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Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in.  We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.

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Dorothy is here tonight with a set of reviews for another 3 book categories.  Welcome Dorothy!  I will be sorry when we get to the end of these!

YA Fiction, Debut Novel & Nonfiction

by Dorothy A. Winsor

This is the fourth of five posts reviewing books I read as part of my project to read a book from each of the fifteen categories Goodreads uses in its Best Book of the Year contest. The categories this time are YA Fiction, Debut Novel, and Nonfiction.

YA Fiction

Amazon.com: Check & Mate eBook : Hazelwood, Ali: Kindle Store

Embarrassingly enough, in this category, I chose Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood because I already had it on my kindle. I accidentally downloaded it when I read the adult book Love, Theoretically (reviewed in the romance category). So, I chose Check & Mate accidentally but fortuitously because it won in this category.

I enjoyed this book. The central character is 18-year-old Mallory, who’s decided not to go to college because she’s working to support her ailing mother and two younger sisters. Until five years ago, Mallory was a competitive chess player, natural since her now deceased father had been an internationally ranked Grand Master. In this book, she’s drawn back into the chess world. We see her training (which I didn’t know you did in chess) and playing in various tournaments. She’s so talented that the reigning World Champion wants to play her, and a romance develops between them.

I haven’t done a study, but I think many YA characters are older than they used to be. So you see an 18-year-old as the central character in this book. Sex is treated more frankly, too. Generally, YA books are the equivalent of PG13 movies. Characters can have sex, but it’s of the fade-to-black variety. This book is sex-positive, with Mallory having casual but responsible sex.

Debut Novel

In the Debut Novel category, I chose I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane. The book is part dystopia, part queer romance, and part account of grief. It opens with Kris in shock over the death of her wife in childbirth and the subsequent need to care for their daughter on her own. She lives in a surveillance society, with cameras watching her even inside her own bathroom.

The story is told in a series of short bits, like diary entries, addressed by Kris to her dead wife. She speaks mainly about their daughter, who’s wonderfully rebellious. Over the course of ten years, we see Kris gradually healing. In doing so, she talks about exoskeletons, hard structures on the outside of animals like snails. She herself has a figurative shell that protects her from future grief but also limits her growth.

So, the book is mainly about dealing with grief. The conflict, then, comes from the surveillance society that threatens Kris and her daughter.

It took me a while to get into this book. The structure is unconventional, organized not only in short entries, but also by chronology (structured by time) rather than plot (structured by cause and effect). I’ve blogged about the difference before. In a plot, everything is connected and makes sense. That contrasts to real life, where what I’m doing right now has no connection to what I did this morning. That’s one of the reasons fiction is more satisfying that life.

In this book, I missed the comfort of plot. On the other hand, what we see here is probably more realistic. I did eventually become engrossed in the book. It just took time. I admire the kind of originality it took to write this story.

Nonfiction

In the Nonfiction Category, I chose Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. It’s a very BJ kind of book.

Desmond begins by detailing the extent of poverty in the US, which is wider and deeper than most people realize. This whole book is very data-driven. He brings the numbers for how many people live in poverty and how low their incomes are. One of his points is that the US is a wealthy nation, yet poverty persists to an extent greater than in other developed countries.

He goes through various possible causes, showing that they don’t account for the situation. Government spending on poverty has actually increased (though much of that money is now administered through the states and doesn’t get to poor families). Areas with larger numbers of immigrants don’t have more poverty. Single parent families don’t necessarily account for it either.

His conclusion is: “Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.”

We should, Desmond says, be asking who benefits from the existence of large numbers of poor people. One easy answer is that cheap workers subsidize the purchases the rest of us make. Every time we patronize a fast-food restaurant paying minimum wage, we save on our French fries. Some businesses also make money from poverty. Payday lenders make huge profits off of loans.

The tax code gives multiple breaks to the well-off. We’ve all seen the comparisons between the percentage of income paid in taxes by the rich and poor.

Desmond quotes sociologist C. Wright Mills in saying that we participate in “structural immorality.” Of course, people whose major investment is their house oppose anything that would drag its value down. Of course, old people who live on their IRAs want the stock market to go up, even if that means workers suffer.

He closes with some proposals for what to do, that are too extensive for this review. The book is a sober but enlightening read.

Comments? What have you been reading? Do any of the books here appeal to you?

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