Junky by William S. Burroughs

Growing up, my dad was part of Customs and Excise, or Border Force as it is now (though for how long remains to be seen). As such, there was a loudly spoken rule in my house that drugs were bad and that under no circumstances should my sister or I ever partake in them. Considering that we lived in the most bumfuck nowhere type of village whilst still having a bus connection, I'm not sure looking back how they expected me to initiate such a habit, let alone maintain it. In any case, since starting further education my opinions on drug use have somewhat softened, with my perspective shifting more from the criminal to the medical. But I still hadn't ever read what addiction was like, so when Junky turned up on my shelf, I saw an opportunity to delve into a topic that is somewhat dangerous to look into first-hand.

Junky is the semi-autobiographical tale of Burroughs, under the pseudonym William Lee, and his experiences of opioid addiction. It covers the experience of the drug itself, the process of pushing drugs, run-ins with the law across the United States, and several episodes of withdrawal.
I don't know quite what I expected, but I hadn't expected the experience of drug addiction to be so mundane. After the first description of his initial kick, any positives are kind of toned down. It soon becomes just a background element of the narration, the way that you assume that characters in books obviously eat, sleep and clean themselves but don't need to explicitly say so unless there is something to be implied from this routine. There's a point where he states that no-one deliberately sets out to be a drug addict, and instead fall into it out of a lack of passion for anything else. It's kind of a weird realisation, and it makes the scenes of withdrawal all the more intense. You can usually see them coming as they're signposted by some downturn in personal circumstances, whether that be a lack of funds or increasing pressure from the law, but each is sufficiently different from the previous detox to maintain interest. It's in these moments where Burroughs describes trying to minimise the symptoms of "junk sickness" that the writing is at its most vivid, where all the visceral processes are drawn out with grotesque, but somehow still clinical, detail.
It's a strange realisation, but the main thing that I took away from Junky is the feeling that this was just a drawn out musing on the nature of decay. Once a habit is sufficiently established, maintaining the habit is described more in terms of staving off the symptoms of junk sickness rather than for any kick that the addict may get. There doesn't seem to be any pleasure in it after a while, but just a resigned continuation of a state of self-poisoning in order to avoid the worst of the symptoms. And oftentimes, the attempts at a self-administered cure make the addict worse off than they otherwise would have. Bodies seem to decay at alarming rates, and often at odds with the personalities behind them.

Junky is a strange read, although that may be due in large part to my aggressively anti-drug upbringing. The drug itself sort of fades into the background, fuelling a tone of low-key desperation and disquietude. What stands out most are the episodes of withdrawal, where the body seems to fall apart in the most agonising ways possible. Honestly, I'm not sure why anyone thought that this would encourage people to try drugs, because I come away from this with a sense of sadness more than anything. 3.5/5

Next review: Found by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Signing off,
Nisa.

Abandon by Meg Cabot

Having been thoroughly disappointed with my last read, I was hoping that my next Young Adult book would be more my style. I had read Meg Cabot books previously, specifically the first couple of volumes of both her Princess Diaries series and her Heather Wells series. The latter series I was quite fond of, and the former was far enough in the past that my recollections of reading it were hazy at best. So I had hopes that Abandon would at least be decent.

Abandon follows Pierce Oliviera, a teenager who had a near-death experience. Following her parents' divorce and a mysterious incident that caused her to be expelled from her previous school, she moves with her mother to Isla Huesos in Florida. Wanting a fresh start, Pierce can't help but be fearful, because when she came back to life, she brought something strange and possibly cursed back with her.
I wanted to like this. I'm something of a Greek myth buff, and while the Persephone myth isn't my favourite, I was interested in seeing how it would be reinterpreted. But Abandon just seemed to defy my efforts at every turn.
First of all, since I've mentioned that it's a re-write of the myth of Persephone's kidnap/marriage to Hades, of course there will be a death-god figure for Pierce to both run from and fall in love with. That relation could be interesting, if you went for the whole "I love the person, but I can't give up my life or family to be with them" angle. But despite the in-depth descriptions of John's good looks and the attempts to do the whole "they bicker, so they must be in love!" trope, there is so little chemistry that it all falls flat. And honestly, you have to be concerned when your main character's attempts to reach out emotionally to him devolves to her consciously using tactics learnt from working with wild animals. If you're treating someone you're attracted to like some kind of humanoid badger, then you have issues. Additionally, they don't seem to have actually spent more than a few hours in each other's company over all their encounters, and yet they're quite happy to talk about loving each other. I can barely get a general impression of someone in a few hours, let alone fall in love, so it smacks of obligation more than anything.
This lack of chemistry stems largely from the second issue that I have with Abandon. Pierce doesn't really seem to have a great deal of personality beyond the fact that she died and now has a magic necklace that warns her of danger. And considering that a huge chunk of the plot doesn't deal with supernatural stuff, but her attempts to settle into a new school following some severe traumas, that's a problem. She just sorts of gets carried along by events there, and all that I could take from those sections is that she's drawn to meddling in other people's problems without permission, and isn't especially suited to it. After a while, her incessant whining that somehow people think you're crazy when you tell them "I can protect you from the evil!" get really annoying, along with her repeated exclamations of "Check yourself before you wreck yourself". I don't care if it's even a little bit sarcastic, it soon starts to grate on your nerves. It wasn't long before I had concluded that I couldn't care less what happened to her, which is the kiss of death for a first-person narrative.
The third issue that I have with Abandon is that it takes far too long to get Pierce's backstory over and done with. So, there are two main issues that have impacted on Pierce's life within the past two years that are deemed to be important: her near-death experience where she met and escaped from the Love Interest, and an incident at her former school involving scandal and one of her teachers. What I would have done is maybe dedicate a couple chapters to each event and intersperse them with present-day events, but focus on the entirety of the event at one time. Cabot instead decides to drip feed both of them over the space of two thirds of the book, with both events frequently interrupted by mundane bullshit like school assemblies and queuing for ice cream. This is aggravating to the extreme, as it's obviously meant to raise tension, but there's a massive flaw that means that whatever tension is achieved falls flat. The events themselves are easy to work out. The scandal at her old school for instance? As soon as I heard that a teacher was involved and that Pierce had gotten herself in hot water by trying to get evidence against him, I knew that it would involve the teacher being pervy with his female students. And wouldn't you know, I was absolutely right. Now, compare Abandon with a property that takes this tired "Hot for Student" scenario and makes it work, namely the game Persona 5. Being a video game, it amps the tension by making it the focus of the consumer's attention and it raises the stakes with elements like a time restriction. It also spends a decent amount of time actually building up the secondary characters, so that when they start being harmed because of the teacher's abuse of power, you actually give a shit. In comparison, Abandon spends so much time stalling that you're praying to get the backstory over and done with, rather than being left on-edge to find out how it all turns out.
The fourth issue that I have is the role of the Furies. The Furies are depicted as enemies of John, and by extension Pierce, because they are damned souls who are angry at their treatment. This bugs me for two reasons. Firstly because according to Greek myths, the Furies were deities of vengeance who would target those who committed crimes like matricide or swearing false oaths. They're vicious, but their targets have traditionally been guilty in some fashion, they're the idea that certain crimes won't go unpunished even if mortal justice proves inadequate. To make them mindlessly evil is disingenuous to their mythic origins. Secondly, it seems weird that these all-powerful beings who exist solely to torment the deity running the Underworld are just the souls of evil people. If it's such a problem that Furies are actively possessing and corrupting living people to carry out their plans, then surely you would try and find out what the fuck it is that Hell is doing to make these things and stop it, not just keep shipping souls in to become new Furies only to wonder why your quality of life has plummeted. There's a line from Shakespeare's The Tempest that states "Hell is empty and all the devils are here", but I somehow doubt that it was meant to be taken literally.
Fifth issue is a bit of a spoiler. So it turns out that Furies have been targeting Pierce, and John is concerned that he can't protect her. His solution is to kidnap her again. But it's okay this time, because it's for her own good, and hey, if she gives it time then maybe she'll come to like being in the Underworld. Seriously, what is it with my reading list at the moment? I can't seem to get away from YA books that try to tone down kidnapping at the moment. I explored my issues with this last review, so just assume that it applies here too. Also, it ends having resolved absolutely fuck all of the issues that had been brought up. What was the point of spending so much time with the nasty popular kids in order to help her cousin work through some undefined issues that he has with them, if the main character is ripped out of the world before anything happens with it?
The last issue is just something that bewildered me to the point of exasperation. It turns out that Furies like tassels, so whenever they turn up in the narrative they signal oncoming danger. Let me state that again for the record. Tassels are a legitimate harbinger of doom. I don't think I need to point out the idiocy of that.

Abandon is a book that I wanted to like, but it manages to brain itself at every hurdle. The main character is a charming mix of annoying and boring. Her relationship with the love interest lacks any chemistry, having spent at most a few hours in each other's company over the entirety of their encounters and at times she treats him more like a wild animal than a person. The backstory is spoon-fed to the reader at such an excruciatingly slow pace that whatever tension the author hoped to create is destroyed. The present-day plot is boring and more or less entirely pointless by the end. The mythology that it reports to take inspiration from is cherry-picked and not especially well. It tries to justify kidnapping by the time it ends, and TASSELS of all things are harbingers of doom. Do not bother. 1.5/5

Next review: Junky by William S. Burroughs

Signing off,
Nisa.

Stolen by Lucy Christopher

If I hadn't gotten Stolen as part of an audiobook bundle, I probably would have passed it by. While I'm not averse to Young Adult novels, I usually end up pairing them with other genres like Fantasy or Science Fiction, rather than Contemporary. If I want to read about real life, my first instinct would be to reach for Non-Fiction. Nonetheless, the premise did intrigue me somewhat, and if I already had a copy there seemed no point avoiding it.

Stolen is narrated by Gemma, a 16-year-old girl who is kidnapped while en route with her parents to Vietnam. When she steps away to get a coffee, an older man buys coffee for her, drugging it to make sure she doesn't try and struggle. He takes her to the Australian outback, to a desolate outpost of his own making that she can only survive in with his aid.
I wanted to like Stolen because the blurb made it sound like a bid for survival against incredible odds. It is most certainly not that. I read this in what was a barely contained simmer of anger and frustration. There were a few reasons for this, and they can be embodied in the two main characters: the victim, Gemma, and the kidnapper, Ty.
So, first of all, Gemma. There were a couple things that bugged me about her. First was the fact that she didn't seem to have a whole lot of personality. I appreciate that when confined to an isolated outpost in the Australian bush, there's only a certain amount that you can do to signpost character building, but even the flashbacks she had about before she was kidnapped were more or less bare of personality. So it transpires that the kidnapper was first drawn to Gemma when she was a child, and her make-believe involved flower fairies, and the fact that she engaged in imaginative play like every other child in existence somehow made her special. When she got into her teenage years, she started resenting her parents for controlling her life! So special! So utterly normal for someone going through massive hormonal changes! The only other thing that comes up is her getting wasted in the park with her friends, which is also, say it with me, entirely mundane and not at all special for someone of her age group. At the end of the book, I knew practically nothing about her as a person beyond the stereotype of a middle class teenager. There are no hobbies that I can list, I know nothing about her friends despite her name-checking them multiple times during the narrative, there are no personality traits that I can name now that it's all over. So there's not much incentive for me to want her to get home. Additionally, and this is probably a personal issue, she doesn't seem to make much of the opportunities that she gets to escape. My husband finds it endlessly amusing that my reaction to most conflict in films can boil down to "Find the person responsible for the problem, and start breaking bones until the problem can be considered solved." Violent and a bit reductionist I accept, but it can be vaguely amusing. Not here. Here, that tendency just made the whole captivity bit endlessly frustrating. For example, there's a part where Ty gets a load of scratches on his hands and he pleads with her to help him clean up the wounds, otherwise his hands will be useless. When she first asked what he would do for her in return, I could have cheered. She asks to be taken back home, and he refuses. Fair enough, more or less what I expected. But then she just kind of drops the matter, and asks him some useless fucking question about how he built the hovel that he expects her to treat like a fucking palace. And my mind went wild, asking questions about why she didn't double down and keep asking to be taken back. Hell, a large part of me was screaming at her to find some lye, and see how long he really wanted to be stuck with her after that. She kept hesitating, like she can somehow reason with Ty.
Which brings me to my second major problem with the book. I could have appreciated Ty as a villain, if the narrative didn't want so much for the reader to want to fix him. He's kidnapped a girl almost a decade younger than him who he's been stalking since she was 10, sure, but look at how pretty and muscular he is. He's a hypocrite who wants freedom for himself but sees no issue with abducting anyone or anything that he could benefit from, but you can't be mad because he had a traumatic childhood. He'll prevent anything that Gemma wants unless it directly coincides with what he wants, but he hasn't raped her so of course it doesn't count as actual abuse. Sure, Stockholm Syndrome is brought up in the final chapter, but that doesn't mean I have to like how the narrative goes. There's a line towards the end where Gemma says "It's hard to hate someone once you understand them", and I hate it with a passion. Just because an abuser does something nice doesn't make up for all the awful things that they do. It reminded me of a scene in An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan, which is a hell of a harrowing read, but a really valuable experience in my opinion. There's a scene where the kidnappers, after months of horrific mistreatment, throw a birthday party for one of the hostages. It shows a more vulnerable side to the jailers, but all it does is make them repulsive instead. And that is what Ty's "tragic" backstory does for me: instead of making him more sympathetic, he only becomes more disgusting and pathetic. And the fact that anyone is taking anything romantic out of Stolen just makes me sick to my stomach.
About the only thing I did like was the description of the Australian outback. It's vivid and colourful and sensual, and I could only wish that such descriptions were contained in a less objectionable story.

Some pretty descriptions of the outback are about the only good thing that can be taken from Stolen. Otherwise it's an anger-inducing story about a girl utterly lacking in personality, who slowly becomes convinced that as her kidnapper hasn't tried raping or killing her, that means it's twue wuv. Christ, it's utterly nauseating. Newsflash, abuse isn't sexy and Stockholm Syndrome isn't romantic. Don't touch with a barge pole. 1/5

Next review: Abandon by Meg Cabot

Signing off,
Nisa.