Geek Mafia

admin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:48:00 +0000

Rick Dakan’s novel, Geek Mafia, tells the exciting tale of Paul Reynolds, a recently unemployed comic book artist/videogame designer who befriends a wild crew of techie con men and women living in Silicon Valley. His relationship with the crew (and its attractive head con woman, Chloe) blossoms as they help Paul to get back at his former co-workers, and while doing so, give him a glimpse of how thrilling life can be when it is lived “completely off the grid.” Throughout the novel, Paul vies for the acceptance and approval of both Chloe and her crew. It all comes to a head when he devises a con of his own and presents it to the crew with the promise that if his plan does not work out, he will share the money they helped him scheme out of his former co-workers with all of them.

During the weeks Paul spends cavorting with Chloe and her crew, he finds himself falling in love with not only Chloe, but with the wild life that she and her crew lead. They party hard, and work equally as hard, sustaining themselves by ripping off those they believe deserve it, or simply find to be easy targets. But as Paul attempts to put his own plan into motion with the crew, he also comes to see the dangerous side of living in their nonconformist world. He also learns of secrets and deceit between friends and crew members.

Geek Mafia is an engaging tale about those who choose to live their lives rejecting mainstream society while existing parallel to it. Living under the radar and renouncing all the societal norms and obligations that govern our daily existence is an idea many people find sexy, and many of us have fantasized about it. The book does not delve deeply into the real implications that would accompany the lifestyle lived by the book’s characters, but reality checks would make the book much less fun to read.

Written by: Becky McBride, September 22nd 2009

The Others

admin — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 23:31:00 +0000

By Seba al-Herz

Seven Stories Press

I read all the pages the Google search engine would give me when I typed in the English words homosexual and bisexual. The pages that came up made my head hurt. I felt as though they were forcing upon me awareness, an acknowledgment, of an orientation that was not really mine. And yet the pages that came up on the screen when I searched for the Arabic equivalent, _al-mithliyya al-jinsiyya, all veered from tahrim to tajrim, interdiction to criminalization._

Seba al-Herz’s debut novel, The Others, tells the firsthand account of a Saudi teenager trying to reconcile her feelings of attraction to women—particularly Dai, the woman with whom the narrator first explores these feelings—with the strict Muslim beliefs that make up the framework that governs her country and her ideas of moral behavior. Throughout the book, the narrator battles with the needs of her body and the needs of her soul, and feels that many times the one betrays the other—that she betrays herself. She explains this inner struggle when she speaks of her feelings for Dai: “Dai sliced me into two parts: my body, glorying in its confections, and my self, so determined on purification from its offenses. How horrifically enormous my offense was when measured against the authority of the morals I had amassed through years of instruction.” Her confusion and pain are expressed through beautiful, descriptive prose that captures the struggle of repressed sexuality mixed with the struggles of repressed society.

Although al-Herz’s novel specifically addresses the difficulties faced by lesbian women in Saudi Arabia, her writing transcends those borders and can be applied in some manner to the lives of most women throughout the world. The struggle of reconciling the dialectic that sometimes exists between what we want for ourselves and what society expects of us, and the inability for us to express what we want to those close to us who we know will disapprove, is something that all women can relate to.

Written by: Becky McBride, September 7th 2009