Books 33 and 34 - Double your (mystery-solving) pleasure.

Titles: Shock Waves (1989) and Dangerous Games (1991)
Author: Carolyn Keene

Annnnyway, a while ago I read some Hardy Boys books and mentioned that Nancy Drew was about a million times cooler than they were. But! Having now read two Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys Super Mysteries I can inform you that it's probably only about a hundred times when they're hanging out together. I assume Nancy's coolness rubs off on Frank and Joe.

The first thing to tell you is that both of these books have HORRENDOUS puns as their titles. Shock Waves takes place during a seaside holiday, and Dangerous Games is set (during another holiday) at some kind of international athletic competition. The second important thing is that the characters have "grown up" a bit since their earlier books. By "grown up" I mean that Joe's girlfriend (or his favourite date) Callie... died. In a terrorist bombing. And now Frank and Joe work for some mysterious international organisation where they do undercover work. In other words, you need to suspend your disbelief even further than you had to back in the 70's.

Since Nancy is a girl, her equivalent grown-upness is that she occasionally has fights and/or temporarily breaks up with her boyfriend, Ned. Perhaps the writers went to the Todd Wilkins and Elizabeth Wakefield school of relationship writing. In the course of these two books, Ned proves himself to be jealous of pretty much every guy Nancy spends time with, particularly Frank Hardy. To be fair, Nancy thinks Frank is hot like jalapeños, but she loves Ned and would never do anything to hurt him, so Ned kind of comes across as a huge dick. Since in Nancy's own books he's generally really sweet and supportive, I'm going to choose to believe he's been corrupted by the Hardys.

Anyway, in Shock Waves, Joe's dead girlfriend's ring that is the only thing he has to remember her by, (sob), gets stolen. The boys are determined to track the thief down. Nancy, meanwhile, starts to think that someone wants her new friend Buck dead when he first claims to have seen a dead body and is then attacked by poisonous jellyfish. The cases turn out to be related! I did not see that coming. Most of the plot surrounds Buck hitting on Nancy, and Nancy not noticing, and Ned getting jealous. This is actually not what I look for in a mystery, Nancy dear.

Dangerous Games is so much more awesome. Nancy and the boys are both seperately called to investigate when an international sporting star starts getting threatening notes, and everyone, including Nancy's friends Bess and George (yay!) go undercover. George (who's the sporty one) turns out to be so good at swimming that she considers taking it up professionally, and the sporting star's sister is totally hot for her. This is awesome, because usually it's Bess (the pretty, girly one) that all the guys want. Sorry, did I say I don't want to read about relationships in my mysteries? I meant I don't want to read about melodramatic relationships in my mysteries. Meanwhile Nancy and the Hardys realise that the threat has something to do with a drugs scandal that happened five years before, and I totally called who the bad guy was going to be ages before any of them did. Clearly I would make a much better teen detective than the Hardy Boys! But not Nancy. Her and I would just hang out with George and Bess and solve mysteries and be BFFs for ever and ever and ever.

Sometimes I guess we'd let the Hardy Boys join us and, IDK, fight vampires or something.



In conclusion: I need to get my hands on some more of these books.

One last thing - I know I'm late posting again! But here's why:

His name is Frosting. Frosting the Snowman. He took a while to make.

Book 16 - Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, or: Communism is not for lovers

Dunedin trip was pretty awesome - barely froze to death at all due to deliciously heated motel room - but the book I took down with me was decidedly not. I was hoping to finish it last week and write it up, but I'm halfway through and it is still unbelievably dull. So instead, here's a book I read a few months ago, only twenty years after everyone else read it. (In my defence, I was only 5 when it was published).



Title: Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991)

Author: Jung Chang

Why this book?
After Bomb, Book and Compass I was dying to learn more about China's history. I remember this book being pretty popular at school when I was 13 or 14, but Chinese Cinderella, which was published about then, put me off reading anything Chinese and autobiographical for a really long time (mostly because it was just so depressing.)

What's it all about anyway? Wild Swans tells the stories of three Chinese women whose lives span most of the Twentieth Century as huge social, political and economic changes come to China; three women the author knows intimately, as they are her maternal grandmother, her mother, and herself.

Chang's grandmother, Yu-fang, is born to a poor family, but her father schemes to have a high-ranking warlord take her on as his concubine in order to gain status. After a wedding ceremony, Yu-fang goes to live in a large household where all her material needs are left; however, she seldom sees her husband, as he has many other concubines as well as a wife. She's pretty miserable, as she distrusts the servants and convention dictates she does not return to her own family. Eventually she has a daughter and goes to live with in her husband's own household; however, after he dies, she realises her daughter is likely to be taken from her and raised by his wife as their own child. Yu-fang escapes back to her mother's house.

Yu-fan doesn't exactly have a lot of status as an ex-concubine living under her mother's roof, but nevertheless she falls in love with a kindly older man, Dr Xia, and he with her. They marry, but his family disapproves greatly of the match and his (adult) children go out of the way to destroy the relationship, even going so far as to hurt Yu-fan's daughter. Eventually, Yu-fan, her daughter and Dr Xia move away from his family home to an economically disadvantaged district; but despite her new poverty Yu-fan is very happy, and begins to learn the customs of Dr Xia's people (unlike her, he's Manchurian).

The story of Yu-fan's daughter is very different. De-hong (also known as Bao Qin) grows up seeing the Japanese and Chinese armies constantly battling for supremacy and is used to stories of their brutality and oppression; so she is surprised when she first meets members of the Communist army, impressed with their gentle manners and egalitarian ideals. She begins working for the Communist Party, and slowly works up the ranks, yet in the eyes of her superiors she is never fully committed to the Party - for one thing, she has friends among the Kuomintang (the Nationalist Party) that she refuses to see as enemies, and for another the fact that her own father was a high-ranking military officer makes her a possible enemy (despite the fact she never met her own father).

Still, when De-hong falls for a man who is a well-respected officer in the Communist Party, Shou-yu (also known as Wang Yu) she tries to become more dedicated to the Party, if only for his sake. The two marry, but Shou-yu's own conviction that he needs to put the needs of the Party before his own means that he often neglects his wife. De-hong, like her mother before her, is often lonely, and very unhappy, particularly since Party rules dictate that couples are seldom allowed to sleep together. These stiff rules do start to relax eventually - however, at the same time the ideal country that both Shou-yu and De-hong believe they are helping to build also starts to crumble away.

The couple have five children, including Jung Chang, the book's author. Chang's childhood is dominated by the growing cult of Mao; in contrast to Communists like Chang's parents, all Mao cared about was his own personal glory. After rising to power he began to stamp out past dissenters, present dissenters, possible future dissenters... And, of course, began brainwashing the children of China into believing the only way forward was his way. Chang herself willingly follows the other children, but thanks to her parents' influence finds herself starting to doubt Mao as she grew older. Still, she can't voice these doubts out loud, and like everyone else she is subject to the whims of the Communist Party's Leader - such as going to the country to work among peasants, despite constant illness and her lack of skills.

Mao's death leads to changes in China, although these changes are slow coming. Chang gets to go to university - something she's wanted to do for a very long time - and is able to study English, even meet foreigners. Finally, she is offered a scholarship to England, and the chance to leave China for good.

The Good and the Bad
The biggest problem I have with this book is the same problem I have with any autobiography, which is that it is impossible for the writer to describe her characters - her friends, family and enemies - without any bias, or to describe how an event transpired with a wholly impartial view. Chang does do a wonderful job with her grandmother and mother - although she clearly admires and loves them, she doesn't treat them softly, nor does she go the other way and treat them too harshly. When it comes to describing her own life, however, it really felt to me like she was talking herself up a little. Maybe I was just too cynical towards what I was reading, but whatever it was I didn't enjoy her story as much as I enjoyed the stories of her mother and grandmother.

Besides that, this was a wonderful book. It wasn't nearly as depressing as I thought it was going to be, and even when Chang is describing the most horrific of events she does so in such an even tone that it's surprisingly readable - she doesn't lay on the emotion, or revel in shocking her audience, she's simply telling what happened. That's really what makes Chang's story so believable, I think.

So should I read it or what?
This isn't a light read, but definitely worth putting in a few days of reading (even if I did start to skim a little towards the end...)

Unrelated link of the day: Superflat First Love, an animated music video created by Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton. Cute and cracktastic, this link was passed on to me from a friend who as big a dork about anime as I am.