book-reviews – AUSTIN DEWAR

“A Fine Balance,” by Charlotte Ashley – Analysis and Plot Beat Sheet

“A Fine Balance” came out in 2016, but I have it in an anthology and recently did a deep dive analysis of the story structure. Sharing my notes here in case anyone else finds this helpful—I talk about the significance of character names, meta themes, an interestingly passive twist on a heroic figure, and outline what makes these action scenes so tight and explosive.

You can read or listen to the short story via PodCastle!

Synopsis

Set in a fantasy version of the Ottoman Empire, the story is told by Emin Akdari, apprentice to a Kavalye, a duelist whose engagements with her rival from the opposing ethnic group not only provide entertainment, but play a critical political-economic role in maintaining equilibrium within a divided city. Because of this unique tradition, the city doesn’t know war, and has literally not invented the concepts of “soldiers” or armies yet. However, the balance has been upset, and the city is on the verge of a crisis because the two top duelists are so godmode and their prize money so high, that either one winning stands to destroy the whole system.

The main character seems to tag along simply supporting her mistress’ mission, while being somewhat of a lackluster apprentice duelist themself. But at the climactic moment, we see that it’s just that loyalty, that diligent service, which saves the day.

Concept / Passive heroism

What’s special about this story is an intriguing story structure which refuses to “stand on only two pillars,” as the main character says. Instead of having a hero and an antagonist, there’s a compound cast of heroes: the POV main character, their mentor, their mentor’s rival, and being generous and taking the story’s moral to heart, all the characters that assist them along the way—doctors and messengers and witnesses.

On the surface, the “true” hero, the POV main character, directly undermines standard protagonist conventions: they take a backseat to their mentor, who seems like the real hero of the action, to the point of straight up curling into the fetal position to hide at the climax of the story. They have their own lengthy combat scene, but it’s almost completely irrelevant to the plot (it does a little characterization mainly)—a good example of, if something is interesting enough, it doesn’t need to strictly follow the “rules” of plotting. The main character doesn’t even get a gender. One might assume they’re a woman, as all the duelists in the world seem to be, though it’s ambiguous since their name, at least in the real language it’s pulled from, means “young man.”

However, Emin serves the role of hero in two humble, yet critical, ways. First, by their singular virtue of being a reliable servant of their mistress, encapsulated in a ritual: every day, they clean and prep their mistress’ gun, even though she never uses it. This obedient and diligent practice ends up saving the day when the time suddenly comes to use the gun. But the second and lasting way the POV main character is the hero, as is suggested at the end of the story, is by simply being Witness to the events recounted, as many others were. This witnessing and then testifying to others teaches the city, persisting through future generations long after the heroes of the story are gone, the values the heroes stood for, thus inspiring perpetual peace.

Structure analysis

On a structural level (see full breakdown below), the story does this cool thing by having the decisive action of the climax, the decisive “heroic action” of the protagonist, occur in the opening lines of the story. Only, you don’t know its significance until the end, and spend the rest of the story thinking how our “hero” isn’t heroic at all, in comparison to the superhero-esque duelists. It’s Chekhov’s gun—gun included—but with a unique spin.

There’s a lot to learn from this story about writing action scenes, as well. I’m holding onto this one for future reference writing combat beats. I break them down in the outline below, so check that out there.

I’ve been studying basic stuff like the 3 (or 4) act structure, but that’s geared towards novels and screenplays, so it’s interesting to see where short story structures diverge from or condense these points. In this case, I identify 6 acts – Setup, Part One, Interlude, Part Two, Part Three, and Resolution/Summing-Up. These parts roughly follow the given breaks in the story, with one exception. But you might also divide the story into these broad beats: Hook, Setup, First Battle, Interlude, Second Battle, Interlude, Crescendo, Third (Climactic) Battle, Climactic Moment, Resolution.

In the 3-4 act novel structure, you have an initial plot point where everything changes, from which the hero goes through three stages: reactive (act one), active (act two), heroic (act three-four). Here, the hero remains reactive throughout the course of the story, but for this story, it’s their very passivity and obedience to a higher power that makes them heroic.

You can still identify all the beats of a 3-4 act structure here, but condensed and pulling double duty. The middle point, where a twist is introduced, and the dark night moment, where a mentor or someone close to the hero is lost, happen concurrently. And the third plot point, where the real antagonist and final piece of missing information is fully revealed, and the climax where it’s all systems go, are back to back in the same scene.

As I analyze more stories, I am curious to learn how common this structure is for an action story. Perhaps it’s standard, just seems new to me because I haven’t looked closely at too many!

Worldbuilding / Themes

Set in an alternate version of Early Modern Albania, there’s a lot that appears like fantasy to an uneducated reader (me) that on further research, is actually references to real things. What I took for a fantasy spin on the word “cavalier”—”kavalye”—is literally the Turkish word for “cavalier,” and a “shashka” is an actual, historically relevant type of sword. “Dushiq,” the name of one of two peoples in the story, is a real place in Albania, where uprisings against the Ottoman Empire took place, a variation of which seems to be happening in this story. I’m not sure what “Onsen,” the name for the other peoples, is supposed to reference—the Ottomans, presumably, but was it an actual name for a Turkish place or group of people, as “Dushiq” is?

One of the most interesting terms is “sahidi,” the name for the dueling tradition/relationship. “Sahidi” doesn’t translate to “duel” as you might expect. Instead, it translates to “witness” or “testimony.” Because of the way the duels are used to settle disagreements and redistribute wealth between two opposing ethnic groups, and a form of Islam spirituality informs the characters’ decision, I think we are meant to understand, without it being outright explained, that the duels have a religious basis. They are a “testimony” to the will of God—whoever wins, God must favor that people to receive wealth.

But also, in the context of the story, our main character is the true sahidi, the witness to the events that unfold. And it’s these testimonies, stories and allegories like this one as the narrator concludes, that reinforce peace as they persist in the minds of the greater people. So that in the end, it’s not the hero of the story who defeats evil—they do, but briefly, for one instance in history. The real heroes who bring peace to their country are the witnesses, the storytellers, who collectively cultivate peace through how they pass on these stories, which heroes they affirm, and cultural values they want to preserve.

Also, at the inciting incident of the story, the Rival and apparent antagonist is spotted at the courthouse, “talking to lawyers,” and disappears down “Justice Way,” so there’s some symbolism there, and also the conflict between the traditional/religious form of conflict resolution versus the modern/military war method seeking to break or rewrite the law.

Significant Names

The characters’ names draw on Turkish, Albanian, Arabic words, and seem to reference each character’s essence. Making some guesses, since there’s a fantasy/invented slant to the names that leaves ambiguity rather than one for one translation, they are:

Emin Akdari = “Trustworthy/reliable young man” – this is this character’s whole thing, their shining single virtue on which the climactic moment rests, that they are a completely trustworthy and reliable servant to their heroic Mistress, and that the fate of the world depends on such sharing of responsibility, not simply individual heroes.

Shoanna Yildirim = “beautiful/fantastic lightning” – a fitting warrior’s name, and also evocative of how her final act will be to strike a fire into the top palace tower of her enemy, like a bolt of lightning.

Kara Ramadami = “Earth Scorched/Set alight” – also a fitting warrior’s name, and also evocative of her role in the story, in several ways. First, “lightning” and “earth set on fire” go hand in hand in the natural world, so her and her rival’s names pair together. Second, “Ramadam” recalls “Ramadan,” the Muslim period of fasting, making sacrifice to draw closer to God, like this character makes the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of peace.

Dashuri Dushku = “Tree of Love” – less clear what’s up with this name. “Dashuri” means “love,” and “Dushku” is just a last name, which does mean a type of oak tree. I feel like the main foreshadowing or symbolic point her name makes, is that one’s rival in the world of the story is not one’s enemy as it first appears, but actually one’s other half, the love of one’s life in a way, the person who makes you who you are, even if the mechanism of that is violent duels.

Plot Beat Sheet / Story Structure Breakdown

Title
+ References theme, “ a fine balance,” which will be stated in closing line of story.

Introduction
+ Hook – Opening line foreshadows climactic moment
+ Action taken in opening paragraph is actually the critical choice made to determine the course of the story, but this won’t be revealed until the very end climax sequence – Chekhov’s gun
+ Introduces the main (POV) character, who fails at basically everything except her Virtue, being a trustworthy servant of her mistress
+ Introduces main Feature character (Mentor) name-drops her Foil/Rival, and the Concept.

Part One
First half
+ First line foreshadows the theme with key words, “a pair” – theme of pairs
+ Exposition
+ Inciting incident – spotting rival on the move: hunting her will unfold rest of plot
+ Builds up characters and setting
+ Low stakes action and dialogue

Second half
+ Introduces MC’s foil/rival
+ Provides some further light exposition
+ Highlights characters

Action sequence #1 – status quo battle, still in Act One equivalent – initial failure:

1. Prepares for battle
2. Makes challenge, challenge accepted
3. Enemy attacks first
4. Result = MC injured
5. Counter attack = fails
6. Recovery = too slow, losing chance to riposte
6.5 flash of reminder of stakes, heightening stakes
7. Enemy attacks a second time
8. MC retreats
9. MC has an idea, change of plan/tactics
9.5 exposition to setup action
10. MC puts wild idea into action as enemy attacks again
11. Initial success in escaping the attack
12. Ultimate failure in enacting wild plan to attack back though = END
13. Enemy gloats and takes prize
14. Dust settles. Mentor helps to recover, assess damage, debrief and lick wounds

+ Concluding paragraph with exposition of the overall Stakes

Interlude
+ Backstory exposition more fully explaining the situation/predicament and the stakes
+ Hero recovering from injury and Mentor plotting main battle

Part Two
+ Almost full page of exposition and description setting the stage, and showing (not telling) the theme: a pair, two sides, unbalanced, and the problems caused by their being unbalanced. One paragraph shows the hero’s side, and one shows the “enemy” side.
+ Foreboding foreshadowing, you know it’s not going to end well.

Action sequence #2 – the ambush – Plot Point 1 + Brush with death combined

1. Following a false lead, MC leads Mentor into danger, pursuing who they think is Rival
2. Ambushed in darkness, Mentor injured by surprise attack
3. Prepare for battle
4. Mentor counter-attacks = success, but already wounded, & two more attackers appear
5. Attackers reel confused, MC attacks = success
6. Assessment – 4 attackers left, but both MC and Mentor injured, & more attackers coming. Forms new idea
7. MC attacks = success (but false success, another trap not sprung yet)
8. MC continues attack = Success! (But…)
9. Mentor grievously wounded – reveal MC was lured away so she’d be exposed – END
10. Assessment of damage, retreat/escape

+ Recovery scene, nursing wounds
+ Fast forward to next day
+ Reminder/foreshadowing subtly of the action MC took in opening paragraph, which will set up for final victory

Part Three
+ Lull beat, waiting for coming storm
+ Messenger arrives whose dialogue gives exposition, setting up for arrival of climax, introducing new details regarding antagonistic force, questions to be answers
+ Preparing for final battle sequence – safety off – pulling out all the stops – Chekhov’s gun loaded
+ Full reveal of the antagonistic force AND of Rival (not yet distinguished)
+ Showdown dialogue between Mentor and Rival, reveals character and some key exposition that’s been missing until now
+ Theme on display: the pair echo each other’s words, affirm how each has been forged by the other, two opposing sides depend on each other, and balance and trade offs between them, for peace.
+ Dialogue ends with twist: seemed to be setting up for battle, but instead, a quick and immediate victory, as Rival immediately surrenders – not part of the antagonistic force after all, even though it’s her own government, but equally its victim
+ The two rivals team up to face down the real antagonistic force, which responds with confusion, warnings

Action Sequence #3 – Climax

1. Mentor draws Chekhov’s gun and fires before countdown can even begin = kills one
2. Mentor fires again = kills two in a badass way
3. Enemy counterattack = too late. Mentor/Rival launch clever plan.
4. Rival attacks = success
5. Mentor attacks = success
6. Longer paragraph, enemy routed, deal sealed with final volley of attacks from Mentor/Rival
7. Enemy fires while fleeing = fails. Notably, MC hides and curls into fetal position, taking as far from a heroic action as you’d expect. Will juxtapose with climactic moment.
8. Rival urges MC back into action
9. Dust is settling, the battle is over, but one final heroic action remains to win the war. Like in LOTR, at the end of the whole entire war, it still comes down to the climactic moment of throwing the ring in the volcano, the moment of truth that proves the hero.
10. CLIMACTIC MOMENT – brings into play everything foreshadowed in the introduction of the story, and subtle reminded throughout. While on the surface, MC herself does nothing, while Mentor fires the heroic shot that ends the war, MC is the hero because of her trustworthiness as a servant – she has diligently maintained that gun since day one, is able to inform her Mistress of exactly how many bullets are left since the attack began (a single bullet) so she can decide how best to use it, and although the Mistress certainly wins the day with her individual skill, she could not have gotten to this moment without all the behind the scenes preparation MC has done consistently to equip her for this moment, again, the Theme of pairs of people who depend on each other for their success, no one person can succeed alone. —- I think having the virtue of the hero be this little virtue of being a reliable servant is so refreshing and cool to read, you don’t see that virtue too often as traditional servant/master values and little virtues in general aren’t typical main course in action stories at the moment.

Resolution / Summing Up
+ A brief handful of short paragraphs ties up the loose ends. What happened with the Mentor and Rival after that, what happened to the antagonistic force, that peace was restored and tradition preserved, balance restored.
+ Last line restates theme in new light, “no peace could stand on only two pillars, no matter how strong. The fine balance between Onsen and Dushiq, we all shared between us.” Shows that in common understanding, people see the balance of binaries, Us vs Them, Good versus Evil. And they are mostly right, that these yin and yang pairs are important. But it’s an oversimplification, for the interrelated pairing of all people. And as we saw, the least powerful, overlooked person in the story, was actually crucial to the success of who everyone else, including even herself, perceives as the “Hero” who restores balance.

The girl who chose violence: The Spindle of Fate by Aimee Lim (ARC Review -Coming 6/4)

Disclaimer: I received an advanced reader copy (ARC) of this book for free for the purpose of giving an honest review.

The Spindle of Fate can be purchased here.
***SPOILERS***

New author Aimee Lim’s The Spindle of Fate is a middle grade fantasy drawing on an old Buddhist tale, Mulian Saves His Mother From Hell. It tells the story of Evie Mei Huang, a 12-year old girl who descends into the Chinese underworld to rescue her dead mom, who turns out to have been part of a secret magical society. Both educational and entertaining, the overarching narrative serves as a vessel to share a sampler of Chinese myths, folk tales, history, and language tidbits as it follows vengeful antihero Evie into Hell.

Personally, I think this book is horror disguised as fantasy. From depicting the Huang’s petty bourgeois world where even the magic system functions as a family business, to the literal pond of blood the kiddos have to swim in, it sets some deeply unsettling scenes. Evie herself is a horror movie fan, so I feel like it’s intentionally nudging at that genre, even if the book had to get marketed as plain fantasy. I would still say it’s appropriate for its proposed 8-12 year-old audience, as a kid that loved horror at that age myself—just a head’s up that it’s more Dante than Rick Riordan.

Evie reminded me of one of Roald Dahl’s spiteful characters, and was fun to read precisely because she’s not “good.” She doesn’t seem to like anyone, even her supposed best friend, and has a particularly carceral/punitive ethics driving her every move. Despite being given strong evidence to the contrary, Evie can’t wrap her head around the idea that the cycle of violence is bad. Instead, in order to overcome the cognitive dissonance of seeing innocent people harmed, she decides to believe they must be guilty in some way. When that fails, she allows herself to enjoy their suffering simply because she likes it. She even engages in some torture of innocents herself, using a magic staff that her forebearer Mulian once used to liberate people. Lol. One of the book’s themes is capitalist ethics superseding other values systems the Huang’s Chinese ancestors upheld, so this checks out.

At the end of the book, in one of the most psychologically disturbing moments to me, Evie is forced to smile and shake the hand of the guy who murdered her mom. Her mom’s ghost, demonstrating lackluster ethics, had made her swear not to avenge her death not because killing people is wrong, but because you might go to prison for it. But the conclusion of the book, and Evie’s almost nonexistent character arc, is that since she doesn’t believe in filial piety, she is gonna freaking murder this guy anyway, against her mom’s wishes.

I was a little confused by this ending, as the story felt like it was setting up a moment of reckoning where Evie realized, through several illustrative metaphors and potential lessons from past and present, that the best way to “avenge” her mom is actually to refuse to continue this cycle. For example, her sidekick is a boy who barely gets to see his mom because she’s off on her own revenge quest all the time. But Evie sees and then overlooks this. It’s like Hamlet if Hamlet didn’t die at the end, and decided to go on killing more people, without any repercussions for his actions.

It left me wondering what I’m supposed to take away from the story—that it’s actually a good thing to seek revenge? That everyone else was wrong and Evie was right? That money really does come before everything (for example, the only argument that showed signs of convincing Evie not to kill somebody was when she considered how it might affect online reviews of the family’s business—lmao). I’d be curious to hear how others interpret this story’s message.

One other thing that bugged me was how a last minute introduction of a bisexual character was handled. At the very end, the boy character, Kevin, gets his wish to know who he’s fated to marry. The problem is, he’s informed of his fated mate, at twelve years old, in front of a crowd of adults we don’t know much about, and it’s another boy. This is presented as totally fine. But I felt visceral shock that an adult would out him publicly in front of other adults, not only that but ones who had been shown throughout the story to be committed to a lot of traditional values and in some cases were particularly violent. When the rest of the book mentions things like colonialism and sexism, I assume homophobia exists in the world too.

I also would have preferred if the story more meaningfully engaged with Kevin’s sexuality. Like have him discover this aspect of himself through the course of the story—have him love—rather than through an adult telling him what he is at the end of the book.

But I’m still glad that such a character is on the page at all, which is a big change from when I was Kevin’s age. I’m thankful Aimee Lim wanted to make this gesture towards queer kids to let them know they’re welcome. And if the book becomes a series as it’s been set up to be able to do, I’m sure Lim would be able to expand on things like giving Evie and Kevin both more character development, and working out some of these things that felt a little underbaked.

All in all, I would recommend this book not only to young readers, but to their older friends, family, and teachers—there’s a lot here to use as a springboard for learning about other stuff together, like Chinese history and mythology, so I could see this book landing on school reading lists. Congrats to Aimee Lim on getting published—she’s a librarian, so I can imagine there will be a super cool moment when she gets to shelve the book she herself wrote!

This was my first Advanced Reader Copy review so I’m still learning the ropes, and I think I went more into analyzing the characters I was fascinated with than giving the overview someone deciding whether or not to read the book needs, but I’ll work on improving my approach for the next one.

Buy the Spindle of Fate here!

The Bookshelf Ecosystem

Notes from the Bookstore Sales Floor, Episode 2

Welcome to episode two of Notes from the Bookstore Sales Floor where I, someone who knows little about either writing or selling books (yet!), presume to teach you about both. For the start of this blog series, check out episode 1, about who buys all these books anyway? here.

[Image via Penguin Random House. Cover design by Amanda Dewey]

I’m currently reading Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland, about the origin and philosophical implications of quantum physics. One of Rovelli’s main arguments is that the essence of reality is fundamentally made of relationships, not substances: “[Things] do nothing but continuously act upon each other. To understand nature, we must focus on these interactions rather than on isolated objects.”

With this on my mind, I’ve started looking at the bookshelves of Big Name Bookstore (BN for short), where I work, as a living ecosystem of relations.

Bookstore shelves are an environment more dynamic and fascinating than one might suppose at first glance. They are continuously acted upon by the people in the store (and everything else, according to Rovelli, but we’ll focus on the people), and they themselves act upon people, by design and coincidence.

You choose to pick up a book based on a combination of internal factors (your preferences, history, mood, etc.) and external factors (the book’s cover, marketing, placement on the shelf, etc.). Or rather, you do not pick up the book, and the book does not make you pick it up, but you and the book emerge in relationship with each other.

It’s difficult to wrap your brain around, but I envision this emergence in the way that music emerges only in the relationship of violin bow, tuned string, player, and composition, and can’t just come into being on its own or hang around in the air without something producing and reproducing it.

Similarly, a book emerges on a shelf through relations of writer, publisher, workers producing the physical book-object, the sunlight that went into the trees that went into the pages, etc. And the composition or activity of the broader bookshelf also continuously changes and evolves.

Most fascinating, in my opinion, is how booksellers and visitors alike engage with the shelves in a kind of guerrilla warfare, or evolutionary struggle, with all the spontaneous organization and furtive acts of sabotage that entails.

I’ve already talked about some of the factors at play in my first “Notes from the Bookstore Sales Floor,” regarding the impact of promotion (or lack thereof) and regular book buyer behavior on what happens to a book at the store. But here I’ll look a bit more at how booksellers and visitors operate as active subjects in relation:

Booksellers: are people, and unpredictable

Outside of bestselling books, whose promotion can’t be avoided, which books are featured on a shelf can largely fall to the whims and interests of the store’s booksellers. They are human beings, so they bring to their work a complex relation of motivations, ethical beliefs, areas of expertise, physical states like enthusiasm or fatigue, limitations… like being too short to reach the top shelf and organize it… etc. The relations between these shape the actions of the bookseller, and the actions of the bookseller shape the shelf, and through it, the actions of customers and their interest or ability to buy a book.

I was organizing a shelf yesterday and found a book that had, perplexingly, been shelved under the name of the testimonial in small print beneath the title. The cover quoted something like “‘Great book, 10/10’ – Michael Scott,” and so the bookseller had shelved it under “Scott”… Even though the author’s name sat in very large print just above that, and was the only name on the spine. Some mysterious set of relations produced an action the author and publisher could have never accounted for, which made this book effectively disappear from access for who knows how long.

Another example: the vast majority of my coworkers are romance/romantasy/YA readers. So these sections in our store remain impeccably “gardened”—regularly checked and lovingly maintained. The sections closest to customer service, the hub at the center of the store where employees congregate, are also better maintained on average. But sections hosting genres our booksellers aren’t personally invested in, like science, Spanish-language, and true crime, are disasters. Or were, because I personify everything and fall in love with the overlooked and bullied, so I took these areas under my wing like orphaned baby birds.

Case study: my own shelving behavior

To do a deeper dive into bookseller-as-relation, here’s what I’ve noticed about myself.

For my part, when I approach a shelf that needs some books faced-out (cover turned out to highlight the title), and it doesn’t matter which, I tend to promote books based on four basic impulses: fidelity, empathy, sense of humor, and ethics.

Fidelity means I highlight books I love and feel a devotion to because of what they’ve helped me become. I say fidelity and not just affinity, because it feels almost like an indebted sense of duty to pass these books on. I look out for the authors I grew up with like Ursula K. Le Guin, Diana Wynne Jones, and C.S. Lewis, and the authors I’m fanning for lately like Jeff VanderMeer, Tamsyn Muir, and Ann Leckie (also A. K. Larkwood, who isn’t on our shelves sadly, but who I highly recommend—The Unspoken Name is basically the glorious second coming of Le Guin’s Tombs of Atuan, and reads like what it would have been if Le Guin had felt free from male readership bias to let Tenar lead the story and also have a cute gay romance).

Anyway, continuing on: Empathy means books that haven’t been promoted well, yet seem good. I offer my support to these Davids against the Goliaths of authors like Patterson and Brandon Sanderson hulking across the shelves next to them. Because these are books in which I can see myself. Imagining one day I will publish a book that only gets a single ignominious copy sent to the store, I try to give these little friends a boost up.

Sense of humor is usually invoked when I encounter an absurd, oddball cover or an amusing juxtaposition on the shelf. Ship of Destiny by Frank Chadwick is one of my most beloved covers—I can NOT stop laughing at this perturbed owl in a crop top who’s about to kick your ass—so I face it out periodically. Sincere shout out to the artist, Don Maitz, who offers some lovely reflections on craft and cover design here. An example of juxtaposition: in the science section, I like to face out a Stephen Hawking book next to Hawking Hawking by Charles Seife, which condemns the scientist as something of a charlatan, and let this conflict potentially draw in a reader.

[Image credit: Simon and Schuster, cover art by Don Maitz]

Ethical means if I think your book is literally evil, such as encouraging violence or dehumanization of people, I will not help promote it. BN sells more than a few books which advocate for the abuse, dehumanization, and death of people like me, and other minority groups. This is fucked up enough already without me obligingly aiding in their promotion.

Overall, these aren’t conscious guiding principles in how I shelve, but were largely unconscious behaviors to me until I critically reflected on what I do. There are all kinds of processes, conscious and unconscious, that go into the promotion of books at this ground level, and I’d be curious how other booksellers conceptualize their relation to the shelves.

[Nota bene: if you enjoy wacky cover art, check out Funny as Shit Book Covers and r/badscificovers]

Visitors: the left hand of bookselling

Along with bookseller influence over shelving, there’s the even more chaotic element of visitors to the store. (I say “visitors,” not “customers,” because they don’t necessarily come to buy anything). Visitors are not so different from booksellers as you might think, but like the electron to their proton, they participate in the same practice with a different charge: they have just as much access to shelves and control over shelving as booksellers, with none of the responsibility.

Periodically, they awaken to consciousness of this latent power.

Just like booksellers, visitors shelve books, reorganize shelves, choose what to feature and face-out, and what to remove and discontinue. But as the trickster fairy version of staff, they shelve books according to impulse and malice, rather than alphabetically. They re-home books to different sections, sometimes out of carelessness, other times intentionally; for example, often I see Bibles shelved in Self Help by Christians, and in Fiction by Atheists.

Visitors have their own form of face-out, I call “faceover.” They face-out a book over an already faced-out different book, hiding the one and promoting the other. This may cause booksellers to overlook the problem for a while, especially if both books are the same dimensions, assuming they are the same book. It’s like a brood parasite, a cuckoo overtaking a nest.

Visitors also have another technique, which I call “edging” because these are not serious terms. This is when instead of shelving the book with the spine out, they turn it 180 degrees so all you see are pages. This is most often used as a camouflage technique and act of protest, to hamper the sale of certain books. Currently, our most frequently edged books are Ron DeSantis’ The Courage to be Free and all our books about Israel, but especially Israel, a history by Martin Gilbert, which would otherwise feature prominently on the shelf with its many, hefty copies. Visitors will apply a moral judgment to the shelf, to a degree most booksellers avoid, since they have to worry about keeping their jobs.

Insights for authors: I’m sure everything averages out on a large scale, and a lot of what I’m describing here are odd flukes and strange maneuvering, outlier situations and mutations. But these peculiarities do have effects as unpredictable as they are undeniable, and may be worth considering if you’re involved in the book trade.

Personally, my chaotic neutral side kind of loves that millions of dollars and years of work can go into producing, marketing, and promoting a book only to be undone in a second by some punk walking in off the street and flipping it around back to front.

But if you don’t love this, then it should increase your respect for the diligent work of the noble booksellers who, despite only getting paid $11 an hour (💀), walk miles per shift circling the store and fixing displays, putting your book back where it can be easily found by a reader, and perhaps even giving you a helping hand as a newer author.

There’s so much more I’d like to analyze, and may try to tackle, in a future post about the art of shelving, BN versus American Library Association standards, fun terminology (I love learning about the vocabularies of different trades and practices), and following Carlo Rovelli, thinking about the relations of books and people. But for now I’ll leave it here.

If you engage with books, whether as an author, bookseller, reader, etc. what is a (perhaps unusual) way you’ve found yourself making an intervention in this ecosystem? I would love to hear anecdotes from others’ experiences!

Reviews you can use: Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer

First blog post, welcome!

I’m going to start by blogging edited-down versions of the analyses I write after reading stories, paired with writing exercises based on the book I’m reviewing, I call it “reviews you can use”!

As part of my writing practice, after finishing a book I go back over it and take notes on its plot, characters, structure, techniques, etc. With shorter stories, I will often construct a complete “template” based on the story’s beats and unique quirks, then write a story using this template. These blog posts will pass on templates and exercises I’ve come up with, which I hope you’ll find fun and useful too.

They will contain spoilers and may not make as much sense if you haven’t read the book yourself, but I hope you will find the writing exercises fun and helpful either way (scroll to the end for these), and that sharing these examples of how I analyze a text may also be useful in your own approach to breaking down a story.

**Analysis: Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer**

Warning: Spoilers!

Summary

Rachel, a scavenger in the nightmarish apocalyptic “City,” where biotech creatures engineered by “the Company” have taken over, finds Borne, a mysterious creature. It begins to rapidly grow and change, and she becomes a kind of mother to him, with all the love and heartbreak that entails. The story engages themes of not just motherhood, but personhood, as well as love and trauma, nature and nurture, destruction and evolution.

You can’t shake the feeling you’re reading Alice and Wonderland, but a version VanderMeer altered so much along the way that it’s a totally different story– only some vestigial Alice and Wonderland vibe continues to haunt your reading, like Rachel points out the reader yourself haunts her story. The Red Queen has been recast as the Magician, Wick whom Rachel pursues in their “warren” home is the White Rabbit, Mord is the Cheshire Cat, and most tellingly at the end of the story we learn that Rachel quite literally came here through a looking glass.

The narrator – the key to why this story works (for me)

The story’s world is so (darkly) whimsical and surreal, it almost turned me off, because absurdist stories are not so much to my taste. It takes a few chapters to get your bearings, you feel like Rachel when she looks at Borne’s shapeshifting colors and considers that her eyes didn’t evolve to be able to see anything like this.

But I was quickly anchored by the real-world-ness of the narrator Rachel, and kept grounded throughout as much by her presence as by her own grappling with the world. Through Rachel, I was able to appreciate the world as a metaphor for the psyche, and its chaos as a metaphor for trauma and growth, in a way I’m not able to appreciate Alice in Wonderland. Rachel is completely human and relatable, and she’s in charge of the story, so despite the madness going on around her, we’re able to stay sane through her and her ordering of the world for us via her narration and her actions in it. It also helps Rachel feel so real as a character because she makes us real to her– she serves to give a sense of meaning to many people’s lives in the story despite the chaos (both external and existential), including us readers.

I just started reading VanderMeer’s Annihilation since it was turned into one of my favorite movies, and it’s interesting in both books there’s a reason we’re receiving this story, here it’s Rachel achieving her dream of writing a book, there it’s the Biologist completing her requisite journal entries during their voyage into the mysterious Area X.

Dialogue

The dialogue is super fun and tightly woven into the activity of each scene. VanderMeer delightfully captures not only how kids talk, but how this particular type of kid would talk, who is not human and is growing up in 5 directions instead of 1. In the acknowledgments, VanderMeer thanks stepdaughter Erin Kennedy and grandson “Mr. R” Riley for help with this dialogue. That’s a good cue to seek advice and assistance in the writing process, and in particular go out and study and inquire from the type of voices you’re trying to emulate.

A flaw; there were a couple parts where Wick’s dialogue didn’t sound like him, but more like Borne. This was confusing because sometimes, Wick sounding like Borne was intentional foreshadowing that he WAS Borne pretending to be Wick. But there were one or two parts where he was definitely Wick but still sounded like Borne. Maybe this was to foreshadow that since Wick was also non-human, he occasionally had his idiosyncrasies. But it took me out of the story at these moments because it didn’t sound authentic to his character and felt like a fumble where VanderMeer got used to writing as Borne so the “Borne voice” leaked into Wick voice.

Storytelling theme and narrative devices

There’s a strong theme of storytelling within the story, and VanderMeer also employs various devices to spice up the one running narrative by Rachel, like injecting journal entries, uncovered secret files, flashbacks, and a letter. Rachel herself wanted to be a writer, and her relationship with Borne, especially in its first stage, really develops through her continuously telling stories to him, even before she realizes he can understand her. She also, obviously, tells us this story, fulfilling her dream of being a writer. Rachel’s partner, Wick, designs drugs which can erase your memories and/or insert new ones– he too is a kind of storyteller, or inverse storyteller, untelling people their life stories. Borne himself is like a walking library of stories, since he remembers the life of every creature he “knows” (eats, kind of). We don’t get to know all the stories he knows, but VanderMeer probably wrote them out as worldbuilding, because you get glimpses into their existence based on things Borne says and does.

Significant names

You can’t do this with every type of story, but I find it fun when names have literal or significant meanings, and Borne, in all its weirdness, gets to run with this. All the names in this story seem to have significance, although only some are explained.

Rachel is the only person with a normal name (which tracks with her being the Alice who’s not from this world), explained as a name she was given because it didn’t run on either side of her family, a compromise between her Romeo and Juliet-esque parents. In the Bible, the original Rachel is an important matriarch whose relationship to motherhood is also complex and traumatic, interwoven with infertility, betrayal, and surrogacy. One could draw many parallels between the biblical story of Rachel and the story here –they both raise someone else’s child who appears to be a kind of divine intervention, they are both “discovered” by their partners beside pools of water, etc.–, but I won’t belabor (no pun intended) the point.

Rachel named “Borne” after a play on words her partner once made about being born/borne. Borne’s name gains added significance as a creature who is borne (carried, and carried to term) first by Mord, then by Rachel, and by whom others are borne, since his nature is to incorporate the material and information around him into his body.

VanderMeer’s own name indicates Dutch heritage, and in Dutch “moord” means “murder,” a fitting name for the embodiment of destruction that is Mord. (Also interesting, “VanderMeer” means “From the Lake” and many creatures in this story come from watery places).

“Wick” is more ambiguous, but my theory is that there’s an off-stage story behind this, that Wick was originally designed as a bioluminescent creature, and this is a candle metaphor –at certain points Rachel dramatically describes him as radiant with light, especially when his love for her is fully revealed in his acts towards the end of the story. The way she describes this can be read as metaphor, but looking back he may actually have a luminescent quality which Rachel was consciously or subconsciously picking up on.

An incomplete picture and keeping some mysteries

VanderMeer delivers on the big promises, but introduces plenty of mystery that doesn’t get answered, in a way that you won’t feel disappointed because you got the answers to the biggest questions, but which serve as further hooks to keep you engaged. Some examples:

What is Borne? We are given enough angles to form our own understanding of Borne, but a definitive answer is never given — we’re satisfied with this because we realize it’s asking the wrong question, or rather, this is the ultimate question of all creatures, and does not have a definitive answer– existentialism etc.
What’s up with the Company and the City? We get to know them fairly well, but at the end of the book there’s no definitive history given of where either came from and how they got to the state they’re in today, aside from the general understanding of human failings, capitalism, and climate crisis leading to apocalypse.
Who is Mord? — unlike Borne, we get a more definitive answer to “what” Mord is, but not who. We learn he was initially a human being who turned into a creature, but not who that human was. I was expecting to learn more about who was before, especially the way Wick talked about him sometimes I thought they might have been in a relationship. But I guess the interesting thing here is that, Mord is human who becomes a creature, who is he is what he is now, like everyone else.

Personhood

This is one of the two top themes of the book in my opinion, beside motherhood. “Am I a person?” “What does it mean to be a person” etc. are questions regularly asked directly by characters, or raised in the readers’ mind as the story unfolds.

The contrasts between characters and their relation to personhood allow for a holistic contemplation of personhood and humanity. We see each character as one thing and then learn they “are,” or were, something else entirely. For example, we see Wick as human for most of the story, but he doesn’t see himself that way. Later we learn that Wick is a creature we mistook for human. But he does become human, after self-sabotaging his own personhood for so long through self-loathing, love of Rachel, and hatred of Borne.

Within this theme arises the question of nature versus nurture, or the big impact both have. On the one hand, Mord is a human who is transformed into a creature through the Company’s evil surgery –nurture over nature. On the other hand, Borne is a creature who is transformed into a person through Rachel’s love, but also through an inner light or nature which understands himself in a subconscious way to be deserving of more love and personhood than even Rachel gives him –nurture, but wait! More deeply, nature.

Rachel is the only one who actually doesn’t change that much, now that I think about it, despite being the ostensible protagonist as the narrator (though Borne is really the protagonist imo). Or at least the change with Rachel is more subtle. At the beginning, the trauma was so great that she doesn’t know how she got here, she has a broken relationship with her beloved, and she’s also given up her dream of being a writer. At the end, she learns what happened to her parents, that their great act of love seeking a better life for her got them killed and brought her here, she has a complete and healed relationship with her beloved, and she has apparently written this story. She’s been able to heal and self-actualize even in what we initially considered apocalypse, she’s found new life at the end of the world.

Some other thoughts on personhood/character development

Borne’s dressing up as a wizard to disguise himself was the most adorable thing and made me just fall in love with him as a character. And as a shapeshifting creature that can look like anything and beyond, the choices he makes or feels he has to make about what he looks like serve as meditations on children trying to please parents, people trying to please societal norms, etc.
The horror of when Rachel, after obviously loving Borne as her child, completely neglects to check up on his wounds after asking him to defend her with his life, was one of the most shattering moments of the book for me. The mother using the child as a human shield and then just absentmindedly forgetting to even check up on the wounds he incurred in protecting her was brutal, it revealed in a way she doesn’t see him as a person like she sees her own kind (even ironically when the other human turns out to be not human at all). In this case, Borne is more human, or at least a better person, than Rachel. This was a key scene for interrogating who is really “human” or “person.”

Mixed feelings about the ending

The very last lines, in which we learn that Borne survived in a way, but that Rachel will kill him if he shows any sign of personhood, didn’t sit right with me. His survival felt a little deus ex machina, and Rachel’s reaction felt like VanderMeer delivering a moral to the story that I didn’t realize he was pushing, and which I highly disagreed with. For most of the read, I thought the book was gonna end with Borne devouring everything and this turning out to be a good thing because he’s a kind of preserving, healing, synthesizing force that becomes a new world in itself. So for Rachel to conclude it’s right to kill Borne felt all kinds of wrong.

But reflecting further, I can also see this as a masterful ending. Because remember, Rachel is telling us this story, not VanderMeer. Rachel’s conclusion is at the end of the day, Borne’s nature is a killing machine, so he needs to be killed before he can kill. But VanderMeer’s conclusion, is to have us interrogate this, Rachel’s conclusion, and apply the same logic to her: maybe humans are a killing machine that can be kept around in a future run by more evolved creatures only if we’re “nice” (one of the story’s motif words), but we may just to be eliminated if it seems we’re doomed by nature to be a killing machine.

This ending states that humans kind of suck and can’t think beyond certain limits, and Rachel will never be able to really outgrow her limited morality in this regard. But just like the book earlier wondered, “you wouldn’t hate a wolf for hunting, that’s its nature,” maybe in ending on this disappointing note with Rachel, it’s inviting us to consider that we shouldn’t hate humans for the apparent evils we’ve done either. It’s our nature, just like a wolf can’t choose to be vegetarian, we’re stuck thinking in terms of killing or being killed. Or maybe we’re like Borne, and may have [been] developed to be a killing machine, but can choose to be good, in the right conditions.

Either way, the ending seems to point to the City’s salvation via the creatures that succeed humans, who aren’t just better because they try to be better, as we try but fail to overcome our nature, but are better because they have better natures to begin with (a sort of Aristotelian ethics). Evidence for this interpretation comes in the angelic figure of the fox, who moves through the world (literally, through solid matter), accompanying its dying creatures in love, without yielding to them or harming them, on its way to building a world beyond them. I think this is an interesting form of climate optimism championed by VanderMeer, that humans may wreck and irrevocably alter the earth, and go extinct, but the earth will not end, and life will continue to evolve and improve.

**Writing exercises based on Borne by Jeff VanderMeer**

Practice writing child dialogue. Take notes as you listen to kids you know, or lookup youtube videos of kids speaking, analyze its sense and syntax, get inspired by its quirks, and then try writing your own.
Descriptive chapter headings. Outline or organize a story via descriptive chapter headings, like Borne is structured. For example, “What Wick had told me about the fish project and the company,” “What I found and how I found it,” etc. The novel Cracks uses this device as well, often in the form of questions, which the chapter answers: “Why did our parents send us to this school?”, “How we first heard about Fiamma.” Posing a question about the story as a chapter heading at then writing to answer the question can be a good way to brainstorm material as well as retain as a narrative device in the final draft.
Collage. Embellish or shake up your story by telling part of it through a journal entry, letter between characters, or flashback. For practice, try delivering the same content through all three different vehicles.
Who’s your narrator and why do they write? Write in the first person as if this is a real story you’re passing on, and consider in what manner it would have been written down and delivered, to whom, and why.
Write from nature. VanderMeer’s books attest to his growing up in, studying, and loving complex ecosystems. Spend time studying, actually studying, the flora and fauna of the place where you live. You can use apps like iNaturalist or PlantNet that allow you to snap pictures and quickly learn about what you’re looking at. Use this knowledge to enrich your worldbuilding and/or write an apocalyptic story based in your backyard and how the creatures you find there might evolve.

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