before it picked up the pebble now. And the popcorn ball was gone again.

The popcorn ball leads to a friendship with a girl from the past, and time hijinks ensue, but it's Aster Glenn Gray, so in addition to time adventures, you also get really great exploration of interpersonal relations.

Link to that one is here--both Kindle edition and paperback. It's fun reading as an adult, but would also be great to share with a middle-grade-aged reader.

The Wolf and the Girl
Aster Glenn Gray




A wonderful thing that Aster Glen Gray does in The Wolf and the Girl—which she also did in Briarley—is transpose a fairy tale to a very particular time and place and make you really feel that time and place. For Briarley it was World War II England; for The Wolf and the Girl it’s pre-Revolutionary Russia—and then early-twentieth-century France.

The first part is like a Russian lacquer box—dark, jewel-like, beautiful. As a small child, Masha would be with her Babushka when older village girls came to hear Babushka’s stories and fairy tales. The older girls all went on to better things, and none more so than Raisa, who got a scholarship to university in St. Petersburg. But then Raisa fell in with anarchists and was exiled to Siberia, “which gave the good people of Kostin no end of satisfaction.”

“But they were all so proud when she went to study in St. Petersburg,” Masha protested to Babushka. “Why are they happy it ended like this?”
“Pride and jealousy are two sides of the same coin,” Babushka told her. “If you toss it up in the air, you never know which way it will come down.”

--Just the sort of insight into human nature that I’ve come to expect from this author, and the sort of thing that makes The Wolf and the Girl more than just a fairy tale wearing new clothes.

Not only has Raisa been exiled to Siberia, she’s fallen afoul of an anarchist enchantress. Wounded and bespelled, she finds her way to Masha and Babushka, and the elements of Little Red Riding Hood—transmuted to fit pre-Revolutionary Russian times—play out.

But the story doesn’t end there! There’s a whole next part—for all of us who’ve ever said, “But what comes after the ‘happily ever after’?” (Only in this case, it’s not quite a happily-ever-after—there are situations and exigencies.) And *this* part involves fleeing to France, encountering a friendly theater group, and eventually getting involved in film. There’s still an angry enchantress on the loose, too, so . . . well, it’s an exciting and satisfying ride. I recommend it highly!

It's available both as an ebook and a paperback.

Briarley retells the story of Beauty and the Beast, imagining what might happen if Beauty’s father was man enough not to let his daughter sacrifice herself for him. Instead, he stays in her place.

In this retelling, it’s World War II, and the father is a parson who’s also a veteran of the Great War, and the beast takes the form of a dragon.

You know this is going to be a different type of retelling by the parson’s initial reaction to the dragon’s dilemma:

“The curse says you must learn to love and be loved, does it not? Those are the only conditions?” The dragon nodded, his head still buried in his hands. The parson broke a piece off a roll and buttered it. “Then I suggest you get a puppy,” he said.

Nor is this mere flippancy: “I have seen shell-shocked soldiers make great, great strides when they are given charge of a dog,” he says, and adds,

“A dog is a more loving creature than man. All the things that we wish we were, dogs are: loyal, faithful, loving, and cheerful in the face of adversity.

And that’s the type of story this is: the parson musing on the nature of love, different types of love, in the company of the dragon, who’s at first haughty, vain, capricious, and entitled, but gradually becomes… well, somewhat less so. Gray resists the easy out of a dramatic personality transformation—the emotional equivalent of taking off the glasses and having a character become suddenly gorgeous. Real people are beloved despite being prickly and short tempered. In this story, the parson has reasons for feeling both deep pity for and a deep attachment to the young man that the dragon once was.

The two talk not only about love, but also morality, vindictiveness, compassion—so much. And lest I’ve made it sound like some kind of milk-soaked graham cracker of a story, let me quickly also add that it’s **funny** too, as when the dragon and the parson have this exchange:

“That’s not how you learn to love, not at all. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it does not kidnap – ”

“You’re misquoting,” the dragon interrupted. “Paul doesn’t say anything about kidnapping.”

The parson replies, “I believe the injunction against kidnapping is implied by all the rest of it.”

It’s an original, moving, surprising story—I highly recommend it. It's available on Amazon here.