{"id":3274,"date":"2023-11-09T23:05:10","date_gmt":"2023-11-09T23:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=3274"},"modified":"2023-11-30T16:46:52","modified_gmt":"2023-11-30T16:46:52","slug":"the-night-of-baba-yaga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=3274","title":{"rendered":"The Night of Baba Yaga"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The novel opens with the abduction of a young woman, Shindo\u2014a butch, menswear-wearing, expert fighter\u2014who is taken away by the yakuza, a crime syndicate. After turning several henchmen into minced meat (it\u2019s very Kill Bill), and nearly raped and brutalized herself, she\u2019s given permission to live, providing that she agrees to work as the bodyguard and driver of Shoko, the only child of the gang\u2019s leader. Shoko, who\u2019s around Shindo\u2019s age, is a revelation: doll-like, dressed in strange, old clothes (it\u2019s the early 1980s), a student at a women\u2019s junior college that is more like a finishing school, with courses in French pastries. And while Shindo misses her old life delivering for a florist, she and Shokow slowly begin to hit it off as Shindo ferries her back and forth from school. Shoko\u2019s life, it turns out, is no picnic, including her upcoming marriage to a complete and utter sadist. How the two women manage to escape from this uber-violent world, confront the patriarchy, and create an alternate existence is <strong>as thrilling as it is fast paced<\/strong>. This novella was nominated for a 2021 Mystery Writers of Japan Award<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The novel opens with the abduction of a young woman, Shindo\u2014a butch, menswear-wearing, expert fighter\u2014who is taken away by the yakuza, a crime syndicate. After turning several henchmen into minced&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3273,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[113,142,51,122],"class_list":["post-3274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-feminist","tag-japan","tag-thrillers","tag-world-literature"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Baba-425x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Baba.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Brian Kenney","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}