All the Ms: Marais to Marcom

Marais, Bianca: Hum If You Don’t Know the Words takes place in South Africa. The opening chapter engaged me. I don’t read much literature by South Africa authors so I’m dealing with a small sample size, but the books seem, by default, to deal with complex relationships and issues. Complexity comes with the territory, quite literally.   

Maranini, Dacia: The Silent Duchess starts out as a story about a deaf-mute girl. The description is most effective. It then turns into something from Law & Order: SUV, which means…it gets boring. 

March, Ava: “Bound to Him” is about two people (who already know each other) sleeping together: one fools the other a la Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. I’m not sure I entirely believe it, no matter how much I like disguise tales. KJ Charles’s Seditious Affair is far more believable: a story where the men know each other but don’t know what each man does (one works for the government; the other is a radical pamphleteer) since they came together over sex and then literature, not politics. The reality is revealed early in the story. The “disguise” is less important than dealing WITH the disguise. 

Marcom, Micheline Aharonian: The Daydreaming Boy starts with a “we” passage. I’m not a fan. I’m aware that “we” is ubiquitous in academic literature. I think it is as bad as the non-attached “they,” a generalized pronoun that refers to everyone and no one. Who are these people? Who is that person? Stories are about individual people. I encounter a “we,” and I lose interest immediately.