The Emergency of Black and the Emergence of Rap (A Special Issue of Black Scared Music : a J... Book

I think i'm being generous. i think this book could easily get two stars and it would be okay. yet i loved it for long stretches, and got turned off only towards the end. still, endings count. in the mystery genre, a book that weaves a very complex web but lets you down at the end is a seriously flawed book.

this started losing me when the intricacies of the plot became so intricate that i started losing the ability to suspend disbelief. also, o'connell plays with red herrings and misleading/confusing side-plots a bit too close to the fire. i got burned.

for most of the book, though, i shamelessly rooted for mallory. she has the potential to be a very good character. maybe the previous books of the series show her in a less preposterous light. maybe future books will. i have read neither.

now i'll talk about the mystification and de-mystification of the female loner. literature, high and low-brow, has male loners galore, but the other characters don't spend quite as much time worshiping them at a distance, tiptoeing around them, discussing them, analysing them, worrying about them. above all, they don't call them "the kid." male loners are cool. this female loner is cool, too -- definitely portrayed as such -- but for some reason o'connell felt the need to endow her friends with an insistent, sticky brand of avuncularism that, at the end, does get on one's nerves. leave well enough alone, already. the woman on the pedestal is a mainstay of heroic representations of women since homer, and plenty people have made the argument that it actually diminishes women. i am not telling o'connell to get with the program, but i'm telling you that it would help a lot with my enjoyment of her books if she did.

maybe carol o'connell is not too worried about the diminishment of her character, though. and here's another observation. i am no mystery expert, but my tiny exposure to the genre has led me to observe that women writers love to put their female characters in situations in which women and or children get massively brutalized. i understand the exorcising function of this fantasy, the drive to turn terror into pleasure. it's primal and common and i buy it. and maybe male writers do it too, and maybe only the three or so women mystery writers i have read do it.

** SPOILERS **

having covered my bases, though, i'd like to say that in this 21st century of ours it might be nice for women writers to move on from this specific exorcising fantasy and be a little less transparent in their desire to come to terms with violence against women and children. i mean, do you HAVE to get ONE HUNDRED LITTLE GIRLS brutally slaughtered?

the small mercy, here, is that there is no sexual violence. the annoying fact is that the killer must be über-phobic of touch with a live human being in order for this fact to be supported by the narrative.

i get frustrated by the way in which this culture of ours thrives on the brutalization of children. i know we are all terrified. i know we are battling powerful frontier fantasies of treacherous enemies and the great unknown. i also know that the strongly religious fundamentalist roots of our cultural, with their accompanying demonization of sexuality, make us angry and repressed. but, com'on. it's the 21st century. it's okay to lay the beast to rest. it's okay to walk close to it and realize that it isn't that bad after all. it's okay to let our kids walk to the grocery store on their own, play in the front yard unsupervised, grow up a little less frightened.