Category: Uncategorized

William Alexander, Sunward. A charming planetary SF piece with very carefully done robots. Loved this, put it on my list to get several people for Christmas.

Ann Wolbert Burgess and Steven Matthew Constantine, Expert Witness: The Weight of Our Testimony When Justice Hangs in the Balance. I picked this up from a library display table, and I was disappointed in it. It isn’t actually very much theory of the use of expert witnesses in the American legal system. Mostly it’s about Burgess’s personal experiences of being an expert witness in famous trials. She sure was involved in a lot of the famous trials of my lifetime! Each of which you can get a very distant recap of! So if that’s your thing, go to; I know a lot of people like “true crime” and this seems adjacent.

Steve Burrows, A Siege of Bitterns. I wanted to fall in love with this series of murders featuring a birder detective. Alas, it was way more sexist than its fairly recent publication date could support–nothing jaw-dropping, lots of small things, enough that I won’t be continuing to read the series.

Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays. Mostly interesting, and wow does she have an authoritative voice without having an authoritarian one, which is sometimes my complaint about books that are mostly literary criticism.

David Downing, Zoo Station. A spy novel set in Berlin (and other places) just before the outbreak of WWII. I liked but didn’t love it–it was reasonably rather than brilliantly written/characterized, though the setting details were great–so I will probably read a few more from the library rather than buying more.

Kate Elliott, The Nameless Land. Discussed elsewhere.

Michael Dylan Foster, The Book of Yokai. Analysis of Japanese supernatural creatures in historical context, plus a large illustrated compendium of examples. A reference work rather than one to sit and read at length.

Michael Livingston, Bloody Crowns: A New History of the Hundred Years War. Extensive and quite good; when the maps for a book go back to the 400s and he takes a moment to say that we’re not thinking enough of the effects of the Welsh, I will settle in and feel like I’m in good hands. Livingston’s general idea is that the conflict in question meaningfully lasted longer than a hundred years, and he makes a quite strong argument on the earlier side and…not quite as strong on the later side, let’s say. But still glad to have it around, yay.

Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker, The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics. Also a disappointment. If you’ve been listening to science news in this decade, you’ll know most of this stuff. Osterholm and Olshaker are also miss a couple of key points that shocked me and blur their own political priorities with scientific fact in a fairly careless way. I’d give this one a miss.

Valencia Robin, Lost Cities. Poems, gorgeous and poignant and wow am I glad that I found these, thanks to whichever bookseller at Next Chapter wrote that shelf-talker.

Dana Simpson, Galactic Unicorn. These collections of Phoebe & Her Unicorn strips are very much themselves. This is one to the better end of how they are themselves, or maybe I was very much in the mood for it when I read it. Satisfyingly what it is.

Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. If you were hoping for a lot of detail on And Peggy!, your hope is in vain here, the sisters of the title are very clearly Angelica and Eliza only. Vaill does a really good job with their lives and contexts, though, and is one of the historians who manages to convey the importance of Gouverneur Morris clearly without having to make a whole production of it. (I mean, if Hamilton gets a whole production, why not Gouverneur Morris, but no one asked me.)

Amy Wilson, Snowglobe. MG fantasy with complicated friend relationships for grade school plus evil snowglobes. Sure yes absolutely, will keep reading Wilson as I can get her stuff.

Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe, A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression. This went interestingly into the details of what people were eating and what other people thought they should be eating, in ways that ground a lot of culinary history for the rest of the century to follow. Ziegelman and Coe either are a bit too ready to believe that giving people enough to eat makes them less motivated to work or were not very careful with their phrasing, so take those bits with a grain of salt, but in general if you want to know what people were eating (and with how many grains of salt!) in the US at the time, this is very interesting and worth the time.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is the second half of what is being called a duology, with The Witch Roads as the first half of the story. I would say it’s less a duology than a novel in two volumes. The first volume ends on a cliffhanger, and the second picks up basically immediately with no reintroduction to the characters, setting, and plot. So: one story in two volumes, now complete.

There were things I really liked about this and things that left me cold. I feel like the pacing was weird–the chapters are short, but that didn’t really obscure how many pages were spent on basically one argument. I also found the ending deeply unsatisfying–the situation of having a character possessing other people was basically glanced at as problematic and then embraced as a happy ending that was entirely too convenient for all involved.

But the return to our protagonist Elen’s past home, illuminating it with her adult eyes, was really well done, and I liked the courage and strength shown by the child she encountered there. I love having a fantasy that has an aunt/nephew relationship as one of its emotional cores. This duology simultaneously locates itself centrally in the secondary world fantasy genre of the moment and branches out to do things that I’m not seeing a lot of in other fantasy of this type.

Philip Ball, The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China. A history of China through its rivers. And other water, but really mostly rivers. Gosh they’re important rivers. Some of it was more basic than I hoped, but the part where he talked about the millennia-long conflict between the Confucian and the Daoist views of flood management–that’s the good stuff right there. That’s what I need to think over.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Testimony of Mute Things. Kindle. A neat little murder mystery fantasy novella, earlier in the Penric and Desdemona timeline than most of the others in the series. I really like that Lois is feeling free to move back and forth in the timeline as fits the story she wants to tell.

Traci Chee, A Thousand Steps Into Night. Demons and time loops and complicated teenage relationships with oneself and others, this was a lot of fun.

Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule. The latest in the Craft sequence, and hoo boy should you not start with this one, this is ramifying its head off, this is a lot of implication from your previous faves bearing fruit. I love middle books, and this is the king–duly appointed CEO?–of middle books, this is exactly what I like in both middle books generally and the Craft sequence specifically. But for heaven’s sake go back farther, the earlier Craft novels are better suited to read in whatever order, this has weight and momentum you don’t want to miss out on.

Rebecca Mix and Andrea Hannah, I Killed the King. A fun YA fantasy murder mystery, better as a fantasy than as a murder mystery structurally but still a good time with the locked room and the suspects and their highly varied motivations. Are we seeing more speculative mysteries? I kind of hope so, I really like them.

Lauren Morrow, Little Movements. This is a novel about a choreographer who gets a chance to work slightly later in life than would be traditional, of a group of Black artists who deal with insidious racism, of a woman who has miscarried and is trying to put her life and identity and romantic relationship back together. In some ways it’s a very straightforward book, but also it’s a shape of story I don’t think we get a lot of, the impact of being all of the people in my first sentence at once. It’s a very intimate POV and nicely done.

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation. The authors were journalists in Russia early in the Putin era and had a front row seat to watching people they respected and trusted become mouthpieces for Putin, and this is that book. Unfortunately I think some of the answer to “how could they do this” was that many of them–as described by Soldatov and Borogan!–were already those people, and Putin gave them the opportunity to be those people out loud. I was hoping, and I think they were hoping, for more insight on how someone could become that person; what we got instead was insight into how some people already are and you don’t necessarily know it clearly. Which is not unuseful, but it’s not the same kind of useful. Anyway this was grim and awful but mostly in a very grindingly mundane way.

Serra Swift, Kill the Beast. Discussed elsewhere.

Amanda Vaill, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War. Amanda Vaill does not like Ernest Hemingway any better than I do, bless her, but when she picked her other subjects in writing about a group of journalists and photographers in the Spanish Civil War, she was apparently kind of stuck with him. Did that mean she learned to love him? She sure did not, high fives Amanda Vaill. Anyway some of the other people were a lot more interesting, and the Spanish Civil War is.

Jo Walton, Everybody’s Perfect. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author has been a dear friend since the mastodons roamed the plains.

It seems like half of the reviews out there claim that the book they’re reviewing is something really different, but this, in fact, is something really different. It’s like Marguerite Yourcenar’s A Coin in Nine Hands, where the story passes from person to person as they encounter each other, showing different facets of life. But it’s also very much not like that, because the story is a fantasy story with crucial worldbuilding, and the quiet nature of its plot makes it easy to miss that it’s about massive social change.

Serenissima is not Venice, though they are connected. Serenissima, city of the mists, is the point that joins nine worlds, each filled with a sentient humanoid species, living and trading and growing and learning across worlds. No matter how long anyone has lived in Serenissima, no one person knows all of its secrets–so they need to work together to cure the blight that has stranded some of them there.

Because yes, this is a Venice Carnival mask book–but it’s also a book that couldn’t have been written in 2019. It is a book with strong awareness of the pandemic we’ve been going through, and all the ways in which it’s only one possible way that we could suffer–and need to help each other. It’s a book with a strong sense of forming community with others, even when those others don’t fit our preconceptions of what a friend, an ally, a lover might look like. I really like the gentleness and the hope in this one. I think you might like it too.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Nothing lastingly bad happens to the dog in this book.

Sorry but not all that sorry to those of you who wanted that suspense, but Brandy is a lovey good big boy and I think most of you will have a much better time if you don’t have serious worries about the mastiff. This is a debut novel, so Serra Swift doesn’t have a lot of trust built up. This is the beginning of building it. Brandy gets a nice chewy in his nice bed. He is fine.

The humans…well. The humans are a bit more messed up. A bit more tangled in grief, a bit more vengeful, a bit more desperate. The Beast has been slaughtering humans since time out of mind, and after Lyssa Carnifex (Cadogan) loses her brother she swears that she will put an end to it no matter what. She manages to dispatch a large and varied number of magical beasts, but The Beast eludes her. But when she meets Alderic Casimir de Laurent, it seems like she’s found someone who’s just as dedicated to helping her slay The Beast as she is to doing it. She just has to put up with Alderic’s annoying fashion sense and weird priorities.

…or so she thinks. Obviously, “or so she thinks,” there’s not a book if there’s not an “or so she thinks.” I don’t feel like the twist is one that will surprise most experienced fantasy readers, but if you’re looking for an engaging and well-written adventure fantasy, this may well suit.

K.J. Charles, All of Us Murderers. In a lot of ways more a Gothic thriller than a murder mystery, I found this gripping and fun. I hope Charles keeps writing in the thriller and mystery genres. The characters are vividly awful except for a few, and that’s just what this sort of thing calls for.

Virginia Feito, Victorian Psycho. And speaking of vividly awful, I’m not sure I would have finished this one if it hadn’t been both extremely short and part of a conversation I was having. There is not a piece of vice or unpleasantness not wallowed in here. It’s certainly affecting, just not in a direction I usually want.

Frances Hardinge, The Forest of a Thousand Eyes. I’m a little disappointed that Hardinge’s work seems to have gone in the direction of illustrated middle grade, more or less, because I find the amount of story not quite as much as I’d like from her previous works, and I’m just not the main audience for lavish illustration. If you are, though, it’s a perfectly cromulent fantasy story. I’m just greedy I guess.

David Hinton, trans., Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China. An interesting subgenre I hadn’t had much exposure to. Translating poetry is hard, and no particular poem was gripping to me in English, but knowing what was being written in that place and time was interesting.

Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen, The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition. Kindle. If you’ve been reading anything about American Black history this will be less new information and more a new lens/synthesis of information you’re likely to already have, but it’s well put together and cogently argued, and sometimes a new lens is useful.

Im Bang and Yi Ryuk, Tales of Korea: 53 Enchanting Stories of Ghosts, Goblins, Princes, Fairies, and More! So this is a new and shiny edition, with a 2022 copyright date, but that applies only to the introduction and similar supplemental materials. It’s actually a 1912 translation, with all the cultural yikes that implies. Even with the rise in interest in Kpop and Kdramas information about Korean history and culture is not as readily available as I’d like, so I’m keeping this edition until a better translation is available.

Emma Knight, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus. This is a novel, and I knew it was a novel going in. It’s a novel I mostly enjoyed reading, except…I kept waiting for the octopus. Even a metaphorical octopus. And when it did come, it was the most clunkily introduced “HERE IS MY METAPHOR” metaphor I recall reading in professionally published fiction. Further, using it as the title highlighted the ways that most threads of this book did not contribute to this thematic metaphor. I feel like with two more revision passes it could have been a book I’d return to and reread over and over, and without them it was…fine while I was reading it, not really giving me enough to chew on afterwards. Sigh. (It was set on a university campus! It would have been trivially easy for someone to be studying octopus! or, alternately, to be studying something else that was actually relevant and a source of a title and central metaphor.)

Naomi Kritzer, Obstetrix. Discussed elsewhere.

Rebecca Lave and Martin Doyle, Streams of Revenue: The Restoration Economy and the Ecosystems It Creates. Does what it says on the tin. The last chapter has a lot of very good graphs about differences in restored vs. natural streams. Do you like stream restoration ecology enough to read a whole book about it? You will know going in, this is not a “surprisingly interesting read for the general audience” sort of book, this is “I sure did want to know this stuff, and here it is.”

Astrid Lindgren, Seacrow Island. Surprisingly not a reread–not everything was available to me when I was a kid back in the Dark Ages. I had hoped it would be Swedish Swallows and Amazons, and it was not, it was a lot more like a Swedish version of something like Noel Streatfeild’s The Magic Summer, but that was all right, it was still delightful and a pleasant read. I will tell you right up front that Bosun the dog is fine, nothing terrible happens to Bosun the dog in the course of this book, there, now you will have an even better reading experience than I did.

Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen. Reread. Probably my least favorite of her collections despite some strong work–least favorite of a bunch of good collections is not actually a terrible place to be, nor is improving over one’s career.

Freya Marske, Cinder House. A reverse Gothic where a nice house triumphs over a terrible human. Short and delightful.

Lio Min, The L.O.V.E. Club. I really hope this gets its actual audience’s attention, because it is not about romantic love or even about people seeking but comically failing to find romantic love. It’s about a teenage friend group trapped in a video game and dealing with their own friend group’s past plus the history that led to their lives. It was about as good as a “trapped in a video game” narration was going to be for me, sweet and melancholy.

Nicholas Morton, The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East. Two hundred years of Mongols, and this is a really good perspective on how Europe is a weird peninsula off the side of Asia. Which we knew, but wow is it clear here. Also it’s nice to read books where people remember the Armenians exist, and related groups as well. My one complaint here is not really a fault in the book so much as a mismatch in it and me: I’m willing to read kings-and-battles kinds of history, and this is a khans-and-horse-troops kind of history, which is basically the same thing. I prefer histories that give a stronger sense of how actual people were actually living and what changed over the period that wasn’t the name of the person receiving tribute. But that’s not a problem with this book, it was clear what kind of book it was going to be going in.

Caskey Russell, The Door on the Sea. This debut fantasy (science fiction? science fantasy?) novel is definitely not generic: it’s a strongly Tlingit story written by a Tlingit person, and it leans hard into that. Raven is one of the major characters; another character is a bear cousin and another straight-up a wolf. It’s a quest fantasy, but with a different shape to harmonize with its setting. I really liked it, but let me warn/promise you: this is not a stand-alone, the ending is not the story’s end.

Vikram Seth, Beastly Tales (From Here and There). Very short, very straightforward animal poems. If you read something like this as a child, here’s more of it.

Fran Wilde, A Philosophy of Thieves. A very class-aware science fiction heist novel that looks at loyalties and opportunities at every turn. Who’s using whom and why–if that’s your kind of heist, come on in, the water’s fine.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a good friend.

Thrillers and near-future SF are not the same beast. Naomi has written tons of the latter, but as far as I know this is her first foray into the former. And she nails it–the differences in pacing and focus are all spot-on for a thriller. The general plotline of this particular thriller is: an obstetrician under fire for having provided an abortion to a high-risk patient is kidnapped by a cult to handle their obstetrics (and general medical) needs. If you just went, “Ohhhhhh,” this is the novella for you.

Some points of clarity: the cult is not a sensationalized one. It’s a very straightforward right-wing Christian compound, not wild-eyed goat-chompers but the sort of people who firmly believe that they’re doing the right thing while they treat each other horribly, the sort you can find in some remote corner of every state of the US. Without violating someone’s privacy, I know someone who joined a cult like this, and Naomi gets the very drab homely terror of it quite right.

One of the things I love about Naomi’s writing is that she never relies on Idiot Plot. You never have to say, “but why doesn’t Liz just blah blah blah,” because Liz does just blah blah blah–that is, she does try the things a sensible person might try, and there are reasons they don’t work, or don’t work instantly, or are considered but actually can’t be tried for lack of some particular element of the plan. But Naomi’s characters not only try things, they keep trying things. I love the doggedness of Liz and of several others who aren’t even sure what they’re reaching for, who have been in a terrible place to find it, but keep striving all the same.