All Woman and Springtime by Brandon W. Jones

All Woman and Springtime by Brandon W. Jones

Copyright 2012

Algonquin Books - Fiction

372 pp.

Let's just get the important bit out of the way, up front: All Woman and Springtime by Brandon W. Jones is one of the most important and surprisingly well-written books I've read in 2012. I gushed about it to my friends but I think the sound bite by Alice Walker says it best:

"One of the most absorbing, chilling, beautifully written, and important novels I've read in many years."

Yes. All that. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Gyong-ho (nicknamed Gi) is a mathematical genius who was starved and abused at a labor camp in North Korea. Il-sun is a beauty whose spirit has not yet been broken. When they meet in an orphanage, they become fast friends. Gi is a hard worker who lives in terror of the slightest infraction but she's protective of her rebellious friend, who often dawdles and underproduces at the clothing factory where they both work.

When Il-sun falls for a man she thinks can improve her status, the relationship leads to a horror neither girl can fathom as they're smuggled through the Demilitarized Zone and sold into sexual slavery in South Korea, along with a third girl named Cho.

As Gi, Il-sun and Cho are forced to engage in acts at least two of them could not even begin to imagine in their naivete, they also gradually become aware that the world outside North Korea is not at all what they believed it to be. Fragile in some ways, strong in others, the three young women must deal with the cruelty and anguish inflicted upon them, both mentally and physically.

There is a "graphic and mature theme" warning by the author and the book is a difficult read because the characters are so fully dimensional. First you get to know their daily lives in North Korea and to understand what the author calls "a living Orwellian nightmare". Then you follow them through the even deeper terror of human trafficking. I quickly found that I cared about the characters and hoped they would get through the trauma and horror of their experiences.

There are three things I have to say about the graphic and mature theme warning:

1. There is no superfluous sexual matter in All Woman and Springtime. What's there is horrifying and shocking but the author limited the graphic and sometimes violent scenes to what is necessary to understand the brutality of human trafficking.

2. The ending is uplifting. You will close the book with a smile on your face. I actually was moved to cry tears of joy -- something that almost never happens with books.

3. Take that warning seriously, though. It's definitely not a book for youngsters.

I highly recommend reading Brandon Jones' essay on how he came to write All Woman and Springtime. There are no spoilers; it's informative and answers a lot of the questions I found lingering in my mind after I closed the book. How did he research the book? Was there some compelling reason that Jones chose North Korea and/or human trafficking? Are the citizens really that indoctrinated to the respect of their "Dear Leader" in North Korea, in spite of the fact that most of them are starving? Is this really Brandon Jones' first book?!

Recommendation:

An excellent read, highly recommended but definitely hard to stomach, at times. Believable characterization and dialogue, compelling storytelling, stunningly mature writing and an uplifting ending make All Woman and Springtime an all-around great read and the kind that needs and deserves to be passed around. I found it absolutely unbearable to put this book down; I had to know what was going to happen to Gi, Il-Sun and Cho.

Recently walked in:

The Queen by Robert Lacey - from HarperCollins

The Aleppo Codex by Matti Friedman - from Algonquin Books

The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison - from Algonquin Books

Victricia Malicia by Clickard and Meyers - from Flashlight Press

The Tesseract by Alex Garland - from Paperback Swap

Mrs. Delaney: Her Life and Her Flowers by Ruth Hayden - purchased

In my defense, 3 out of 6 of those books were surprises.

Here. Have a flower.

©2012 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery and Babble or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

The Reapers Are The Angels by Alden Bell

The Reapers Are The Angels
by Alden Bell
Copyright 2010
Henry Holt & Company
Horror/Zombies
225 pages

WARNING: This review may contain some spoilers. Read only if you don't plan to read The Reapers Are The Angels, right away (or you're really forgetful).
You have been warned!! Sounds ominous, eh?

. . . you know what my gut tells me? My gut tells me that's my old friend Moses Todd who's got some business he's gonna want to finish up with me. It's a wonder how he's trackin me, but you can't put nothing past these southern boys. They just sit around waiting for somebody to kill their brother so they can get started on some vengeance. It's like a dang vocation with them.

p. 62

I could write this entire review in quotes alone, simply because The Reapers Are The Angels is so beautifully written and utterly profound and even funny, at times -- strikingly literary in tone for a novel about a young teen surviving in a world of zombies, a world where the humans are as much if not more of a danger than the risen dead. But, let me tell you a little bit about it and then I'll besiege you with quotes.

Temple is fifteen years old. The world was overtaken by zombies before she was born. A world dominated by dead people who eat or turn living humans along with a smattering of survivors is all she knows. As a young child, she was trained in survival and at one point she had a young brother to watch over. But, then she was left alone. As The Reapers Are The Angels opens, Temple is living alone in a lighthouse on a small island off the coast of Florida. But, then her safe haven is breeched and she must move on.

Right from the beginning, the reader knows young Temple is no ordinary teenager. She's a survivor but she's also a loner. When she does encounter civilization, things go terribly wrong and she ends up being pursued by a man who is determined to take revenge, even though he knows the crime she committed was an act of self-defense.

The Reapers Are The Angels is a brutal tale that is absolutely startling in the beauty of its telling. It truly blew my mind. I'm pretty sure it's billed as a Young Adult novel and that bothers me because I'd say it's at least R-rated in content. And, yet, it's such an incredible read that I'd probably hand it to my 18-year-old with a warning, if he expressed interest. I'm pretty sure zombies aren't his thing. They're not what I'd call "my thing", either. But, if you can stomach the gore that goes with stinky, rotting zombies and the brutality of people who will do anything to survive, the book is truly a stunning work of craftsmanship that took my breath away. A few more quotes, before I conclude:

Beyond the pursuit of meaning and beyond good and evil too, she says. See, it's a daily chore tryin to do the right thing. Not because the right thing is hard to do--it ain't. It's just cause the right thing--well, the right thing's got a way of eluding you. You give me a compass that tells good from bad, and boy I'll be a soldier of the righteous truth. But them two things are a slippery business, and tellin them apart might as well be a blind man's guess.

p. 107

Fifteen! You're too young to be wanderin the countryside. Too young by a mile.

I tried to be older, she says. But it's something that's hard to force.

p. 168

And she turns her back on the lost and the dead and the trampled down, she leaves them to their airy graves, and she and the big man next to her look upward at heaven and find there not just gates and angels but other wonders too, like airplanes that go faster than sound and statues taller than any man and waterfalls taller than any statues and buildings taller than any waterfall and stories taller still that reach up and hook you by the britches on the cusp of the moon, where you can look and see the earth whole, and you can see how silly and precious a little marble it really is after all.

p. 171

The night comes, and when the sun rises again it rises over a motionless desert, over streets full of rusty, broken-down automobiles, over tumbleweed towns filled with derelict buildings, signposts twisted and bent so that their arrows become nonsensical, pointing into the dirt or up into the sky, billboards whose sunny images and colorful words flap unglued in the breeze, shop windows caked with the grime of decades, bicycles with flat tires abandoned in the middle of intersections, their wheels turning slowly like impotent tin windmills, some buildings charred and burnt out, others half fallen down, multistory tenements split down the middle, standing like shoebox dioramas, pictures still hanging on the upright walls, televisions still in place on their stands teetering over the gaping edge of the floor where the rest of the living room has collapsed to the ground in great mountains of concrete and dust and girder like the abandoned toys of a giant child.

p. 177

The bottom line:

Graphic, violent, brutal, honest and even humorous, at times, The Reapers Are The Angels is, quite simply, a work of art. It is deep, dude -- quite spiritual, in fact. Highly recommended, but be forewarned . . . it's a hard, hard read and it will break your heart. This book gets a family warning for violence and sex. If you're considering handing it to a young adult, I'd advise reading it, first, so you can discuss it with your teen.

In other news:

Two reviews in one day! I think I deserve some kind of reward, like a nice bath with a lavender fizzy. Hope everyone in the Midwest survived today's bizarre weather.

©2010 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery and Babble, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.