Stars: 4/5
tl;dr: Anti-masker chases down wife and kid. Finds more than he bargained for.

Cabot Howard is not a nice man.

I go into most stories expecting to root for the protagonist, but this hits a little too close to what’s happening in the world right now – a pandemic caused by airborne viruses, a lingering paranoia, deniers who are too full of themselves to be part of the possible solution, and no traffic on the roads. In any case, this is my first encounter with pandemic fiction resulting from COVID-19, a genre we will no doubt see more of in months and weeks to come.

Anyway, we find Cabot racing his fancy car to his ex-wife’s hometown because Leana took off with their son “without his permission”, which is already a red flag on many levels. He wants Porter back, of course, but things take a turn for the weird when he gets to Rookfield. Sure, the adults are wearing masks and he doesn’t get any service if he doesn’t put one on, but what’s with all the kids wearing full-face Plague Doctor masks? And what’s with the town’s bird obsession?

I won’t exactly call Rookfield a pleasant read. Cabot’s headspace is a cringe-worthy place to be idling in while he attempts to barge his way through people who don’t like him and don’t want him around. But the author keeps his protagonist just interesting enough for you to go along for the ride to see if this will end in redemption or comeuppance.

And the strangeness of what’s actually up in Rookfield also proved to be a great hook, or even THE hook, which unfortunately leaves us wanting at the end. I want to know more about how the town and its residents fell into this creeptastic scenario. Should Rookfield be a novel instead of a novella, we might have learned more about this strange little backwoods town and its avian secrets. Something for another book, perhaps?

Gordon B White isn’t an author I’ve read before, but this isn’t surprising since my reading habits have stayed local lately. I came across his tweet quite by chance, and the genre was right. It’s been a hot minute since I reviewed anything because my iPad 2 finally died, and I can’t afford a new reading device. Turned out that my new (bigger!) phone worked well enough. So, more reviews forthcoming?

This ARC was courtesy of author Gordon B White in exchange for an honest review. Rookfield will be released by Trepidatio Publishing on 15 October 2021. You can pre-order your copy here.

I wrote this review last year for The Borneo Post but the article was published with all traces of its reviewer removed. I was so traumatised, I filed it under “selective amnesia”. Here is my unedited copy, which I found this week sorting my folder.

‘Rainforest World Music Festival – 20 Years of Song and Rhythm in Sarawak’ contains all you need to know about Sarawak’s internationally acclaimed music festival on it’s 20th year of existence.

Officially launched by Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture, Youth and Sports Datuk Abdul Karim Rahman Hamzah on July 12, the 164-page book sounds like a hefty tome but the writing manages to be both light and to-the-point, leaving the spreads of colour photographs to paint their thousand words and dredged up memories of the years I attended.

For regular festival goers, this book contain information on RWMF that you may have wondered but never wondered enough to ask. When the festival gets going, there is too much to keep up with to even try keeping up with everything.

The typical audience member only wants to know who is playing that night, where a workshop venue is, and where to get food. The logistics and machinery of what makes the festival run is something that few think about. Fortunately, this book addresses a lot of that.

The authors, Gracie Geikie and Lah Wan Yee, spoke to key personalities behind the festival, and honoured their role in making RWMF happen.

People like Deputy Chief Minister Tan Sri Datuk Amar James Jemut Masing, who was the Tourism Minister in 1997, had the task of presenting the idea to the then Chief Minister Tun Pehin Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud.

Taib asked him if he could guarantee that this idea would work, probably because he was just asked to drop a total of RM250,000 for the festival.

Masing responded with, “I cannot guarantee that, but I can guarantee that it will not work if we don’t start.”

It would be impossible to capture and sandwich the true atmosphere and the music of the festival between the pages of a book, and the authors did not bother trying.

Instead, they looked into the evolution of the venue, Sarawak Cultural Village (SCV). They looked into the complementary events and bazaars springing up around the venue, and how other aspects of indigenous culture – crafts, food, tattoos – are being brought forward.

It’s easy to think that the book is about the festival but it is really about the people – those who pushed for it to begin, those who guided its baby steps, those who came as volunteers and stayed as part of the backbone, and those brought word of it out of SCV and in to the greater parts of Malaysia and the world.

It’s about those who went to earlier festivals, and left dreaming that one day they will be the ones on stage playing to the audience. It’s about longtime guardians of indigenous music and instruments, and about how more young people are playing the sape today than back when RWMF started.

It’s about personal and corporate responsibility, and of countering any environmental damage created by bringing thousands of people to Kuching and the Santubong Peninsular for a weekend.

At 20 years old, it’s safe to say that RWMF isn’t going anywhere, so drop by and say hi.

‘Rainforest World Music Festival – 20 Years of Song and Rhythm in Sarawak’ comes in hard cover (RM200) and paperback (RM180) and contains 164 pages. It was published by Place Borneo Sdn Bhd.

It is available at the festival site this weekend, or online. It will soon be available via Amazon.com. Like their Facebook page for updates.

Stars: 4/5
tl;dr: A glimpse into Malaysia via the goggles of one of its most recognisable spoken word poets.

After reading so much garbage poetry books that seem to be the one making all the money, Melizarani is refreshing to the fellow spoken poet’s soul. This book peels back the layers around the world of a Malaysian Indian woman with both keen word-fu and an unapologetic candidness. Her pieces about issues faced by the country and our people strike a chord.

And yes, it really did take me this long to finish this book. I started and stopped because I was in one of my reading ruts. Things only started taking off a week ago when I realised that I’ve been holding on to my friend’s copy for a ridiculously long time and should really see about returning it. I gave it another shot.

Right away ‘blank’ struck a chord. A commentary on the Allah controversy, Melizarani talks about having to substitute the A-word with a blank. Being from Sarawak, I am fortunate to live some place where everybody agreed how ridiculousness of this controversy is, even if they don’t personally believe in either deities popularly associated with that name. Or even if, like me, their Blank really is blank.

‘my country is a man’ puts a whole different, sexy spin on how to talk about Malaysia; while ‘to the macha who got away’ made me put the book down halfway through the piece because one stanza made me laugh so hard I was unable to immediately continue. ‘hero’ was a beautiful use of Superman as a metaphor; I wish I wrote that.

There were little pieces in between the longer ones that will make connoisseurs of instapoetry happy, but I barely remember any of them. I look at them again when I get my own copy.

This digital copy of The Body Reader by Anna Frasier was courtesy of NetGalley.

Stars: 4/5
tl;dr: Fast paced, compelling psychological thriller.

This was pretty damn hard to put down.

Detective Jude Fontaine escaped a 3-year captivity after overpowering her captor and making a run for it. But she was not the same person anymore. Everything about her and her life before she was kidnapped has changed – she was replaced at work, her boyfriend was seeing another woman, she was a cold shell of the happy normal person she used to be. And she gained a new ability, a bit of a super-heightened sense in smell and the ability to read body language.

Despite being plucked out of a situation and dumped into another, Jude coped and bounced back. She returned to the force and was given a new partner Detective Uriah Ashby, who had reservations on whether or not she should return to work at all. They immediately get thrown into a new case, which of course has some kind of connection to both Jude’s secret personal history and recent kidnapping. All this and how it eventually wrapped up is a little too convenient, but the writing is good and pulls you along to the next page. You really want to find out what happens to Jude and whether or not she is truly safe.

The great part about The Body Reader is that you have characters who have been through hell and are stronger for it, despite moments of human weakness. Both Jude and Uriah are compelling characters. Their partnership had a rocky start, but Uriah started to care and Jude started allowing someone to care. This didn’t lead to any romance, thankfully, because that would have been way too cliche.

I’m interested in read more from this author if The Body Reader isn’t just one  sample of a formulaic plot.

I don’t feel like this review did the book justice, but if you’re a fan of thrillers, this is a pretty good bet.