Author: Marissa Lingen

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

I know that there are readers who don’t like series to be indefinite, and this one is not. This is, technically, the third in its trilogy: series over! For those who want to wait and be sure that a trilogy is not five books, eight, twelve: it is not. Go ahead. But I also feel that Spellbreaker stands on its own quite well. You may want to go read Spellwright and Spellbound after having read it, but “after” is a perfectly good time to do so.

So what have we got here? We’ve got a world in which text is really, really crucial to magic–and in which learning disabilities as both advantage and disadvantage in that system have been clearly thought through. We’ve got an author with medical training who is using it in the books a lot. We’ve got gods that can aggregate, so you can stick humans together with more than one god at once, with each god having demands to make on the system. We’ve got an archipelago system–ships and kayaks galore, hardly a horse to be seen. Traders and shark gods, yes. Tough Guide to Fantasyland travelers making stew, hardly.

This is an adventure fantasy on multiple levels. Empire, interpersonal, intrapersonal, autoimmune. On some levels it’s “if you want a one of those, it’s a one of those.” On others–I can’t really think of another one of those that works quite like this one. People who are made partly of texts, partly of gods, partly of dragons…there’s a lot of stuff going on here, and it goes by pretty fast. There’s not something for everyone. But there’s something for quite a few people.

Please consider using our link to buy Spellbreaker from Amazon.

Liz Duffy Adams, Delia Sherman, Mary Robinette Kowal, Madeleine Robins, Barbara Samuels, and Sarah Smith, Whitehall. Discussed elsewhere.

Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross. Discussed elsewhere.

Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. This one I discussed in several places throughout the week I was reading it: here, here, here, here, and here. After the first introductory post, those are by decade of poems in the book, with the 1950s and ’60s lumped together.

Carrie Jones, Flying. Discussed elsewhere.

Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters. This is the last Kelly Link collection I had to catch up on. It had some overlap with Magic for Beginners, but the overlap was in some of my favorite stories, so I suppose I’m glad they’re available to more people. Still definitely glad that I decided to pick up reading Link after years of not, and from here I’ll probably stay caught up.

Pat Schmatz, Lizard Radio. I think one thing that adults reading middle grade and YA need to remember is that everything is somebody’s first time encountering a concept. For people in my immediate social circles, Lizard Radio‘s protagonist not being transgender but not fitting the expectations her culture has of girls either will not be revolutionary. The handful of portmanteau words used by the characters in this future setting will not be shocking. But if you go over to GoodReads, you’ll find people–many of them quite young–who are struggling through these ideas for the first time. And many of them don’t care that the ending is a little loosely formed–they’re just caught up in Kivali’s story. Sometimes it’s good to remember that people who have been utterly steeped in inside-baseball genre politics for more than a decade are not the only or even the main audience for most books, and let it be what it is: a coming of age story against a dystopian backdrop, with gender politics that shouldn’t be notable but I guess we all know still are, at least for a lot of people.

Paul Schneider, Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History. This is like sitting in the bar at a convention with some guy who likes all the same books as you like, even though his own book is kind of a mess. Schneider rambles wherever he wants to–instead of writing about the Mississippi proper, which would have been enough for a book, he wanders throughout the entire Mississippi watershed and beyond. I suspect that he included the Ohio River section of the watershed in this book just so he could talk about Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War, which puts me in great sympathy with him, because I talk about Crucible of War at the drop of a hat, I terrified someone at a birthday party once talking on and on about Crucible of War. (That poor woman. She seemed nice.) And John McPhee, he loves John McPhee, I love John McPhee, hurray. So this was reasonably good fun to read, but I resent it a little, because it will fill the space where a history of the Mississippi goes, and there’s quite a lot to be said there. And also if you hadn’t read McPhee going in, I am not at all sure that Schneider is coherent about the perils of the Lower Mississippi. So really go read Anderson and McPhee and try to find me and this Paul Schneider in the bar at a convention sometime, that’s my actual recommendation. (Note: I have no indication that he would even consider attending a convention.)

Leonie Swann, Three Bags Full. This is a murder mystery from the perspective of a flock of sheep trying to figure out who killed their shepherd. To some extent it succeeds for me based on how much primate stuff the sheep never really do understand. But then again, its general lightness and sly jokes are not really entirely in keeping with how things turn out, so…it’s a mixed bag full, this book.

Review copy provided by Serial Box

Each episode of this serial has its specific authors listed, but there are thirteen episodes, and I don’t think you care who wrote episode one and who wrote episode seven, so the six contributing hands are Liz Duffy Adams, Mary Robinette Kowal, Madeleine Robins, Barbara Samuel, Delia Sherman, and Sarah Smith.

For those unfamiliar with Serial Box, their very conscious model is a TV season, only with written fiction. You can subscribe to get the serial every week when the new episode comes out, catching up with a “season pass” if you find a serial you like that’s already out. You can also buy on an episode by episode basis, and all the serials have their “pilots” available to read for free.

For many people, the serialization is part of the fun, and reading a sample will help you decide what you like. For people like me…not so much. Right up front: I fundamentally dislike serialization. I am a really fast reader, and I never got into watching TV on a weekly basis before DVDs and Netflix were widely available, so I’m not at all accustomed to the idea of having to wait for the end of the story. For me, this is not a feature. But! There is a solution to all this, and I’m doing it with Chaz Brenchley’s Crater School serial, which is subscribe to support the project and let it pile up in my Kindle until there’s enough to make a satisfying amount of story. So when the publicist for this project asked if I wanted to review it and told me the pitch and who was writing for it, I said absolutely…if I could have the whole thing. If it had a definite ending. It does and I could! So here we are.

Whitehall is the story of the early days of Catherine of Braganza’s marriage to Charles II of England. I basically always want another historical novel that’s reasonably well-researched and grounded in its period, and the Restoration is a period I know enough about to be annoying, so I was on board in an “I will catch the two nits that got through your meticulous editing process” way. (But the fact that this book did not make me run screaming in the first episode is a very good sign, because I am easily to send screaming about this period.) Catherine herself is a major point of view character, but so is the king’s acknowledged mistress, one of the queen’s serving girls, the king himself, and a few others as the story demands. Whitehall traces Catherine from her earliest alienation from the English court as a new, foreign, Catholic princess to finding her place as a beloved and acclaimed queen.

Unlike some collaborative works, each writer writes all the characters–you can’t break it down and say, “Oh, Jenny is written by Delia” or “Barbara writes the stuff with Rochester,” even if you could recognize writing style. Instead there is continuity of characters for each episode. Further, I felt that there was some effort to create a consistency of voice throughout the project, as one would see in a TV show. This has its good and its bad points. The good: Whitehall read a lot more like a novel in parts than like a series of short stories written by various people around a common topic, each with a slightly different idea of what James II would have been like in the time before his reign, etc. The bad: if you are craving a Delia Sherman novelette, a Mary Robinette Kowal novelette, etc., this will probably not scratch that itch, as the voice is a lot more averaged-out, with a lot of the quirky individuality of prose and characterization lost. This happens at least a little bit in any collaboration process, the more so with each additional collaborator, but when you have collaborators who have vivid voices you love to read, having a smoothly written group voice can be a bit more of a letdown if you’re not expecting it.

I found that there was not a lot of the kind of reminder you would find if the writers did not trust the readers–at least not the obtrusive kind. So if you’re like me and want to read your serials all piled up into one longish novel, this will not be a repetitive novel that cycles back to “remember who Lady Buckingham is? she’s the one who…” over and over again. I think that the presence of a “who’s who in Whitehall” webpage link and other links to keep you grounded will help those who are reading on a more weekly basis if they get lost in the English court. I felt that there was also enough incluing of why these people are important to the plot and why they should have some of the political/emotional triggers they have so that if you don’t have a solid grounding in Restoration history, it should not be confusing to you–while still not going into pages of backstory that would bore the fetchingly fitted trousers off those of us who already know that Catherine of Braganza wore them.

So if you’re interested in historical drama, especially in serial format, Whitehall scratches that itch, and you can give the pilot a try without committing to more. If you’re like me and a pilot will frustrate you, I can promise that there’s a whole story coming in all the pieces if you’re just a tiny bit patient.

Review copy provided by Tor Books. Also Max is one of my Fourth Street people, so yay for people who show up and talk theory with me.

The Craft Sequence is pretty carefully designed so that you can start it at any point, but the titles tell you what the chronology is: the number is right there in the name. This is the fifth one published but the fourth in chronology, hence the number FOUR right there conveniently in the name of the book. But you can read it first, no problem. All will be explained. Well, all will be inclued, hinted at, etc., which is better anyway.

So. Four Roads Cross. You’ve got a city with a resurgent moon goddess and a bunch of gargoyles, and how the population will take it depends on how it’s handled by…a lot of people. The news reporters and their choirs. The official law. Some people in personally difficult transitions, because hey, who do the gods use? Who have they always used, any gods, anywhere?

This is a book with stone poems and nightmare matrices and gods in very–very–unexpected places. It has mining consortiums and implicit and explicit contracts fighting it out in courts. And fallen empires echoing down through history to produce characters in the current world who are who they are because of who they were aeons ago–not just gods, but…other things.

If you’ve been missing Tara Abernathy, or Alt Coulumb itself, or watching pieces of the Craft universe unfold–if you’ve been waiting for this book–then yes. This is the book you’ve been waiting for. With all the shiny bits that implies, worldbuilding-wise, interpersonally, all of them. Go and get it.

Please consider using our link to buy Four Roads Cross from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

The tagline on this book is “Cheerleader Vs. Alien. Who will win?” And that’s pretty accurate. If you think, “I don’t want to read a fun book about a high school junior and her friends running around trying to figure out what’s going on with unexpected aliens and Men In Black-type agencies in their New England town!”, then this is probably not the book for you.

If that sounds like fun, though, well, it is. Mana–and this is important to me–genuinely likes her mom. She likes her friends. She doesn’t have random drama just to have random drama. Carrie Jones trusts her plot–she doesn’t introduce sniping or ill-treatment between Mana and her friends or family in order to “heighten tension.” Some books are about people from abusive families, and those books should take that seriously. But some books can be about people from loving families whose moms bake them cookies and still are managing to get up to alien-hunting shenanigans. This is one of the latter.

This actually may be the only one of the latter. But there should be more.

There is quite a lot of action, and Mana gets to rely on her strengths as a tiny acrobatic cheerleader–a flyer, the one who does the high-flying stunts–and on talents she never knew she had, when her family and friends are in unexpected danger. She is realistically sometimes confused, sometimes a little whiny, sometimes a little frustrated with herself for getting whiny, sometimes not entirely sure how to handle new situations…none of this bogging down a book that moves quite quickly. Light and, as I said, fun.

Please consider using our link to buy Flying from Amazon.