Novel Gazing Redux

Katherine Addison, The Orb of Cairado. A novella in the world of the Goblin Emperor, with a believably flawed protag and neatly fitting together mystery plot. Very happy with this.

Elizabeth Bear, Angel Maker. Discussed elsewhere.

William Blake, The Portable Blake. “I’ve mostly read the much-anthologized, heavily-quoted parts of Blake,” I thought, “I should look at the rest.” Hooooo boy. There is a reason they stop at burning tigers in your early education, pals. I knew he wandered off into (substantially nonsensical) apocalyptic visions, but I didn’t know know, you know? And now I know. In detail. Welp.

Erik J. Brown, All That’s Left in the World. Post-apocalyptic YA with a queer central love story. Brown’s writing is smooth and readable, and the two boys falling in love will be just what some young people need out of a post-apocalypse, so I’m not sorry I read it. The post-apocalyptic worldbuilding and story beats are very much of their genre–this is not a book that is attempting to revolutionize those elements, it’s attempting to recast them for the enjoyment of the reader looking to feel seen in this landscape.

K.J. Charles, Death in the Spires. Absolute catnip for me. This is a murder mystery hinging on the college friend group of the main characters, leaning hard on social dynamics of historical higher education, class, sexuality, etc. If you know more like this, please send them my way. If you’re K.J. Charles and want to write more like this, I will read every single one.

Suzy McKee Charnas, The Vampire Tapestry. Discussed elsewhere.

P. F. Chisholm, A Murder of Crows and An Air of Treason. Fifth and sixth in the Sir Robert Carey series of historical mysteries, these go deeper into the politics of the English court–which is all very well but I’m glad there are indications that the series will return to the Scottish border soon. There’s more arc plot here than is standard in a mystery series–I think it’s more important to read them in order than it would usually be.

Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story. Danticat is looking at writing about death from multiple angles, all of them thoughtful and interesting.

Christopher de Bellaigue, The Lion House: The Coming of a King. For me this attempt at writing nonfiction as though it was fiction was not a success. It didn’t go far enough into the fiction territory to be a successful historical novel, and I found it more cumbersome than winsome in the direction of “make this nonfiction easy to read.” I mean, it was easy to read, just less informative per page. Suleyman the Magnificent is considered at length, but there are other works that do so in ways that I found more congenial. Oh well.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. When I have to grieve, I like to do it in company with the art of other people who are grieving. I had never read Joan Didion’s famous books about her grief(s), so I got them this time around, and the first one, The Year of Magical Thinking, was a really beautifully observed book about the loss of her husband while her daughter’s health was fragile. She was specific and personal about her husband and about losing him and what that meant to her. Wonderful. Brilliant. So I eagerly went on to Blue Nights, which is about the subsequent loss of her daughter, and that’s where we went off the rails. I see–I even agree with–the sense that there are fewer consent issues around writing intimately about one’s partner, whom one consensually married as an adult, an equal, than about one’s child, whom one encountered first as a vulnerable infant and who got issued oneself as a parent rather than consenting to it. I see why she wanted to be careful about that. But what she ended up doing was flirting with personal revelation in weird ways that were fundamentally not about her daughter Quintana, dwelling on weird rich person brand name trivia, and getting inappropriately defensive on a number of fronts. Sigh. Well.

Amal El-Mothar, The River Has Roots. A beautiful faerie tale with murder ballads at its heart, short and captivating.

Margaret Frazer, Volo te Habere. Kindle. Even shorter–much shorter–this is one of her murder mystery short stories that’s very much puzzle structure rather than anything else.

Jendia Gammon and Gareth Powell, eds., Of Shadows, Stars, and Sabers. My favorite stories in this volume will not surprise you, because you’ve seen the names here before: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Holy Fools” and John Wiswell’s “An Asexual Succubus.” Both are sequels to other works I have enjoyed previously

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature. Discussed elsewhere.

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed. Intensely personal, deeply comprehensive, ferociously angry, more or less devoid of the smug moments that make me roll my eyes at him……unless you read the edition I read, which had the world’s smuggest preface from Madeleine L’Engle, in which she primly observed that she never doubted God and God’s goodness while grieving, she felt close to God, but she supposed people did differ. I am frankly aghast that they let that preface run with this book; it was a different version of “treating a book like an historical object instead of a work of art that a person could interact with personally now, today” than the prefaces that spoil the whole plot of novels for you, but it’s the same thing. The grief Lewis observes (his own, for his wife Joy, in case you didn’t know) is intensely human and unfortunately relevant to somebody every day; skip what L’Engle has to say about it. (Why did they ask her? “Known fellow Christian” is a rather large category, pals, it’s not like there was no one else to choose from.)

H. G. Parry, A Far Better Thing. Discussed elsewhere.

Herman Paul, Historians’ Virtues: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century. Kindle. A slim monograph on what, exactly, the ideal historian was supposed to be aiming for and how it has shifted over the ages, what it has to say to us today. For history nerds only, but I expect you knew that from the title.

Tamora Pierce, Alanna: The First Adventure, In the Hand of the Goddess, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, and Lioness Rampant. Rereads. These were massively influential on me as a young writer, as they were for many of the women my age who write fantasy. I could still see all their virtues–the action, the freedom, the ways that Alanna’s sexuality is handled–but also there were some clearer flaws than when I was 11, most notably the handling of the Bazhir (yikes, and Pierce also seems to have moved away from that element of her early work) and the fact that every single dude in Alanna’s life is patronizing as hell. Welp.

Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. This is right on that borderline where social commentary shades into political commentary, and I’m absolutely here for it. There were heartbreaking stories in this book, but it was weirdly not depressing, considering the subject matter. And having some details of what things were like in Russia as of the writing of this book a decade ago feels relevant.

Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. A lot about what the Paris Commune thought they were doing and how it’s affected the rest of us since, interesting stuff but not a good introductory book on the Paris Commune if you haven’t read something like Paris Babylon that will give you more of a straightforward who what when etc.

Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. Tackett, like many authors before him and likely many after, is taking on the question of what the heck happened to move from passing resolutions to The Terror. Again probably not a good place to start on this period but a really interesting examination if you’ve already got the basics.

Gerard Toal, Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hasten Climate Change. This is much better at outlining problems than thinking about solutions, and if you’re the sort of person who might read a book with this title on your own hook, you probably have already encountered the majority of what he’s going to say. So…a book to press on your more neutral relations? I suppose?

Review copy provided by the author, who’s been a dear friend for [mumble] years now.

Karen Memery–the near-titular protagonist of Karen Memory–is back! and since she’s not heading for Hollywood, Hollywood has headed for her. The neighboring farm is the location for filming one of those newfangled moving pictures, and Karen and Priya leap at the opportunity to make a little extra cash riding stunts, wrangling horses, fixing mechanicals, and whatever else needs doing around the set. And there’s a lovely horse called Angel Maker who is practically crying out for Karen’s attention. The movie people think he’s untamable, barely usable, definitely expendable. Karen thinks…he may be the latest addition to their ranch. (I LOVE HIM.)

But that’s only if she and Priya can both get through filming, and with bodies dropping, movie melodrama, and old enemies–not Karen’s this time!–re-emerging, that’s very much up in the air. They’ll need all the help they can get–maybe a mechanical cowboy named Cowboy? Maybe some neighbors they didn’t know very well? They’re not sure who on the set can be relied on, but there’s no way out but through–with some trick shooting and some fancy riding along the way, and a steampunk mecha fight featuring a certain lanky special guest not expected in these parts…. If you’ve been waiting for more of Karen and Priya, you’ve got a treat ahead. If you haven’t, well, now’s the time to find out.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

How much do you like A Tale of Two Cities? Because this is very, very straightforwardly the fantasy version of A Tale of Two Cities. The characters are not renamed, it is about the Manettes and the Evremonds and Carton and Darnay. It’s clearly written by a twenty-first century person rather than a nineteenth century one, in terms of percentage of chattiness/digression, but many of the other virtues and vices of the original are present here.

The immediate premise is: what if Carton and Darnay look so much alike because one of them is the changeling left in the place of the other? The theme of doubles is replicated and reduplicated from the original, with changelings and coincidental connections abounding. If that’s the sort of thing that annoyed you in the original, be braced. Similarly, this is a book set in the French Revolution that is only glancingly about the French Revolution, which is absolutely true to the original.

Most curiously for me, the gender dynamics of the original have been barely disturbed. Parry has a history of doing much better than that, but once you’ve chosen to hew this closely to your model, there’s only so much to be done, I suppose. I’d be interested to hear if it works at all for someone who hasn’t read the original–I wouldn’t think so?–and as a result I think the main audience is people who know the original well–and unless you were in a similar position to mine (I remember it from intense study for Academic Decathlon, not from personally enjoying it), that’s probably going to mostly be people who liked it.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is basically a memoir of a queer mycologist’s journey. If you read it as a memoir, it is a really lovely example of the thing, lots of beautiful details of the natural world and personal growth, some interesting facts learned along the way. If you go in thinking that it is going to be a more technical or even pop-sci book that is largely about reproduction and sexuality in the non-human natural world, you will probably be disappointed, because that’s not the focus.

And I think Kaishian is making the case fairly clearly, for those who need to hear it, that queerness is not just about who has what bits for the sex. If you’re not someone who needed to hear it, there’s still enough heart and personal detail to keep things interesting; if you are, maybe a great point of view to pick up and contemplate. But the fact that it’s not a technical book of that sort is not an accident, it was not the goal, a broader sense of possibility is the goal.

Who doesn’t want that, these days?

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I said to a friend that I would likely read this all the way through because it’s Charnas, and I would likely not want to reread it, because it’s vampires. That turned out to be substantially correct, except that it’s just the one vampire.

Charnas apparently wrote this thinking about vampires as predators, camouflaged in part to fit in with their prey herds. Weyland remains a predator throughout, and this is never justified any more than any other being’s need to eat is justified. He undergoes therapy but is reluctant to engage with his reactions to it, to art, to anything that connects him with humanity, because forming those connections makes it harder for him to stay alive. He is not a sexy vampire–he is very nearly an ace vampire. Most of the rare occasions on which he has sex are orthogonal to sexual attraction.

Charnas does not soften this by giving us kind, gentle human foils for Weyland. For the most part his human foils are abrupt, grumpy, panicky, and only in a few instances showing their best selves. Weyland is acting according to his animal nature, but so, in many cases, are they.

The writing remains impeccable throughout. It’s Charnas. She could write a damn sentence; she could write a chapter too. It’s not her fault that I am fundamentally not interested in the vampire question. It maybe is her fault that she flirted with the edge of “okay but what about human predators in larger cultural ways” and then didn’t develop it very deeply. I see why this was worth a reprint, but it’s never going to be a favorite for me.

Clara Benson, A Case of Intrigue in Islington. Kindle. The latest Freddy Pilkington-Soames mystery, entertaining enough if you’re already reading that series.

Eiren Cafall, All the Water in the World. A post-apocalyptic novel that starts in flooded New York City and ends up the Hudson. It is doing all the things that an eco-focused post-apocalyptic novel does. It does them well, but also if you don’t want another one of those, this is another one of those, it’s not doing something new, it’s doing something established nicely enough.

P. F. Chisholm, A Season of Knives, A Surfeit of Guns, and A Plague of Angels. This is books two through four of the Robert Carey mysteries. I have the first six books of the series in two omnibus volumes, so you’ll be seeing more of these soon, I expect. In the last one they have adjourned to London, which is slightly disappointing because I like the Scottish Border, but I’m hopeful we’ll get there eventually. And for an historical mystery that featured Marlowe and Shakespeare as characters, it was not doing the same thing as several of the others, so there’s that.

Joseph Cox, Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever. I wouldn’t have read this if someone else hadn’t brought it into the house, but it’s interesting though outside my usual interests. It’s crime nonfiction from the last decade with a tech focus. Much of what I got from it was “you’re kidding, they what.” Welp.

Jack Dann, ed., Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Science Fiction. This was a book club read, and many/most of the stories traded in stereotypes of Jewish women. Some of them also were pretty stereotypical of Jewish men, while others walked the line of “I’m allowed to make that joke, it’s about myself.” I think there are a lot of interesting Jewish SFF authors and would not start here for which of them to read, but it’s quite an old anthology and was clearly doing something that was not otherwise being done at the time.

Tananarive Due and Patricia Stephens Due, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. The structure of this is a bit weird, because it alternates who is writing each chapter, and Patricia Stephens Due is doing basically a linear memoir, and Tananarive Due is doing…whatever she can to fit the thoughts she has about this topic in a thematic order that informs her mother’s memoir. It is definitely worth reading if you are interested in Civil Rights memoirs, which I am, but the amount that it speaks to any intersection with Tananarive Due’s other writing interests is fairly small.

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems. Reread many years later. My late beloved Aunt Judy’s poetry collection is making its way to people who will appreciate it, and this was one of the volumes I got. It’s technically a reread–I know I read this in college, and have revisited pieces of it since–but not coherently, not for many, many years. The thing that struck me this time around was how many SFF titles come from The Waste Land. It’s not all that thematically relevant, as modern poems go! It was almost an, “I went to see Hamlet, it was just a bunch of famous quotes strung together” situation, but for SFF titles.

Nalo Hopkinson, Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions. Hopkinson notes that she’s published in a wide variety of places, and she’s correct, there are fewer of these stories that were in the “oh, I remember enjoying this somewhere else” category than in most collections by authors I’ve been reading and enjoying for nearly 25 years. More fresh work. Good.

A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad. Reread. This was the other of the Aunt Judy volumes I got, and I had reread it much more recently. I always feel this bleak protectiveness about Housman, with the Great War bearing down on him and he has no idea, poor dear.

Karl Smari Hreinsson and Adam Nichols, eds., The Travels of Reverend Olafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627. Nonfiction, sort of a travelogue/memoir, but very much in the “there’s a religious lesson here if we have to turn it upside down and shake it” vein. The thing that weirded this guy out–this 17th century Icelandic pastor who was kidnapped by Barbary pirates–is that Turkish people of the time did not wear socks. I mean, possibly other things weirded him out? It seems likely? But there is a heck of a lot of “we trust in the Lord our refuge” and then “OMG THEY DON’T EVEN WEAR SOCKS.” Bless.

Katherine Rundell, Impossible Creatures. I wanted to like this. I really loved her book on John Donne. I did not like it. There was a lot of death for a children’s book, and all of it felt off to me, most of it felt absolutely gratuitous. Also some of the references to grown-up literature felt extraneous to the heart of the thing–I could see what Rundell loved and wanted to pay homage to, and I could also see it largely not working for me in this shape of book. Sigh.

Arwa Salih, The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation in Egypt. Salih was part of the 1970s leftist movements in Egypt and has some interesting and some personal and some absolutely scathing things to say about them. It makes me want to know more of the backdrop against which her stuff took place. Books! They’re self-reinforcing, you read one and it makes you want to read five more!

Dana Simpson, Unicorn Book Club. This is another installation of the running comic strip, which I enjoy. It doesn’t have a lot of book club material, but that’s okay, if you like Phoebe & Her Unicorn or want to find out if you do, this is a perfectly reasonable one of them.

Stephen Spotswood, Dead in the Frame. The latest in the Parker & Pentecost mystery series, and the previous volume and this one both have clear signposts for what the next mystery will be while still solving the one at hand. This one dealt with women’s prisons in general and the House of Detention in New York City in specific as a major element, well-researched, good stuff.

Chris Thorogood, Pathless Forest: The Quest to Save the World’s Largest Flowers. I would have preferred less of Thorogood in this, but that’s not a reasonable thing to ask someone who is writing a book. I kept reading largely because I was interested in what he was saying about rafflesia, and I don’t expect there will be another readily available book on that topic soon.

Carrie Vaughn, The Naturalist Society. I was enjoying this 19th century fantasy, but it veered off into idiot plot (multiple idiots plot) in ways that annoyed me, and I found the end unsatisfying. I wanted this to be one of her books that I love (see for example Bannerless) but instead it was more in the “well okay I guess” category. I do like 19th century naturalists. Sigh.

Nghi Vo, Don’t Sleep With the Dead. Discussed elsewhere.

Olivia Waite, Murder By Memory. Discussed elsewhere.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Pilgrim Machines. I like a far-future/highly advanced aliens space opera as well as the next person, but the characters in this barely cohered at all, and I couldn’t attach to any part of it emotionally really. I wanted to think that Wijeratne was doing things with Buddhism that I was missing, but the end notes do not seem to point in that direction.

Rita Woods, The Edge of Yesterday. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This novella manages to pack generation ship SF and cozy murder mystery together into one compact package. We hit the ground running with the speculative premise about memory and life extension on page one and do not stop the whole way through. Some of the SF is beautiful–the liquid memory stuff is great–and some of it is fun plot engine.

Because of the novella length, we only get a handful of characters, but what we see of them is fun–and the relationship of aunt (protag), nephew, and nephew’s newish husband is not at all a standard relationship dynamic. It’s realistically done and affectionate, and I look forward to seeing more of these characters’ adventures in the next volume.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

The premise of this book is that two upper middle class Black people from Detroit from a century apart can sometimes see and talk to each other through the expedient of Greer, a ballet dancer from 2025, going briefly back in time to 1925 and meeting Monty, a doctor. The parts of this book that are about upper middle class Black Detroit, in both eras, are great. Extremely well written, and if you have any fondness for Detroit at all (I do), you’ll see some of the stuff you love there. Woods is herself a Black woman from Detroit, and this is a love letter to her community.

It’s the science fiction side that lets me down, unfortunately. It’s not that the science of it is handwaved, I’m totally fine with that. It’s that the personal relationships are. Greer has a chronic illness that seems to be somehow related to the time jumps, but how is not clear, and that’s the sort of thing that comes with pitfalls when you’re writing about chronic illness. Sure enough, at one point Greer’s best friend Leah chides her that she has to stop the time jumps because she’s changing the timeline too much–but her control over them is very minimal–and Leah’s logic is that Greer is being selfish in trying to find enough changes that she doesn’t have a chronic illness, because what she has will not kill her. But…it’s undiagnosed. It is a major plot point that this mystery illness is undiagnosed. So who knows whether it would kill her? Why is it not okay for Greer to want to not be debilitated? And also why is Leah so sure that the tiny interactions Greer has with the past–she doesn’t, for example, warn Monty about the stock market crash or anything like that–are going in negative directions? None of this is fleshed out because it isn’t Woods’s focus.

At the very end, but only the very end, Greer is trapped in the past, unable to get back to her family, friends, or career. It’s made very clear that she still suffers her chronic illness and dies with it. Meanwhile Monty…gets to pursue his restless dreams in Paris due to Greer’s influence. So…the woman with the chronic illness is punished for having a largely volition-free interaction with this condition, but the able-bodied man gets to live his dreams because of it? I was not left feeling great about the ending to this book.