Archive for the ‘Lauren Beukes’ Category
Broken Monsters, Read with a Friend!
Posted on: May 25, 2019
Last month, Book Forager and I read Lauren Beukes’s Broken Monsters. This book came out a while ago, but we both realized it was a book we had been meaning to get to. . . and just needed a nudge to finally read. As we each got through different portions of the books, we’d email back and forth our thoughts and questions for each other. Our conversation morphed in a shared Google Doc for us to chat back and forth about our favorite characters, the weirdness of this book, the ending (holy crap that ending!!), and that a book that is ostensibly about a serial killer made me cry.
Below, is one half of our conversation, head over to Book Forager this weekend to read the other half!
Who were your favorite characters?
Book Forager: I’m torn between Layla, TK and Clayton. Layla is such a badass and I still think she’s the hero of the book. Yes, she’s a teen who’s trying to sort everything out in her head and work out who she is, but she’s got some serious backbone. She takes on VelvetBoy and Travis (which was awesome!), and she seems to understand better than anyone else what’s going on in the factory at the end. She admires Cass without realising just how frigging awesome she is herself.
I loved TK from the moment he found those red shoes and handed them over to Ramón instead of keeping them for himself. Everything about his story breaks my heart. At the end of my copy of the book there was an interview with Beukes (was there in yours, Andrea?) and in both that and her acknowledgements she mentions James Harris from the NOAH project at the Central United Methodist Church in Detroit, who allowed her to use details from his personal history. I’m guessing that’s why TK feels so real. Real or not, he’s loyal and smart, an incredibly sympathetic character, and has an odd super power involving chairs.
And Clayton. He’s just so well written. I have a soft spot for characters who struggle to interact with the world in an acceptable way. He’s incredibly creepy, and deluded, and I’m not sure I can scrape up that much empathy for him, but I still have a little. At least I did at the beginning. I feel like he’s not quite fully formed, if that makes any sense? I’m guessing he may not be on your favourite characters list Andrea, but how did you feel about Clayton Broom?
Andrea: You guessed right, Clayton totally creeped me out! And yes, I 100% get what you mean that he didn’t feel fully formed. Do you think that was on purpose? That he’s looking for something that will make him feel (or literally be) fully formed? I’m such an idiot, I thought my book didn’t have the interview in the back. . . . and I just looked again, just now, and of course it’s there. How did I miss that before??
At first I really liked Jonno, more on him in a bit.
It’s funny, at the beginning of the book, it looks like Gabrielle and Jonno are being presented as the main characters. And yes, they are both important, but I felt like as the book progressed, Layla, and by extension, Cas, become the main characters. It is awful that this thriller about a freaky AF serial killer is really Layla’s coming of age book? She starts as this quiet “don’t look at me” kind of girl who is overshadowed by her boisterous best friend, and the tables kind of turn by the end, in a good way. The crazy shit Layla and Cass do to Velvetboy? Holy crap! And like, I don’t think Layla figures out exactly who she is by the end, but she sure figures out who she isn’t. And wow, what a bonding experience between her and her mom!!!
Layla has a unique way of looking at the world, and I think for teenagers, that unique way is totally normal. But us adults, we’ve forgotten how to look at the world in such a unique way. If she hadn’t been at the warehouse at the end, the book would have had a much more gruesome ending, I think. I wonder if Beukes sort of wrote the lead up to the end backwards? Like, she knew Layla had to be there . . . so how to engineer the scenes before to make sure Layla is there? I bet all authors do something like that, where they know certain characters need to be in certain places for certain things to happen, so how do to you make sure people have a legit reason to be where they are supposed to be at the right time?
Book Forager: Huh … this is going to sound dumb, but it never occurred to me that Clayton’s not-quite-fully-formed-ness was something deliberate. But that makes complete sense (I feel a real wally!) of what happens to him in the woods (even though I think Beukes is deliberately vague on that score, perhaps to keep the reader guessing about the supernatural elements until later on), and why.
Yeah, I felt like Gabrielle and Jonno were going to be the key players too, and I liked the way Layla and Cass slowly moved into the spotlight, how the whole book starts out feeling like a typical procedural and slowly twists into something much more.
Did your favorite character(s) change by the end of the book?
Thanks to the amazing organization skills of Rinn over at Rinn Reads, we’re right in the heart of Science Fiction Month. And I’ve noticed something. Something wonderful: lots of folks who are participating in SciFi Month are completely new to science fiction.
This is fantastic! That so many people who have never picked up a science fiction book are interested in giving some weird stuff a try, it warms my heart. Getting into science fiction isn’t always easy. Strange names, alien planets, technobabble, far future technologies. . . it can be a bit much. Luckily, there are plenty (countless, actually) of “gate way” books, books that take place right now, or maybe a few years in the future, or even a few years in past. Books that don’t leave the solar system, maybe don’t even leave the Earth. You don’t need to be fluent in technobabble or have a degree in astronomy to enjoy these. You just need to turn the first page. . .
to help you on your journey into scifi, I’ve linked the titles to my reviews. If you have any suggestions for other gateway books, let everyone know in the comments!
American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett – After her parent’s death, Mona inherits her Mom’s old house in a sleepy town in the southwest. It’s one of those old fashioned towns, where everyone knows everyone else, and the oldsters remember all the family secrets. there are family secrets, and then there are Family Secrets. How will Mona react when she learns her own?
In the Garden of Iden, by Kage Baker. I love Kage Baker, it’s as simple as that. This novel is the first of her Company Series. Don’t worry, it doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, you won’t feel sucked into reading another long series. Mendoza is an operative with a company that collects historical artifacts, and they’ve turned her into an immortal cyborg, of sorts. She spies on people, but can’t tell anyone who or what she is. Really sucks, when she falls in love with someone on her first mission. This book is as heartbreaking as it is funny. By the way, I’ve got a review of some Kage Baker Company short stories that’ll be posting in a few days.
Review: Moxyland by Lauren Beukes
Posted on: July 7, 2011
Moxyland, by Lauren Beukes
first published in 2008
where I got it: purchased new
why I read it: I really enjoyed Beukes’ Zoo City
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in a not so distant future, connectivity is everything. Not only does your cell phone connect you to your friends and family (not to mention the internet), but the government and local police use it as a tracking device, and when necessary a punishment device. Disconnectivity by government order can equal a death sentence for some, as your phone is also your public transit pass, your pass to get into work, and your pass to get through certain city checkpoints. It also screams tech-based apartheid. May sound shocking to you and I, But to the youth and 20-somethings of South Africa, they grew up with this – to them it’s completely normal.
ahh, taking technologies and the social order and making their uncomfortable side effects feel normal, that’s just one thing Beukes excels at. All of our characters, Kendra,the art school drop out turned PR guinea pig; Toby, the LARPer with dreams of taking down the government; Tendeka the children’s charity organizer whose getting sick of losing funding; and Lerato, the programming genius who thinks she knows it all.
Read the rest of this entry »
come on, everybody’s doin’ it.
Posted on: December 27, 2010
Behold! LRR’s end of year listy thing! (Yay peer pressure!)
Favorite book of 2010: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. Words can not describe how much I loved this book. It turned me into a blabbering fangirl.
Favorite newly discovered author of 2010: Joe Abercrombie. Okay, so his First Law trilogy was published before 2010, but I read, no, I devoured this trilogy during the second half of 2010. this is the uncut good shit.
Best twist in a SF/F novel: Mark Hodder’s Springheeled Jack. If you’ve read it you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t read it, you still have a few days of vacation left, so what are you waiting for?
Favorite newly discovered character is a Big ole tie between: Joe Abercrombie’s Sand dan Glotka, Lauren Beukes’ Zinzi December, and Mike Resnick’s Doc Holliday. Me, have a weakness for tragic characters? no way!
Favorite graphic novel: Rising Stars by J. Michael Strazcynski. It’s not new, but it was new to me.
Favorite Manga: Nana, by Ai Yazawa. I love Shojo. Who knew?
Book most looking forward to in 2011: Wise Man’s Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss
what were your favorites for 2011?
Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes
Posted on: December 7, 2010
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes is one of those wonderful books that what it’s about isn’t at all what it’s about. It’s about Zinzi December, and her knack for finding lost things, and the dangerous mystery she gets herself involved with when she gets hired to find a teen starlet whose gone missing. And yes, that’s what it’s about. But it isn’t about that at all. Zoo City is about how society treats the marginalized – the destitute, the different, the criminal class. On top of that, there is some wonderfully hella cool magic.
Although she and I are very different, on every page I felt I could relate to Zinzi December. I have never spent time in prison, she has. I am not marginalized, she is. I don’t make a living scamming people over the internet, she does. But the trust issues? The anti-socialness? Her realistic attitude that comes off as cynicism? He reaction when her lover says he’s leaving? Oh baby can I relate. Maybe we’re not so different after all.
In this alternate world, every jail sentence is a life sentence, no matter what. When you commit a crime, your animal comes for you. Not a totem and not a familiar, the animal brings a special talent with it, and being separated from your animal causes physical pain and death in some cases. And if your animal dies before you do? The Undertow will come for you. Governments learn very quickly how to identify and exploit this new class of undesireables, known derogatorily as Animalled or Zoos.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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