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Jul. 11th, 2020 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsTuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts was described to me as "like the Westing Game, for adults, but also intensely Boston" and I am happy to report that this description is completely accurate -- especially the Intensely Boston bit. I hit this paragraph and I had to put the book down for the moment and reel at the truly devastating accuracy:
"They all considered themselves Black Cats, but within that there were subgroups, treasure-hunting gangs like pub trivia teams, representing their corners of Greater Boston. The Smoots had MIT; the Gay Mafia covered Eastie; The Highlanders, Somerville; The Green Monsters and Challahback Girls, Fenway and Brookline. Adama Is A Cylon -- the name of a trivia team she and Dex had gone up against more than once, which couldn't be a coincidence -- had parts of Cambridge."
YEAH, OK.
(I still want to know where the place is near the MFA that Lila Korrapati got an incredible-sounding falafel on the night she met Vincent Pryce? Please, Kate Racculia! Tell me what you know! A sincere plea from a falafel-starved ex-New Yorker.)
Anyway, the plot! Vincent Pryce is an elderly eccentric who dies dramatically of a heart attack at a charity auction, then launches a posthumous series of announcements inviting the city of Boston to participate in an elaborate treasure hunt game. Protagonists enmeshed in the quest include:
- Tuesday Mooney, most protagonist-y protagonist, a donor prospect researcher at a local hospital who declares herself perfectly satisfied with both her pleasantly detective-y job and her self-defined lifestyle as a Cool Goth Loner until the lure off the treasure hunt pulls her dramatically off-course
- Poindexter (Dex) Howard, Tuesday Mooney's current best friend by dint of constant effort on his part; a born diva who feels required to squash the most interesting parts of himself down most of the time to maintain his comfortable lifestyle and boring finance job and series of cute but boring boyfriends, and Has Regrets
- Dorry Bones, Tuesday's next-door-neighbor and occasional tutee, a sad and lonely teen not coping very well with her mother's death who thinks Cool Goth Loner Tuesday is just the absolute knees of the bees and is DELIGHTED by the opportunity to help her with a treasure hunt - until Tuesday gets distracted, and Dorry starts wondering if she can play on her own
- Archie, a hot-but-problematic billionaire scion with a missing-presumed-dead father, a dramatically unhealthy family, and a mysterious tie to the dead Vincent Pryce, who wants to team up with Tuesday on the treasure hunt for Reasons Of His Own
The journey to pursue Vincent Pryce's clues brings up a moderate level of metaphorical and/or literal haunting from everyone's personal ghosts (for Tuesday it's the best friend who vanished in high school; for Dorry, her mother; for Dex, the version of himself that he wanted to be) while putting tension on their connections to each other -- one of the most endearing things about the book is that, although pretty much everyone gets their own B-plot romance, the emotional foreground is on the complexity of the friendships between Tuesday + Dex and Tuesday + Dorry. The Tuesday-Dex dynamic felt especially real to me, an incredibly relatable grown-up friendship that began as Casual Work Hangs and through the course of both time and conscious effort and various inequal levels of investment on one side or the other has grown into something that's actually deeply significant. I love it and I care very much!
Also I have just lived in Boston long enough by now that it's just a delight to read a book that's so very Boston. I mean, it's extremely Boston in a number of ways; it's incredibly nerdy, deeply aware and possibly a little too proud of its own geek cred, a little too ready to be charmed by the glamor of its wealthiest and most privileged characters and to give itself credit for queer joyous progressive spirit without really grappling at all with the city's underlying systemic inequalities ... like, I think it's also worth noting the absence of Dorchester or Roxbury in the paragraph I quoted above. And Archie is a poor little rich boy with a tragic backstory, and Dex is a finance guy who feels kind of bad about negative world impact of his job, and Vincent Pryce is a good, fun, wacky billionaire. You know. But I do also love the Boston that Kate Racculia loves, too.
"They all considered themselves Black Cats, but within that there were subgroups, treasure-hunting gangs like pub trivia teams, representing their corners of Greater Boston. The Smoots had MIT; the Gay Mafia covered Eastie; The Highlanders, Somerville; The Green Monsters and Challahback Girls, Fenway and Brookline. Adama Is A Cylon -- the name of a trivia team she and Dex had gone up against more than once, which couldn't be a coincidence -- had parts of Cambridge."
YEAH, OK.
(I still want to know where the place is near the MFA that Lila Korrapati got an incredible-sounding falafel on the night she met Vincent Pryce? Please, Kate Racculia! Tell me what you know! A sincere plea from a falafel-starved ex-New Yorker.)
Anyway, the plot! Vincent Pryce is an elderly eccentric who dies dramatically of a heart attack at a charity auction, then launches a posthumous series of announcements inviting the city of Boston to participate in an elaborate treasure hunt game. Protagonists enmeshed in the quest include:
- Tuesday Mooney, most protagonist-y protagonist, a donor prospect researcher at a local hospital who declares herself perfectly satisfied with both her pleasantly detective-y job and her self-defined lifestyle as a Cool Goth Loner until the lure off the treasure hunt pulls her dramatically off-course
- Poindexter (Dex) Howard, Tuesday Mooney's current best friend by dint of constant effort on his part; a born diva who feels required to squash the most interesting parts of himself down most of the time to maintain his comfortable lifestyle and boring finance job and series of cute but boring boyfriends, and Has Regrets
- Dorry Bones, Tuesday's next-door-neighbor and occasional tutee, a sad and lonely teen not coping very well with her mother's death who thinks Cool Goth Loner Tuesday is just the absolute knees of the bees and is DELIGHTED by the opportunity to help her with a treasure hunt - until Tuesday gets distracted, and Dorry starts wondering if she can play on her own
- Archie, a hot-but-problematic billionaire scion with a missing-presumed-dead father, a dramatically unhealthy family, and a mysterious tie to the dead Vincent Pryce, who wants to team up with Tuesday on the treasure hunt for Reasons Of His Own
The journey to pursue Vincent Pryce's clues brings up a moderate level of metaphorical and/or literal haunting from everyone's personal ghosts (for Tuesday it's the best friend who vanished in high school; for Dorry, her mother; for Dex, the version of himself that he wanted to be) while putting tension on their connections to each other -- one of the most endearing things about the book is that, although pretty much everyone gets their own B-plot romance, the emotional foreground is on the complexity of the friendships between Tuesday + Dex and Tuesday + Dorry. The Tuesday-Dex dynamic felt especially real to me, an incredibly relatable grown-up friendship that began as Casual Work Hangs and through the course of both time and conscious effort and various inequal levels of investment on one side or the other has grown into something that's actually deeply significant. I love it and I care very much!
Also I have just lived in Boston long enough by now that it's just a delight to read a book that's so very Boston. I mean, it's extremely Boston in a number of ways; it's incredibly nerdy, deeply aware and possibly a little too proud of its own geek cred, a little too ready to be charmed by the glamor of its wealthiest and most privileged characters and to give itself credit for queer joyous progressive spirit without really grappling at all with the city's underlying systemic inequalities ... like, I think it's also worth noting the absence of Dorchester or Roxbury in the paragraph I quoted above. And Archie is a poor little rich boy with a tragic backstory, and Dex is a finance guy who feels kind of bad about negative world impact of his job, and Vincent Pryce is a good, fun, wacky billionaire. You know. But I do also love the Boston that Kate Racculia loves, too.
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Date: 2020-07-11 03:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-13 12:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-11 04:56 pm (UTC)Probably Boston Shawarma. They were always mobbed by students every time we walked by. Technically they're closer to Northeastern than the MFA, but still less than ten minutes on foot from the museum. Now I want falafel.
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Date: 2020-07-11 06:48 pm (UTC)Or maybe something in the Fenway area... https://g.page/sufra-mediterranean-food?share
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Date: 2020-07-13 12:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-13 12:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-13 06:29 pm (UTC)Is there any near you? (Can you make some?)
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Date: 2020-07-14 12:22 pm (UTC)(There is some reasonable falafel near-ish us ... it would be a bit of an expedition, but doable! And tempting, on a day when I actually have time. >.>)
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Date: 2020-07-11 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-13 12:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-11 05:44 pm (UTC)yeahhhh.... which, I mean, doesn't not fall in line with The Westing Game's cheerful 1970s multiculturalism...
It is such a fun book, though.
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Date: 2020-07-13 12:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-11 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-13 12:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-11 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-11 09:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-12 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-13 12:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-11 09:58 pm (UTC)I think part of it is that I just found the characters kind of relateable (mostly Tuesday) and I want more recommendations of books with early 30s/late 20s characters. I also loved the Boston, but from the perspective of "yesss I've never lived here but I've visited and want to keep coming back and getting to know the place better so tell me more."
What are Dorchester or Roxbury like? I'm very curious about Boston neighborhoods in general as my exploration has started from places-my-friends-talk-about-or-live-in which is Camberville and maybe Arlington neither of which is actually Boston and I do have a tendency to be stuck inside Building 46 at MIT for a lot of the time I'm in the area so that's not totally proximate to much Boston either...
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Date: 2020-07-11 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-13 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-14 03:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-12 01:37 am (UTC)The area was also gentrifying fast when I lived there -- fancy blocky condo buildings erupting out of every street, plus a few old brick apartment buildings and row houses being spiffed up inside and rented to hipsters at a huge sum. I don't think of myself as part of the problem because I was renting a finished attic bedroom in a shared house that had been virtually a commune since the 80s, but maybe that's giving myself too much credit.
The area I was in was apparently crime-ridden in the 1990s, but that was long done by the time I moved in. I heard a few instances of not-quite-spoken racism from white people not from Dorchester, who found out I was a white woman living in Dorchester. I don't know what the experience of being, say, Haitian and from Dot is like, but it's the only area where I've lived that hasn't been majority white, which is one more thing I liked about Dot. Boston is hella segregated for the most part.
Dorchester used to be The Irish Immigrant Neighborhood, I seem to recall. There's a majority Irish neighborhood with its own pubs and shops in another part of Dot, but as it wasn't on public transit I didn't spend much time there. There's a neighborhood called Lower Mills which I would occasionally walk to for ice cream, and it had a cute little double row of restaurants and shops with an Irish pub that had a session Monday nights. Near there was a waterfront area on the Neponset River with a cove with boat docks and a path along the river where I used to sit and watch the ducks. There's a beach near the JFK/UMass T stop. It's nothing special but it's a beach, and I went swimming there a few times in the summers.
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Date: 2020-07-12 02:15 am (UTC)Like maybe it isn't totally weird or amazing but there's a map store on Mass Ave somewhere between Harvard and Porter. I love weird little shops. I also love walking along the Fens, and going to the Gardiner, and combining these two activities of course.
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Date: 2020-07-13 05:49 pm (UTC)Ward Maps is totally amazing! In 2012, I bought from them a magnificent paper object entitled The Boston Terminal Co. Diagram of Tracks and Signals. Resident Engineer's Office. Boston, May 28, 1905. NOT TO SCALE. It looks like the layout for a circuit board, only instead of transistors and capacitors, the components are labeled things like "Power House Yard," "Express Yard," "Atlantic Ave. Bridge," and "Subway Tracks." It's behind me in my office as we speak. I also got a pamphlet for the 1914 Boylston Street Subway from them once.
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Date: 2020-07-14 03:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-12 03:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-13 12:44 pm (UTC)Yeah, as Laine said, I haven't lived in either nighborhood, but both of them are historically black neighborhoods facing significant gentrification and displacement crises -- most of the times I've been to Roxbury have been because many of the city's Black Lives Matter events begin in that neighborhood. So the fact that there isn't a treasure-hunting team from there feels a little bit like a gap!
(If you want some fun Boston lore, can I recommend this show from the 70s that we digitized at work? It's basically just a dude wandering around different Boston neighborhoods chatting to the people there, and in some ways it's very dated and in some ways still COMPLETELY accurate.)
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Date: 2020-07-14 03:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-11 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-13 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-14 03:26 am (UTC)That is excellent writing-of-place.
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Date: 2020-07-12 01:42 am (UTC)Not to be That Guy, but one of the best things about Infinite Jest is a similar love it evinces for the lesser known geography of the greater Boston area.
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Date: 2020-07-13 12:57 pm (UTC)I think I'd heard that Infinite Jest was set in Boston but I'd forgotten! Unfortunately I'm not sure I have the attention span for anything infinite at this particular point in time ... perhaps it will come back once we have passed out of reach of La Corona.
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Date: 2021-01-03 10:07 pm (UTC)It was a deeply frustrating book that changed scenes incoherently on a constant basis, nearly everyone was detestable, it goes on forever, it thinks it is SO VERY CLEVER, and when I hit the end I would've thrown the book had it been a physical book and not my phone.
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Date: 2020-07-27 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-14 08:00 am (UTC)That sounds amazing!
it's incredibly nerdy, deeply aware and possibly a little too proud of its own geek cred, a little too ready to be charmed by the glamor of its wealthiest and most privileged characters and to give itself credit for queer joyous progressive spirit without really grappling at all with the city's underlying systemic inequalities ... like, I think it's also worth noting the absence of Dorchester or Roxbury in the paragraph I quoted above. And Archie is a poor little rich boy with a tragic backstory, and Dex is a finance guy who feels kind of bad about negative world impact of his job, and Vincent Pryce is a good, fun, wacky billionaire. You know.
Haha, I don't know Boston at all, but this is sharply observed and feels familiar, not least from fandom.
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Date: 2020-07-14 12:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-22 10:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-27 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 11:32 pm (UTC)THANK YOU
Date: 2020-07-27 11:45 am (UTC)Re: THANK YOU
Date: 2020-07-27 08:18 pm (UTC)