Category: Uncategorized

Diane Ackerman, Animal Sense. I am now afraid to reread Diane Ackerman’s poems for adults, since this was for children and was so bad–flames on the side of my face–that I am seriously afraid that I was badly, badly wrong about what she wrote as poetry for adults and will go back and read it with horror. And I’m not sure if that would be worse or if it would be worse if she believes that things don’t have to be good if they’re for kids. I suppose there’s always the alternative that she thinks that “good for kids” is this hideous twee category with the scansion of a badly fitting boot and didacticism that isn’t even right. I just. Sorry, I’m just going to have my Madeline Kahn moment with that YouTube clip up there. Aaaaagh. “I know, I’ll have the library get me a book of children’s poems from a poet I like while I’m sick aaaah what is this aaaaah.” When my godson Rob was two he liked calamari rings, and someone accidentally put the tentacles on his plate. And he got to that part of his plate and recoiled in horror and intoned, “I–I–I DON’T YIKE DIS” from somewhere deep in his two-year-old soul. The depth of his offense was much more than one might think proportional from an outside perspective. And that is where I am with this book somehow. I love the tentacles. Maybe you will like these tentacles. But I am very glad I did not buy this for a small person in my life on the strength of author name.

Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising. A very satisfying ending to this trilogy, but I think not at all satisfying if you started here–lots of emotional weight from earlier events. There was a bit of the trick to the ending that made me kind of scrinch up my nose, but I was overall so pleased with the fast, fun reading experience that I didn’t, in general mind, and will be pleased to look for what Bardugo does next. Go start at the beginning for the weird Russian-esque YA fantasy stuff.

Andrea Barrett, Lucid Stars. A novel following the women of one American mid-century family, with a focus on astronomy that never gets particularly passionate or technical–an interesting angle, since usually somebody in that kind of novel actually gets really quite good at astronomy. It walks a fine line of almost getting compassion for a particular kind of depression right, but interested readers should go into it forewarned that Barrett is a little iffy on the topic of weight and dress sizes–she gets ill-advisedly specific about how big the character who is supposed to be really quite big is, and if it made my eyebrows do the tango with my hairline, I imagine it would be quite a bit worse for some of you. She’s also iffy on the line between “this character finds a healthier place for herself to be in all areas of her life that happens to be at a smaller though still not thin weight” and…worse than that really. So: with caveats, this book. With definite caveats.

Jianing Chen, The Core of Chinese Classical Fiction. Short bits and excerpts from lots of pieces of Chinese classics throughout the ages. Alec lent me this as part of our discussion about the range of Chinese ghost stories, but it also has bits of non-ghost-related Chinese classics. A good jumping-off place if you want to go further, probably not a good place to stop and say, “Oh good, now I know about Chinese lit, the end.”

Tim Cooper, The Reader: War for the Oaks. I make a policy of not writing reviews of things I’m in, and I have an essay in this (as well as being in some of the photos). But it’s here, the thing that I posted about Kickstarting. It can now be ordered and read as an actual book, including my bit, and I did read it as one.

Pamela Dean, The Secret Country, The Hidden Land, and The Whim of the Dragon. Rereads. I am often very stern with myself about rereads. “You can’t just reread the same things all the time!” I tell myself sternly. And then when I was sick in bed, after some days of being too sick to read when I could read again, what I really wanted to read was the Secret Country trilogy, and I was really quite sick, so I said okay, let’s do that. And then when I went to put it in my booklog when all was said and done, it had been nearly a decade since I’d reread them. So I think the moral of the story is that I should be somewhat less stern with myself. Also, the Secret Country books make me happy in my heart and are totally where I left them, untouched by the Suck Fairy, hurrah, and I love everybody. Someone–maybe even Pamela?–was saying how much Patrick was their favorite, and Patrick is not my favorite because I don’t have a favorite because I love all the main people. All of them.

Samuel Delany, Driftglass. Reread. I am pleased that in the years since I read this, it’s looking a lot more influential on the short fiction being published in the field, although I can’t say how much of that is direct. It was less of a “wow” because of that than it was the first few times reading it, and I think that’s a good thing.

A.M. Dellamonica, Child of a Hidden Sea. Discussed elsewhere.

Karen Joy Fowler, Black Glass. Reread. What a good title for the shiny and reflective stories herein. Particularly the opening one made me glad I randomly returned to this collection.

Julia Mary Gibson, Copper Magic. Discussed elsewhere.

Benedict Jacka, Fated. Someone–Rose? someone who is perhaps Rose?–recommended this when I was less than satisfied with the Paul Cornell book I had just read, and that someone, whether or not it was Rose, was correct to do so. It is a fun urban fantasy of the sorta-noir-but-not-depressingly-noir school of urban fantasy-ing–set in London, as several of them are, but it did not feel repetitive with Aaronovitch, Carey, or Cornell–and I will be glad to get the sequel from the library. It goes well in that set and did not annoy me. Hurrah.

Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan, Sailing to Sarantium, and Lord of Emperors. Rereads. The Lions of Al-Rassan remains the one true GGK book, for my money. I read it and wondered whether everyone else also thinks that he wrote one of the three religions in it to be the one that is obviously correct, but the people I’ve consulted so far (my mom and Alec) are not really the people one would want to consult to get a viewpoint that is, one might say, most distant from mine. So please chime in, if you’ve read this book: the Kindath, the Asharites, the Jaddites? Then I reread the Sarantine Mosaic books, and if there is direct observed evidence of the truth of any religion in this world, it is none of those three. Huh. Well, I stick by my impression anyway. Also: while the suck fairy had not visited Lions and in fact I liked the Sarantine Mosaic books better this time around (having remembered them in the context of comparing them directly to Lions, which would leave many things unsatisfying), I had not remembered the amount of sexual violence implicit in any of them. I don’t think it was badly handled, but I do think it’s indicative of how much more weary I am of feeling battered by it all, even in the books I love.

Walt Kelly, Pogo: Through the Wild Blue Yonder: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips Volume 1. This was in some ways a Christmas present from both my grandparents, despite the fact that Grandpa died and was not technically around to consult on the present. I remain convinced–I become even more convinced–that Pogo is mostly one of those things you had to be there for. There were three or four strips out of this collection that made me laugh and laugh, and the rest made me say, “Ah, I see, that was certainly…a comic strip, yes, I have read comic strips, and that was definitely one.” Even when I was very clear what the topical references were, I just tend not to find them particularly funny. But it was an interesting insight into Things Grandpa Liked, so okay then.

Seanan McGuire, Midnight Blue-Light Special. Second in its series, and I can’t believe that was still the same month. This is why I do fortnight posts instead of month posts, aughhhh. Anyway, this book establishes that while the InCryptid books are a series, they will not be a “sitcom reset, everything back to normal” style series–there are major changes for Verity throughout. This makes it more fun, for me at least. While on the Fourth Street writers’ seminar with Seanan I got promised werewolf rabies if I stick with this series, complete with Seanan actually getting to dissect rabid brains as research. This is a pretty good promise to dangle in front of a Mris, I have to say, and “start with unusual elements like the waheela, so that when you move on to werewolves, readers trust that you will do something unusual and interesting with them” is really quite good writing advice; people should take it to heart.

Robin McKinley, Sunshine and The Hero and the Crown. Rereads. More of my sick in bed “you can’t always reread the same things!” rereads. The thing that struck me about The Hero and the Crown was how very, very much younger Aerin was than anyone else in the book–in fact how completely inappropriate some of these people’s behavior was considering the age gap. “We are both seven years old and still in the process of being civilized” is a very different set of behaviors from “I am seven and you are fourteen and could have reasonably been considered a responsible person to be put in charge of me, except that you are apparently an abusive psychopath.” I…am not entirely sure what was going on there. When I was seven, I read it as “vaguely older” not “holy crap what is wrong with this entire culture.” I still like the bits where Aerin experiments and figures out how to slay dragons. But the people who think that Deerskin is McKinley’s important book about abuse…should really go back and reread The Hero and the Crown, because it is not just about injury and recovery, it is also all about abuse and complicity. As for Sunshine, I did a Sunshine rant on my attention-direction panel at Fourth Street. It’s not that I don’t like it on the reread. I do! I still enjoyed it very much. But just as we acknowledge that Santa Claus only happens if we buy trinkets for each other’s stockings, we need to acknowledge that Robin McKinley does not write direct sequels. She just doesn’t. Her publisher claims that the other half of her pegasus book is coming out this year, but that’s the one where she literally wrote half a story rather than a whole story. So all the threads that she left dangling in Sunshine…with Rae’s father and grandmother and whether they are dead and if not where the hell they are…with Rae’s badass boyfriend and his crazy wizard tattoos and how it is that he can control so many of them and why she doesn’t ask for his damn help when they are having the throwdown…with all the things. All the things that she put in that book that go beyond “hey this might be cool” and well into “no really, this is a plot thread; I’m just going to leave it here.” Those things are going to keep dangling for the rest of our lives. And we just need to cope with that. Because this is all we are likely to get, if statistics bear out. Also, when we first got Sunshine, it was the first in the “Robin McKinley’s prose rambles” books, and it was charming because Rae was a charming narrator, and she still is. But now I look at it being followed by Dragonhaven, Chalice, Pegasus, and Shadows, and it starts to look like a turning point in her work. Sunshine is the pivot where things stop being dense and start being tangly. And it is a tangle I love, but it looks to me like a crucial turn.

William H. Patterson, Jr., Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue With His Century: Vol. II: The Man Who Learned Better, 1948-1988. Discussed elsewhere.

Harold B. Segel, Renaissance Culture in Poland: The Rise of Humanism, 1470-1543. A fascinating look at Polish participation in Latin culture before the rise of the vernacular, with various interactions with what we would now call Italy and Germany. A reminder that not only was Copernicus Polish, he did not exist in a Polish cultural vacuum.

Clete Barrett Smith, Aliens in Disguise. Finishing up a trilogy of children’s SF. Probably better for its target age audience but still silly fun with lots of light-hearted aliens and the kids taking charge of situations that very much need it.

Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer. Kindle. An Englishwoman who has married noble German, pre-wars, talks about a summer of not having company, and dealing with her children and her garden. This sounds dull but in fact is gentle and warm instead. And short; the shortness probably helps.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes. Oh how I loved this book. It gets described as the story of a witch, but she is a witch in very classical deal-with-Satan terms, and the thing that she makes a deal with Satan for is very early twentieth century introvert upper-middle. Oh so lovely. Highly, highly recommended.

Richard Zimler, The Warsaw Anagrams. A completely wrenching mystery novel about the Warsaw ghetto of WWII and murders therein. Vivid and well-done and detailed, and you will probably want to pick your time to read it very carefully if you can bear to read it at all. Oof.

Review copy provided by Tor.

I love portal fantasy. Drop somebody through from our world to a different world, and I’m pretty much with you. Cheesy, corny, whatever other State Fair food adjective you like: sure, whatever, don’t care, I’m there. Add to that the fact that I’ve read and enjoyed Dellamonica’s work before, and I was on board for this book from the start.

Which is a good thing, because I will warn you: I found the start pretty rocky. Compared to the rest of the book, the prose is a bit choppy, and I took awhile to care about the character we were actually spending time with (as opposed to the mentioned backstory characters, who seemed frankly more interesting–and did show up later). Sophie’s transportation to the alternate world lands her in the water, and that level of disorientation is difficult to show–especially when you’re trying to throw preceding backstory at the reader. I recommend perseverance, because things improve swiftly.

The premise: Sophie loves her adoptive family like crazy, but she’s still curious about her birth family. When she goes looking, things get wild very very quickly. There’s an angry birth mother who wants nothing to do with her, there’s an aunt who’s slightly more reasonable, there are people attacking the aunt, there’s transit to a watery world of ships and weird magic tech and different species of bug and bird and sea critter, with variable languages and national customs…and the variable languages and national customs matter. A lot. If you’ve ever complained about books where it was raining on such-and-such an entire planet, Dellamonica has your back.

And when you get a whole new birth family, fighting with itself and from more than one culture, you get a whole new set of enemies, free of charge, home grown just for you! Sophie at least gets to go home and get some of her gear and her (adopted) brother Bram to help her out, but mostly she wins through by her wits and her mindset, and the said mindset involves things like collecting and observing evidence. So really, I’m very glad I kept on through the first chapter, because that’s catnip for me. I hope there’s more. I hope there’s lots more. There’s room for it.

Review copy provided by Starscape Books.

Michigan in 1906 is a pretty easy sell for a YA fantasy setting for me, and I have a feeling it might be for several of you, too. Violet Blake is 12 years old, and her mother and little brother have left her alone with her taciturn cherry-farming father. The small town in which they live has a spiffy resort hotel that has drawn a newfangled photographer–a newfangled lady photographer–and Violet gets to be her assistant.

All this is because of–maybe because of?–a copper hand Violet finds that grants wishes. And is ancient and Indian, but that’s okay, because so is Violet. (Well. Not ancient. Just Indian.) Through her mother’s side of the family. And all the Indian/Native American characters care about nature, in a vague and unspecified way, and….

Look, this book is very readable. It’s fun to read, and there are some pretty good bits, particularly as Violet figures out that intentions don’t actually count for all that much compared to what you actually do–especially when you have no excuse for not following through with real actions. But I really felt like Gibson leaned pretty heavily on her own intentions when it came to the Native American characters in the book. They were very much a string of tropes about Caring About the Environment without a lot of real impact to that. There wasn’t a lot of depth to the old-time photography, or the ecology, or the First Nations tribe portrayed, or any of the elements that the marketing copy touted. I’m having a hard time finding a balance of how to talk about this book, because there were real consequences for Violet’s actions, and that was good, and I sat down and read it without much pause, so really there was that type of appeal. On the other hand, a bit shallow in handling of speculative and cultural elements. Fun, readable, but not amazing. Would like to see whether Gibson goes deeper with later work or whether this is what she was aiming for.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

You would think that Robert Heinlein was a writer who could, if he chose, offend plenty of people all on his own without any help. But he has not been left to his own post mortem devices in this! Oh no! No, he has the assistance of William H. Patterson, Jr., to make sure that no stone is left unturned if it might have creeping, crawling things under it that represent stomach-turning levels of ignorance to pass off on the reading public as somehow relevant to the first SFWA Grand Master’s career.

Oh, sorry, maybe I should start this review more straightforwardly: I did not like and do not recommend this book.

Let’s go with the paragraph that brought actual tears of rage to my eyes:

They [the Heinleins] had both fallen in love with the northern countries on their earlier trips, but Finland (which does not consider itself to be “Scandinavian”) was special even among them, with a national character of fierce resoluteness–sisu–that precisely suited their mood on this occasion. The Suomic “do what must be done” was the only attitude that a free people could possibly take, living next door to the Soviet Union. The Baltic states–Latvia, estonia, Lithuania–did not have it, and they had been eaten up by the USSR.

That last piece of toxically inaccurate drivel, friends, has no footnote. No. Footnote. That is not Robert Heinlein talking in any sense. That is William Patterson slandering the people of the Baltic states–using Finland to do it, no less!–on his own hook. For fun. Because it suits his own political agenda to declare, ex cathedra, that if only they had wanted it badly enough, the facts of geography and political support of the 1940s would have been different for those small countries. He knows less than nothing about the Singing Revolution. Nothing about the resisters who went to the camps or who lived in the forests resisting Soviet rule for years and in some amazing cases decades. He knows nothing about what the west did on behalf of Finland–“brave little Finland”–that it never once considered doing for any of the Baltics. No. William Patterson was an American of the Baby Boom generation who decided that what a biography of Robert Heinlein most needed–what people reading about Robert Heinlein most needed–was to have lies about these people just tossed into their reading material for giggles. Because, you know, most people who pick up biographies of mid-century science fiction writers read reams about the history of the Baltic region and can easily have this kind of blatant falsehood countered rather than lodged in the back of their brain as the truth about the people of this region.

Most of my regular readers know that I am a serious Finnophile. I find it all the more offensive to have Finland used as a club on other countries that did not have the advantages of geography and political support. This is just wrong. I used up all my obscenities on this yesterday when I was reading, and believe me, I used many. Today I’m left drained. Today I can just say: this is so very wrong.

I wish that was only one thing. I wish that was the only time that the staggering arrogance of Patterson’s ignorance made itself known in this volume. But alas. If I was the sort to write in books, the single most common thing I would have written in the margins of this one would have been, “Who asked you?” When Patterson was reporting that Heinlein decided to vote for Eisenhower in 1956, he notes, “He was not a Republican, but he voted for Eisenhower–probably the least harmful choice that year.” Who asked you? Seriously, who needed this bozo to be patting his biographical subject on the back at every turn? And on what grounds? What research did he do other than reading Robert A. Heinlein on the subject? Here’s another of Patterson’s un-footnoted long-winded political digressions:

Perhaps there had been embedded in Roosevelt’s New Deal the seeds of this current leftism that was softening the brains of otherwise bright and well-intentioned people, who seemed not to realize that they had conceded important intellectual and moral ground to that stunted and malign child of socialism, as Wells had called Lenin’s and Stalin’s Communism. America’s leftism now had no room for that strain of American progressive optimism and benevolent patriotism that married love of country to love of the great ideals of the Founders, that went back to the last century, through Emerson and back even to that old Puritan thunderer Jonathan Edwards.

This is notable because 1) again, this is all Patterson, not a word of it Heinlein; 2) Heinlein was himself a New Deal Democrat; 3) citation, please? What exactly makes Patterson an expert of any kind on the state of the American left or the Democratic Party as an institution at mid-century or in fact at any time? He can tell you how Robert Heinlein was feeling or at least writing about it, certainly; he had unprecedented access to the letters that would do that. But to just bloviate about what America’s leftism had or had not room for: pics or it didn’t happen, basically.

And this is sprinkled throughout, sometimes in a phrase or two and sometimes at far, far greater length. We are treated to an expansion of Heinlein’s view of Joe McCarthy in which, Patterson opines, “the worst that happened was that some people had reputations blackened, possibly deservedly if they had in fact been engaged in treasonous activities.” (Loss of livelihood to Americans exercising their Constitutional rights of free speech and free association: eh, whatever, no big, as long as William H. Patterson Jr. still finds them suspicious. Nor does he feel the need to actually look into what happened. Reading one single reputable book on the matter would be too much to ask; he’s got pontificating to do.) His citation of Emerson is particularly hilarious given that he’s not at all clear who and what Fourier influenced in American politics, even given a footnote to expand on the matter, and the surrounding material about European liberalism or lack of same is not worth the paper it’s printed on. And again: who asked him? As fascinated as we all are with the 1848 revolution, why on earth does it belong in a Heinlein bio that is already bloated in two volumes?

Various places in the book, Patterson cites Heinlein’s letters feeling that America had moved to the left without him after the Second World War. However, Patterson expands upon this at length and adds his own feelings about it without citing a single political position that would support it. I spent a pretty good chunk of yesterday reading platforms and campaign speeches for Adlai Stevenson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, just to see if I was completely mad, and the single place that I could find where Roosevelt looked considerably less “leftist” was on the matter of race–where Patterson is careful to cite letter after letter showing that Heinlein was pleased at the direction of the Democratic party away from segregation. So what would a responsible biographer do here? At most, a responsible biographer merely says that this is how Heinlein felt. It’s also responsible to interrogate that feeling–to say that this is how Heinlein felt but to note an inclarity as to why he felt that way. Patterson does not. He takes it as given that everything, everything Heinlein felt must be right.

Even in non-political issues (or inter-field political issues), this leads the biography to be a lesser work than it could have been. For example, in writing about a falling-out with Ben Bova over an Alexei Panshin review of Expanded Universe, Patterson does not apparently contact Dr. Bova for any memories he has of this incident. Last I saw or heard, Dr. Bova was alive and well, and his perspective could at least be noted. If it was so “clearly polemical” and “simply malicious,” why did Bova commission a “hatchet job” of one of the most notable writers in the field at the time? Patterson doesn’t care to know–even to dismiss the point of view directly. For him Bova’s point of view simply doesn’t exist. The only place that Patterson notes anywhere that Heinlein might have been wrong is in a dispute with the L5 board over SDI, where he notes that the situation was “more complex” than Heinlein was predisposed to see it. Everything else gets a rubber stamp–not only does Heinlein apparently learn better, he never fails to learn better.

That’s not biography, it’s hagiography.

And the worst of it is, some of this stuff is going to get attributed to Heinlein. Some of this stuff is going to get attributed to Heinlein by the people who think he could do no wrong, and some of it is going to get attributed to Heinlein by the people who think he could do no right, and especially it will be attributed to Heinlein by people who think that he is a symbol of everything right-wing about America today, whether they personally love it or hate it, whether he actually said or thought any such thing. Patterson had unprecedented levels of access to Heinlein’s papers. He could have written a real biography. With the first volume, it almost looked like he was going to. And instead this. It has immensely detailed information about what Heinlein wrote when, which drafts were called what and how they developed. In places there are the sketched outlines of a touching portrait of how a married couple can work together as a team for the benefit of the career of one of them. It’s just interspersed with a pointless, ill-informed, and occasionally sickening slog through What William H. Patterson Jr. Thinks Of Every Damn Thing (Without Actually Looking It Up).

(The most hilarious line of WWHPJTOEDT(WALIU): when he was shocked, just shocked, that even some figure skaters might not be nice people. Golly. Even some figure skaters? If you can’t trust the profession that brought us the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan scandal, indeed, what profession can you trust? That was twenty years ago. No one has any excuse for still thinking that figure skaters are all sweetness and light. Twenty. Years. Yeah. We’ve got some real depth going here, people.)