Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 4

 

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann via Unsplash

Chapter 4 opens with the introduction of Monica Sells. She strikes Dresden as familiar, but he puts that down to something about her look, her outfit, rather than having seen her before. Or someone who looks like her. This is a solid way to turn something that might otherwise be a clue for the audience into foreshadowing - while her appearance is also compared to Jennifer Stanton's, it is only put in terms of the absence of a dye job. We're not really told anything about Jennifer Stanton's facial features, so we can't compare them to Monica's, and we aren't told Monica's eye color, so we can't compare it to Jennifer's. This means that on a first read through, the reader has no way to guess that they're sisters, but when it's revealed, many chapters from now, it doesn't feel like it's coming out of absolutely nowhere. This is some very solid storytelling technique. 

We are given enough information to guess that Victor Sells is abusing his wife. Monica leaping to the defense that "he only wants a good life for us" when no one present in the conversation is questioning his behavior is the major indicator, but her general level of anxiety and the fact that she pays in cash also point in this direction. Really the only thing that points away from it is that she wants him found in the first place, and like, lots of DV survivors still love and worry about their abusers. To be clear, I did't catch this on my first read, but it's there to find if you know what you're looking for. This also implies that she might have been more open with Dresden if he hadn't been so irritable. He definitely thinks he's doing a good job of covering his annoyance with how nervous she is and her mispronunciation of "tarot", but one of the things about abuse survivors is that they tend to get really good at picking up when someone is stressed out or angry, and Dresden getting impatient with her about basically innocuous things is not exactly going to foster a sense of safety. That said, given the amount of difficulty she has talking about magic, and the fact that she gave him the scorpion talisman even though we aren't given any other indication that she wanted to hurt him, I do also wonder if she might have been under some weak or poorly worded compulsion that constrained her words and actions when she was talking to Dresden. 

During the discussion of Monica's missing husband, Dresden suggests that she might be better off talking to a private investigator. So I guess that's a solid yes on Dresden actively self-sabotaging, but also, did he... forget that he's also a licensed PI? There's a short story written before this novel, where Dresden is still completing his PI training, so this is definitely not something Jim Butches just didn't decide until later. (It's called "A Restoration of Faith", I think, and it's in one of the short story collections, which we will be covering in this reread at the points between books where they came out). I don't have a serious criticism here, it's just odd. 

A thing where I kind of do have an actual criticism is the discussion of the scorpion talisman. Scorpions are frequently a symbol of evil - probably the best known bit of folklore about them in the English speaking world is the story of the fox/frog an the scorpion, although we know Dresden doesn't know that one until Mab tells it to him in Summer Knight. But they can also be a symbol of protection from evil and, perhaps more interestingly, given the nature of Victor Sells's rituals, of human sexuality. That's like, a quick Google's worth of information, and while Dresden doesn't have Google, he does have Bob, who is supposed to be as good or better where magic is concerned. There's also the Egyptian scorpion goddess Serket, who was a goddess of like, healing and fertility and stuff, as well as scorpions. And one time she defeated an evil snake god. She's not exactly among the best known Egyptian deities, but given that Justin DuMorne mostly used Egyptian words for his spellcasting, he almost certainly knew about Serket, and we know from Dead Beat that it was DuMorne, and not McCoy, who taught Dresden most of what he knows about the actual applied use of magic. Which is all taking the very long way 'round to saying that it really seems like Dresden should know that the magical and symbolic significance of scorpions is not exclusively Bad Things. 

There's also some discussion of how people new to the craft often think they need to isolate themselves to practice. This is sort of an interesting piece of worldbuilding, inasmuch as it goes absolutely nowhere. Not only it it not what Victor Sells is doing, I don't think we ever see a character actually doing this. 

The chapter ends with Dresden calling hospitals and morgues, thinking he sees the scorpion move, and putting into into a drawer. I don't like to "why didn't he just" fictional characters, and he did check it for enchantments, but I do nonetheless notice that Dresden could have saved himself a lot of trouble later on if he'd put the damn thing in a magic circle. 

I think I've got an actual rhythm going here, so stay tuned for Chapter 5 sometime next Saturday, even if it ends up being for values of Saturday that include the early hours of Sunday. Well, it's still Saturday on the west coast. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read ALL the things. 

Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 3

 This chapter is a much more reasonable length, despite a similar density of detail in describing Marcone
and Hendricks, whose introductions comprise basically the whole thing. Dresden is still very much in detective mode when he gets into Marcone's car, and being forcibly offered a ride by a crime lord isn't doing anything for his nerves, or his mood. He's snarky to both of them, and while I understand Dresden wanting to level the playing field after Hendricks threatened him at the end of the previous chapter, we aren't presented with any solid reason for his instant dislike of Marcone beyond "crime lord - bad", which... kind of doesn't feel like enough of a reason. I don't have good comparators here, so I can't strictly speaking say that this feels out of character. He's perfectly capable of being polite to Bianca, but Dresden is weird enough about women that it's not a useful contrast. We don't get any indication that Dresden has a serious problem with criminals in a general way. Honestly, I might think Dresden was just having a bad day here were it not for the fact that he keeps having a problem with Marcone throughout most of the series, even in the face of mounting evidence that Marcone is in a lot of ways a decent person. I'm trying to think if there's anything in Dresden's backstory that would account for it, but if anything it feels like Dresden's having apprenticed as a PI at Ragged Angel investigations, which specializes in missing children, might make him more positively disposed towards Marcone for his policy of not allowing his business to harm children. It's possible that Dresden just kind of can't with male authority figure, and that would make some sense, but his attitude towards, for example, The Merlin, actually updates over time in a way that his attitude towards Marcone...kind of doesn't, so this doesn't feel like an entirely satisfactory answer. 
After unsuccessfully attempting to hire Dresden to not investigate the murder, Marcone catches Dresden in a soul gaze, the description and aftermath of which take up the largest part of the chapter. This is different from other soul gazes we get later in the series. We aren't actually shown the landscape or imagery of Marcone's soul, just Dresden's interpretation of it. I think this is also how we get the leader of the Street Wolves in Fool Moon, and I know it's how we get Monica Sells later on in this one. By Death Masks we're actually being shown the contents of soul gazes rather than just being told about them, so presumably the change occurs somewhere in books 3 or 4 - but I don't at the moment remember whether Dresden actually gazes anyone in either of those. (What he does with Susan at the end of Grave Peril isn't a normal soulgaze since they've gazed each other already). Aside from making it godawful difficult to choose a picture for this blog post, there's nothing wrong with writing soul gazes this way, although it's certainly less evocative. 
We learn that Marcone is cold, calculating, disciplined, and predatory. That he's committed to both his goals and his people, and that he has a deep dark secret from which he draws his resolve. Aside from nemesis itself, Marcone's Big Secret is the only plot thread established in this book that, at the time of this writing, is still going on. And while I'm not convinced that Jim Butcher really had with situation with Nemesis worked out until like, Death Masks, and maybe not until as recently as Proven Guilty, he clearly had the general shape of the situation with Marcone, Helen Beckett, and the girl we still know only as Persephone, in mind here, even though we won't learn all the details until White Night. 
Dresden is upset that Marcone tricked him into a soul gaze, and seems to be even more upset that Marcone isn't shocked, horrified, or overwhelmed by what he finds in Dresden's soul. Is it possible that Dresden's issue with Marcone is actually Marcone's more or less unconditional acceptance of Dresden? Like, he doesn't like Dresden, doesn't necessarily respect him, especially early on, but especially early on fucking no one else trusts Harry. No one else, even Ebenezer, is just... blithely comfortable with Dresden's past, or his current character flaws. On some level, virtually everyone else Dresden knows sees him as either a tool to be manipulated or a monster to be either feared or controlled, and even most of the people with the former attitude focus on his destructive potential. But while Marcone is perfectly happy to play on other people seeing Dresden that way, he never, even at the very beginning, sees Dresden as anything other than a person trying his best to do the right thing. The only person who comes close to displaying a similar attitude is Michael, but even Michael is like, Concerned about Dresden all the damn time. Having the literal crime lord just... treat you like a person, when no one else does, has gotta be unsettling as hell. In any case, Dresden reacts by being a dick and making threats, and then immediately feels like an idiot, which is not unreasonably, although why he thinks Marcone will become a threat if he sees Dresden as "weak" I honestly don't know. Hurting people who aren't a threat to you isn't good business. But at least Dresden is on time for his appointment with Monica.  

Book Review: Sick Kids in Love

Moderately Awkward Confession Time: I absolutely love cancer kid fiction. It is one of the few subgenres that I will read enthusiastically no matter how godawful the specific book is. I am 100% here for the sadness, the sticky melodrama, the TMI medical detail, all of it. It's been one of my Things since well before I joined the chronic illness club myself, but having my body abruptly renegotiate the terms of our relationship when I was right around the age of the protagonists certainly contributed to my continuing to read it as an adult. (I've always been hypermobile, but I didn't start to feel like I was sick until I developed a post-viral syndrome a few months before I turned 16). Reading cancer kid fiction after my own adventure began made me kind of want similar stories that more closely mirrored my own experience: undiagnosed for years, symptomatic, but not dying. Not yet anyway. I even briefly attempted to write a novel of my own about a group of friends who all had chronic illnesses. It died for wont of a plot, so while the idea is still technically on a back burner, I wouldn't be looking for project updates any time soon. In any case, writing something like that was a last resort. I wanted to read it. 

The ridiculously successful The Fault In Our Stars unlocked a lot of doors in what I guess we're gonna need to start calling Sick Kid Fiction instead of Cancer Kid Fiction, and this is one I've been particularly eager to see opened, especially after Five Feet Apart (and to a lesser extent Midnight Sun and even The Space Between Us) gave us a cancer kid story where they didn't actually have cancer, and where both the protagonist and the love interest survive to the end, although the norms of the genre and the nature of their illness still necessitated a death. But finally, finally Hannah Moscowitz has opened that door with Sick Kids in Love, and I am almost indescribably excited. 

The Premise
Isabel Garfinkel has Rheumatoid Arthritis. Sasha Sverdlov-Deckler has Gaucher disease. They meet cute in the drip room of Linefield and West Memorial Hospital when their infusion schedules (hers every month, his every 10 days) happen to overlap. After some initial hesitation and awkwardness (Ibby inital caps Doesn't Date), they transition from hanging out constantly to actually getting together. There's not a lot of overarching plot aside from their relationship. They go on a few dates, meet each other's families, and spend a lot of time just chilling together and watching TV. Sasha understand Ibby in the ways her healthy friends and father don't (even though her father's a doctor). He's also more comfortable with her illness than she is, and encourages her to actually handle herself like a sick person rather than trying to pretend she's just like everyone else. When Sasha's impulsive and sometimes irresponsible temperament leads to a fight, they handle it, but eventually Ibby's insecurity and indecisiveness, which has more to do with her parents' recent divorce than her RA, leads to a short breakup, which Ibby resolves when she realizes that making maybe-necessary changes to herself that her boyfriend happens to be asking for isn't necessarily "changing for a boy" in the bad way. This bit of the story also involves Ibby finally starting to lose patience with her friends' ableism, which they react to with...varying degrees of understanding. This spills over into the opening of the final episode of this very episodic book, when Sasha's spleen ruptures, necessitating an emergency splenectomy. Cuteness, recommitment, frustration with doctors, and hospital bed snuggles ensure. 

The Feels
Sick Kids in Love called me out about once every three pages. Like, I came out here to have a good time, but I honestly feel so attacked. I often relate to the kids in actual cancer kid fiction, and Stella from Five Feet Apart is pretty much my role model (which is super weird, I do realize), but they're all, as Ibby would say, part of the Shiny Dying People Club, not the Long Slog Club. It's different. 

Mostly from Sasha it's little offhand things, because he says stuff as he's thinking it and has apparently mostly gotten over any hangups he might have had about being sick, while Ibby's painfully relateable remarks are longer form, more thought out, and laden with anger she doesn't want to acknowledge. The effect is this kind of back and forth like,
"Healthy friends. Sounds exhausting."

"There's only so much you can carry quietly by yourself, so you turn an illness into a list of rules instead of a list of symptoms, and you take pills that don't help and you think instead of feeling. You think."
Those quotes aren't actually right next to each other in the text; it's an exchange that goes on throughout the whole novel, and every time we hit one I had to stop and take a breath. Most of it doesn't extract as well as the bits above, so if you really wanna know what I mean, you're gonna have to go read it yourself. (There's an audiobook).  But this book made me feel seen in a way that I don't think can ever be entirely comfortable, even when it's exactly what you needed. 

And this is maybe the other place where it really differs from cancer kid fiction. Sick Kids in Love isn't for healthy people. I don't know what a healthy reader would get out of it because, like Sasha, I don't really hang out with anyone who's not sick or disabled, but they'd best be prepared to adapt quickly and not take things too personal, because it's amazingly not here for their ignorance, their pity, or how hard they're trying. When Ibby told Sasha her labs were normal and Sasha said "Wow, that's really frustrating," I almost cried. When Ibby calls out Ashley for pity-flirting with Sasha, I cheered. If you're not already here for that, the novel isn't super interested in helping you get there. It treats as normal things that a lot of healthy people maybe wouldn't want normalized, like right at the beginning when Ibby says she has to go back and get something from the bubble tea place, so she doesn't have to keep pace with her friends. Or, although she doesn't say so on the page, ask them to slow down and have it become a Thing. Sasha, when they're together, does half the work of keeping track of how Ibby's doing, and has zero weirdness about the other half. She does the same thing for him. It works. The text continually emphasizes that being sick isn't a problem. Symptoms are only as much of a problem as they are. What gets to you, what makes the overall experience of chronic illness just suck, is elevators at the subway station being reserved for wheelchair users, and friends who one way or another don't believe that you know your own limitations, and parents who think negative test results are a good thing, and doctors who tell you to try losing some weight. The pressure not to just - exist in the world as a sick person, and the silent, lethal assumption that the two halves of that idea are somehow mutually exclusive. (To be clear, the text does not directly discuss the relationship between chronic illness and suicide. If that's something you need to be careful about, you should be okay here). 

Oh, also it's Jewish, in that casual, comprehensive way that a lot of YA romances set in New York City are Jewish. It does a better job, or at least has more fun with it, than a lot of the others, and I'd probably be writing a lot more about that if the core subject matter were like, almost literally anything else. 

Form and Function

I mentioned earlier that Sick Kids in Love is really episodic, but it bears repeating. Once we've got everyone established, weeks or months sometimes pass between chapters, many of which center around holidays or other major events in the characters' lives - the winter dance, the first decent warm day in spring. I felt like I was reading a 13 episode Netflix series, in all the best possible ways, and honestly, this thing is practically begging for single season TV adaptation. For a realist YA novel, there's very little formal wonkiness, and the fact that texting hurts Ibby's hands means that we get a lot of old school phone conversations. When text messages do appear, they're in a simple, sans serif bold font. 

The book's only serious formal conceit is the advice columns. Ibby writes a column for her school newspaper where she asks a bunch of people a question (from things like "What's your best tip for time management?" to "What's your favorite subway line?" to "What secrets are you keeping?") and curates the answers she gets to make something fun and coherent. Often, these questions reflect the themes or content of the preceding or following chapter. Once Sasha is introduced, we always get answers from him, and almost always from Ibby's father. And from Claire, but Claire is...beyond the scope of this book review. The answers give us a different angle on the major characters.  Sasha's responses are often rambling, snarky, and barely on-topic. Her friends talk about their lives and their feelings, helping us get backstory and keep current on school drama even thought most of the story doesn't happen there. The other random people in the columns add depth, flavor, and humor, and help solidify the feeling that this is a New York Novel. I suppose this part might be a little tricky of a screen adaptation, but there are ways. 
The only place where the book's structure really fails it is in the transition from the end of the acknowledgements to the beginning of the "book group guide", a set of discussion questions intended to help book clubs and classrooms talk about what they just read. The last paragraph of the acknowledgements is a shout out to Moscowitz's fellow chronically ill people, ending on the line "We are here, we are here, we are here." The first discussion questions asks "The author wants us to understand how people live with invisible illnesses...Do you know anyone with a chronic illness? If so, how do they handle their issues?" Do you know anyone with a chronic illness? Honestly, it felt like a slap in the face. Now, Moscowitz didn't write these questions - they were written by a media specialist named Nancy Cantor. I don't know whether Moscowitz even got to look at the questions before the book went to print. I kind of hope she didn't. That first question is... violently othering, following a book that does evening in its considerable power to refuse exactly this narrative. The rest of the questions are a combination of pointless and destructive, but none of them are quite so insulting. 

Conclusion
This is exactly what I wanted in a chronic illness novel. When I was jumping around at the Barnes and Nobel brandishing it at my roommates, this is exactly what I was hoping it would be. I hope it opens the door still further, because there are a lot of common chronic illness experiences that this one story didn't have the time or space to cover. I want undiagnosed and misdiagnosed kids, kids who use mobility devices, kids with multiple conditions, kids who didn't get sick until they were teenagers. This book gives me hope that we might eventually get them. 
Oh, also, Sasha's bi and two of Ibby's friends are lesbians, so if you've been reading this review like "Ew, het", don't worry, the straightness is largely incidental except for creating the opportunity to compare gendered experiences with chronic illness and medical care. 
If you're chronically ill, you will almost definitely like this book. If you're not, but you're up for an insider perspective, no bullshit, no handholding look at what it's like, I highly recommend it. In either case, I can't promise it will be an entirely comfortable experience, but it will be fun, and you'll almost certainly learn something. 

Another good way to have fun and learn something is to be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things. 

(Note: The Nancy Cantor who developed the discussion questions is a retired elementary school teacher and is NOT the same Nancy Cantor associated with Rutgers and Syracuse University. If you want to google her, I suggest including "Entangled" or "Nova Southwestern University" in the search terms).