Author: Adrienne Kress
Publisher: Dial
Rating: WARTY!
Adrienne Kress has tried to promote this novel and rationalize her treatment of her three heroes here by claiming that she's subverting tropes, but I disagree. Yes, they are far from the worst examples of female abuse in YA writing, but they are nowhere near the paragons of feminism which she portrays them to be. You can read her version here and here.
This novel seems, at first blush, like a steam-punk novel mashed-up with a mystery, but it's really not. Not steam-punk, that is, and there is some mystery to it, but that's not necessarily what the author intended! I didn't like the very beginning; it seemed rather amateurish. Kress is not English and even though she lived in that country, she doesn’t seem to have quite mastered capturing the tone for people's thinking and modes of expression for the era. I understand that it was not her intention to be true to life (this is fiction, after all), but I'll share some thoughts on this later. What she did wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; I'm all for breaking molds (and even moulds!), but it does trip-up the reader somewhat to begin with. Again this is not necessarily a bad thing depending on where you're going and how far you take it with you! Unfortunately, Kress didn't seem to know where to go with this nor how to get there competently.
Having said that, I initially warmed up to this story rather quickly. Kress has an interesting sense of humor and made me almost laugh out loud at times, for example when another character, Nellie, sighs wistfully and her partner, The Great Raheem, asks her "Are you sighing wistfully?" For some reason, that one really tickled me.
The novel features three main characters who are introduced alphabetically (by last name), each one allowed three chapters in which to establish themselves before the story proper kicks off. I did like the way Kress did this, introducing the character in their first chapter, the male in her life in the next (not a romantic male but a guardian or partner or troublesome bully), and finally something to pique interest in the third of the character chapters. I think it was the symmetry of it all which really resonated with me. Kress seems quite playful with her chapters and chapter titles. She has chapters 10½ and 10¾ for example. I enjoyed this playfulness. The title "The Friday Society" came from the fact that each of the three girls is a "man" Friday (as in Robinson Crusoe).
Cora Bell is a London street urchin turned ward of Lord White her mentor, who is rather fond of the seven percent solution evidently, and also is a scientist/inventor. There's no word at the beginning on how these two very different people hooked-up together, which I found particularly peculiar. We first meet Cora after an explosion in Lord White's laboratory where she ends up covered in "green goo". We don't learn what this might be until later. Shortly after this, Cora has to retrieve Lord White from his opium den.
This proved to be very standard stuff, except that the opium den is in an alley, and when Cora comes back outside with Lord White in tow, she's almost blinded by with bright sunlight. That does fly in the face of the London trope (that it’s always raining or drenched in smog), but that's not what caught my attention so much as the disconnect between a narrow, dingy alley in a depressed part of town and the bright sunlight. I'm not sure how much bright sunlight you’d get in a narrow alley, so that seemed odd to me, but I guess it depends on the alley you ally yourself with....
When Cora returns him home, she heads down to the lab and confronts what she takes to be a burglar, but is actually a new lab assistant. This makes Cora feel surplussed as well as nonplussed. Andrew Harris appears to be none other than Trope Romance Guy (TRG pronounced TRRRRGGG! - yes with the exclamation point, and made to sound as rude as possible). Naturally she hates him. Yawn. Could we not have a romance novel for a change where she starts out with an attraction and ends up hating him? That would be my kind of romance novel! So, for those who are taking notes: Ian not v. impressed wrt Cora or TRG. So I have to ask, vis-à-vis Kress's claim to be subverting tropes, how the hell this tired cliché of a "romance" even remotely contributes to that goal? (Short answer: it doesn't. It merely sells out your girl in the same way every other badly written romance sells her out). Fortunately, Kress was about to make a better impression on me with the next two girls who make up this mystery-solving trio (girls, make-up, get it? No, neither did I...).
Nellie Harrison is up next (no doubt destined to be George's great-great grandmother - after her descendants move to Liverpool)…. She starts out her three-chapter introduction almost identically - with an explosion - which I honestly appreciated. Indeed, the very first line of each chapter trio is exactly the same but caused by a different kind of explosion. This time it was flash powder, as in early flash photography, but she's not a photographer's assistant, she's a magician's assistant as we discover in her second chapter. The magician is the aforementioned 'The Great Raheem', a Persian who learned street magic in what is now Iran, and managed to bring it to London where he hit the big time. There's nothing going on between Raheem and Nellie, just as there was nothing going on between Cora and Lord White, but unlike Cora, Nellie doesn’t get a lab partner, she gets a dead body! And she gets fewer pages allocated to her than does Cora. Nellie was chosen not only for her looks, but for her personality and smarts, so we're told, although she exhibits little of either.
She also has a parrot who purrs like a cat! Evidently it’s an excellent mimic, and it keeps on annoyingly reappearing throughout the story doing things which parrots do not do unless specifically and dedicatedly trained to so do. Frankly, given its coloring, this "parrot" seems much more like a macaw, and I'm not sure that Kress knows the difference. They're in the same biological grouping, but they're not interchangeable. If Kress were truly looking to add a parrot for its intelligence, then she needed to pick an African grey which has proven talents in that direction. This parrot/macaw also seems to magically appear and disappear. The parrot doesn't fly out of open windows, intriguingly, and it tends to follow Nellie - perhaps it can open doors and windows on its own? Must have a windows operating system.... We're given no reason for this parrot's attachment to Nellie and this creature seems out of place here - more like it should be in a children's story than in YA. In one incident, Nellie - the one with smarts and personality - rudely wanders off in search of food to the kitchen of someone else's home. The parrot is nowhere near her and does not follow her but when she exits the premises, the parrot is magically with her. So in short, a big 'NO' to the "parrot".
Last but far from the least character IMO, except in how she's treated by the other two, comes Michiko Takaneda, a Japanese-born samurai-trained girl who was denied her katana, sold to a bully, and brought to London. She has a history of running away (which is how she came to be a trained Samurai), and is planning on running from her bully as soon as she can save up sufficient funds from her meager (or is it meagre? This is London, after all!) paycheck. She gets a rather petty but very satisfying revenge on her bully by referring to him as Callum-kun. It is a mark of respect in Japan to suffix someone's name with -san, just as in India one might add -ji, as in Ghandiji. Michiko's use of -kun is a mark of disrespect in that it is only applied to someone who is your inferior. This gives poor Michiko a measure of satisfaction since Callum has no idea what it means, nor is he smart enough to care.
One day while out buying new swords (Callum's business is teaching people self-defense/defence), she sees a real katana - so different from the cheap junk for which Callum is paying way too much - and she touches it admiringly and longingly. It was the sword she was never awarded in Japan. The elderly Japanese gentleman who runs the stall sees her and talks with her for a few minutes. He never did this before, despite her frequent visits. So unlike Cora, who gets a guy, and Nellie, who gets a corpse, Michiko gets her dream: the Japanese guy sends her the sword as a gift. He has named it Silver Heart. Michiko breaks down in tears as I almost did! (Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit but not by much!). Michiko gets more pages than Nellie - marginally, but fewer than Cora. I'm starting to really dislike Cora!
But peeves aside, how great a start is that? Aside from the rather disappointing Cora, I couldn’t ask for a better first nine than this, with only a hole in one and a fair way to go, Kress managed to stay out of the rough, and everything is green. I felt like I could get to like Kress at that point, but from this point on, she chose to let me down instead, because it was all downhill from there on out.
After she introduced her three protagonists, Kress had to get them together, and she does this after a gathering which Lord White attends with Cora in tow, and at which both Nellie and Michiko perform. It also involves a second dead body - this one actually more of a dead head, with no body in sight! Michiko discovers this walking home (having been dismissed by the callous Callum, who is now claiming to all who will listen that he taught Michiko!). She ends up in a sword-fight with a bearded man who knocks her out when she had expected to die. She lost the fight because her cheap sword - not the Silver Heart - broke. She's discovered, of course, by Nellie and Cora, who are sharing a steam cab home. The three spend the night together, which seemed to be a remarkably unlikely outcome to me, given their circumstances. I guess that's why it's fiction! These girls are supposed to be bonding (at least Kress claims they are): showing how girls can be friends and not bitches who undermine one another, yet the two white girls routinely diss the Asian. But Kress seems to miss the point that in Edwardian London, women were not USA high school cheer leaders. It was not the norm to be bitchy and to diss others. Politeness and manners were routinely exhibited, so her entire "argument" falls flat!
It was at that point in the story that I started running into issues, curiously enough, and they came thick and fast. There were far too many Americanisms popping up during this entire encounter, and every time I read one I was kicked out of this fable into the reality that it was just a novel masquerading as an Edwardian mystery, but written entirely in the good ole' US of A without even a minimal effort made to offer a nod or even a wink to Edwardian London. This is nothing but laziness and arrogance on the part of the author, and constitutes a gross insult to the rest of the world and to history. Kress is quite overtly stating here: screw London, screw the world, screw the Edwardian period! Everyone needs to be American or at least subjugated to the USA, or they're not worth writing about!"
Kress has Nellie saying "Hiya", she has Michiko thinking in American idioms, not in Japanese. How is this subverting trope? How is this championing women's rights? This is another writing quandary (yes, quandary, I shall countenance it no other way!). Sometimes it’s better to betray authenticity in favor of conveying something deeper. I'm not suggesting here that she should have Michiko thinking in pigeon English. Of course not! Perish the thought. Michiko would think as fluently in Japanese as Cora and Nellie did in English, but I feel that in this regard, it’s less important exactly how she thinks than it is how what she thinks is conveyed to the reader, and she certainly didn't think in Americanisms.
I think that it would not have hurt to play with the phrasing of Michiko's internal monologue to convey more of her eastern origins, but it’s a choice which every writer has to make. Kress has made hers, and I think she chose badly. I know that Kress wanted to write this in modern idiom, rather than try to emulate Edwardian speech patterns, but it doesn't work because of the the jarringly anachronistic Americanisms. There's one instance in particular which leaps to mind and which really glared in my eyes. Michiko has a very limited grasp of English. She's learning and she's doing well, but she's far from fluent, and often has issues with what’s said to her, but her internal monologue is so American as to be disturbing. At one point, she thinks, "For crying out loud!". This isn't Edwardian; it’s an Americanism, and it seriously grated. This kind of thing effectively turned my suspension of disbelief into a sword of Damocles!
In this same vein (or vain if you like!), there was a totally bemusing interaction on p105 where Nellie, making "a spot of tea" asks Cora if she wants sugar, and Cora responds that she takes it black? I have no idea what Kress thought she was doing there. Sugar and whether the tea is black or white have nothing to do with one another. It’s whether or not milk/cream is added which determines this, and I doubt many Edwardian Brits would actually drink it black any more than they would drink it iced!
One reference which might escape the intended audience for this novel is Kress's introduction of "cavorite" - a fictional compound (indeed, the "green goo" which Cora was experimenting at the start of this novel, evidently). This was invented by a guy named Cavor in the movie First Men in the Moon which originated in a much earlier novel by HG Wells. That movie is antique by modern CGI standards, but it is a pretty good movie. It's a seriously black mark against Kress in that I didn't see anywhere in this book, not in the narrative nor in any notes, that she had taken this from HG Wells. It's bad form to offer no acknowledgment and this contributed to how I rated this novel.
Talking of reviews, let me reiterate here that I typically don’t derive my choice of books from reading reviews. Most of the positive book reviews I've read are nothing more than a gushing recommendation, and as such they tell me nothing about the quality of the read nor of any downside to it. For those who do offer more, I say a heartfelt "Thank you!", but I don’t know of any reviewers who share my idiosyncratic taste in novels and whose reviews are in sync enough with my own perspective for me to be able to rely on them. Hence this blog! In short, I typically don’t read reviews to discover new material for me to read because they're unhelpful to me, but sometimes when I'm writing a review and I have mixed feelings about it, as I did with this one, I do take a gander at what others have said. I usually wait until I have a feel for which way I'm leaning, but not always. What I routinely look for in others' reviews is anything that I might not have addressed in my own, so I tend to read a half-dozen one-star and a half-dozen five-star (or equivalent) to get a picture of what's irking or smirking other reviewers.
In doing this for The Friday Society, I couldn't get over how many of the reviewers (positive or negative) described this novel as "Victorian". It’s not. It’s Edwardian. One reviewer even described it as "Regency" which is so far out of the ballpark as to be eight blocks down, two over, and then a sharp right behind the medical supply store. I noticed a difference between the positive reviews which described this as steam-punk and the negatives! I'm not a big steam-punk fan, but I started out deluded by Kress into thinking that this was steam-punk. The negative reviews tended to call foul on the steam-punk, and having read much of it now, I have to go with the negatives. There is a steam-punk element, but it's so very subdued and amateur that it plays no useful part in the novel. I mean a steam-powered flying ship? Airship fire "trucks"? No! Wa-ay too clunky. Learn a little physics and get back to us! You're better off thinking of The Friday Society as an Edwardian amateur detective story with some mild action thrown in, but the action isn't impressive, and the writing is definitely pitched towards the younger end of YA.
Here's a point of annoyance: Kress has Cora tell us that as a child, she went swimming in the Thames (pronounced temmz). I doubt this - not as polluted as that river was at that time, and not a street urchin who rarely strayed from her street and never from her neighborhood if she was anything like your typical street urchin. I call bullshit on that one. Admittedly the Thames was improving by this time (the worst pollution was in the mid nine-teeth(!) century) but swimming in it? Even for a street urchin, this smelled strongly of 'out of character' for me. This was one of too many annoyances, which contributed to how I rated this novel.
Another of these was when the trio removed yet one more body from a crime scene and took it to Officer Murphy, and he assured them that he would get it to the morgue. Where the hell else would he take it? Home? Would he plant it in his garden? Would they use it for an umbrella stand? Would he throw it out on the street after they left? Yet another instance was how Michiko got her Silver Heart samurai mask: it was a gift from a woman who, moments before, had been treating her like trash. This was an appalling example of non-sequitur writing and contributed to my rating of this novel.
I've mentioned that I was not exactly thrilled with Cora, and in Chapters 18 & 19 I was turned off her completely. This began when Harris manhandles her and she complies. Yes, you can argue that she has the hots for him and so she was consenting, but there's more to it than that. It’s painfully obvious that she likes Harris not in spite of, but because of her professed hatred for him, but who Kress thought she was fooling or what she thought she was doing here is a mystery, since Cora's predilection is itself neither mysterious, nor is it unpredictable. Now if Kress were planning on turning Harris into a villain, I might warm to this playing against trope, but I don’t get that feeling at all - neither from the story nor from Kress herself based on what she'd done with this tale to that point. Given the level of the writing Kress exhibits, I don’t think she has that kind of subtlety in her. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, Harris is a villain, regardless of what Kress intended him to be. His behavior speaks volumes. Far from subverting tropes here, Kress plays right into one, and demeans Cora into the bargain.
What makes this part of this story so pathetic is that when Harris grabs Cora without warning or preamble and kisses her, she shows none of the propriety of an Edwardian girl, allowing him to get away with this without comment, even participating in it herself. But why not? He has shown none of the propriety of an Edwardian man, so maybe they deserve each other? Harris is interested in nothing more than laying Cora, and that's it! You'd be better off reading about my own character Cora in Saurus. She knows exactly how to deal with jerks like Harris (although she's conflicted about approaching it!).
As if Harris's effectively forcing himself upon a young, insecure, and rather impressionable girl in the complete absence of any invitation from her wasn't bad enough once, Harris promises he will not do it again and immediately does it again. Some might find this romantic. I found his repeated kiss attacks upon Cora to be as obnoxious as they were creepy. Again the writing is really clunky, and I had to ask myself, why did Kress even set this novel in the Edwardian period if she wasn't serious about setting it in that period? Why not make it a more modern novel? No explanation. And no respect for her female characters.
The novel descended further in chapter nineteen. All three girls head out into the night. How Michiko gets away with this is a mystery given how possessive and controlling Callum is. We know that Cora sneaks out, so that's no problem (except in that she's abusing her patron and being dishonest, but I've already written her off); however, for Nellie's partner Raheem to let a young girl in his care out at night alone is completely inexplicable, especially given how protective of women people from his part of the world tend to be. Yes, this "protection" runs to the criminal all too often, but we cannot judge all people of the Middle East from reports of the actions of a few extremists. Those concerns do not apply here since Raheem has already shown himself to be honorable (if not exactly completely in character for his origins), so again, this is not believable within context.
By utterly amazing coincidence (of which Kress is all-too-fond) all three meet up at the site of the headless man! This coincidence motif is overplayed by a significant margin in Kress's writing, again undermining the smarts and abilities of the women. There are far too many magical coincidences (including one where Michiko happens to be training a woman at a private residence which also happens to be the very same one into which Nellie is breaking and entering), but back to the story. This particular coincidence results in them finding a young girl whom Cora knew from back when she was ten years old and living on the street. The girl has been stabbed by the mysterious "Fog person" who beheaded the man in the first place. She dies without conveying any information of value as to why she was seeking Cora! This was a real annoyance. Enough with the ostensibly enigmatic but actually tediously truncated and obfuscated statements, and with people dying before they can tell us something. This is another trope which needs to die itself. Again, Kress fails to subvert trope here and show us that it's nothing more than a lazy way to write a 'mystery novel'. But this isn't the biggest problem here!
Rather than call the police, they girls move the body (this is a sad habit with these idiots) - taking it home to the girl's parents whom Cora knew. This is yet another example of how pathetic Cora is. She has given no mind to this girl - her best friend just six years before - or to her parents or their impoverished circumstances. She has done nothing for them in six years despite being in a position to really help them. She passed the girl on the street when she went to collect Lord White from the opium den, and didn’t even recognize her, much less give her money for flowers, yet now she feels this compulsion to return this neglected girl's body to her family (and thereby become an accessory after the fact of a murder)? I didn’t think it would be possible for my opinion of Cora to sink lower, but there it went down that drain right there at the kerb - you know the one which drains sewage directly into the river where Cora claims she swam happily as a child? Maybe she really did swim in the Thames. That might explain why she's brain-dead....
Oh slap my wrist and call me Mrs. Peevish! Moving right along now…. Did I mention the London particular (aka smog)? Yes, there was a smog problem, but no, it did not routinely occur every night without fail. I've been to London many times, and I've seen fog there only once. Indeed, the weather was bad there only once out of all the times I've been. No, I never went there during the heyday of the industrial revolution (or revulsion as I think of it!) so I can’t claim that I personally experienced any of the worst smog occurrences (although since the worst recorded instance was in 1952, there may well be people living in London who do recall it).
Having put that out there, we're typically talking fog, not smog in this novel, and Kress has it appearing on cue, every single night! Is this how Kress subverts trope, by troping fog out every time her characters are out at night in London? That's not the only stretch! If you want to learn about how prevalent and frequent fog was back then, read contemporary writers such as AC Doyle and HG Wells; they'll set ya straight! But to conclude this mini-diatribe, Kress has the three girls meet up again accidentally on another night, when the fog is yellow, which indicates a potentially dangerous level of sulphur dioxide (yes, sulphur! This is English sulphur, you abominable cad, not American sulfur!), but immediately prior to telling us the color of the fog, Kress had told us that Nellie suggested to Cora that they take a stroll to enjoy the night air! Color the fog yellow, and me confused.
Actually the confusion of that night extends beyond the quality of the night air. Nellie and Cora meet Michiko again. Isn’t it amazing how these completely accidental gatherings occur with such regularity? The trio encounters three men who are nothing more than bullies and muggers (despite her penchant for employing modern phraseology Kress doesn’t say they were muggers as such - but why would she baulk at that?). When they meet the men, Michiko is trailing behind the other two like a pet, but when the men start telling them to hand over their valuables immediately afterwards, Michiko is in front without having moved in the interim. The force is strong with that one! Michiko kneels and centers herself (like common London thugs will respect her rituals and wait!), before rising to cut each of them with her katana, as a warning. The men run away. Really? This was a truly amateurish and sadly-written scene for Michiko, and I have to down-rate this novel yet again, because of it. Tell me: how does this subvert any tropes, exactly?
In conclusion, I was on the fence on this one right up to the last fifty or sixty pages. It took one more encounter with Andrew Harris to tip the balance. Cora is a moron and Harris is a scumbag, and that's all there is to it. I couldn't, at that point, even pretend to hold out any more hope for this to improve or be rendered worth while by the finale. Consequently, I cannot honestly rate this as worthy when it's so poorly put together, and the three female leads are so badly wasted, and so completely sold out by a female writer. I just can't. It lost its Lady Sparkle, broke my Silver Heart, and really needs to go Hyde under a rock. I don't care if there's a sequel because this is WARTY!
