Author: Marissa Lingen

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Okay, look. I am pretty sure this novella was not written specifically to be the pilot for a filmed TV series. It could have been, though. I am the world’s least visual person, and there was not one part of this fantasy mystery that I could not clearly imagine as it would be handled by specifically a British mystery producer. This was a very odd experience for me–not a bad one, but very odd.

This is very much an overtly gay Holmes and Watson analog–they’ve been around the world together, they are clearly a couple, they are so much clearly a couple that they–well, there’s a frame story, let’s put it that way, and the frame story is described as a mystery but really is not. The central mystery deals with fantastical relationship with trees in an isolated community, and also there’s a B-plot about their relationship, but it’s a long-established relationship, not a new one. It’s very sweet. It’s not very much about whodunnit. But if you like trees and procedurals–yes, hello, hi, it’s me–then this is a charming little bite of a novella that will be a good way to spend your time.

Jorge Aguirre and Andres Vera Martinez, Monster Locker. A cute, fun middle-grade graphic novel in the same sort of shape of “young person deals with the legends of his personal ancestors as well as his individual self and contemporary aspects of culture” that the Rick Riordan Presents line of (prose) novels have done so well. If the library gets the sequel I will probably keep reading this series–it’s very charming.

E.K. Johnston, Pretty Furious. Oh geez can Johnston write small towns. Can she ever. The eye for detail and social dynamics just blew me away. This is not the kind of small town fantastika that she started with, it’s mimetic fiction, but that’s okay, I did not need dragons, a group of teenage girls supporting each other and hell-bent on justice was entirely enough.

Isabel J. Kim, Sublimation. I really liked this science fiction novel about doubling of selfhood and immigration, and I felt like she walked a very difficult line very successfully, of being aware of some of the really worse outcomes for immigrants right now without making them the focus of a book where she clearly wanted to talk about a different but also at times difficult shape of immigrant experience. It’s vividly written, and I recommend it.

Fonda Lee, The Last Contract of Isako. Fonda Lee thinks about the applications and consequences of violence so well. The action scenes in her books are never tacked on, they’re always very much to the point and illuminating the thoughts she’s having about violence in systems and individuals, and I think it’s just so beautifully done. This is a science fiction hired goon book, more or less, and I had a lot of fun with it but it was not the “oh you rogue with your clever quip” trope that the speculative genres sometimes see with hired violence, and that was all to the good too.

E.C.R. Lorac, Bats in the Belfry. Kindle. This sure is another Golden Age mystery that I enjoyed for what it is.

Yotam Marom, For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness. This book walks the line between activist call to arms and personal memoir. I think Marom’s personal experience in activism and organizing can be extremely useful, but there are times when the type of personal discussion involved muddies the waters a bit and makes it harder for me to recommend this to as many people as might have benefitted from the other side of it. Ah well, still interesting.

Freya Marske, Bodies of Magic. Discussed elsewhere.

David M. Perry, The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook. David (who is a friend) is not kidding with this subtitle. If you’re an academic looking for straightforward, concrete advice about writing for the broader public, he’s got your back, clearly from experience.

Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters. Reread. Gosh this is simultaneously not-Shakespeare and all-Shakespeare-in-a-blender. He got better with time but I still enjoyed rereading this, even though it turned out not to apply to a potential project at all.

Anthony Price, A Prospect of Vengeance and The Memory Trap. Rereads. Finishing up the series reread, I feel like these last two sort of…illuminate the line between “ramifications and consequences” (one of my favorite series elements ever) and “rehash of previous events,” which I sort of felt like these were. Poor Price, the world he was writing about had fallen apart while he was writing it. I still like the early part of the series, but I think the later ones are unlikely to draw me on a reread, which is fine, knowing where to stop is good.

Ursula Whitcher, North Continent Ribbon. A linked-story novel about settling a planet and its environmental-social relations for the humans doing it. Really liked this, even though I wanted it to be a bit more of a unit than it turned out to be. I’ll enjoy the reread more knowing to expect what it actually is.

P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs. Kindle. Light-hearted and humorous stories doing the thing his plots do basically all the time. If you’re in the mood for the thing he does, he sure is doing it here. (For me this made it a great thing to read in my hotel room during Fourth Street, a break from the intense kind of thinking that convention produces.)

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I absolutely tore through this and was so glad to have it. Highly recommended. I’m saying that first up, because I don’t want you to mistake one of the other major things I’m saying as a criticism: it is one of the most clearly about the aftereffects of the Covid pandemic on medical staff of any novel I’ve read in any genre; certainly the most in the secondary world fantasy genre.

Okay, so the plot is: five students about to take their final exams to become healers in the city that produces the most magically gifted healers of anywhere in the world (distinguished from non-magical medics and nurses), and there’s a murder mystery they have to solve that turns out to have a direct connection to all of them. In the middle of finals. While they sort out their complicated personal lives as people at the cusp of their professional careers often have to do. Backwards, in high heels.

Marske isn’t trying to obscure some of the strongest sources of inspiration to her book. This is a matter of “let’s make a Covid-like situation in a number of dimensions but not pretend that Covid itself is universal,” not “let’s make it a point of dispute about whether we’re even talking about that.” We are. But we’re talking about it thematically, in the same way that the system of educating healers in this universe does not directly replicate our current med schools but invites thought and discussion about some of the same issues that ours have. This is one of the things fantasy can do well, and Marske is doing it really well specifically here. While also juggling a murder mystery plot and several flavors of human interactions, from grudging colleagues through dearest friends into complicated family ties and unsettled romantic/sexual relationships. It’s a longish book, but not because she’s taking her time–there is a lot packed into this one. And I love it that way, I really really do, I love all the chewy thoughts about bodies and healing and relating that go into this with shiny magic systems along the way.

Erin Hatton, Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment. This book is thinking quite intensely about the points of commonality among kinds of coerced work in the US, particularly imprisoned labor, “workfare” programs, and the graduate student and student athlete labor associated with the American university. Hatton is being very careful about the ways in which these types of labor are dissimilar as well as similar, and there are lots of interesting thoughts on how this impacts the labor, the laborers, and the larger labor pool in which we exist.

Andrew Hiller, Hornytown Chutzpah. Discussed elsewhere.

Mark Hudson, Bronze Age Maritime and Warrior Dynamics in Island East Asia. Kindle. A brief monograph that, among other things, goes into some detail about considering what meaning the “Bronze Age” has beyond the geographic region where it originated. Revising thoughts about trade and tool use based on new information about this era is pretty cool, the idea that the future is not arriving linearly anywhere is usefully exemplified here.

Tove Jansson, Moominpappa at Sea and Moominvalley in November. Kindle. Rereads. The latter is an ongoing favorite I’ve read many times and find delightful; the former is my least favorite Moomin book, and there’s a reason I haven’t reread it since I was about 8. Basically it’s Moominpappa Explores Mildly Toxic Masculinity. He pouts whenever he doesn’t feel other people are centering and deferring to him enough; he stomps around making other people clear up after his messes; he is just generally an extremely unpleasant version of his previous self, and I hope I remember not to go back to this one again soon. Especially when November is always there. And the others.

Shay Kauwe, The Killing Spell. This is an own-voices post-climate-apocalypse fantasy whose use of languages is, I think, much closer to what many of my friends wanted in Rebecca Kuang’s Babel. Its character is part of a complex family and community whose relationships with each other did not ever get oversimplified. I really enjoyed it and hope it gets attention, because frankly I don’t think the title and cover are doing it any favors.

Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth. I sure hope that Keefe has a good therapist and personal life, because he so consistently writes about such awful people. And one of the things that makes him very good at what he does is that he doesn’t get drawn into the “glamor” of horrible rich people. But oof. Criminals and Russian oligarchs in contemporary London, terrifying but interesting and well done.

Ada Limon, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry. This is a single essay in a beautifully published edition. It was published as a book because this is a former poet laureate, not because it in any way counts as an entire book. It’s a reasonable enough essay but I’m glad the library had it because it would have disappointed me to spend money on it only to find the number of blank/ornamental pages.

E.C.R. Lorac, Death of an Author, Fell Murder, Post After Post-Mortem, and These Names Make Clues. Kindle. Lorac continues to write quite good Golden Age puzzle mysteries. The one I thought succeeded least here was the last of them. When your pen name is openly known to be an acronym (this is an author who is secretly a lady named Carol!!!), and then you title the book These Names Make Clues…having the names literally as clues is not a good mysterious mystery premise.

Sujata Massey, The Star from Calcutta. The latest in this series, and I think it’s flagging a little but still worth having. This time it’s gone into early filmmaking in India for its setting, which is fun and interesting.

Jo Miles, The Final Chronicle of Yeneh. Discussed elsewhere.

Andrew Moore, Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit. A really cool exploration of this fruit throughout its range in the US, which does not include where I am, so it’s interesting but from one step over. Definitely worth reading if you have an interest in how produce gets bred and marketed and/or local fruits, definitely of interest.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other. Frankly much more useful in terms of interesting and provocative/inspiring essay writing about creative work. Lots of writers should read this and think about it.

D.T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Kindle. I continue my slow-motion comparison of epics from different parts of the world. This one was somewhat defensive about its tradition–but a lot of writing down of oral epics does come out that way.

Emmet A. O’Brien, Both Your Houses and Ever Vexed With Storms. Discussed (both books, separately) elsewhere.

Nnedi Okorafor, The Daughter Who Remains. Kindle. Coming full circle in this series, and for heaven’s sake don’t start here; you’ll know if you’ve read the rest of the series and want this conclusion, and if you do I think it’ll be satisfying.

Linda Proud, Pallas and the Centaur. Kindle. No actual centaurs were harmed in this Renaissance Italy fantasy novel. It’s the second in its series and worth reading the first if you think you might be interested; artists and powerful families and religious figures abound. It’s non-fantastical except for a divine possession that might be literal or might be a really intense metaphor. I like this kind of big historical novel and would like to find more.

Rebecca Roanhorse, River of Bones and Other Stories. Oh gosh am I glad this exists. Several favorite things and also some new-to-me things, hurrah for having them collected, hurrah.

Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There. This is a reasonable collection but not one of her absolute barnstormers. If you like her essays previously, you’ll probably like this; if not, probably try another thing first to find out.

Kory Stamper, True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–From Azure to Zinc Pink. I thought this was going to be about colors, pigments, and dyes, and it is not, it is about the Merriam-Webster 3rd edition dictionary and the people who figured out how to define colors in words to their particular standards. Stamper is a vivid prose stylist, and this was interesting and not terribly long.

D.E. Stevenson, The Two Mrs. Abbotts and The Four Graces. Kindle. These two are marked third and fourth in a series, but I would call them third and vaguely-related. They’re both light middlebrow midcentury novels, and I enjoyed both, but only one is really stand-alone.

Molly Tanzer, And Side By Side They Wander. Molly’s deep knowledge and love of art history really shines through in this novella, and she sets up her characters to ring changes on her theme very skillfully. It’s one of the many novella cases where I wanted more room for them to do so, but I don’t read the ending as very open to a sequel? I could be wrong. It’s marketed as a heist and then the focus is very much elsewhere, which was fine with me, but if what you’re looking for today is center-of-genre heist fiction, maybe read something else and come back to this a different day.

Jessie L. Weston, trans., Guingamor, Lanval, Tyolet, Bisclaveret: Four lais rendered into English Prose. Kindle. Weston did a bunch of translations of Arthuriana and similar eras of heroic poetry, and this volume is four Breton examples. If you’re interested in more examples of that, here are some. If you’re not, I wouldn’t recommend them as the place to start or as particularly good exemplars.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a dear friend.

Zamyatin is a Recusant world. Its people have considered the advantages of membership in humanity’s great interplanetary Hegemony and decided that oh gosh, no thank you, they’re washing their collective hair that day. But there are dangers in the universe that do not play by the Hegemony’s rules, so sometimes careful diplomacy with the Recusing worlds is required. Enter our heroine.

Corin Oshima is still outrunning the timewave resultant from altering the timeline around the horrible events of Rossem (before this series begins), but she is also dealing with the fallout from more recent events on Eisenhower (in Both Your Houses). Gangster Charlie Salamanca has gotten away, and in a world with extensive body modifications available, he could be anywhere–or anyone. But Corin can’t focus on that right now. She’s busy trying to make sure that neither Zamyatin nor its already-shaky relationship with the Hegemony is destroyed.

This series continues to be really excellent at its balance of thought and action. If you want space opera that considers the nature of the universe both morally and physically–now! with cool aliens!–this is the series for you. This is volume two, and I happen to know there’s more to come. Yay.

Review copy provided by the publisher, who is also my publisher, and Jo is a friend.

Ada is the heir not only to a duchy on another planet, but also a tradition of portal fantasy, beloved by many and written by her ancestor. She has spent her life striving for her stern, authoritarian grandfather’s approval. The planet outside and its biological wonders have been last on her consideration list.

But when she runs into an old classmate who is trying desperately to get his botanical research in before the alien habitat is destroyed, she starts to question her assumptions about the planet outside–and about her ancestor’s research for her beloved novels. What has she been missing all this time–and what did he miss generations ago? The richness of alien life is far beyond what she’s seen before. Ada enters into a desperate race to convince her grandfather of the importance of beings beyond his assumptions and join in her classmate’s efforts to find out more. If you love Narnia or rhizomes–or especially if you’re like me and love both–this is for you.