Category: Uncategorized

Elizabeth Bear, Steles of the Sky. Discussed elsewhere.

Tobias S. Buckell, Hurricane Fever. Discussed elsewhere.

Dorothy Canfield (Fisher), Understood Betsy. Kindle. This is a very strange thing: an anti-helicopter parenting manifesto kids’ novel from…1917. It’s astonishing how many of the details of the helicopter parenting map pretty exactly. I think that the sort of modern kid who enjoys “old time novels” might still enjoy it? but my main recommendation of it is to modern adults who should find it to be a quick read and may be greatly interested in the details of how much the more things change…. Canfield/Fisher is very careful not to put country living over city living, for example, and although there are a few places where her priorities make me wince, overall it’s really quite good.

C. J. Cherryh, Peacemaker. The latest atevi novel. She keeps writing ’em, I keep reading ’em. Honestly, do not start here. Whatever you do, do not start here. Not at all the strongest of the series, by no means stands alone–they get less and less stand-alone as time goes by–but I still do care how Cajeiri negotiates the question of the birthday coat and its consequences as well as being impatient for the Spoiler who still do not Spoiler yet in this book. (Maybe in the next fortuitous three. Or maybe not. Sigh.) This book could have done with more Jago. But I still liked it.

Nancy Hale, Mary Cassatt. A quite competent but not transcendent bio of one of the important (American, female) Impressionists. Recommended if you’re looking for a bio of Mary Cassatt, otherwise not really.

Seanan McGuire, Discount Armageddon. Not my usual thing, but I could see how skillfully she was appealing to the audience she was appealing to, and there were some quite amusing moments. I’ll probably go back for the next one when I’m in the mood for humorous (modern-type) urban fantasy with cryptids.

E. C. Myers, Quantum Coin. Definitely in sequel land, and while I could see where this went all sorts of places an author might be eager to go, I was less eager as a reader to follow. I hope that Myers goes somewhere entirely different with his next work.

Michael O’Brien, Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon. Louisa Adams, the wife and First Lady of John Quincy Adams, was with him when he was ambassador to the court of the tsar, and she kept an account of when she had to travel by herself from that court to Paris. (“By herself”: with servants, her sister, and her son. But with no suitable male escort.) These worlds coexisted in my mind but did not really intersect: the philosophical austerity of the early American Republic (largely brought about by the elder John Adams) and the demands of an embassy at a court such as that of the early nineteenth century Russian one. Uff da, not an easy thing to have in collision, and an interesting book thereby.

Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird. I loved this book! This was so beautiful! Such a lovely amazing book! Um. Except the last few chapters. Other than that, great stuff! Ignore the last couple of chapters. I think the thing was, Oyeyemi had all sorts of interesting things to say about passing and the intersection of African-Americans and ethnic whites in the era she’d chosen, and then she tried to take it an analogy too far. There was a light touch with the fairy tale parallels (seriously, fantasy writers, we could learn from the lightness of touch), there was a richness of historical detail, there was all kinds of good stuff here. But the last few chapters…well, just…no call for them really. I will try again with another of her books. Onwards.

Reader’s Digest Editors, Great Biographies: Charles A. Lindbergh, Thomas A. Edison, Hans Christian Andersen, etc.. Grandpa’s. Again, the biographies are chopped to bits and strikingly laudatory and uncontroversial. One would hardly know that Edison ever had a controversial thought or deed. I am impressed that one can even manage such a biography of Edison. Or Lindbergh, although his was an autobiography focused solely on the Spirit of St. Louis trip, which does tend to limit the debate.

Reader’s Digest Editors, Scenic Wonders of America. Grandpa’s. This was large photos of scenic areas, followed by essays about them, then lists of nearby (“one day’s drive,” which is not all that nearby, by my American standards) places to visit. It was from 1973, and it was kind of nice to see that Grandpa had looked through it and picked out some things that looked interesting and gone to see them–often with me–but it would have been unlike him to use it as a checklist, and in fact he had not. Not really the sort of thing one reads so much as looks at, but in the spirit of my project with my grandpa’s books, I did indeed look at it.

Evelyn Sharp, All the Way to Fairyland. Kindle. Somewhat twee late Victorian fairy tales, not too bad but not the best Evelyn Sharp or the best late Victorian fairy tales. Probably mostly for the specialist in one direction or the other.

Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham, Veronica Mars: The Thousand Dollar Tan Line. Had some very fun bits. I was interested to see whether a novel would read more like a season or more like an episode, and for me it was more like a slightly extended episode. Clearly some of the juicier developments are being held back for future movies if it turns out that demand for such things exist, but there were still a few character arc points for the committed fan.

Monique Truong, The Book of Salt. A novel about the Vietnamese chef for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in their time in Paris. One of the key pieces of advice in critiques–which this is not, it’s nattering about books–is that one is to focus on what the author wanted a book to be, not what one wanted of the book oneself. This is one of the cases where it was a perfectly readable book where the author and I kept having drastic mismatches in what we felt was interesting about the situation and where we wanted the book to go. I, for example, found Binh’s communications (successful and otherwise) with his employers and with Parisians–and in flashback scenes, with his countrymen–fascinating, and felt that Truong missed a lot of opportunities in where she ended the scenes she chose to write. She was a lot more interested in elements like his parents’ sexualities, which…kind of bored me, frankly. So I think this is a reasonably good book for which I was very much the wrong audience.

Greg van Eekhout, California Bones. Every time I read a lovingly detailed book set in Southern California, I think, “Maybe this will be the one that makes it clear why people love this place I so very much do not love!” van Eekhout has probably come the closest so far. He also has some cool fun osteomancy worldbuilding, which is nifty and zips along. It isn’t out yet, but I borrowed a copy from someone else who got a review copy. Out this summer. Good fun. Expect to hear more when they’re actually, y’know, available and stuff.

Review copy provided by Tor.

The first of Buckell’s thrillers (Arctic Rising) made me sit up and take notice, because there is a distinct stylistic difference between writing a thriller and writing near-future SF. I think a lot of us SF writers look at the sales numbers for thrillers and think, “But that’s basically the stuff we’re doing!” But the differences are crucial. They start with the shorter sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and often books, and they go on from there. The thriller skims the surface of the near-future technological and social changes, focusing on action and adventure. The emotional connections between characters are clear, not murky, whether they are positive or negative–even when someone is in the “friend or enemy?” category, they are clearly tagged by genre conventions to be in this category. It is sharp and accessible and fast.

Buckell has completely nailed this style, as distinct from the style of his previous books. He deserves the sales numbers that go with it, and I hope he’s getting them, because he has married the thriller style to actual knowledge of the Caribbean as something other than a vacation destination and fun extrapolative bits of SF–shark-based bio-paint, awesome!–so that it is a superior grade of thriller. If you’re an SF reader who dips into thrillers from time to time, or if you have a dedicated thriller reader in the circle of people for whom you buy presents, Hurricane Fever (out in July) should definitely make your shopping list.

Hurricane Fever the story of Prudence “Roo” Jones, who is preparing for the increasingly common storms he and his nephew weather on his boat when he gets a message from an old friend. The consequences for Roo, his neighbors and friends, and his nephew Delroy, span several islands and the entire rest of the book. There are multiple storms of varying severity, other strong effects of climate change, a hemorrhagic plague, tailored genes, spies whose governmental support is also varying, Bond villain monologues, neo-Nazis to thwart…the whole thing races along at an amazing clip, and if you like thrillers, you won’t want to miss it.

Review copy provided by Tor Books. Also the author is a personal friend, which I sometimes completely forget to say, as I forgot to say it about Katherine Addison, which does not mean I like her any less or am any less willing to make her dinner or am trying to put one over on people in order to get them to buy The Goblin Emperor. (Which you should do! But not because Addison is my friend; I have plenty of friends whose books I don’t like half so well as The Goblin Emperor. But this is not a post about one of them. Ahem. Anyway.)

I hate total orderings. Total orderings give me hives. There is no particular reason one has to say that one thing is the very best thing and another is the second best and on down the list when they have diverse good points, and there will be reasons to recommend one book to one person and another to another.

That being said. Now that the Eternal Sky series is finished, I feel that it is a very strong contender for Bear’s best work to date, even over the one that has my heart so transparently that it got dedicated to me before I’d even read it. (That would be By the Mountain Bound, and if you’ve read the Edda of Burdens, you’re probably going, yeah, that’s pretty Mrissable. And yeah, it is. But these books, people. These books.) It’s a very high contender for “thing to recommend if someone says ‘Elizabeth Bear, I’ve never read her, what should I read,'” unless there’s a darn good reason to go another way, such as their passionate love for generation ships or the Norse, and even maybe then. The things she’s doing are strong and interesting and complicated, and Steles of the Sky is very much a book of sticking the landing.

And what a complex landing it is to stick. I feel that what Bear deserves for this–what I would have wanted in order to try to get it right myself–is a tiny set of carven stone pieces in jade and tiger’s eye and all the materials, to be the dragon and the bear men (BEAR MEN SHE GAVE ME BEAR MEN IN A BLIZZARD SHE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TO) and the horses, each of the horses and the herd, and the ghulim and all. I am amazed that she managed to make it all work without an entire layout of them, and I think she deserves them all to play with and pet, just for making it all work.

Here is what you will notice, if you pay attention to the rest of the series so far: you will notice that not everyone gets to win. And that even the people who get to win…you will probably start to think as you think about what there is in play…probably do not get to do so without a price.

There are some pretty high prices in this book. I’m finding it hard to talk about it without spoilers, but…yes. Not without cost, this one.

Some series are books that only incidentally go together–they have the same characters and setting, but the events are only loosely linked. This is not one of them. While there are ample reminders of who is who and what is what if you haven’t reread Range of Ghosts as a refresher before picking up Steles, the weight of everything from the horses’ colors to Hsiung’s choices will be much stronger with the weight of the previous two before it. But the thing is complete now; if you’re a reader who only wants to read stories that are complete, now’s your time. Highly recommended.

Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes. When Mark finished this, he said, “Very middle-book,” and I agree. It’s very hard to discuss this book outside the context of the rest of the series. I understand why some people had problems with the end, and I didn’t, and I would be happy to discuss it over email, but–giant giant spoilers, new book, so: email. Yes. (My gmail is marissalingen. This is available on my website, on my main lj site…I am really easy to find on email.)

Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor. Discussed elsewhere.

Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents. Discussed elsewhere.

Emma Bull, Finder and War for the Oaks. Rereads. I have reread War for the Oaks multiple times over the years, including when we were house-hunting all over the Twin Cities, which was lovely. So that was more a familiar friend. I don’t think I’ve picked up Finder since I was a teenager, which meant, among other things, that when I encountered the minor character of Milo Chevrolet, my jaw dropped. When I was a teenager, I think what resonated for me with Finder was the idea that the things you’re good at can in some way be used to maneuver you into stuff you don’t want to do. That felt very familiar at the time, and it still works quite well.

Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent, Heaven is for Real. I read this as a favor to someone, and there is really no reason you should read it unless you want an exercise in subcultural dogwhistles and confirmation bias. Here’s what happened: a preschool-age kid had an experience during surgery that he described a few months later–I believe quite sincerely–as an experience of heaven. I believe that his parents, one of whom is an evangelical pastor, were very sincere in their attempts to elicit details from him about this experience. However. They didn’t even start writing down what he was saying until months after he started talking about it–so several months after the event. Of the things he said, they don’t seem to have asked any more pursuing questions about the single thing that was outside their theological orthodoxy (that Jesus has a rainbow horse). In addition to seeming to hold firm beliefs in their own verbatim memories and ability to not influence a three-year-old in the form of their questioning, they also hold the dubious belief that if they do not specifically recall sitting a three-year-old down and personally telling him a thing, there is no way for him to acquire knowledge that is common in their subculture. If that was the case, the human race would have died out long before now. Kids are sponges for information. And the more of an industry this becomes–it’s a movie now–and the more it’s used to support very very narrow ideas, the sketchier it looks to me, and the less the original little kid’s sincerity matters. Anyway: if you already believe in a right-wing evangelical Christian heaven with very particular trappings, there is nothing in this book that will be new or even very inspiring, and if you don’t, there is nothing in this book that has sound or convincing methodology to change your mind. No reason to read it.

Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos. This should be subtitled “Dorothy McKibbin and the Secret City of Los Alamos, because Conant used her grandfather’s connections (yes, that Conant) to talk to not just the scientists–everybody talks to the scientists–but the administrative staff. And as a result this book stands out from the common run of books on Los Alamos by chronicling and valuing the administrative and logistical work done by the women involved. Very much worth the time.

John M. Ford, The Scholars of Night. I would say “who else could center a spy novel on a lost Marlowe manuscript?”, except that, of course, the cover and the obvious inspiration provide the answer: Anthony Price probably could have. He didn’t, though, and he almost certainly wouldn’t have spent quite so much time on the wargaming as Mike did. I like this, but it does get a bit obscure in spots, I can see that when forced to.

Felix Gilman, The Revolutions. Discussed elsewhere.

Karen Healey, When We Wake. Someday, someday, some sweet sweet day, people will be done talking about how the Beatles are everything. But Karen Healey is approximately my age, so I’m beginning to think that I will not live to see that day. Don’t get me wrong, this was fun cryogenics dystopian YA SF–I enjoyed it and will look for the sequel quite happily. But I am so over the centrality and overwhelming brilliance of the Beatles in SF novels, I really really really really am.

Erik Hildinger, Warriors of the Steppe: A Military History of Central Asia, 500 BC to 1700 AD. (Yes, that is the way the title put it: 1700 AD, not AD 1700. Would that I could say that this was not indicative.) This was published in 1997, but it read more like 1957. Hildinger is the sort of historian who just goes around blithely saying that it’s hard to believe things for which there is perfectly good evidence, when what he means is that he doesn’t wanna. Which: tough toenails, little boy, the Sarmatians had female warriors. Honestly, some people’s kids. Also, if for some stupid reason you have decided that the Manchu count as steppe warriors (don’t decide this, just–don’t), you should notice that a book that would cover the rise of both the Yuan dynasty and the Manchu dynasty–and then, like, the Mongols in Europe and ten other things–would really need more than 240 pages not to do a shoddy job of it. There are some interesting bits here, but so much argh. So. Much. Argh.

Michael Holroyd, Augustus John: The New Biography. I kept coming up with alternate titles for this, such as Surrounded By Women More Interesting Than Himself and To Know Him Is To Loathe Him: The Augustus John Story. The up side was that Holroyd had the intellectual honesty to admit that he was greatly more interested in every single other person in Augustus John’s life including many of his servants, and so he would go off on lengthy tangents about them. (Many of the episodes in this book were also covered in the Gwen John bio. Gwen John’s biographer had no trouble whatever focusing on her, I’ll tell you that for free.) The down side was that this gave almost no narrative thrust to the rather weighty volume, and, given that the paintings were in the first set of illustrations and the sketches only in the second one, I was left very puzzled for quite some time as to why on earth anybody cared about this horrible, horrible man at all. Some of the sketches are rather nice, but in general, save yourself the trouble and go read Susan Chitty’s bio of Gwen John, even if she can’t stop calling her by both names, and then you’ll have the best of the John family. Or skip them. Skipping them is fine too.

Paul Kane and Charles Prepolec, eds., Beyond the Rue Morgue: Further Tales of Edgar Allen Poe’s First Detective. The main reason to read this, for me, was to restore my faith in Mike Carey after the latest volume of The Unwritten, and it did that beautifully. (Tammany Hall! I am such a sucker for things featuring Tammany Hall well-handled in era.) The other stories varied considerably but did not win my heart.

James Kochalka, The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza. Discussed elsewhere.

Ian McDonald, Empress of the Sun. I like some of the bits with the evolved dinosaurs, but in general I was less engaged with this than earlier bits of the series.

Reader’s Digest Editors, Great Biographies: Johann Strauss & Son, Adm. Richard Byrd, Heinrich Schliemann, etc.. Grandpa’s. Given the dates of it, possibly Gran’s first, not sure. I hesitate to give these bios by original author and title, because the flaws in them may well have been induced by the Reader’s Digest Editors, who did not care to give their own names. They were choppy and weird–the “Johann Strauss & Son” formulation, for example, when the “& Son” is the Johann Strauss most of us actually know well, and his father is something of a nonentity, comparatively. But the thing that really leapt out at me was how much sexism can kill, in the Byrd autobiography. This man got left by himself in a polar situation without knowing either cooking or organizational skills, which everyone would have thought was beyond horrible if he had been a girl. And the stories of what he tried to do to that poor polenta and those canned goods–he said he could have died, and I believe him, and gahhhh sexism kills. It kills women and girls in tiny rural villages every year. It could have killed Adm. Byrd. Sometimes our continuing survival as a species is a wonder, given the stupid crap we manage to come up with, I tell you what.

Jane Ridley, The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, The Playboy Prince. If you were saying to yourself, “Gosh, I’m feeling very positive about Queen Victoria just now, I would really like something to temper that,” do I have the book for you! Jane Ridley has read ten million pages of letters and other papers on Queen Victoria’s relationship with her heir, and she is willing to pass the near-toxic levels of emphasis on to you, dear reader. Seriously, this is a fascinating book that doesn’t feel nearly as long as it is, and it’s got all sorts of horrible Victorian stories. The press’s reaction to the death of Edward VII and Alexandra’s child, for example, was brutal. Jaw-droppingly brutal. Put quite a lot of things in perspective.

Marie Rutkoski, The Jewel of the Kalderash. The conclusion to this MG series, it returned, satisfyingly, to Bohemia and some of the characters from the first volume. Very series-y, so I wouldn’t start here, but I’m glad I read them all.

Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki, This One Summer Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

In the last 3/4 of The Goblin Emperor, I caught myself making excuses to get up and do other things. Sort the laundry, write an email, get another glass of water. Not because I wasn’t enjoying it, not because I didn’t want to see how it ended, but because I knew that when it was over, it would be over. And I didn’t want it to be over quite yet. I wasn’t ready to be done yet. The Goblin Emperor is, as its author indicated in Q&A yesterday, a stand-alone. So it’s not just “it’s over, until the next book in the trilogy, which is scheduled for October,” or, “it’s over, until the sequel which is due next year if all goes well.” It’s, well, over.

And, I mean, this is great, because there is the whole story, no waiting. There is no biting your nails through another volume or three or twelve wondering if the whole thing will fall apart (it doesn’t) or turn out to have a point after all (it does). All your cynical horrible friends–you know you have them–we love our cynical horrible friends–can be presented with this volume with full assurances that this is the whole story, no cliffhangers, no to-be-continued, no chance of bloating into a thirty-volume epic. Beginning, middle, end, airship crashes, court politics, astronomy, all right here. Airship crashes! Court politics! Astronomy! These are the things Mrissas like best! Also architectural proposals and people tripping over things they assume other people will know (but do not) (in mutual directions) and more court politics! And layers of etiquette and loyalty and more court politics!

But I want more goblins, she whined ungratefully. And more steppe nomads. And more elves would do, but really: goblins and steppe nomads, this is what I want. Not in this book, I hasten to add. This book had the proper proportion of these things.

This is a fantasy novel, and will get labeled with fantasy court politics and steampunk tags–and rightly so, I think, although some of the things I find most annoying about steampunk are absent–I think the group who might miss out and should hear about it is people who love Cherryh’s atevi books. There is even tea (albeit more pleasantly, in samovars), there are very interesting servant and bodyguard characters, there is attention to logistics, there is intercultural diplomacy, there are pieces where people think they understand just when they do not and things go awry…it’s not the likeliest “if you like this, you should try that,” but it seemed worth mentioning.

One of the things I’ve seen in a few other reviews that also seems worth mentioning: Maia, the main character, is very concerned with treating others well. My father once told me that our parents are patterns for us whether we like it or not, but we get to choose whether they are positive or negative patterns, whether we follow their lead or make sure we don’t do whatever-it-is, large or small scale, as they did. And Maia is a character who is living that, sometimes with his literal parents and sometimes with other figures who have passed in and out of his young life in parental surrogate roles. But the thing I said in the comments section of my Gilman review, about how I can deal with all sorts of darkness if people are kind to each other: Maia is kind. He does his best to be. Even without airship crashes and court politics, that would have been worth a lot to me.