Find Me: A Review

Laura Van Den Berg's Find Me is a pandemic apocalypse set within a malaise filled falling apart modern world. It is a the coming off age story of a young girl, who catches the usually deadly disease , and is shipped off to an odd medical research facility in Kansas.

 

Laura Van Den Berg fits in that mold of up and coming young writer.  She was raised in Florida and lives in Boston:  two areas that do feature in the story.  Her previous books had been short story collections.

 

Joy is an ironically named young lady who grew up in the foster care system in Massachusetts.  She is struggling with dead end jobs, loneliness, etc. when a plague sweeps through the country.  The first signs of the plague include memory loss, which is used as a literary device set against the difficult memories of our heroine.

 

It is a difficult story to review without giving away too many important plot moments.  There is a little bit of a medical thriller going on, along with some episodic short-story-like tales interspersed throughout the stories main theme of the young lady trying to find herself.  The plague, the weird medical story, and the depiction of a country slowly falling apart, is very well done.

 

All of which sounds great, except that the author has a less than straightforward delivery, and their is a fair amount of poorly explained oddness.  It has an odd disjointed, trippy sort of feel that diffuses the storyline into more a muddle of confusion, than a heartfelt story of discovery.

 

So I while I liked certain parts of the story very much, in the end I was disappointed.  A lot of modern readers seem to like overly confused story telling, and a coming of age stories are also wildly popular.  So combining those two elements guarantees that it will get some positive review.  But I don't think the payoff of the novel justifies the effort.  I would call it a near miss.

 

We now come to our two descriptive (not qualitative) ratings: 1 to 7 with 4 the mid-point and 7 high. Realism does not include the cause of the collapse or apocalypse, but is otherwise an assessment of how close to today's world is the setting. Could you imagine your friends, or families living through the situation. Readability is not literary merits, but literally how quick and painless of a read.

 

You have strange trippy-ness, intermingled with a fairly realistic portrayal of surviving in a collapsed economy with a very realistic portrayal of how a deadly pandemic might actually play out.  I think the trippy-ness does effect some of the realism, but mostly effects our next category - readability - so I will say its realism is a six.

 

Readability is mixed.  There is a plot line, and some elements of the plotline do move forward, and have a fair amount of resolution. But there is a lot of odd sub-stories along the way, and not all the storylines are resolved cleanly.  The symbolism is a little heavy handed at times.  So I will call it a literary 3. 

Under A Graveyard Sky: A Review

John Ringo's Under a Graveyard Sky is his entry into the "realistic" zombie-apocalypse.  By realistic, it uses about the only sensible way you might get a real zombie-apocalypse, through bioterrorism. The book is the first of the four books in the Black Tide Rising series.

 

 

 

John Ringo is famous in what I would call the modern version of the men's action novel.  These seem to have adopted their tenor from Tom Clancy's well researched near future, military-clandestine based stories.  In the case of Mr. Ringo, much of his work fits within the Military Science Fiction genre.  It is not a genre I have read much, but for the reading male populace, I would call it a welcome change from the earlier pulp fiction violent-sleaze-soft porn that dominated up into the early 1990s.

 

So what you get is a lot of detailed research on what is mostly a bunch of either utter nonsense, or over analyzed drivel used as a way to make the rock-em-sock-em shoot up combat story seem plausible.  Improbable in this case refers to the fact that two of the main combatant-protagonists, even though their parents are healthy and still around, are teenage girls.

 

So the quick run down.  Prepper, Australian special services father lives in United States with wife and two teenage daughters.  He gets special advance notice of coming z-apocalypse from secretive sources, goes and buys a boat with money conveniently given to him, and then, after a very strange trip to the least safe environ you can imagine, New York City, starts on a nautical, apocalyptic journey off the East Coast of the United States.

 

The tone of the novel is that of, in this case mostly unearned,  self-righteous heroics, sprinkled lightly some anti-Obama/Democrat Party digs,  counter poised with an insanely pro-military, libertarian-right version of reality.  A world view that I suspect is very popular with the military folks that a lot of these books are no doubt sold to.  While it is not a viewpoint I see that often in my readings, I find preachy self-righteousness annoying in general, even when it is closer to my own version of reality than most.

 

I did find the heroics of the teenage girls highly annoying.  I happen to know a fair number of athletic, very educated young ladies in their age range and none of them could even come close to pulling of the heroics they are capable of.  The author greatly underestimates the learning curve in trying to pull off sophisticated maneuverings of boarding actions, and small combat units at sea.  The odd sexual overtones used when describing the younger tom-boy daughter is particularly creepy to my mind. 

 

So I was not thrilled with the novel.  But I am ambivalent.  The heavy research involved does mean you get to learn some interesting factoids along the way, and for some reason, I have a particular fondness for novelistic  high-seas escapes from the apocalypse.  I think a lot of folks who like the action adventure type of prepper-porn, will really like it.  By the standards of that genre, much of the goings on are very realistic.

 

We now come to our two descriptive (not qualitative) ratings: 1 to 7 with 4 the mid-point and 7 high. Realism does not include the cause of the collapse or apocalypse, but is otherwise an assessment of how close to today's world is the setting. Could you imagine your friends, or families living through the situation. Readability is not literary merits, but literally how quick and painless of a read.

 

It is set in the near future (a plus), it is zombie-novel (a minus because the zombie issue doesn't go away), the hero-family has access to all sorts of ridiculous intel and money (a minus), they do worry about ammo and such ( a plus), there are issues of intergroup bickering (a plus) .   So I will call it a six on the basis of the extensive research, even as I noted that the overall tone of the story is not always plausible.

 

Readability is tough.  There is a lot of action, but there is also a lot of talking, and arguing, and the story line takes some extended detours before we get to our boat bound excitement phase.  So it's not a page turner, but not a complete boar either.  Unless you think mild jabs at Democrats count for literary symbolism, it is pretty much an on-the-surface story.  Call it a six. 

Machiavelli on cycles

The concept of a cyclical nature of rise and fall of political entities goes back a long way.  Here is Machiavelli's thoughts on it.

 

Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, Book 5, Chapter 1

It may be observed, that provinces amid the vicissitudes to which they are subject, pass from order into confusion, and afterward recur to a state of order again; for the nature of mundane affairs not allowing them to continue in an even course, when they have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline. In the same manner, having been reduced by disorder, and sunk to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend; and thus from good they gradually decline to evil, and from evil again return to good.  

The reason is, that valor produces peace; peace, repose; repose, disorder; disorder, ruin; so from disorder order springs; from order virtue, and from this, glory and good fortune. Hence, wise men have observed, that the age of literary excellence is subsequent to that of distinction in arms; and that in cities and provinces, great warriors are produced before philosophers. Arms having secured victory, and victory peace, the buoyant vigor of the martial mind cannot be enfeebled by a more excusable indulgence than that of letters; nor can indolence, with any greater or more dangerous deceit, enter a well regulated community.

Although I don't completely ascribe to his theory, it is notable that our move to a large standing professional army (a national mercenary force) somewhat mirrors Rome turning away from its citizen's armies toward a professional standing force.  This of course leaves the folks back home with more time to chatter and talk about things.

Men are stronger than women

I am not going to make a huge deal of this one, but I thought with the prevalence of the Hunger Game-style combative post apocalyptic (or at least dystopian) female warriors, to point out that it is not a good idea of women to rely on matching physical strength with men in real life deadly conflicts.

Hand-grip strength of young men, women and highly trained female athletes
D. Leyk , et al, European Journal of Applied Physiology (2007) 99:415-421 (Hat tip: UNZ:RK)

What we are talking about is our forearms. That is where the muscles we grip with primarily come from.  The group tested is between 20 and 25 years old. It all comes down to one chart:

As is shown, the lower bound of the average men is stronger than the upper bound of average ATHLETIC women.  The absolute high scorers of the athletic women was just barely above the average of the men.  The absolute high scorers of non-athletic (normal) women is less than the average of the males, and in fact is barely above the lowest bound of the average men.

There is a lot of anecdote evidence that shows that athletic men blow athletic women off the charts in strength, but I think most people are surprised that even average men are stronger than athletic women. Particularly when the athletic women were highly trained in sports (judo, handball) that required hand strength.  As they noted"  "95% of the females produced less force than 90% of the males".

This isn't even close to the fictional portrayal, and I think when it gets to be that out of sync with reality, there is a strong potential for a dangerous miscalculation of abilities.  It is not as if women are not good at all sorts of other things, why the emphasis on an area where they are mismatched?  That seems like a perverse sort of boosterism.