**This review was first published in Alternating Current's online column The Coil*

The snowy owl unfurls
its wings, swoops down
on the field mouse. The mouse squirms,
releases into a need larger than itself.

(“Mother,” p. 23)

Despite the fact that poetry and culture are frequently positioned as going hand in hand, there are still some cultures that seem to be shot directly into the forefront, while others await their chance. Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music is a collection that touches upon the immigrant experience, not so much addressing the process of coming to Canada as reaching out to bring about memories of India and Pakistan, demonstrating how the past can bleed into the present in a way that transcends any sort of assimilation.

Yet the poems of the collection are just as restless as the wasps, flitting around in an inconsistent pattern that frequently leaves the reader with a dizzying sensation. The collection is broken up into five sections, five “tion”s, starting off with a heavy focus on culture and tradition to set the tone. The second poem of the collection, “The Master Bedroom,” does this spectacularly, displaying its cold, sharp tongue in just a few simple yet biting lines:

He is getting married, so the painters
arrived, or his mother is getting married
because she is arranging his marriage.

(p. 5).

The first quarter of the collection had me searching for these kinds of memorable and saturated lines, though the main problem in the collection lay, I found, in this very same way of phrasing it: the need “to search.” Where the first quarter of the collection was more grounded to the synopsis of the book, afterward the poems seemed to scatter in every direction. There was hardly any grounding point that could keep me focused on where the collection was going, and if with the more “traditional” verse poems this was manageable, then the prose poems of this collection proved to be a different sort of beast.

The poem “The New Sentence” was a mix between those two, retaining some traditional poetic elements, though its voice resembled poetic prose. It was one of the few that stood out and remained memorable, showing what the collection was truly trying to get at: the shifting times and mass fear that are slowly creeping in, doing so by reminding just who stands at the very center of these machinations:

Chapter one is usually white.

Chapter one is usually male.
Chapter one is usually middle-class.

(p. 37).

Progressing further through the poems, however, it becomes difficult to focus and follow along, the prose poems becoming longer and truly more “prose” than “poem.” Ghaffar loses that pointedness that characterizes the beginning and instead seems to throw everything in all at once, requiring quite a bit of patience to work through. They reminded me of a professor who was so engaged and interested in his own topic that he’s trailed off, delving down into several layers of analysis without bringing his students along, as well, having left them to frantically scamper along. That is how a majority of Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music made me feel — On one hand, these are poems written by someone who is clearly knowledgeable and determined in finding ways of expressing these visions, playing with words to achieve the desired effect. On the other hand, there is an overbearing quality to these poems, a certain heaviness that makes them difficult to keep up with and, sometimes, to connect to. They create a barrier between themselves and the reader and remain contained in their own wordplay. They emit a strange sort of music, indeed, one that I found a bit too much for my taste.

I was drawn into the Roma Series because of the fabulous covers and the storyline.

It made me think of Kathy Reichs and the the TV series, Bones, with her forensic anthropology, only for a character that specializes in forensic accounting.

 Amazon  /  Goodreads

MY REVIEW

Bianca is back in the Wasp’s Nest by Gabriel Valjan, the second book in the Roma Series. She has returned to the States and is working for Rendition…again. I wonder if she may regret it. She is a loner and distrustful. She walked away from love, but she cannot forget him. Will he come back into her life?

A scientific element arises when Bianca investigates Nason Pharmaceutical and wasp DNA. Will it be used for a cure or a weapon? In this twisted world, who can say.

As the story grows and develops into more than one mystery to be solved, I wonder how safe any of the characters are. An assassin, corruption and greed…can anyone be trusted?

It is difficult for me to understand some of the scientific and technological references, but I do understand conspiracy, greed, betrayal and murder. The heavier reading sometimes seems like a school lesson, but I do want to know and understand, so my pace is slower than usual.

In Wasp’s Nest we are becoming more serious, more involved in the mysteries and there is less eating and traveling and more investigating. Italians do have a passion for food and their needs are a celebration of taste so I think it is a valuable component to the story. The suspense has ramped up, with danger around every corner. I was worried Bianca’s band of merry men may pay a fatal price. I have become very fond of her gang, each with their own personalities, desires and motives.

If I gave half stars, I would give Wasp’s Nest 3 1/2. The story is much better, with more action, for an action junkie like me. There will be more in this five book series and I look forward to following the gang to the very end.

I received Wasp’s Nest free of charge from the Gabriel Valjan.

You can see my review for Roma: Underground, Book I, by Gabriel Valjan HERE.

3 Stars

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THE SECRETS OF FLIGHT

Maggie Leffler

It all starts with a wasps' nest in Raymond's mother's basement. The wasps are Hymenoepimescis sp., which usually reproduces by attacking the Plesiometa argyra spider and laying its eggs within the spider's abdomen. As the larvae feed off the spider, they change its behavior, compelling it to create a web that can allow them to finish their development. When the spider is done with its work, the larvae kill it. (The spider and wasp species are real – nature is freaky and horrifying.)

Hymenoepimescis sp. doesn't usually build a nest or use humans as its hosts, but in this case it was affected by the unusually high radon levels in Raymond's mother's basement. Julia, Raymond's wife, is attacked by one of these wasps and unknowingly has its eggs injected into her. Over the course of the next few months, the larvae gradually affect her behavior in various ways, until one day she decides to leave Raymond. From that point on, she proceeds to become famous, carrying out an assassination and inspiring a nameless political movement which has no apparent goal. What neither she nor Raymond realizes is that they are both pawns in an ancient war between Hymenoepimescis sp. and Plesiometa argyra.

I'm not sure how I feel about this book. Part of the problem was that “war” was maybe too strong of a word for what was going on between the spiders and the wasps. Although the spiders were an intelligent collective and were, in fact, the book's narrator, the wasps were just doing their thing. When their hosts were spiders, “their thing” meant inspiring behaviors that would allow their larvae to survive and become adult wasps. They weren't intelligent and hadn't evolved to grow inside and control human hosts, so their effect on humans was more aimless and chaotic. The end result left me wondering what the point was supposed to be, and the story became more tedious than interesting.

I did enjoy the bulk of this book, though. I was drawn in by Julia's erratic behavior. I wanted to know what she'd do next and what sorts of actions she'd inspire (although she was the only one being directly affected by the wasps, she seemed to inspire changes in everyone around her, apparently without even meaning to). Raymond watched her antics on the news and desperately tried to make some sense of it all, unable to truly move on.

The main reason why I decided to read this book was because of the intelligent spiders. I liked that the story was told from their collective point of view, both as individual spiders trying to keep track of the movements of the various characters and as spider-controlled masses of webbing designed to look like “men of indeterminate ethnicity.” There were moments when I felt that the author occasionally slipped up, including details that Raymond would have known (about his own experiences and feelings, for example) that the spiders probably wouldn't have. Still, it was interesting, and I liked their very alien perspective on how they should behave and what sorts of things humans might feel comfortable with and enjoy. I wish there had been more of that.

The world-building didn't really work for me. I could deal with the way the wasps mutated to be able to inject their eggs into Julia (honestly, it wasn't much different than accepting that radiation could create superheroes), and the author did eventually (a bit later than I'd have liked) provide some of the history of the spiders' influence on humans. However, there were lots of things I wanted to know more about, and instead I got vagueness or absolutely nothing. I'm still wondering how a giant mass of spiders could create a believably human-looking being, especially since the spiders didn't always seem to be confident about their ability to successfully communicate like humans or create natural human facial expressions. And why weren't they more confident about their mimicry, considering how long they'd existed alongside humans?

I also had issues with the characters. Just about every female character in the book behaved, at one time or another, like she was Julia under the influence of wasps. It didn't seem like they were consistently themselves. And the thing was, I'd probably have been able to put up with that, and my issues with the world-building, if it had all amounted to something.

I really liked the premise and the unusual POV. I just wish the finale had been as good as the buildup.

Additional Comments:

I counted at least six typos or instances of missing words. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it was more than I expected in a work this short, and the errors were really noticeable.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

I had tremendous fun with this debut mystery novel, set in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, not least because I know the town well enough to identify individual buildings mentioned in the book. It's a quiet, sleepy Main Line town where the biggest problem is usually one of the idle rich overdoing it at the country club's cocktail bar. So it's a big shock when Kristen Clark, the struggling owner of an antiques shop, stumbles over the local real estate shark, knocked out under a bush, while walking her overweight basset hound at the plush manor across the way. Within days, the hot chef in town suffers an accident, and the hunt is on.

The writing sparkles, and Kristen is a funny and sympathetic guide. I enjoyed the gallery of social portraits hugely—everything but the ending, in fact, which comes from so far out of left field that the author has to resort to the old confession trick (at least not engineered by the detective). But by then I didn't care, and besides I could piece it together in retrospect. Looking forward to the sequel, although it does not, alas, take place in Bryn Mawr.