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merricatct's review against another edition
3.0
This was really well-written, and I found it really compelling - but I also didn't really like it. I almost felt forced to read it, and I don't know if it's because it was fascinating or because I was hoping to make some sense of it. Probably both. The main character seems to be going through a mental breakdown as the world around her devolves into dystopian violence, but the people around her seem oblivious to what's going on, instead focusing on their sex parties and vegan recipes and yoga classes. There's a farm commune, revolutionary parents who relive their child's unfortunate and early death from years ago, domestic terrorism, rat cemeteries ... this was a very odd book.
sharonfalduto's review against another edition
There are people who are going to love this book. Neo-hippies in their baggy overalls and dreadlocked white girl hair and going think this book, like, is so REAL, man. I found it about 80% interesting and 20% unreadable. The author kept going off on tangents, referring to things I didn't understand. The plot, essentially, is about the narrator, daughter of revolutionaries who would be so proud if she ended up being a lesbian, getting caught up in a sort-of revolution against corporations. Just when I thought I was following the plot I would get lost again.
mhall's review against another edition
4.0
Issued by a small press called Red Lemonade, this first novel by a Portland writer strikes right to the heart of an alternate near future, where the one war is still going but the second war hasn't quite started, and the bombs are a daily fear but also could just be mostly in your head. The main character Della is in her late 20s, working as a waitress at a vegan-ish diner where the customers debate which country they should move to - Bali, Costa Rica, Sri Lanka? But the time for getting out might have passed, and the overwhelming immense hopeless dread is kind of in her head more than anyplace else, as she thinks things like this:
“When the first box-mall-church went up in the blackberry field I wanted some kind of rampant mass stigmata with blackberry juice for blood. It didn’t happen. It’s not going to. They win; they just roll, pave and drive over everything that’s beautiful: babies, love and small birds."
Della is at loose ends, with an abandoned academic career in geology and a more recent failed career working with her brother as a community activist (their greatest success came when they slightly delayed the building of a Wal-Mart). She is surrounded by all the trappings of left-wing culture, described accurately and lovingly. A wicked, precise sense of humor permeates the novel, mostly in sharp dialogue and satire of the small details of the characters.
The writing is the greatest strength of this book, which meanders a little in plot. Della starts calling in fake bomb threats and eventually falls in with a group of would-be left-wing terrorists living on a farm, but along the way several people drop in and out and we never really get to know them.
“When the first box-mall-church went up in the blackberry field I wanted some kind of rampant mass stigmata with blackberry juice for blood. It didn’t happen. It’s not going to. They win; they just roll, pave and drive over everything that’s beautiful: babies, love and small birds."
Della is at loose ends, with an abandoned academic career in geology and a more recent failed career working with her brother as a community activist (their greatest success came when they slightly delayed the building of a Wal-Mart). She is surrounded by all the trappings of left-wing culture, described accurately and lovingly. A wicked, precise sense of humor permeates the novel, mostly in sharp dialogue and satire of the small details of the characters.
The writing is the greatest strength of this book, which meanders a little in plot. Della starts calling in fake bomb threats and eventually falls in with a group of would-be left-wing terrorists living on a farm, but along the way several people drop in and out and we never really get to know them.
rebeccafromflorida's review against another edition
3.0
Della is a scientist who lives with her brother and his pregnant wife after graduating from school and having somewhat of a mental breakdown. She has an obsession with fire, as well as with people setting themselves on fire. Through her job at a local restaurant, through her brother’s connections, and through her parents, Della is surrounded by people who are hippie-radical types, and is focused on changing the world in some way, by using extreme measures.
When the places she calls in bomb threats to actually start being bombed, Della knows she needs to figure out the connection.
Continue reading at Love at First Book
Thanks for reading,
Rebecca @ Love at First Book
When the places she calls in bomb threats to actually start being bombed, Della knows she needs to figure out the connection.
Continue reading at Love at First Book
Thanks for reading,
Rebecca @ Love at First Book
prcizmadia's review against another edition
5.0
This is really leaning hard towards five stars, because the world that Veselka created, and the characters she put in it, are so unbelievably engrossing that I devoured this book in a very short time. I love that she does not wander the well-worn path of trope in examining the psychology of terrorism and social critique, and instead presents a fresh take on the topics that is scarily relevant in the consumer and fear-addled world we live in. I do feel like some themes that were mined for symbolism in the beginning were cast aside as the story went on, but this does not detract at all. When she pulls the noose tight on the story, it really is a work of art.
nataliya_x's review against another edition
4.0
"Sometimes you just need to be someone else, someone who doesn’t care about anything at all. I know I do. I want emptiness but I can’t have it."
I read this book because of the amazing review Kris wrote, and she truly has an impeccable taste in books. The memory of her praise of this slim volume was what kept me from giving up through the first third of the story, until finally the book gripped my heart and insisted that I continue with it, until I finally was powerless to put it down.
"Lately, I’ve become afraid that the feeling I used to feel, like something good was waiting, is what people mean when they say “young” and that it is nothing more than a chemical associated with a metabolic process and not anything real at all."The core of this book hinges not on the plot but on the metaphor-laden emotions and feelings - desperate and overpowering ones. It's very internally oriented - which eventually becomes its strongest point.
“I wish it were enough just to be alive.”Narrated by a character who recently has gone through a significant (even if not much alluded to) mental breakdown and is in the utmost fragile mental state ("my wiring was shot and I cried all the time"), Zazen is filled to the brim with trembling tense panic, raw staccato emotions, disdain of conformity and nonconformity alike, loss and isolation and alienation, suffocating fear and anger, deep intense longing for something that at last can be real, and overpowering desire to run away from it all - to the place where something will somehow be better.
I knew what she meant more than anything I had ever known.
"I’d like to see something happen. Something big that wasn’t scary, just beautiful. Some kind of wonderful surprise. Like how fireworks used to feel."Della, emotionally fragile paleontologist turned waitress at a vegan restaurant, is very isolated and quite misanthropic, secretly harboring a "hidden desire for things not to be fucked, to belong somewhere". A child of the radical revolutionary parents, she exists in a world of the contrasts and divides.
On one side there is the suffocating fakeness of the all-is-hunky-dory culture venerating mass consumerism, worshiping it in the box-mall-church. On another side, there is the counterculture of rejection and resistance, bordering on hatred and destruction. And somewhere - place them yourself - are those "so thoroughly anchored into some sort of pop culture aesthetic that nothing can knock me over or wash me away or make me hate everyone".
But is any of that *real* in a sense we perceive real? Real as in 'free from fake', free of the pre-packaged ready-to-consume one-size-fits-most roles and identities that are so easily doled out by the culture where patriotism and shopping are intertwined? Is is any wonder Della is angry and confused? Is it any wonder she feels lost? Is it any wonder she notices that "...Everyone had a pretty good reason to blow up a building. I agreed with most of them."?
"War A is going well and no longer a threat, small and mature. Like a bonsai. War B is in full flower. Its thin green shoots reaching across the ocean floor like fiber optic cable. Our only defense is attack."Is it any wonder she feels trapped in a world perpetually on a brink of war, where bombs go off, children die, and there are people who in protest set themselves on fire?
"And they were all like that, macrobiotic Belgian trust-fund junkies, park bench anarchists, mean white lesbians in canvas clothing and dreadlocks—each ready to denounce you as a cop at the slightest sign of dissent. My dirty little secret was that I only liked militants at a distance. Up close I couldn’t stand them. Their targets were always the same, a cow path from the cell to the Great Reactionary Dawn. I wanted something more creative than dead clerks."
A child of radicals, a sister of an activist, a friend (or at least an associate) of those who can be easily called domestic terrorists, Della strikes me as first of all a pacifist. She may be fascinated with bombs and self-immolation and such - but, after all, all she really wants is for "everything to be okay, everything to change, and no one to get hurt." And the world does not work that way, sadly.
"That’s the problem with symbolic gestures. People never take them far enough."And the world does not run on symbolic gestures only. But *real* gestures - Della eventually comes to see that they are not an alternative - not for her, at least.
--------------
The tense panic, the longing, the fear of passivity and fear of violence, the need for acceptance, the search for real identity - all those things screaming from the pages of this metaphor-laden book, and try as hard as I can I'm unable to stop thinking about it.
"I also knew what it was like to be somewhere foreign, waiting for the person you used to be to show up."I have spent a few days trying to come to terms with what I feel about this book. I've never really felt that lost or desperate or that lonely as Della does - so why did it ultimately begin to resonate with me this hard? Because it plays on our inner essential desire for things to be fine, for the world to be *real*, for love instead of hatred?
Maybe so. I don't know - maybe I need a few more years on my shoulders to understand everything that is going through my own head right now. What I do know is that this book still hasn't let me go - and for this I can give it 4.5 stars without much hesitation.
"Annette says I’m too hard on the world, that I only see one side.
Grace says I’m afraid of my own longing.
I looked around at the smoke and people. I couldn’t find any hate in me anywhere. The world is a violent child none of us will get to see grow up.
I decided to love it anyway."
——————
Recommended by: Kris
kingkong's review against another edition
4.0
Very cool, thoughts and feelings and bombs and Wal-Mart and hey, Vanessa Veselka, are you reading this? Are you reading my review? Hello?
meganmilks's review against another edition
5.0
this is like a queer feminist fight club, a million times more complicated and interesting. i have not seen contemporary radical/anarchist politics handled so effectively in fiction, except in scifi, and i guess there's a touch of that here. this future is near, though. it's like, tomorrow. i am particularly impressed by how veselka sets up different ideological systems via character, with some systems/characters rendered unstable by della's limited knowledge and changing allegiances. people appearing one way, then revealing their underground selves... just like in pretty little liars. <3
also della's double-vision -- seeing her mother with "tiny creeks" flowing from each finger, envisioning "the real map...a living map" on top of the topography of box-malls. anyway a lot of blazingly good prose. here's della's description of the kitchen on the collective farm:
"I had been with Grace and Miro [her parents] in a hundred kitchens like that. Everything was wood, metal, paper or glass; nothing was disposable. I knew where to look for cloth filters, tea, compost buckets and co-op containers of peanut butter, honey and tahini. I knew how the bread would taste, how the clay mugs would feel and how cold the kitchen would be until people came and it got warm from the bodies. ... And if you couldn't feel the despair that was in everything, if you were numb to the intense loss at the center of it all, it was like stepping right into a children's story. Fresh milk and cozy fires on the cusp of a wild wood." (169)
also della's double-vision -- seeing her mother with "tiny creeks" flowing from each finger, envisioning "the real map...a living map" on top of the topography of box-malls. anyway a lot of blazingly good prose. here's della's description of the kitchen on the collective farm:
"I had been with Grace and Miro [her parents] in a hundred kitchens like that. Everything was wood, metal, paper or glass; nothing was disposable. I knew where to look for cloth filters, tea, compost buckets and co-op containers of peanut butter, honey and tahini. I knew how the bread would taste, how the clay mugs would feel and how cold the kitchen would be until people came and it got warm from the bodies. ... And if you couldn't feel the despair that was in everything, if you were numb to the intense loss at the center of it all, it was like stepping right into a children's story. Fresh milk and cozy fires on the cusp of a wild wood." (169)
vita_zeta's review against another edition
4.0
There is a bitter joy in this book. I felt it just as I was finishing, a great purging feeling, like a fire starting. “I didn’t bomb those buildings,” Della says. “I just thought they looked pretty as they burned.”
This book is so relevant right now it’s creepy. I don’t know if it’s just because these things are always relevant – terrorism, injustice, desperate hippies – or that Vanessa Veselka is just that on it. I like to think it’s a little bit of both. I mean, this book is about being on it, balancing on the cusp of newness, hipness, just before absolute oblivion. Della makes her fake bomb threats, that turn into a real bombs, just as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s smoldering selfie makes it onto the cover of Rolling Stone. A young black boy is shot for brandishing a toy that Della left out in the rain just as George Zimmerman is acquitted. We all feel helpless to a world slowly burning, and we all feel responsible to some degree, just as Della does. And we think maybe we deserve it. We experience a confluence of egotistical despair and selfless love when we see the world hurting. Or at least, I hope most of us do.
Zazen is impressively accessible, considering the fact that Della’s mind often wanders through memories and detached thoughts, drawing strange correlations between past and present, abstract and concrete. It’s not obtuse or pretentious, it’s actually kind of familiar, or at least for me it was. And the sheer hipsterdom isn’t alienating either. If you’ve ever had your ear talked off by a vegan before, then you will get a few snickers in reading this. And if you are the crunchiest thing since granola, you’ll probably see plenty that’s familiar, some that feels like a rallying cry, with a touch of self-deprecation. This book is incredibly clever, without going overboard with it.
I can’t say that I totally understood Della. I understood how lost and helpless she felt, and I get that she wanted to effect the world in some way. The things and people she as attracted to bewildered me at first until Veselka came clean about where she was going with it. Most of Della’s friends are terribly unlikable, Tamara most of all who mostly just seems to make Della feel awful about herself. But she’s drawn to her like a magnet, I suppose the same way she buys burner phones and names them after dead rats. She behaves on the instincts of a woman who doesn’t know herself anymore, or maybe knows too much about herself.
You’re probably gathering by now that this book is kind of difficult to talk about. In short, it’s not only good, but it’s important, especially now.
This book is so relevant right now it’s creepy. I don’t know if it’s just because these things are always relevant – terrorism, injustice, desperate hippies – or that Vanessa Veselka is just that on it. I like to think it’s a little bit of both. I mean, this book is about being on it, balancing on the cusp of newness, hipness, just before absolute oblivion. Della makes her fake bomb threats, that turn into a real bombs, just as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s smoldering selfie makes it onto the cover of Rolling Stone. A young black boy is shot for brandishing a toy that Della left out in the rain just as George Zimmerman is acquitted. We all feel helpless to a world slowly burning, and we all feel responsible to some degree, just as Della does. And we think maybe we deserve it. We experience a confluence of egotistical despair and selfless love when we see the world hurting. Or at least, I hope most of us do.
Zazen is impressively accessible, considering the fact that Della’s mind often wanders through memories and detached thoughts, drawing strange correlations between past and present, abstract and concrete. It’s not obtuse or pretentious, it’s actually kind of familiar, or at least for me it was. And the sheer hipsterdom isn’t alienating either. If you’ve ever had your ear talked off by a vegan before, then you will get a few snickers in reading this. And if you are the crunchiest thing since granola, you’ll probably see plenty that’s familiar, some that feels like a rallying cry, with a touch of self-deprecation. This book is incredibly clever, without going overboard with it.
I can’t say that I totally understood Della. I understood how lost and helpless she felt, and I get that she wanted to effect the world in some way. The things and people she as attracted to bewildered me at first until Veselka came clean about where she was going with it. Most of Della’s friends are terribly unlikable, Tamara most of all who mostly just seems to make Della feel awful about herself. But she’s drawn to her like a magnet, I suppose the same way she buys burner phones and names them after dead rats. She behaves on the instincts of a woman who doesn’t know herself anymore, or maybe knows too much about herself.
You’re probably gathering by now that this book is kind of difficult to talk about. In short, it’s not only good, but it’s important, especially now.
discomagpie's review against another edition
challenging
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
5.0
We gave this book 5/5 stars on InsatiableBooksluts.com.
We often do discussion-style reviews on our site. Here's an excerpt of our review:
"Amy: We both loved, loved, loved it! Best book I’ve read so far this year, by far.
Susie: I’m also so glad that we read it. I was enchanted (as much as you can be enchanted by a book that is about terrorism and war and hippies).
Amy: Almost every line was a poem in itself. I’m going to try to find the one, early on, that hooked me.
Susie: I loved her use of imagery. During the “anniversary” scene she talked about Della’s mother in terms of a tsunami–ocean imagery is dicey because it can be so overdone, but hers was perfect.
Amy: Bah, I can’t find the specific line, annoying. One I did find: “I had been kissing the hems of ghosts.” *swoon* Gorgeous.
Amy: Her use of language and imagery is masterful. The recurring themes of the self-immolators, the pregnant rat, her sister, the ocean… so many common (and often ugly) things, but made beautiful with her language around them."
Read the full discussion at our site.
We often do discussion-style reviews on our site. Here's an excerpt of our review:
"Amy: We both loved, loved, loved it! Best book I’ve read so far this year, by far.
Susie: I’m also so glad that we read it. I was enchanted (as much as you can be enchanted by a book that is about terrorism and war and hippies).
Amy: Almost every line was a poem in itself. I’m going to try to find the one, early on, that hooked me.
Susie: I loved her use of imagery. During the “anniversary” scene she talked about Della’s mother in terms of a tsunami–ocean imagery is dicey because it can be so overdone, but hers was perfect.
Amy: Bah, I can’t find the specific line, annoying. One I did find: “I had been kissing the hems of ghosts.” *swoon* Gorgeous.
Amy: Her use of language and imagery is masterful. The recurring themes of the self-immolators, the pregnant rat, her sister, the ocean… so many common (and often ugly) things, but made beautiful with her language around them."
Read the full discussion at our site.