Book Review: The Parliament by Aimee Pokwatka

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: The Parliament
Author: Aimee Pokwatka
Publisher: Tordotcom
Publication date: January 16, 2024
Length: 361 pages
Genre: Horror/fantasy
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley
Rating:

The Birds meets The Princess Bride in this tale of friendship, responsibility, and the primal force of nature.

“Murder owls are extreme,” Jude said. “What’s more extreme than murder owls?”

Madeleine Purdy is stuck in her home town library.

When tens of thousands of owls descend on the building, rending and tearing at anyone foolish enough to step outside, Mad is tasked with keeping her students safe, and distracted, while they seek a solution to their dilemma.

Perhaps they’ll find the inspiration they seek in her favorite childhood book, The Silent Queen….

With food and fresh water in low supply, the denizens of the library will have to find a way out, and soon, but the owls don’t seem to be in a hurry to leave…

The Parliament is a story of grief and missed opportunities, but also of courage and hope.

And of extremely sharp beaks.

Awww, look at the cute owl on the cover!

Kidding. That’s a murder owl. Not cute!

And ignore what the synopsis says about The Princess Bride — that might seem to indicate that this book is full of whimsy and silliness, and it’s nothing of the sort.

Let’s get back to the murder owls.

When Mad Purdy agrees to teach a kids’ chemistry workshop — making bath bombs — as a favor to her former best friend who works at the local library in their hometown, she has no idea what she’s in for. She’s already moved away to put distance between herself and the site of her worst memories, but in the name of friendship, agrees to do this one thing.

But that one thing, meant to just be one brief event, turns into days of waking nightmares, as the library is surrounded by millions of tiny owls. Maybe one on its own is cute. This swarm is far from it, as the trapped inhabitants learn after watching the owls descend on the first person to venture outside. It isn’t pretty.

Mad expected to be in and out in one hour, boundaries firmly in place. Instead, she’s thrust into the role of protector, keeping the kids physically and emotionally safe, or as safe as they can be, given that food, water, and medicine are running out, and the outside world seems to have no clue how to rescue them.

To keep the kids distracted, Mad begins to read to them from her favorite book, The Silent Queen — which seems to show up in the library just when needed. No one has ever heard of it before, but for Mad, it was a lifesaver through the worst days of trauma during her childhood. The story of a young queen who isolates herself in a tower, but finally has to step out of her safe zone to save her people, may seem a little on the nose, but it doesn’t feel heavy-handed. The story gives the kids something to focus on, and meanwhile starts forcing Mad out of her own inner fortress.

The Parliament can be terribly frightening, and while there are several scenes of gruesome attacks when a few people are foolish enough to venture outside, much of the horror is psychological. The people inside the library are trapped, cut off (there’s no wifi or cell service, thanks to the owl swarm), and utterly reliant on one another and whatever scraps of supplies they can scavenge. Meanwhile, the few attempts at solutions that come from outside the library seem doom to failure, and worse, put the people inside the library in even greater danger.

This book is fascinating, and the story-within-a-story approach (chapters of The Silent Queen alternate with chapters focusing on the library) keeps us on the edge of our seats with both pieces of the narrative. The Silent Queen reads like a fairy tale/fantasy quest, and it’s both lovely and dramatic. The main story, within the library itself, conveys all the terror and claustrophobia of being trapped with a bunch of strangers, with a clock ticking and no rescue on the way.

Mad herself survived a terrible incident at age eleven, and that’s impacted every aspect of her life ever since. She’s taught herself a thousand useless, random tricks and survival skills, but at the expense of allowing herself to connect with others or let anyone really know her. This may make her the perfect person for helping the children in the library, but she has to get past her own trauma before she can truly start connecting with them.

My only quibble with The Parliament, and it’s a minor one, is that there are too many adult characters in the library to keep track of. We have Mad and her best friend Farrah and her former friend and love interest Nash, but there are also librarians and a book group and some seniors and, well, they start blurring together. Ultimately, I was more interested in the kids as individuals than in the glimpses we get of the adults, and so I didn’t bother trying to keep most of them straight in my mind. Like I said, this is a pretty minor issue, and ultimately didn’t keep me from being totally engrossed in the book.

Overall, The Parliament is a fascinating read, and once I started, I just couldn’t stop. The main story and the fantasy story within it work together in complicated and surprising ways, and as the tension ratchets up, I was on the edge of my seat. The author does a terrific job of keeping the action intense and frightening, while also letting us inside the characters’ experiences and providing a look at the long-lasting effects of trauma and survivor’s guilt.

Highly recommended.

1Nov2020

Book Review: Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: Plain Bad Heroines
Author: Emily M. Danforth
Publisher: William Morrow
Publication date: October 20, 2020
Length: 608 pages
Genre: Horror
Source: Purchased
Rating:

The award-winning author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post makes her adult debut with this highly imaginative and original horror-comedy centered around a cursed New England boarding school for girls—a wickedly whimsical celebration of the art of storytelling, sapphic love, and the rebellious female spirit.
Our story begins in 1902, at The Brookhants School for Girls. Flo and Clara, two impressionable students, are obsessed with each other and with a daring young writer named Mary MacLane, the author of a scandalous bestselling memoir. To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish their own private club and call it The Plain Bad Heroine Society. They meet in secret in a nearby apple orchard, the setting of their wildest happiness and, ultimately, of their macabre deaths. This is where their bodies are later discovered with a copy of Mary’s book splayed beside them, the victims of a swarm of stinging, angry yellow jackets. Less than five years later, The Brookhants School for Girls closes its doors forever—but not before three more people mysteriously die on the property, each in a most troubling way.
Over a century later, the now abandoned and crumbling Brookhants is back in the news when wunderkind writer, Merritt Emmons, publishes a breakout book celebrating the queer, feminist history surrounding the “haunted and cursed” Gilded-Age institution. Her bestselling book inspires a controversial horror film adaptation starring celebrity actor and lesbian it girl Harper Harper playing the ill-fated heroine Flo, opposite B-list actress and former child star Audrey Wells as Clara. But as Brookhants opens its gates once again, and our three modern heroines arrive on set to begin filming, past and present become grimly entangled—or perhaps just grimly exploited—and soon it’s impossible to tell where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins.
A story within a story within a story and featuring black-and-white period illustrations, Plain Bad Heroines is a devilishly haunting, modern masterwork of metafiction that manages to combine the ghostly sensibility of Sarah Waters with the dark imagination of Marisha Pessl and the sharp humor and incisive social commentary of Curtis Sittenfeld into one laugh-out-loud funny, spellbinding, and wonderfully luxuriant read.

This 600+ page book almost defies description, but I’ll give it a shot!

“I wish some one would write a book about a plan bad heroine so that I might feel in real sympathy with her.” – Mary MacLane

Plain Bad Heroines is a story-within-a-story book, with interlocking characters and motifs that center on the (supposedly) cursed and/or haunted grounds of the Brookhants School for Girls — an early 20th century institution for the education of society girls, located on a wooded estate in upper-crust Rhode Island.

In 1902, students Clara and Flo are inspired by the writings of (real-life) Mary MacLane and form a secret society, the Plain Bad Heroines, to celebrate her work and her life. Clara and Flo are in love, but after a disastrous trip home and a ride back to school with her judgmental cousin, Clara storms off into the woods to meet up with Flo, only for both girls to meet a ghastly end by being attacked by swarms of yellow jackets.

In our own timeline, the events from 1902 gain new notoriety after Merritt Emmons publishes The Happenings at Brookhants at the age of sixteen. Now years later, the book is being made into a film by an edgy director, with superstar “celesbian” Harper Harper committed to star as Flo. Merritt is on board as a producer, and she’s not pleased when Audrey Wood, a B-list actor who bombed her audition in a major way, is cast as Clara.

As the production cast and crew settle in to film on location at Brookhants, weird things start to happen, and there’s much more going on than can be easily explained. Is the place truly haunted? Or is this Hollywood manipulation at its most devious?

The plot weaves backward and forward in time, cutting between the modern-day movie storyline and the complicated relationships between Harper, Merritt, and Audrey, and the timeline that includes the aftermath of Clara and Flo’s deaths and the impact on Libbie, the school headmistress, and her lover, Alex (Alexandra).

There’s so much more to both pieces of the story than is readily apparent, and the author carefully layers on more and more hints and explanations, constantly deepening the story and shifting its direction and meaning.

Plain Bad Heroines is proudly, unabashedly queer, and its (plain, bad) heroines make no attempts to follow anyone’s rules but their own. They love as they please, and take inspiration from Mary MacLane’s own bold pronouncements when they need courage. The relationships are intricate and shifting, in both timelines, and the character refuse to be cookie-cutter types — author Emily M. Danforth does an amazing job of managing such a large cast and making sure each individual character has a life and personality of her own.

This book is BIG, and it takes concentration, but I could not stop reading once I started. The writing style is clever and filled with footnotes and commentary that are snarky and funny and informative. There are also dire and tragic happenings — and this IS a horror story too, with plenty of creepy, spine-tingling moments.

Black and white illustrations throughout the book add to the overall mood and make reading this book feel like an experience.

Yellow jackets are scary anyway, but now, having read Plain Bad Heroines, I’m pretty sure I’m terrified of them. Read the book — you’ll see what I mean.

I really only have two complaints about Plain Bad Heroines, and the first is not with the story itself but with the layout. Whoever picked the typeface for this book should have paid more attention to the asterisks that lead to the footnotes — I almost never saw them (they’re tiny), and had to constantly go back and search the page to see where the footnotes connect to.

My second complaint is a larger one, which is that I wasn’t completely satisfied with the ending. It leaves a bunch of unanswered questions, and I’m a little frustrated that certain elements didn’t get more clarity and resolution.

Still, this is overall a marvelous and unique book, and I laughed and shivered my way through it. The final scene takes place at the Cannes Festival premiere of The Happenings at Brookhants, and all I could think was, damn! I wish this was a real movie, because it would be fascinating to see how it all worked out.

Plain Bad Heroines is a terrific read. Don’t miss it!

To learn more about the real Mary MacLane, visit The Mary MacLane Project.