“Ridi Bobo” (1993)

I thought this story by Robert Devereaux was pretty well done. It’s on the short side, which helps it stay so resolutely in bizarre character. Killer clowns don’t seem that original anymore but maybe they were more so then, and these aren’t exactly killer clowns anyway. In fact, actually, I get more of a hit of Roger Rabbit cartoon physics in the way this goes (which also fits the timeframe of when Devereaux might have been writing). Lots of bops to the noggin and so forth. Extreme violence but generally everyone recovers quickly. The story is all cliches as Devereaux clowns up the details of an extramarital affair and its exposure. Some of it is comical but more of it, like clown sexuality, is a little disturbing. All I know about that is genitalia is described as rubber chickens for males and honkers for females and it’s all right out there to observe, though it’s not entirely clear how these rubber chickens and honkers work. But then, we may not want to know. But then, we may. The story: a clown husband suspects his clown wife is cheating on him. He hires a clown detective to look into it. Sure enough, Momo the detective trails Kiki the wife to a seedy low-rent motel and gets pictures of her in the act with some other clown. When the husband finds out, he slaughters his whole family—pet piglets, twin sons, and wife—and then kills himself. So I guess it is about killer clowns after all. The simple beats of the story enable it to lean very hard and creatively into the clown aspect. There’s a lot of slapstick, pratfalls, miming, clown costumes, and clown props, and if some parts of it are funny they are often uncomfortable. The clowns have names like Bobo and Momo and Juju. We see a law enforcement scene with “the screaming whistles in the bright red mouths of the Kops clinging to the Kop Kar as it raced into the neighborhood, hands to their domed blue hats, the bass drums booming.” As Bobo kills his family he pauses to draw teardrops on his face under his eye. Actually, if anything, what’s most disturbing about this story now is the familiarity of the spectacle of a madman slaughtering a bunch of people and then himself. Sad!

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

Splendor in the Grass (1961)

USA, 124 minutes

Director: Elia Kazan

Writer: William Inge

Photography: Boris Kaufman

Music: David Amram

Editor: Gene Milford

Cast: Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Pat Hingle, Audrey Christie, Barbara Loden, Zohra Lampert, Sandy Dennis, Phyllis Diller, Martine Bartlett, Gary Lockwood, Ivor Francis

Splendor in the Grass is set in the Roaring ‘20s of Kansas USA, in part perhaps so it can use the Wall Street Crash of 1929 as a convenient plot point. Shades of Singin’ in the Rain and Sunset Blvd., looking back from the economic safety of postwar boom times. Really, Splendor almost couldn’t be more of a ‘60s movie, at least that part of the decade that took place before 1967. Less than 10 years after the coming of Playboy magazine, maybe two years after the coming of the birth control pill, the picture is obsessed with sex among coming-of-age youth—desiring it, denying it, getting it, trying to understand it, wondering what it’s all about and what it’s going to be like being grown up. The movie wants to shrug off the mantle of sexual repression, but the burden still weighs it down in 1961. Splendor in the Grass has one foot planted in the arrival of liberated sexuality, exploring the wonders of men discovering women actually enjoy sex, and the other foot planted in the puritan shame of sexuality. Director Elia Kazan is on the psychoanalyzin’ boards again.

It's only an interesting coincidence that the picture pairs a former child star and one-time America’s sweetheart, Natalie Wood (Miracle on 34th Street, Rebel Without a Cause, The Searchers), with “introducing” Warren Beatty, who happens to be so ridiculously young here that he kept reminding me of Tony Dow, the Beaver’s older brother Wally. Living in the future as we do now, we know this aw-shucks captain of the football team routine of Beatty’s is not what we would come to expect from the future lothario by reputation. Shampoo, maybe, is more like it. There is thus an interesting and eerie tension to this strange exercise in managed hysteria, which is worth a look if you don’t mind cringing at things a fair amount.

“The Spectre Bridegroom” (1819)

[spoilers] This story by Washington Irving may be his best known after “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” although in my opinion (with all due respect for him as a pioneer) “The Adventure of the German Student,” which came five years later, is his best I’ve seen. The earlier classics are all from Irving’s Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. This story is a little proud of its own cleverness but comes by it honestly as it is actually clever, and well done, though it never takes itself much seriously. Really it is the story of a prank, but a strange and macabre one. It turns out Irving was another Anglo-American infatuated with Germany. I don’t know how I missed this (maybe the Nazis). I know my Humanities 101 class in college started with Goethe, so it’s always been there for me to see. Irving based both “Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” on German folklore and here he doesn’t even bother to move it out of Germany. It is a sitcom premise though it broods with gloomy atmosphere. A man is to marry a woman he has never met, arranged by their parents, but is attacked and killed by highway robbers on the way to the wedding. He and his old bosom buddy were already late, now this really tears it. The dead fiance’s companion—as it happens, an enemy of the bride’s family—immediately goes on to the wedding party to pass the news. Now comes the comedy part. The bride’s family is so happy and relieved he has arrived he can’t get a word in edgewise. They presume he is the groom none of them has ever seen. Yes, we’re approaching stretcher territory now. In all the confusion he and the bride fall in love at first sight. More sitcom: our pretender has the presence of mind to strike on a brilliant idea. Granted he has the whole evening to work it out, but basically he makes himself more and more gloomy as the evening goes along. At midnight, he announces dramatically that he must leave—he was killed earlier tonight by robbers and must be buried tomorrow. He leaves the wedding party stunned. At first they think he is astoundingly rude and then they are just astounded when they get the news. A more modern sensibility might end it somewhere around here as a kind of conte cruel with a sharp twist. This being 1819 and horror as we know it in its infancy, we carry on with the romance. He appears to the bride and conducts some other shenanigans as a ghost before cluing her in. The ending is also very sitcom, with all revealed and all forgiven and this former enemy of the family welcomed to marry their daughter, who loves him true, and happily ever after.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

The Quiet Girl (2022)

It’s not often that a movie can hit its highest sustained note right at the finish, but The Quiet Girl is one that can make the claim. It’s a coming-of-age story written and scripted by Irishman Colm Bairead about tweenager Cait (“introducing” Catherine Clinch), who is sent away for the summer while her mother has approximately Cait’s fourth sibling and the slouchy dad (Michael Patric) chews on toothpicks and tries to make ends meet without doing much. Cait has been sent to live with her mother’s people, a middle-aged couple who are second cousins to Cait, if I understand family trees. They are older, with no children, and something isn’t right about them. One thing The Quiet Girl does well, which I appreciated because I kept expecting it to veer off in that direction (too much horror and true-crime, doubtless)—one thing it does well is steer clear of explosive, unpleasant issues like sexual abuse. There is abuse here, in her family of origin and in the way many of these people live—the story plays a little like an episode from Chekhov’s “Peasants”—and there is grief and loss in the air and water and earth as well. At first Sean (Andrew Bennett) is so aloof as to be hostile toward Cait whereas Eibhlin (Carrie Crowley) is warmly open to her, taking tender care of her, bathing her, fitting clothes to her. Cait's loutish dad was in such a hurry to be off he took her suitcase with him and never brought it back. The summer passes quickly. Eventually Sean warms to the girl, who works with him on the farm. I like the quiet scenes that show Cait visibly growing emotionally under these terms of honesty and love. Which honesty, however, starts to become troubled by family secrets. There’s something this kindly couple is not telling her. That inadvertently falls to a family friend, Una (Joan Sheehy, who almost steals the show), who alone on a walk with Cait quizzes her about gossipy stuff like whether Eibhlin uses butter or margarine in her pastries, and then about much more intimate family details Cait had no idea about. The picture shifts here and ultimately makes the bonding between all three even tighter. However, the summer must end and Cait must go back to her family, where the newborn baby is squalling and everything is chaos. They must say goodbye under these conditions. The Quiet Girl is a wonderful small movie full of revelations and surprises and great characters. Recommended.

Disgrace (1999)

I bought a copy of this novel shortly after J.M. Coetzee won his Nobel in 2003, so once again everything takes a long time. It was actually my first by the white South African writer and it’s quite good, complicated, nervy, and tense. Our main guy is a pretentious 52-year-old English professor. At the start he is teaching as an adjunct. He is twice divorced and a creepy self-serving philanderer, which is where the trouble starts when he is dismissed from his job after an affair with a student. This guy’s sexual habits are compulsive and self-destructive and it is obvious he is learning nothing from even his increasing consequences. His pride and rationalizations are so transparently delusional you want to scream. He goes to live with his daughter in the country where she owns and operates a small farm in a small community. She is in her 20s, a lesbian, and something of a “back to the land” hippie, though the story takes place in the present time when the novel was published, not long after the end of apartheid. Then a terrible event takes place, a brutal home invasion, and the rest of the short novel is about attempting to put the shattered pieces back together. In a lot of ways the first half of Disgrace veers close to a thriller, and it’s quite effective. I thought of Elmore Leonard in terms of the compressed, direct language and extreme events reported with sparse, telling details. The second half has some scenes and plot points that felt more strained. I never really cared much for the main guy, David Lurie, even as he changes and a kind of redemption takes place. I’m very tired of bed-hopping main characters, but at least Lurie’s sexual compulsions are not really normalized. They have a definite edge. It’s pretty clear something is wrong with him. Animal deaths are a key part of the story but it’s a nuanced take with multiple levels. The worst is kept offstage and in many ways the novel turns on a heartbreaking euthanasia operation. I shouldn’t complain about the sex here because it’s such a huge part of Lurie’s personality, but his way of moving from partner to partner (woman to woman) is familiar from TV shows and I’m tired of it even when done well. Mostly I was impressed with Coetzee’s lean and powerful language, and also his ability to create scenes of great tension. I’d like to look into more of him, but first impression is that Coetzee warrants the hype and hoopla. He’s good.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

It Can’t Happen Here (1935)

Sinclair Lewis turns his hand to the literature of dystopia and makes a creditable job of it. His fascist takeover of the US (much like the one we are mired in and resisting?) is modeled closely on Nazi Germany. In fact, I was surprised by how much seemed to be common knowledge in 1934 and 1935 when Lewis was working on the novel. It turns out Lewis’s wife at the time, Dorothy Thompson, was the first US journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, in 1934, which probably accounts for it. He had a front-row seat. There are lots of familiar Lewis notes here: extravagantly ridiculous names (Doremus Jessup and Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip are basically the principals, plus a Unitarian “radical” named Lorinda Pike), dreary extramarital affairs, and an implicit and almost corny faith in the so-called American experiment in democracy. I think a lot of readers would complain about the surplus of “telling” and the relative lack of “showing.” It gets sloggy in patches. But in the 2020s It Can’t Happen Here has all kinds of markers of prescience. It goes to some extremes that are hard to believe, but much of it is actually all too believable. Lewis knows exactly, for example, that US fascist shock troops would look and talk and act like the goons we saw attacking the Capitol two years ago. The main point of this novel is by way of warning, which the title dryly emphasizes. It’s ultimately not that hard-hitting—though we see terrible things—because it softens the blows with broad streaks of US sentimentalism. It takes heart, for example, in the Underground Railroad to free slaves and the North’s win in the Civil War, and chooses, like many of us, to ignore the ways in which the South won and continues to win that conflict—which isn’t over yet, by the way. Lewis certainly knew that much in 1935. Black Americans get the worst of it as usual, though antisemitism in many ways is the face of this fascism, as in Germany. So altogether a mixed bag—it’s not always believable, but when it is it can be shocking just for its familiarities. The story is illustrative and the characters more allegorical. But there is a gnawing sense that this is what it would look like. I know this novel went into lots of lists of books we were supposed to read after Trump was elevated to power in 2016. So I’m late to the party again as usual. It Can’t Happen Here is a good Sinclair Lewis novel, or not bad, and it speaks eloquently to our current predicament.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

If Walls Could Talk (1970)

Someone somewhere praised this album by Little Milton (his fourth) so highly and so ardently, with words to the effect it saved their life or some such, that I didn’t hesitate to add it to my get-to list, assuming it was some blues masterpiece from the ‘60s/’70s period and I would learn more about its claim to fame when I got to it. But now that I’m here the album seems to be remarkably obscure and I have no idea who wrote that piece. If Walls Could Talk does not yet rate its own Wikipedia article, and when I turned to Discogs I found out not even a lot of the session players are known. The cover design varies across releases, though generally based on the same few images. On at least one of those covers Gene Barge gets high-profile credit for “orchestra arranged and conducted by.” To me, “orchestra” means strings, which I don’t hear, so I’m assuming Barge did the horn charts and directed these mostly unnamed session players. Even the track sequencing at Napster is scrambled from the vinyl version shown at Discogs. Whatever is going on here, whoever is responsible beyond singer and guitar-player Little Milton, it is good stuff—really good. The band assembled is on the sunny side of perfect, both for Little Milton and for the material. Barge’s work pulls it all together seamlessly. Little Milton is a great guitar player, fitting in neatly with the horns and cutting loose with tidy rave-ups and solos. One of the few sidemen named is Donny Hathaway, who sits in on “Let’s Get Together,” an ode and plea to an ex written by Morris Dollison that is at once pathetic, touching, and creepy. “Blues Get Off My Shoulder,” a Bobby Parker song and another high point, is bruised and moody and so good. The title song by Bobby Miller is a pretty good choogle, with some nice organ lines from Barge’s anonymous player. “Kansas City” has become an R&B standard, here rendered proficiently with an Otis Redding gloss. I’m no expert on the blues but I can see where Little Milton may be accounted second-tier—arguably, Bobby Bland or Redding is the better singer in this soul-tinged style and Little Milton is only one of many contemporary blues guitarists. On the other hand, this is another album that keeps sounding better the more I play it. If I stick with it long enough it might save my life. In short, recommended.

Zama (2017)

Argentina / Brazil / Spain / Dominican Republic / France / Netherlands / Mexico / Switzerland / USA / Portugal / Lebanon, 115 minutes

Director: Lucrecia Martel

Writers: Antonio Di Benedetto, Lucrecia Martel

Photography: Rui Pocas

Music: Ernesto Lecuona

Editors: Karen Harley, Miguel Schverdfinger

Cast: Daniel Giminez Cacho, Lola Duenas, Matheus Nachtergaele, Juan Minujin, Rafael Spregelburd, Daniel Veronese, Nahuel Cano

Zama is a historical drama set in an outpost on the sea of colonial Argentina, late in the 18th century. Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Gimenez Cacho, virtually carrying the whole thing though well supported) is a Spanish magistrate who can’t catch a break: the woman he wants to seduce rejects him for another, the governors to whom he reports will not act on his request for a transfer, and, more than anything (though somewhat hypocritically), he longs to be reunited with his wife and family. Gimenez Cacho puts on a face of long suffering as he suffers long, enduring the indignities heaped on him, finally, perhaps, earning redemption, but at a very high cost.

The first half of Zama is largely focused on the absurdities of the colonial enterprise, with features like enslaving natives often part of it. Zama hears the complaints of one couple who operate a plantation. They had to deal with a series of native uprisings, forced finally to the most extreme measures. “None were spared,” the woman reports. “And now there’s no one left to work.” They seem to have no compunctions about their request for “40 tame Indians,” which they feel is the least the Spanish administration can do for them. So go the travails of the colonialist. Zama is part of it, enmeshed in it however he might actually feel about it, however much he intends to get out. He opts to work within the system toward this end, for example betraying a colleague in a vain attempt to please a capricious governor. The governor who moves him to poorer quarters.

“The Houses of the Russians” (1968)

I’m not sure yet what the consensus is on Robert Aickman, I’m just going with the ones that seem to really reach me. They all seem to reach me. This is another good one from probably his best period, the late ‘60s. I was slowed down a little by all the description of unusual landscapes, where land and water meet with many islands in remote Finland. This story might be ripe for graphic adaptation because I can see you could really lay it out in comic book panels with the right artist. It’s also a story with indeterminate borders in other ways: between the political entities of postwar Finland and the USSR, for example. Because of these geographical and political factors there is necessarily some sense of this story as travel writing. The island with the mysterious vacation homes, once we finally get there, is the kind of stuff that I think only Aickman can do. As usual, it is accompanied with an unsettling sense of the experience of dreaming. These houses are at once peculiar and bear a bland malevolence that comes through well, though it is hard to explain. Another border is one of time and history, with the Russian experiment with communism approximately at midcentury, and memories still alive of time before the Revolution. This theme may even have been Aickman’s most intentional in 1968. Or not—certainly the landscape also reflects the preoccupation of his day job and other life, as the protector of waterways. It’s a frame story, told by a mysterious old man. I like the way the houses veer from totally abandoned to alive with parties in progress. I love that our main guy, the storyteller, ends up at one. I like the imposing, massive figure in black he takes for a priest. The old man’s idea, at least at the time of his visit to this strange region, was that he was presumably Eastern Orthodox or something, which perhaps evokes Soviet persecution of organized religion. I looked at a cheesy paranormal reenactments show called True Horror the other day. It was a story about a woman in England in the 2000s who bought a house that used to be a “witches prison” and was now haunted. By coincidence, one of the ghosts as depicted looks like the black figure in this story. Funny coincidence, but also emphasizes how Aickman is able to slip his ghosts in so effectively. This one is working on a lot of levels and takes some time to sink in.

Robert Aickman, The Unsettled Dust
Story not available online.

Pinocchio ’22 (2022)

The first film adaptation of the 19th-century Italian stories by Carlo Collodi is the 1940 Disney Pinocchio, but no decade since has gone by without at least one movie or TV version. Last year, in fact, there were two. With a third from 2021, a Russian picture called Pinocchio: A True Story, that means the 2020s are already holding up their end of this bargain. Pinocchio is a live-action / CGI Disney that was directed and cowritten by Robert Zemeckis, starring Tom Hanks. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is what it sounds like. I haven’t, full disclosure, seen any of the other versions but I got a look at those two anyway along with the 1940. Start with the Zemeckis. On IMDb, some 38,000 voters have ranked this remake an aggregate 5.0. That’s not good—compare GdT’sP’s 92,000 going 7.6. It’s not hard to see why. One of these movies is clearly better than the other. Tom Hanks makes a creditable enough Geppetto but he can’t carry the whole thing. It is faithful to the 1940 version to a fault, practically scene for scene. It feels notably uninspired and insipid. It has little to add to or improve on the Disney original and the changes it makes can be almost comical. Pleasure Island, the destination for wayward boys, if you recall, was populated by boys playing pool, wantonly vandalizing property, and, above all, smoking stogies—all of them, including Pinocchio, whose face turned funny colors as a result.

But in 2022, images of smoking are frowned on and now part of routine content warnings, even if smokers are shown paying the price. Disney decided to take the easy way out with movie-rating panels and just cut the smoking out completely. All things considered, it’s probably the better idea for society at large, and it shows some of the ways things have changed since 1940. Here’s another one. An interesting plot point, which is that Geppetto had a wife and son who are now dead, was not in the 1940 version. It completely makes sense as motivation for Geppetto, of course, but when I first saw it cropping up in the 2022 version I took it as unnecessary embellishment. As a plot point, however, it is really front and center in del Toro’s workup of the story, which arguably turns on it, and makes me think it must come from the original stories by Collodi (which I haven’t read). In turn, it makes me wonder why it was taken out of the 1940 version. Including the point is ultimately one of the few improvements, all relatively minor, that the 2022 Zemeckis makes on the 1940. For his part, del Toro seems to be trying to restore some of the qualities of Collodi’s original stories. His Pinocchio is refreshingly sassy and headstrong, much like reports of the Collodi stories. Del Toro, not surprisingly, certainly has the best Blue Fairy of all of them—even the Zemickis version is an improvement on the saccharine 1940 lady.

Unencumbered by Disney’s family-oriented priorities, del Toro lets the story range into much darker, more emotionally resonant and believable precincts. I’m not sure setting it in Fascist Italy was exactly the right way to go for this story, but at least it afforded a priceless cameo from Il Duce himself. And Del Toro is generally more focused on delving into Geppetto’s motivations to make a puppet and want it to be a real boy—it’s Geppetto who wants it, a simple and ingenious shift of emphasis that makes the story richer and more complex. Del Toro manages to take the story all the way into Cain and Abel stuff. Del Toro’s animation rivals the Disney original and is arguably even better, but there I think my judgment might be affected by how much better del Toro’s narrative is. The animation is very different but equally good in both. I’m not sure looking at these three Pinocchios in such close proximity is the way to do it. I’m sick of Monstro the whale and the nose-growing bits by now (del Toro goes to town on the nose thing much more than either of the others). I would recommend separating them out further than consecutive days. But the 1940 Disney and the 2022 del Toro are equally essential and I wouldn’t know which one to recommend first—probably the del Toro, if you’re an adult. The 2022 Zemeckis—sadly, because I have residual interest in his work—is eminently skippable.

The Blank Wall (1947)

This short novel by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding is the best one yet in the Women Crime Writers series, fast-paced and compulsively readable, though not without elements that strain belief. Our main character is Lucia Harper, housewife. Her husband is away at war. She has a 17-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son. Her father also lives with them. A Black woman, Sibyl, is their hypercompetent maid. The daughter, Bee, is a headstrong adolescent who has taken up with a creep in his 30s who is obviously out to use her. Ted Darby’s occupation is given as “art-dealer,” which seemed innocuous until I learned it means he deals in pornography. Lucia is trying to keep them apart but he shows up this night—apparently Bee’s idea—and winds up dead in an accident. Lucia discovers the body in the morning before anyone else and recklessly disposes of it. A pretty good movie by director Max Ophuls came of this novel, called The Reckless Moment. The movie is faithful to the novel in most ways, and the title is better, except there are actually lots of reckless moments, so hard to know which was intended. The next development is blackmailers who have letters Bee wrote to Darby, and that’s the predicament Lucia spends most of her time working on. The blackmailers are two partners, one of whom comes to fall for Lucia—she’s everything that’s clean and good to this guy and so on. He has an even stranger thing for Sibyl, not as a love interest but because he thinks she’s possessed of greater wisdom, or something like that. Lots of strange tones like that here. They make it less believable but also somehow more interesting. The point, I think, is supposed to be the ferociousness of the mama bear protecting her brood. But Lucia also, plainly, falls in love with the blackmailer who loves her. The weirdest thing is the guy’s right arm going dead in a major confrontation. In the movie they sensibly ascribe it to an injury in the fight. But in the novel it just ... goes dead. It’s psychological. For the purpose of the story it’s another chance to showcase Lucia’s unnatural strength (and poise) in these situations. She always rises to the occasion, and everything is for her family. But the thing with the arm is just crazy, even working as another odd tonal feature. I understand Raymond Chandler was a fan of Holding and it’s not hard to see why from this one. It grabs fast and provides a pretty good ride—same with the movie, which flattens away some of the memorable and intriguing weirdness. Both novel and movie are worth chasing down.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

The Cybernetic Tea Shop (2019)

I have questions about this heartening little SF novella by Meredith Katz. I’m not sure how to classify it, for one thing. It’s billed as a lesbian asexual romance and I’m sure at least that it’s a romance. In a future a few hundred years away, AI technology has reached a point where some robots are considered sentient. The result is that laws have placed limits on what technology can be developed and some robots now have specific grandfathered civil rights. One such is Sal, who has operated a tea shop in Seattle for 278 years—Capitol Hill, I think (Katz lives in Vancouver, BC). Sal still has problems with anti-robot vandals. Clara is a software developer who specializes in AI. She keeps a mechanical talking hummingbird as a pet and assistant. She’s also something of a drifter, never staying more than a year or two in any place before moving on. This is attributed to her background as the daughter of Latinx migrant workers. I would hope they’d sort out migrant worker civil rights before robots, but maybe not. Or maybe they have, because Clara’s parents don’t seem especially economically oppressed. That’s beside the point, but I do have questions like that about aspects of this story. The relationship between Clara and Sal develops pretty fast and has a physical component if not a sexual one, which raised questions for me about asexuality. But all these questions also kept me intrigued with a genre, romance, that doesn’t generally appeal to me. This was “highly recommended” by the booktuber Kazen at Always Doing. It doesn’t tempt me much into any more romances, but it does make me want to read more about asexuality. I identified more with the desires of Clara and Sal to be alone than with their loneliness, which was basically under control, not given as a bad thing but still there. Sal is an interesting character, lost after hundreds of years since her original creator died. This reminded me of Star Trek, particularly Data and his Freudian relationship with his creator (“Father”). Unlike Star Trek, however, Sal is given a range of real emotions. She doesn’t always know what to do with them, but they are real. For his part, Data shows emotions frequently, but they’re not considered valid or are rationalized. Clara the software engineer is able to tinker with Sal’s programming to make improvements and that is basically where the love affair begins. The sheer wholesome mental health of The Cybernetic Tea Shop is refreshing. Still, I have questions. Their sleeping together (setting aside issues of robots and sleeping), even without sex, seemed to me to put them in a realm well beyond friendship. I wasn’t sure how to take or interpret that, and I’m still not, but I enjoyed the book.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.