In this episode, we're tackling two categories from the 2020 annual reading challenge, 10 to Try. First, we talk to writer Sarah Gailey for the category "Read a book by an author whose gender is different from yours." Then, Emily chats with two friends about Tana French's new novel for the category "Read a book with a friend."
Recommended Reading
Check out a list of titles discussed in this episode.
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A transcript of this episode is available at the end of our show notes.
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Credits
The Desk Set is brought to you by the King County Library System. The show is hosted by librarians Britta Barrett and Emily Calkins, and produced by Britta Barrett. Our theme song is "I Know What I Want" by Math and Physics Club. Other music provided by Chad Crouch, from the Free Music Archive.
Transcript
Emily Calkins:
You're listening to The Desk Set.
Britta Barrett:
A bookish podcast for reading broadly.
Emily Calkins:
We're your hosts, Emily Calkins.
Britta Barrett:
And Britta Barrett.
Emily Calkins:
On this episode, we're talking about books in two categories from this year's 10 to Try Reading Challenge: read a book by an author whose gender is different from yours and read a book with friends.
Britta Barrett:
You actually talk with some of your friends, didn't you?
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, so I thought it would be fun for this episode to choose a book that I knew friends of mine would want to read and talk to them about it, so a couple of my friends who are long-distance friends at this point. We all love Tana French, who's a mystery writer and she has a new book out called The Searcher so we all read it and then we had a chat about it and you'll get to listen to that later.
Britta Barrett:
I love long-distance book club and then who, else did you talk to?
Emily Calkins:
So I also talked Sarah Gailey. They're the author of a bunch of sci-fi and fantasy books. They're non-binary and their work features non-binary characters as well. So, we got to talk a little bit about that and also, about all the fun stuff that they have in their books. The main book that we talked about is their most recent book, it's called Upright Women Wanted and it's about ... it's a post-apocalyptic Western starring a band of subversive queer librarians so super, super fun.
Britta Barrett:
Can't wait to listen.
Sarah Gailey:
Hi, I'm Sarah Gailey. I'm an American author of science fiction, fantasy and horror. My most recent books that have come out include When We Were Magic, a young adult novel about teen best friends trying to deal with the consequences of an accidental murder, Upright Woman Wanted, a pulp Western about queer spy librarians on horseback fighting fascism in the near future American Southwest and the paperback edition of Magic for Liars, my adult novel debut about a non-magical private investigator trying to solve the murder of a faculty member at a high school for magical teens for her estranged magical sister just so happens to work.
Emily Calkins:
Thank you. So your work often starts out with a really catchy premise, like you said, like queer librarians fighting fascism in new future. Your sort of first books are about feral hippos in the Louisiana bayous, murder at a private school with magic. I feel like your work actually ends up being as much or maybe even more about the individual characters as these fantastical worlds they live in. Can you talk about how you balance those elements?
Sarah Gailey:
I'm really happy that that's what you take away from the books because that's exactly how I want to be writing. I always start from a place of character and relationship and the pitch kind of comes from there but the fact that I am able to mine out the things that will draw people in so that they wind up getting invested in these characters is really ... that's my whole goal when I finish writing a book, to be able to say, "Hey, you complete stranger who has no reason to trust that I can write a character well, here's why you should be interested in this book." Sometimes I think about it, kind of like when you need to give a dog medicine and you like wrap the pill in a piece of ham or something, where I'm like, "Hey, it's a pulp Western with hippos, isn't that great?"
Sarah Gailey:
People are like, "Wow, this should be fun," and then I'm like "Surprise, it's about the trauma of violence and the way that PTSD affects different people."
Emily Calkins:
So fun. What's astonishing to me is like it actually is still fun. It both has that really serious sort of ... serious topics, serious character work and yet, it maintains this kind of gleeful tone a lot of the time. So I'm just really impressed by the way that you're able to balance those two things.
Sarah Gailey:
Thank you. I don't want to take full credit for that. My editors play a big role in keeping me from kind of going too navel-gaze-y and doom-y. I very specifically remember that the sequel to that first hippo book is called Taste of Marrow, for your listeners who don't know. I remember the editor, just kind of sitting me down and saying, "Hey, this book is so depressing. This is not what people are going to expect from reading the first book," and I'm like, "Yeah, it's all about the second half of that arc where you have the adventure and then you have to deal with all the fallout afterward." He was like, "No, you don't understand. It's too sad."
Sarah Gailey:
I do sometimes have this tendency to kind of fall into a hole of just emotion and it's really good to have my agent who does kind of editorial passes and also my editors to say, "Okay, but don't forget that also like people need to feel good sometimes."
Emily Calkins:
So kind of going back to that idea of like, sort of slipping in these character things or these bigger themes, River of Teeth, which is the first hippo book has a non-binary character, who I believe is just introduced as they and it's kind of never remarked upon by the other characters. In Upright Women Wanted, Cye makes a point of explaining their pronouns to Esther. Can you talk about how you approach introducing non-binary characters to readers who may or may not be used to reading a singular they?
Sarah Gailey:
Yes and it's very different between those two books, because when I wrote River of Teeth, I hadn't quite ... how to put this, I hadn't connected my own non-binary identity with myself yet. I was sort of in this situation in my life, where I was very quietly queer and like, not engaging with it very much and trying to pretend like it didn't matter, it wasn't important. Then, I wrote this non-binary love interest and I was like, "Well, this is the most interesting character to me in the book and also, I want everybody to think they're hot and cool and smart," which in hindsight, a little bit significant. I talk about this a lot and this also strongly influence the way I wrote Upright Woman Wanted that, in the first draft of that book, the ending that that character received was not kind.
Sarah Gailey:
It was written to reflect what I thought was sort of the natural narrative outcome for non-binary and queer and trans characters and an early reader really sat me down and said, "This is bad and wrong, and what are you doing? Don't do it." That opened a big door for me of like, "Oh, wait, it's not dangerous to be this kind of person. It's not bad. It's not going to hurt me and the people around me to be this kind of person," which led to like everything else that happened in my life, it completely opened the door for me to say, "Oh, wait, it's okay for me to look at the person who I am and acknowledge and accept that and that doesn't mean that my life is going to be sad and tragic," which is so much of what Upright Women Wanted is about.
Sarah Gailey:
In Upright Woman Wanted, it's really the story of a young queer person realizing that they can be queer and have a happy story in their life and that tragedy doesn't have to be the end for them. All this to say, I was in a very different place when I wrote each of those books. So when I wrote Hero, the non binary character in River of Teeth, I was playing it as safe as I could. I was saying, "We're going to make this person as palatable as possible to the reader who's not familiar with non-binary people." We're going to make this person as kind of not non-threatening, because no one in that book is non-threatening, because they all are perfectly happy to spill blood if they need to.
Sarah Gailey:
I'm going to make, the way this person is presented as natural and normal as possible. I kind of think of that as the way that popular media was portraying a lot of queer people in like the late ... I want to say the late 90s, early 2000s or it's very like, "Look, queer people, they're just like you," right? That was sort of how I was approaching Cye, both because I wasn't yet comfortable enough in my own queer identity to take more risks as a narrator and author and also because I was very much struggling with this idea of like, "Wait queer people, they're just like me. What does that mean about me?" In Upright Women Wanted, the queerness is a lot more confrontational because that's where ... that's the place I've gotten to in my own life.
Sarah Gailey:
It's the place of saying that ... there are people who will say, "I don't care if you live that kind of life, just don't rub it in my face," and I'm like, "Oh, no, I'm going to rub it in your face." I've also come to a place in my life where I think that ... and this is not something everyone will agree with, this is my own belief, that trying to blend in and be palatable, doesn't actually serve us because you can never be blending in enough, you can never be palatable enough to ultimately please people, who hate the person who you are. So in Upright Woman Wanted, I wrote this non-binary character, Cye, who is also the love interest because I'm apparently very predictable and I feel like I want people to think the non-binary person is hot and smart and cool.
Sarah Gailey:
It doesn't ... nothing to do with me. Don't worry about it, but this person is the love interest and when they are among friends and in safe spaces, they use they/them pronouns and when they're not among friends and unsafe spaces, they use she/her pronouns and pass as female. The reason I did this as this character's life is because she ... Sorry, is because they live in a society that does not accept queerness and so it's not safe for them to be the person who they are everywhere they go the way that it is for Hero in River of Teeth. In River of Teeth, I wrote a very easy world for these characters to live in, in an effort to make this book friendly to people who'd be seeing themselves in a pulp Western narrative and wanting to be able to feel safe and comfortable in that world, which I think was still the right thing to do for that story.
Sarah Gailey:
Upright Women Wanted is very much about how the world we live in and the world that some people are trying to build for us, is not safe for most people and Cye is a character for whom it's not safe to be themselves, everywhere they go. I wrote this both to say something about the world of Upright Women Wanted and to communicate something to readers about the world that we live in because it's not safe for me to use, they/them pronouns everywhere I go, right? I'm about to have to make like a two hour drive in a few weeks. For that drive, I'm going to be putting on full makeup, I'm going to be dressing in very feminine clothing because if I get pulled over by a police officer, I don't want to be a visibly queer person.
Sarah Gailey:
I want to be someone who they're going to leave alone, as much as possible. It's just a matter of safety and this is also true for so many queer, genderqueer and trans people like, I have to decide when I go to a doctor's office, if I'm going to say, I'd like to use they/them pronouns for me or if I'm just going to put up with being misgendered, in an effort not to be discriminated against by my doctor. So, when I'm introducing ... this is all very long winded way to answer your question. I'm sorry, when I'm introducing a non-binary character to a reader, the way that I handle that character is really going to be dependent on the world they're inhabiting.
Sarah Gailey:
It's also going to be dependent on the world I'm inhabiting and the person who I am. That's going to be reflected in kind of how much work I'm willing to do on behalf of the reader versus how much work I want the reader to do on behalf of the character.
Emily Calkins:
I love that. Thank you. I think that Cye is very hot and cool and fun, so great work there. Also, I love that Cye is both like, sort of grouchy, as - like rightfully so, right? Because they're always trying to navigate all of that stuff that you just talked about but also so generous with Esther, like so willing to kind of do that work that Esther doesn't know how to do. I just really appreciated that character. They're wonderful.
Sarah Gailey:
Thank you.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah.
Sarah Gailey:
I think it's, in many ways, that character ... the way that that character approaches, Esther is very much how I feel about my own relationship with the queer community, which I love very much and I'm so thankful for, where the queer community can be kind of grouchy. If you come into the queer community the way that I did, as somebody who doesn't know, nearly enough to avoid stepping on people's toes and causing harm and then, you say something that hurts somebody, they're going to let you know about it. They're going to hold you accountable. At the same time, there's immense generosity in the queer community where people are willing to help other people learn and there's a sense of mentorship within the queer community when someone comes in and says, "I don't know who I am but I'm trying to figure it out."
Sarah Gailey:
Cye's relationship with Esther is very much like that, where it's like, "Listen, you better catch up. You better not screw this up. You better not put me in danger or hurt me, but I don't expect you to know everything about everything, so I'll teach you if you're willing to learn."
Emily Calkins:
So one of the things that I really like about your work is the way that you kind of play with genre, both sort of celebrating it and at the same time interrogating it. To me, it kind of feels like a queer approach to gender, like you're saying, "I see what the rules are and I also understand that I don't have to follow them all of the time," and by choosing when I follow them and which ones I follow, it's kind of like a critique. I wonder if you think about it that way, as like when you're playing with genre, you're both sort of celebrating it and saying, "Hey, we maybe haven't looked at it from this angle, and there's some issues with this genre as it exists."
Sarah Gailey:
My gosh, you are so spot on. I think it is absolutely a queer mindset to bring to genre and it's so interesting to talk to people about this because there are some people who say that I like ... I skewer genre or all of my work critiques each genre I write in, and there's some people who are like, "Oh, no, this is a celebration." I always wonder about where that perspective comes from because to me, you can't celebrate something without critiquing it, right? You can't love something without understanding it and to understand something, you have to understand its flaws. We have to submit genres to the mortifying ordeal of being known in order to truly love them.
Sarah Gailey:
I truly love the genres that I write in and I'm also always like, "Why do we do things the way we do?" One of the biggest kind of easiest examples of this that I really love talking about is the Western because I've written now a few pulp Westerns and I really love pulp Western and like spaghetti Western cinema, especially. At the same time, I'm always like, "Why on earth would we center white men in this?" A Western is a story of survival in a world that doesn't want to let you live in it. It's a story of courage and independence. White guys, like cis-hetero white guys, cis-hetero able-bodied white guys generally have a much easier time navigating the world than other people.
Sarah Gailey:
So why on earth would they be the people who we think could survive in the wild west and the high desert? When I bring queer people and people of color to my pulp Western narratives, to me that just feels like a natural extension of loving what the genre is actually about and what the genre is actually trying to say. It's certainly not a ... it's certainly not coming from a place of contempt for the genre as some people in predictable demographics tend to think. Instead, it's just ... I mean, I really just love the things that I'm writing and I want to write them as honestly as I can.
Emily Calkins:
I feel like that love really shows like, there's I think I said gleeful earlier and I think I see that in both River of Teeth and Upright Women Wanted and I keep coming back to those two, because those are the ones that I've read. Like this sense of like, I don't want to say joy because it's a little bit darker than that but sort of like, "Hey, I'm here to and I can have fun with this and I can play with this and I can be in the sandbox," that feels really celebratory. So anyway, I love the tone. I feel like the tone of your books is kind of unique and that, it's both ... it kind of has that like grouchy, like I'm here too so what do you do about it but also, it's like so fun.
Sarah Gailey:
I think it will not surprise you to learn that I climbed up the slide on the playground as a kid a lot. It feels very much like that. It's like, "Yeah, I can do it."
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so you talked a little bit about at the beginning, that you have ... in addition to these novellas, adult debut Magic for Liars, and a young adult novel, When We Were Magic. How is writing a novella, like Upright Women Wanted or the River of Teeth series, how's that different from writing like a full length novel? Or is it?
Sarah Gailey:
It's so different. It's so different. I think that both forms are really challenging in different ways. So, whenever I talk about how they're different, I always want to kind of preface whatever I say was like, "One is not easier or better than the other." A lot of people tend to fall into that kind of like, hierarchical prescriptivist trap of saying that, one form of writing is more difficult or more valuable than another and I have no interest in that. That said, writing a novella goes for me a ton faster because first of all, it's less words, right? There's also so much less space, that the plot is a lot more dense. You have to jump from plot beat to plot beat a lot faster.
Sarah Gailey:
So, there's a sense of like, being yanked through the story a lot quicker, that kind of keeps my writing adrenaline up, because I'm like, "Oh, the next thing is happening already." Where when I write a novel, sometimes I'll get a little bit bogged down in like the emotions of the scene or the descriptions and I'll find myself like kind of rolling around in those a lot, which slows down my process quite a bit. There's also in a novel, a lot more space for world building, for explicit conversation about emotions and context and narrative exploration of ideas. In a novella, in Upright Woman Wanted, I sketch out my world building super loosely and the same with River of Teeth.
Sarah Gailey:
I sketch out my world building in like a couple of paragraphs, maybe a page. Whereas in a novel, you have a lot more space for sketching out your world building and you're also asking your reader to stay in that world for a lot longer, which unfortunately, gives the reader a lot more time to come up with questions about world building. I also find that when I'm writing a novella length or a novel at length, which I also enjoy writing, I treat my world building a lot more, kind of like a framing device. I treat my world building ... and not everyone does this. This is just me. I treat my world building a lot more like, "Hey, reader, you and I both understand that this is the case and we're going to accept that this is the case," right?
Sarah Gailey:
We both understand that there are hippos in the Louisiana bayous, here's how they got there and we're just going to roll with that for the next 100 some odd pages and we're going to be cool with it. I really need the reader to say, "Okay, yeah, I'm cool with that. I'm willing to accept that as the world that I'm in." Where as a novel length, readers have ... I find, a tendency to say, "I don't know if I am cool with that. You're asking me to stay in this world for a long time. I needed to make more sense. I need more explanation. I need more history and description." Which might be part of why my novels tend to be a lot more micro in scale and a lot more about relationships and not as much about the world building that they're taking place in.
Emily Calkins:
Is your next book a novel, is that right?
Sarah Gailey:
Yes. My next book is The Echo Wife, coming out from tour in February of 2021 and that one is the story of a woman named Evelyn Caldwell. It's the story of the year she divorces her husband because she discovers that he's leading a secret second life with a clone of hers that he created by stealing her technology so that he could have a less threatening version of her.
Emily Calkins:
This is what I mean about pitches like, whoa! I'm just so intrigued by that and tell us a little bit about sort of like, what are the themes, like what's the pill that's in the ham that you're trying to give to us?
Sarah Gailey:
So this one is very much about identity and who defines the person who you are, when you're in relationship with other people. I wrote this book in the year that I was getting divorced. The divorce in this book is nothing like divorce that I went through, the man who I was married to is a very wonderful person. I can't say as much for the husband in this book. When I divorced my husband, the circumstances of the divorce led me to need to move to a different state for a little while and I was sort of all by myself. I didn't know hardly anybody. It was a very lonely time and I found myself having to answer the question of who I was when nobody needed anything from me.
Sarah Gailey:
I had some professional obligations. I had some like long-distance personal obligations. I was living on my own for the first time in a long time and I was far from my friends and family. I was far from a church community that I've been part of for a long time. I just found myself adrift and thinking like, who the hell am I when no one is telling me what they need from me? That's the time during which I wrote this book. I had the pitch for it right when I moved. I sat down with my agent and pitched this book about clones and divorce and duality and identity. As I was writing it, I realized that so much of it is just about the question of who shapes us and who we become when we are separate from the things that have shaped us for so long.
Emily Calkins:
Well, that sounds fascinating. I will put it on my to read list for February and then, the last question that we always ask people is what are you reading now?
Sarah Gailey:
So I have just been reading a book called Why Fish Don't Exist, A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller. It is an incredible book. It is kind of in parallel, a memoir of the life of the author and the biography of a famous biologist and ichthyologist named David Starr Jordan, who is very invested in taxonomies. I would really encourage your listeners to go into this book, knowing as little about it as possible because the way that Miller builds the narrative is, she tells you one story of a person's life and you feel like you have an idea of who this person is and you feel like you have the flavor of who they are.
Sarah Gailey:
Then, she adds in a layer of information that completely changes how you see that person and their life. Then, she adds another layer of information that completely changes how you see that person in their life and she does this for her own life as well as Jordan's life. It's really incredible. I would strongly encourage readers to read all the way to the end, even if they already know things about David Starr Jordan because there are some really shocking revelations, as well as a lot of acknowledgment of the full person who he was, which was not a person who I would necessarily be a fan of today. There are some content warnings for this book for mentions of abuse and assault.
Sarah Gailey:
As a person with a lot of trauma and PTSD, I thought it was handled very well and very tenderly and frankly, the end of the book just put me into a place of such healing crying that I feel like it's sewed something up in my soul that has been needing this book for a long time. I highly recommend it.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, that's one of the best book recommendations I've heard in a long time. So tell us again, it's called Why Fish Don't Exist?
Sarah Gailey:
Yes. It's called Why Fish Don't Exist, A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller and it is brilliant.
Emily Calkins:
Thank you. We will put a link to that in the show notes too, so that readers can find it at the library and that's all I have for you today. Thank you so much for being with us. We really appreciate it.
Sarah Gailey:
Thank you. This has been such a pleasure.
Emily Calkins:
So I'm really excited to have my friends Julie and Kady here with me tonight to talk about Tana French's new book, The Searcher. Julie is joining us from Austin.
Julie:
Hey.
Emily Calkins:
Kady is joining us from Portland.
Kady:
Hello.
Emily Calkins:
They are both huge Tana French fans. So when I saw that she had a new book coming out and I knew that we had this category, read a book with a friend for our reading challenge this year, I was like, "Yes. I want to read this book with Julie and Kady." So you both have read it and I just want to know, to start, how did it sit with you? Let's start with you, Kady.
Kady:
Well, I will say that this I liked it. I like all of her books, so I liked it and there are parts of it that I loved but I was not happy about the ending, and I know we're going to talk about it later. So I will save all of that. There were definitely like ... I was like all in and as everybody has, I think been struggling to like stick with books or even get into books during this weird time. So, this one though, was like ... in immediately the setup was incredible. Sort of beginning scenes where there's ... she's just like creating all this tension because the main character thinks he's being watched and you're like, "Oh, God, what's going to ..." So scene0setting was like really great.
Kady:
I was like all in and just plowed right through it but was left a little bit dissatisfied, I will say that.
Emily Calkins:
Okay, I am anxious to hear more about that but before we talk more about your dissatisfaction, what was your sort of overall take Julie?
Julie:
I am so interested to hear this too. I was 100% satisfied. I was fully satisfied. I loved it. I loved that it was different from her other books, but still great and so much of what I love about her writing and storytelling was still there. So, I just really appreciated like how economical her writing is. Just again, like those opening scenes that you talked about, just draw you in and that hasn't changed over her writing. So, I really, really like that and I was fully on board with just the flow of the plot and where it took us. So I actually really enjoyed it.
Emily Calkins:
I mean, obviously like we all love her and that's kind of why we're here. I really, really liked it and it's sort of interesting to me where it comes in the scope of her work because I think it's so different from The Witch Elm, which is her last book. Not only sort of in terms of this kind of story that she's telling, but also like the way that ... that story was so sprawling and this one is so tight and it's much shorter. You just like get into it, like you both said right away like the very opening scene, he's watching - Cal the main character is watching these rooks attack a rabbit and somehow just like this very normal nature scene, she creates this tension that's amazing. So I think she does all of the stuff that she does really well, well here.
Emily Calkins:
She's great with character. She's great with mood and with place. I don't think it's my favorite. It's definitely not my favorite but it's definitely sort of like a middle of the pack for me and I think it's kind of interesting because it feels sort of different in the economy of it compared to her more recent work.
Kady:
Especially with The Witch Elm which was such an interior book, like it was all inside that character's head and his perspective in this is not, right, which is new for her too and so I think that that was another thing too, where that one was so navel gazey and I love The Witch Elm. I think that's controversial. I think a lot of people did not and so this one, I think I was missing maybe a little bit of that because I know it's ... I always screw this up, third person, right? It was written in third person this time. Yeah and so you're not getting really his thought process and he's like, doing a lot of stuff and you're like, "Well is that the best thing to do, man?"
Kady:
He's doing it. So anyway, it was interesting to read a book of hers that lacked that piece, which I really think of is a hallmark of hers.
Julie:
That's a really interesting point. I think that I just devoured it so quickly. I didn't consciously realize that it was in totally different voice than the rest of her books and I think I actually honestly liked it better for that. I also like how her ... Yeah, I love how her books have changed over time. I did not love The Witch Elm as much but this one really, really got me.
Emily Calkins:
So I think something you said there, Julie, reminded me of another question that has kind of been in my head, which is that this is kind of being pitched as a Western, like a lot of the marketing around it or like when she's being interviewed about it, there's kind of this idea that Cal is the stranger who rides into town and he gets caught up in the local business. Do you have any thoughts about that comparison? It seems like that-
Julie:
Yes.
Emily Calkins:
The difference between like a Western and like a psychological thriller, which is sort of more what The Witch Elm was, with like an unreliable narrator might be part of the differences that you guys are seeing in it. I don't know, what do you think?
Julie:
Absolutely. It had not occurred to me while I was reading it and then, when you had brought that up, I was like, "Oh, my God, of course," and it also makes sense because I'm a really big fan of, at least the movie Western. So there are so many parallels that comparison really does ring true to me and so much of, like thematically, I think also really makes sense. The sense of isolation and the relation between this character and the place that's so strong throughout the Western genre. I think that really was like yes, that makes sense.
Kady:
I think that's reinforced by like ... you talked about the isolation, but there's also sort of the almost lawlessness of it. There's a police presence in this tiny town but it's kind of a joke, right? So, when things start going and Cal is motivated to get involved, he knows it's because there's no one else, right? So I think also just like being out there on your own and not being sort of outside of the rules of regular society.
Julie:
I think another thing that I thought was really great was the scenes in the pub. So, that's another similarity also, where you have the pub functioning in this book, similar to the saloon in a Western, where people are gathering and I think a lot of Deadwood. Yeah, I thought those similarities are also very, very excellent.
Emily Calkins:
That is brilliant. I hadn't thought about the pub and the western saloon at all, but when we were reading Julie and I, we were texting about the book and we were talking about there's like this one particular scene in the pub that is just, I think really shows off all the things that she does so well. Julie, can you talk a little bit about that scene and what you loved about it?
Julie:
The dialogue just feels so real to me and it feels like I am right there. I feel like it's really tough to get those kinds of crowd scenes where you have such interesting and complex character dynamics that are all coming out through either just observation or what they're saying and it's just ... it's so succinct and so precise and entertaining and just you are ... I don't know, you are there and I don't get that very often. I just thought it was outstanding.
Kady:
Yeah, that was my favorite scene in the whole book and that was the only time that I was genuinely stressed out while reading this, a lot but this was the only time in the book where I was just like, "What is going to happen?" I felt so tense and I was flipping the pages but the way that it was just so rapid-fire and you're feeling the ... I felt very much, kind of less a feeling where I was like a little at sea and like, "Oh, no," but a feeling like ... he was definitely feeling like he was like at risk and trying to stay in it and play along. So, it was like ... I mean, it takes a lot to build up that feeling in a reader, right?
Kady:
It was just ... I felt like this churn going around of like this dialogue and trying to and keep up and not get like sucked down and whatever was going to happen because there was definitely like threats of violence and how is this going to turn out? So, it was just yeah, super well done.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. One of the things I normally love in her books is the interrogation scenes where the cops like have the suspects at the station and they're trying to get them to confess essentially. She's so good at writing dialogue where people are not saying things or saying things other than what the words they're saying are and to me, I totally agree that scene, it like levels up on that. There's all of this undercurrent to what's being said and you can kind of get the sense that it's there, but you aren't sure what it is and yeah, Cal is like trying to keep up with all of these, it's like all of the men from this tiny little village and they're trying to get him drunk and you can't ... is it out of camaraderie or is it because they want to do him harm or like a little bit of both?
Emily Calkins:
It feels like it's constantly shifting. That's something I really love in this book is I felt like there are all these moments where you feel ... you can feel Cal feeling everything kind of shift underneath him. The countryside is beautiful and then suddenly, it's dangerous or it's desolate or it's isolated. It's like quiet and peaceful or he's all alone and they turn on a dime. I feel like that scene in particular, like it just keeps turning on you and trying to get your bearings, is so similar to what's happening to the character that it's just, yeah, very stressful. The other thing I wanted to talk about, is there's sort of a ... I don't even want to call it like a Black Lives Matter subplot because it's like lesser than a subplot, right?
Emily Calkins:
It's kind of interesting and this is one of the points where I kind of struggled in the book. So Cal is a former Chicago police officer. He's retired early and in addition to that, alone, sort of having a lot of ... it brings up a lot for American readers, at least I don't know how it would read in Ireland but he has this moment with his partner, where they are chasing this young man, who has leaped out a window for some reason but he's not been accused of a violent crime and his partner shoots at him and misses basically because the kid maybe has something in his hand and everybody is fine, but he sees it as this real close call.
Emily Calkins:
It's sort of like the final straw for him to leave the force. To me, that element felt a little bit forced which is rare for her and even when she's trying to do things that are kind of timely, like I think The Witch Elm ended up having sort of a lot of like #metoo elements to it but I don't know what did you guys think about that part?
Julie:
I agree it felt so ... when I started reading the book, my first feeling was one of like, "I don't feel like I should be reading a book about a cop or even an ex-cop right now." It just didn't make me feel super great but it's Tana French so of course, I'm going to keep reading but I did feel like there was a kind of aspect that felt like here's why and it was kind of like, "Please keep reading, please keep reading my books," that kind of thing and not in a way that was really off-putting. It definitely felt a little more forced and I did feel like kind of more of a direct address to or in anticipation of criticism that might come as a result of just the general subject matter. I don't know Kady, what did you think?
Kady:
That felt like such a weird blip because we get sort of dribs and drabs of information about Cal's life before he ends up in the village and a lot of it has to do with his divorce and everything else. I honestly kind of forgot about that little plot point until you brought it up again, when we were talking about this because it seemed like it wasn't the catalyst and so that's why it even like plot-wise, feels weird and shoehorned in because like ostensensibly is the reason he left, but also his life was falling apart anyway. I don't know, it just ... yeah, I didn't love it and I also ... it was news to me that Tana French is not in fact Irish and just lives ... has lived in Ireland enough for a long time.
Kady:
I was like, "It's weird that she's writing about like an American and what does it mean that she's made this ex cop an American, ex cop coming to Ireland? Is that just like to make him a super outsider and what she's trying to accomplish with that," and it would be really interesting to hear the why behind that, from her perspective because it felt a little strange to me and I guess it's maybe just like, he's just a super outsider but also Chicago, as a city felt like a particular choice to me in a way of like, we all know what happens in Chicago and how the media talks about Chicago. So, I don't know, yeah, it didn't sit right within the rest of the story and yeah, I wonder about that sort of ... I don't know. Yeah, it didn't stick with me and then thinking about it, it makes even less sense as I'm trying to analyze it, so yeah.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, it sort of seemed unnecessary, like it seemed like the fact of his divorce should have been enough to send him to Ireland. It didn't feel like it needed it and I almost wonder if like, either she or someone at the publisher at some point was like, we need to address like if you're going to make him an American ex-cop, we need to maybe address this, right now. Yeah, I don't know. It was just sort of like, why are you doing this? Okay, so now we're going to talk about the ending. So for listeners who don't want to hear us talk about the ending, now is the time to pause, fast-forward or skip the rest of the show. I want to know, first of all, did you see it coming? I never see it coming.
Kady:
I never do either but I saw this one coming, which is why I didn't like it as much.
Emily Calkins:
Interesting.
Kady:
Yeah, so here's what did it, the pub scene did it, I was like, more than anything, this reminds me of the movie, which is maybe not everybody's favorite movie but one of my very favorite movies, Hot Fuzz. Have you guys seen that movie?
Emily Calkins:
No.
Julie:
Yes, of course.
Kady:
Yes. So it's a movie from like 2007 or something starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. It's an Edgar Wright movie. It came after Shaun of the Dead and Simon Pegg is this cop that comes to this small village and he's trying to be a big city cop in a small village and it's all a little weird, and I'm going to spoil Hot Fuzz for everybody now too. What it ends up being is like, they have ... the town elders have this motto that's like for the greater good and they like are murdering people who don't fall in line with the rules of their little village that they've determined. I was like, "This really reminds me of Hot Fuzz. I hope it's not one of these for the greater good things," and then as soon as I thought that I was like well, Mart is very suspicious.
Kady:
So, from then on, I was just looking for that. So, then like all the Dublin drug dealer stuff, I was like, "This is all a red herring. We don't even know these characters. That's not going to be a thing." Then the other thing is she was talking about bogs a lot. I just read that book Ghost Wall. Have either have you read that book?
Emily Calkins:
I love that book so much.
Kady:
Yeah, so for more information about bogs everybody read Ghost Wall. I was like oh ... and then I thought it was going to be a thing where it was like, "Oh, Brendan just like sunk in a bog on the mountain and nobody will ever find his body, and that was how it was going to be like, an unresolved thing." Yeah, so it was like a marrying of those two things. So, when it turned out to be like sort of almost exactly what I expected, I was just like, "Oh, well," like I wanted it to be something other than that and so, those sort of colored my whole reading of it from there on. Yeah.
Emily Calkins:
Interesting. How about you Julie, did you see it coming?
Julie:
So I don't know that I saw it coming. I don't know. Okay. I did kind of see it coming and I didn't mind that because to me, it wasn't so much about the who done it aspect because it was more about for me Cal and Trey and their relationship, and Cal and the town and his relationship to the town or the village or whatever. So, for me, I don't really mind when a who done it isn't like super who done it-ty. I think this is something that I also really like about her books where ... I mean, In The Woods, you don't get closure and if people aren't okay with that, they're not going to like that book. For me, it's like another instance of what you expect from the genre of her kind of playing with that a little bit.
Julie:
That's what it felt like to me. I really like the ending and I didn't mind that. I kind of knew, "All right, there was something going on here with Mart and there's definitely something going on here with Brendan dealing drugs and it's going to be something like that."
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, I mean, I think ... So, I did not see it coming, I'm a great mystery reader because I'm really, I don't want to say dumb but I'll just say-
Kady:
Credulous.
Emily Calkins:
I'm extremely credulous, yes. So, I'm always surprised by the ending of a mystery but one of the things that I love about her is that you don't ever really get like a full stop resolution. In The Wods is the clearest example where you like, really don't get a resolution but even in most of the other ones, you don't get a full resolution or like a full sort of justice served. I think you're right, Julie, the plot is compelling but really, what's most interesting about her books is the way that she uses that plot to explore other themes. Particularly, I think, in this book, what was most interesting for me is this relationship between Cal and Trey and the way that that's kind of mirrored -
Emily Calkins:
This is like the thing that I love so much about her books. The way that there's like something else in the protagonist's life that's kind of mirrored by the circumstances of the crime. So, in this particular book like his relationship with his daughter is sort of similar to his relationship with Trey and the moment when Trey shows up on his doorstep and she's been beat up really, sort of echoes his daughter being mugged, right? To me, that's what makes these books feel so rich is like the way that there's these echoes and callbacks in the plot that help you understand why the characters do what they do. It's like, "Oh, yeah, he sees in Trey what he saw in his daughter," and so that makes him act in certain ways.
Julie:
Did you see the reveal on Trey's gender coming?
Kady:
Not at all.
Emily Calkins:
Not at all.
Julie:
Me neither. Not at all.
Kady:
Yeah.
Emily Calkins:
Let's talk about that.
Kady:
Yeah. So do you think it was like in order ... I don't know, do you think like if he knew that she was a girl to begin with, he would not have taken the time to show her carpentry? Why do you think ... I don't know? It's very interesting to me. Yeah.
Julie:
Yeah. I mean, I think, exactly like he's ... well, I would think coming from ... being an ex-cop and stranger danger and street smarts, that he would not be encouraging a young girl to be hanging around his house. I mean, he makes that - he gives voice to that feeling a lot but I think part of the beauty of that relationship is seeing how that doesn't actually matter and seeing how he's actually wrong about that and I really enjoyed that change toward the end.
Kady:
I guess it was probably not so, it would be like an analog for his daughter the whole time and then, it's like only when it matters.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, I mean, I think that's why she ends up being, like otherwise it would have been fine, right, for her to just ... for the character to have been a boy. I think it's like necessary for him to have that kind of moment with her, where he feels ... where he draws that comparison so that he keeps looking, right, that he keeps trying to figure out what's going on, even though it's been made very clear to him that that is not a smart thing to do.
Kady:
Right. Yeah I feel like ... I wrote this down so I was like making some notes last night thinking about what I wanted to say about this and it seems like both this and The Witch Elm are like Tana French asking like are men okay? Because she ... in this one, you know Mart is very concerned about like the young men in the community and is not concerned about women, they're going to be fine and take care of themselves and get out and they need to get out or whatever. In this one, the concern is for the young men and what's going to happen to them and in The Witch Elm, it was like a lot. I mean, it felt like a real exploration. I mean, of privilege too.
Kady:
It was like very much a privilege thing but also like a masculinity thing too. So, yeah, it just felt like, she's really grappling, I think with that idea of like how to be a man today.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, I agree and I think that's really ... it's just really interesting because I think that's sort of a newer theme. Rob, who's the hero of In The Woods seems like that character would have been ripe to think about that but that's not really ... as far as I remember, it's been a long time since I read that, that's not really part of like what's going on with him. There's a lot of like, hidden trauma and inability to face his childhood and a lot of other stuff. You're right, there's definitely ... The Witch Elm is sort of all about toxic masculinity in several ways and sort of like how masculinity feeds into privilege and all of that. Yeah, I agree, this book too has like sort of, like what's happening with young men? He's going to stay, right? He's going to stay in the town.
Kady:
Yeah, I got that sense as well. So like what's he going to ... because he agrees to get the dog. In the end, he agrees to get the dog.
Emily Calkins:
Right. Yeah. What do you make of that?
Kady:
It's really interesting, you're like how is he going to ... I mean really, it's like how is he going to function being the way that he is, knowing how they sort of handle situations, like is he going to be on the lookout for that stuff or did he learn a lesson here and he's going to like go along to get along? It seems like that's the decision he makes but by the end, he's not really going to ... he's really going to try and hang up being a cop and just like, whatever it means to be a part of this community, he's going to do that. Is that the sense that you got?
Julie:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, to me, I was thinking a lot about like his conversation with Trey on etiquette, manners and morals and thinking through like, so much of his internal struggle with being a cop was, am I doing the right thing and knowing that ... and I think this is where also the discussion on the police state at this point in time, comes in on the good cop, bad system kind of thing and is he doing the right thing and I think in the end, my thought was, yes and for him, that was the community and even though, someone had been killed, understanding that there's ... understanding why, I guess, I don't know. Does that make it right? Am I a monster? You guys. Did I just justify murder?
Emily Calkins:
Definitely the things that's so great about her books, right? It's like, I feel like every time you're like, okay I ... not necessarily like I agree but I see how you got here. I understand and that's sort of to me, like what, makes them so sort of scary and chilling is like ... you're like, "Oh, my God, that doesn't feel that far away." Again, this, perhaps should have been obvious to me because it's always a character that you know, right? It's not like the drug dealers from Dublin who haven't ever shown up before. I was like, "I don't know, it's like a Western, maybe it's different." So much of it is about like getting to know the murderer as well, in some ways. I think that one of her goals is to kind of like shine a light for lack of a better term on how people get into these positions.
Emily Calkins:
How we come to the place of like doing violence and the idea that it's not as foreign as we think it might be but in fact like, it's like everybody is kind of like on the edge.
Kady:
Yeah, I'm just thinking about this in relation to another mystery series that I love and think that I neither ... I don't think you've read it, Julie, but on The Louise Penny Chief Inspector Gamache novels. You've read one, right?
Emily Calkins:
I read just the first one.
Kady:
Yeah. Because there's like 15 or 16 now.
Emily Calkins:
There's so many.
Kady:
They're great but it's definitely less interested, I think and in some ways, like in that. I mean, I don't know, you just don't spend time really with the murderers in the same way but it is also about like, morality and the kind of person you want to be in a world and like having a code. So I do think that Gamache would probably get along with Cal and probably even Mart too in some ways, just because they are so ingrained with like that moral code too. It was reminding me of that a little bit in terms of like, what you see, what the authors decide to show you about the people who perpetrate the crimes, that your intrepid detective of solving.
Emily Calkins:
So I lied, I've read two of the Louise Penny ones.
Kady:
Okay.
Emily Calkins:
I think the difference is in the Penny books, it's only Gamache who gets a moral code.
Kady:
Yes.
Emily Calkins:
In Tana French's books, both parties have a moral code. Not always, especially the earlier ones, I think like In The Woods, she's clearly just a psychopath but even like, by the time he got to The Secret Place, there's like a logic to it and there's like a reason behind it that seems reasonable. I feel like with the Louise Penny one I read, the one where the person gets ... the first one where she like, it's something with an arrow.
Kady:
Yeah.
Emily Calkins:
Something about like, painting and like money, it's not-
Kady:
Yeah, I think a little bit more rote. It's less ... Yeah, yeah. Yeah and I think-
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, and her characters are great but she's not as interested in sort of like this question of like, how does a normal person get to this, which I think is sort of like at the heart of what Tana French is doing because the other thing is that Gamache is ...I think, Gamache is moral code, it's like more in line with sort of like, general moral code.
Kady:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emily Calkins:
He's very good.
Kady:
It's less ... Yeah, it's less fuzzy.
Emily Calkins:
Good with a capital G.
Kady:
Yeah.
Emily Calkins:
Almost all of French's detectives are much more like shades of grey.
Kady:
Yeah. I mean, that's why her books are so devastating too is because you get to see both perspectives and you're like, "Well, there's not like really a bad guy," so to speak and these people are just doing things for their reasons and if they make sense to them, then who's to say that you wouldn't also come to the same conclusion.
Emily Calkins:
Thank you both for being here. It was a delight.
Kady:
Thanks for having us.
Britta Barrett:
Before we go, we actually wanted to give some podcast suggestions. We know you're podcast listeners and these are a few more that you might enjoy.
Emily Calkins:
So a couple that I really love, that are right in line with what we talked about on the show are All The Books which is a Book Riot podcast, where Liberty Hardy, who's an amazingly prolific reader and then a rotating cast of co-hosts talk about new book releases every week. So if you're curious about new books, it's a super great way to hear about both some of the bigger stuff, but also some under the radar things that are coming out. My other personal favorite is Pop Culture Happy Hour. It's an NPR podcast and it's almost like a joke at this point, how many librarians are in their audience.
Emily Calkins:
They're always like, "Oh, the librarians love this one." It's hosted by Linda Holmes who writes for NPR and then she also has a bunch of ... they have a standard set of four co-hosts and then they have a bunch of rotating guest writers. They talk about TV shows, they talk about movies, they talk about other podcasts, they talk about books. It's just a really fun way to learn about pop culture and add to your to watch list so it's as overwhelming as your to read list.
Britta Barrett:
I love that one too and Linda wrote a book that was one of the best books of last year, right?
Emily Calkins:
Yes, she wrote a book called Evvie Drake Starts Over, that I really loved and if you're in the mood for comfort read, it's just such a warm-hearted lovely book.
Britta Barrett:
So some of my favorite kinds of podcasts are things like Reply All and 99% Invisible, which have this kind of nonfiction reportage approach and there's actually a really cool library podcast called Borrowed, that I think is in the same tradition. They're from the Brooklyn Public Library and they actually, get out into the neighborhood to tell local stories and it's just really great storytelling and if you're a fan of sound rich audio and interesting library facts, you should totally check them out. Then, I'm going to do something really shocking. I'm going to suggest some fiction podcasts.
Emily Calkins:
That's incredibly shocking to me. I didn't know you like fiction in any form-
Britta Barrett:
I like it in so many forms.
Emily Calkins:
Just not books
Britta Barrett:
Just not physical books. I love audiobooks but even then, I don't really get into like, a full cast production but weirdly, I love like a mid-century radio drama and I've gotten really into like a very specific kind of fiction podcast. There's a series of them, that are all by the same group. Have you heard of the Black Tapes or Rabbis?
Emily Calkins:
No, I haven't.
Britta Barrett:
So these are two podcasts that are set in the Pacific Northwest and they're by like a fictional NPR-style radio station at Minnow Beats Whale, a place that does not exist, where lots of spooky stuff happens, that they have to investigate and each of their podcasts takes on something different. So Rabbits is about an augmented reality game that consumes the life of the players in a way that becomes really dangerous and the journalist who is sharing the story, her friend went missing playing it. She tries to figure out what happened to her. There's this other one called The Last Movie, which is named such because supposedly it's the last movie you'll ever see before you die.
Britta Barrett:
It makes people go crazy and they're trying to research like, can they see the movie, who made it? All this lore behind it and like all of them have a kind of science fiction, horror, investigation angle that's just like right up my alley. Thanks for listening. You can find all the books mentioned in today's episodes in our show notes. The Desk Set is hosted by librarians Britta Barrett and Emily Calkins, produced by Britta Barrett and brought to you by the King County Library System. If you like the show, be sure to subscribe, rate and review us on Apple podcasts.
