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    The Wall Street Journal.

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Lou Grande (148 KP) rated Sarah in Books

Jun 29, 2018  
Sarah
Sarah
J.T. LeRoy | 2001 | Fiction & Poetry
5
6.5 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
There is so much wrong with this book, and not just because it features a victim of child sex trafficking as the protagonist. The story of JT LeRoy is more interesting than Sarah. LeRoy doesn't exist. The person writing these books was a white woman in her forties. However, she claimed to be someone like the character in this book: a male or intersex child prostitute raised by a drug addicted mother. The media EXPLODED over this. Garbage wrote a song about these characters ("Cherry Lips" on Beautiful Garbage); Asia Argento adapted Sarah into an unsuccessful film, and Gus Van Sant designed the cover! When it came time to make a media appearance, she hired her sister-in-law, who was kind of masculine, to portray the "character" of JT LeRoy.

Thing is, this book is basically Hogg by Samuel Delaney. He's a gay man who wrote a similar book three months before the Stonewall Riots. It's full of anger and rage, and it's more depraved and weird than anything LeRoy could conjure up. The parallels are clear: both feature underage protagonists who are largely nameless and passive, used for sexual purposes, usually at the hands of truck drivers. And Hogg is better in every way. It punches you in the face, where Sarah pulls back at the last second.

Is the story fun to read? Sure, in a sick kind of way. But the fact that it was done before, and better, and by someone who lives in the LGBT community, makes it hard for me to stomach. As it is, this feels like LGBT fanfiction.
  
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Goddess in the Stacks (553 KP) rated Frankenstein in Baghdad in Books

Jul 23, 2019  
Frankenstein in Baghdad
Frankenstein in Baghdad
Jonathan Wright, Ahmed Saadawi | 2018 | Science Fiction/Fantasy
6
6.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
This book won at least two awards; the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and France's Grand Prize for Fantasy, and the author had previously been named one of the 39 best Arab authors under the age of 39. I picked it up to read for the Year of the Asian Reading Challenge, since the Middle East is all-too-often neglected in regional groupings like that. People don't think of it as Europe or Asia. I also try to read translated books on occasion, in an effort to diversify my reading. So this hit a number of my interests - I wish I had actually liked the book more!

It's an interesting retelling of Frankenstein - which I haven't actually read, and now feel like I really should. But it bounces around between several viewpoints. It's not too many to keep straight, but it's definitely too many to truly care about. And it suffers from an unreliable narrator - it's written as several stories told to an author from multiple people that he's woven together into a single narrative, and while he does that well, it suffers from contradictions between how different characters recall things, scenes that don't play a part in furthering the plot but the characters thought they were important, and no authoritative "this is what REALLY happened" to draw it all together.

And I very much dislike unreliable narrators, so that alone is enough to make me dislike the book. If you like ambiguous narratives and vigilante stories, however, you might enjoy this, and the writing style itself was quite engrossing.

You can find all my reviews and more at http://goddessinthestacks.com