Vote for Walter A. O'Brien—fight the fare increase

I have a Charlie Card! After my physical therapy appointment this morning, I met rushthatspeaks in Davis Square and we headed out to Downtown Crossing to replace my expired card and their stolen one. It was a surprisingly painless process. Rush was handed a new pair of cards straight off. I took a number and waited in line and after about five minutes was handed my new card by the MBTA employee who had transferred the stored value from the old one. We were out of there in the time it took to try to remember the RKO films of Val Lewton. (We missed three.) We concluded it was because we'd gone bracing ourselves for an afternoon of administrative hell à la DMV, therefore the law of best-laid plans dictated it was no big deal. If we'd gone in casually and optimistically, the process would have been crowded and awful and taken the rest of the day.

To reward ourselves anyway, we went to the Eldo Cake House in Chinatown and bought the best pork buns. I discovered sadly that the preserved egg in my lotus bun was slightly denser than I wanted to bite, but the lotus paste reminded me how much I just want to make some. It doesn't look astronomically more difficult than azuki bean. Note to self: possibly most inexpensive lunch in months, as well as one of the best. A person really has to work to spend ten dollars in that bakery. We tried to visit the ICA to see Nick Cave's (no relation) Soundsuits, but they're closed on Mondays. At least we found out the new cards work. We repaired to Porter Square Books, whence Rush went home with gaudior and I went home with a book, stopping first at ex-Shaw's to pick up a variety of dairy products. derspatchel and I made a hybrid form of noodles and cheese tonight: Annie's shells, hot dogs, cheddar-and-spiced-breadcrumb topping. Our toaster oven is mighty. I ate coconut-milk ice cream and finished the book.

Here's a story. In a war-locked border town where a prizefight is the only ticket out, an adolescent girl trains to take down the champion who killed her brother in a rigged match. Here's another story. In a demilitarized zone that has lost its name, a gang of church orphans resurrect the legend of the town's patron saint to avenge the abuses of the occupying soldiers and the local families that enable them. Here's another. In a future of pandemic flu and unstable nations, the "Lost Boys" were bred to be super-soldiers—fearless, fast-burning—but some of them wanted nothing more than freedom and family, and none of them knew they could leave children behind. All of these stories are Santa Olivia (2009), the first non-Kushiel novel I've read by Jacqueline Carey and far and away my favorite. Did I mention the queer coming-of-age romance? It's that, too. The book is at least three different genres of pulp all gloriously spliced together with overtones of superhero mythology and the noir-ish kind of B-picture where the girl who thought she was a gold-digger falls for her hard-luck true love after all. And it's not any kind of pastiche: it is a very solid, near-future science fiction novel whose protagonist is named Loup Garron not because she is actually a werewolf (under which circumstances, no) but because the tabloids called her father and his kind "wolf-men," though no one knows for sure what the non-human parts of them were. One of the lovely, characteristic touches of the book is that she never finds out and it doesn't matter. I suspect it was a difficult book to market; I don't think it's YA, although the majority of the story takes place during Loup's adolescence, and it's not at all paranormal in either the technical or genre senses, although the design tries its hardest not to give that away. The cover, which shows a slender, backlit figure in tight boots and a billowing cutaway coat, is about as one hundred percent wrong for this novel as it could have been without whitewashing. (Loup's mother is Latina, her father Haitian-born. Loup herself is brown-skinned—the text does use "caramel" a couple of times—with her father's natural hair. Her half-brother is fair-haired, blue-eyed, an American soldier's son. Santa Olivia was part of Texas before it became plague-wasted Outpost 12 in the cordon between warring Mexico and the United States.) Personally I am not sure why everyone doesn't want to buy a novel with all the elements I have described above, especially the matter-of-fact queerness, especially the boxing, especially the varied cast of characters mostly of color, especially the setting which is dystopian only if so are many army-patrolled places in the present day, but I do not work for Grand Central Publishing. Sadly, I am informed that the sequel is not worth pursuing; fortunately, the book ends like it doesn't need one. Ignore the back-cover text, which is of the species strictly speaking accurate, misses everything about the book, and enjoy.

P.S. I have just realized that what Lana Del Rey's "Video Games" reminds me of most is Siouxsie & The Banshees' "Strange Fruit." I was listening to Through the Looking Glass (1987) and those swaying, bell-tolling chords were suddenly familiar. They're not congruent songs, but something in the sound. I can never tell if this sort of thing is just my brain or not.