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Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a good friend and I read an early draft of this book.

Cristina Ramos is not making the art she meant to make–it didn’t sell. Her paintings now are safe, predictable–things she can sell to tourists. Things that keep her buying more art supplies, things that keep her helping her large and beloved family in the way she wants to, not in her mother’s restaurant the way she feels everyone expects from the oldest daughter. Her nephews need her, her mother needs her, everyone needs her. But she still has visions of another way–sometimes literally. And when her mother is gunned down as an afterthought to a political murder, she can’t hold those visions back any more.

That’s when she meets Felipe K’icab. He’s a jaguar shapeshifter who’s been driving an unlicensed cab, trying to use his collection of masks to get by in a world that’s tumultuous enough for plain humans. Felipe’s roommates have been trying to draw him into their activism, but he gets pulled into the wrong end of dealing with his country’s corruption when he picks up a fare who’s a corrupt cop who recognizes him for what he is. Coopted into an investigation that gets in the way of his own loyalties, he has to scramble to keep his own secrets–and save his closest friends.

Lushly written and beautifully imagined, The Jaguar Mask reaches for the truth of artist’s visions and the needs of family and friends. Their road to unmasked truth is fraught and so, so very human–even when it comes on velvet paws. One of my favorite books of the year, full of tension and hope.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I was just recently at a picnic with the author, so that’s nice.

Some of you may have read this book when its author was writing under her previous name. This is a Tor Essentials rerelease with a new introduction written by Jo Walton saying why she liked it so much the first time around.

One of the things that’s astonishing to me about The Fortunate Fall is how clearly it thinks about the internet compared to a lot of cyberpunk preceding it. The political and social mores of having some people telling stories, others filtering those stories, and still others receiving without knowing what’s gone into either part of the process–that’s something that’s so well-done in The Fortunate Fall, something that’s less the mirrorshades cool of early cyberpunk and more the scarred and lumpy reality we actually got.

Maya Andreyeva’s life as a “camera” is not a glamorous one. Like everyone else who has been wired to record, she’s hustling to convey the most compelling sensations and impressions of whatever it is she’s covering, in hopes that it be safe and yet daring enough to broadcast. She got the job she got at the beginning of the book–covering a forgotten genocide–by sheer trickery, and that’s more or less status quo. Her new “screener” Keishi seems familiar and inexperienced at the same time, and Maya has constant difficulty trusting her.

That’s before they get to the whale, or the technological pan-African empire, or the swapping of hardware to get around different kinds of repression…there’s a lot going on in this book, and it’s fascinating, and one of the things that’s really fascinating is that the stuff that was then-unusual and is now-usual is still written well. I’m thinking in particular of the same-sex relationship that’s the center of the book. Cameron wrote toward a world where no one would have to pat your hand and tell you not to be scared of the lesbians, and partly as a result of that we got to that world. And because it’s not hand-patting about it, the core of the relationship holds up beautifully. It’s a wonder to behold. And now you can behold it! Because it’s available again.

Olivia Chadha, Fall of the Iron Gods. A sequel, very much a sequel, with mechas and an environmentally devastated world. Betrayal and reunion, fun stuff.

Vajra Chandrasekera, Rakesfall. Generation-spanning weird experimental book with echoes of the Sri Lankan Civil War throughout spacetime including onto a dying planet. Even in the weirdest parts, very well-written.

K.A. Cobell, Looking for Smoke. A mystery about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, centering around Blackfeet teenagers. It’s really well done and really emotionally wrenching, particularly if you have a personal connection to this issue. I clutched the pages so hard I had to be careful not to tear them.

Emily J. Edwards, Viviana Valentine Goes Up the River and Viviana Valentine and the Ticking Clock. The second and third volumes of an historical murder mystery series, set in 1950-1951 so far. Fun but not impeccable, so if you’re picky about historicals, this may not be the one for you.

Erin M. Evans, Relics of Ruin. Another very sequel-ish sequel, returning to interesting characters and setting. No reason not to read the first one first in this fun secondary world fantasy setting.

Rebecca Fraimow, Lady Eve’s Last Con. To continue the fun reads theme of this fortnight–which was not wholly deliberate on my part, it’s partly just what the library happened to get in–this is a frothy delightful space opera romance with a con artist main character. I particularly liked the artificial beach scene for being a very science fictional intervention in this type.

Sara B. Franklin, The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America. Brief and delightful biography of a person who was influential across multiple kinds of writing. Not everything that happened to her was delightful, but that’s the nature of the 20th century….

Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire. This is a bug-crusher of a book, and it’s just what I wanted, recounting the revolutionaries and revolutionary movements of South and Southeast Asia in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It successfully centers the perspectives of people in those regions, touching on the rest of the global political scene only as appropriate rather than centering US/European white perspectives. If you’ve ever felt like you’d like to sort out a bit more of who knew whom and who was doing what when, in the anticolonialist movements of Asia, this is a very useful book.

Allan Kaster, ed., The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 8. I make a policy of not reviewing books that I’m in, and I’m in this one.

L.M. Montgomery, The Blythes Are Quoted. Kindle. Oh, what a disappointment this was. The premise is that Anne Shirley Blythe is reading her poetry to her family and we get their reactions in stage dialog form, interspersed with short stories in which other people star but are obsessed with the Blythe family. This is lampshaded by various characters saying that they’re sick of hearing about the Blythes…only to be completely undercut by them all feeling great about the Blythe obsession once their own lives are sorted out. She died before this got published, and perhaps if she hadn’t an editor would have asked her to fill out the poetry scenes with, well, scenes. And it would be better if I liked her poetry, which I definitely do not. This is the last bit of Anne of Green Gables fiction I had unread, and I wish I’d left it there.

Jay Owens, Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles. About literally what it says on the tin, and a lot more interesting than you might expect dust to be. Science! with dust! Good times, also not terribly long.

Noel Streatfeild, Myra Carrol. Kindle. A novel about the life of a woman who falls into decadence and climbs back out again through the love of her children. She uses the word “decadent” a lot, which is not particularly comfortable for me in a book from the World War II era–especially when the proper thing the character is returning to is very kinder, küche, kirche. She’s explicitly anti-Nazi, but she’s not always advocating positions as far from them as I’d think.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, House of Open Wounds. Look, it’s got it right in the title. If you feel like you’re going too read a book called House of Open Wounds and expect it not to be gory and gross, that’s on you. This is a fantasy about battlefield medicine, which is something you don’t see nearly enough of, and I thought it was really well done, but it is what it is. Go in forewarned. (Also it’s a sequel, but I think it’s a pretty stand-alone sequel.)

Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck, eds., We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage. I picked this up from the library’s new book display, and it contains poems by a lot of poets I have liked before. Unfortunately I re-learned that love poetry is not very central to my preferences, that I enjoy it more when it’s a handful of love poems in among other kinds of poems. Ah well.

Alan Bradley, What Time the Sexton’s Blade Doth Rust. Discussed elsewhere.

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time. This was a fun time travel book, though it had one of the plot twists I find tedious in time travel fiction. The relationships are strong, and the central time traveler characters are vividly of their times. The focus on the government program running the time travel situation is very well done and compelling–the title is not metaphorical, it actually is a government department–and I was happy to just dive into this.

Colin G. Calloway, The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America. This is intended to be a primary sources compendium with minimal commentary from the editor. It’s all regionally grouped along the Atlantic coast. If you read this period and focus of history, you’ll have read several of these documents, but here they are all in one place.

Miriam Darlington, Otter Country: An Unexpected Adventure in the Natural World. A charming volume of natural history about observing and spending time with wild otters in the UK and how that’s been handled previously in literature etc. Not particularly long, very smoothly done.

Justine Firnhaber-Baker, House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France. Ah, the Capetians. So many jerks, so many centuries. This is an interesting account of this dynasty, if you’re interested in the transition from the Frankish to the French, if you’re interested in dynastic politics at all, if you like the kind of history where the historian is very clear that the past only looks inevitable to us because we can see it from this distance and in the lived reality it wasn’t inevitable at all.

Margaret Frazer, The Murderer’s Tale. Kindle. This is one of the less pleasant reads in this series simply because of the time in the point of view of the titular character. He’s not merely a murderer but an arrogant jackass, and you get to spend a lot of time in his head. Also Dame Frevisse is having a cranky book, and one can’t entirely blame her with the amount of death that’s been surrounding her. But it’s just a very prickly entry in this ongoing series.

Jodi Meadows, Bye Forever I Guess. Discussed elsewhere.

Premee Mohamed, The Siege of Burning Grass. A weird fantasy meditation on pacifism, war, and how we justify ourselves, lots of beautiful tiny details of magic/tech that are not genre standard, very much fun to read, recommended.

Gennarose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories. Kelly Link blurbed this book, and you can see why: a lot of its themes and stylistic concerns overlap with Link’s favorite types of short story work. I found it generally quite charming, though the illustrated title story was not really my jam.

Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski, The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family, and Kingdom. It was entirely coincidence that I read this and the book about the Capetians in the same fortnight, but it was a lovely coincidence, because it detailed how two very different polities had evolved toward similar(…ish) governance from very different places. Raffensperger and Ostrowski are very careful not to frame their work as giving credence to contemporary Russian nationalist ideas about the proper boundaries of Russia, using Rus and other relevant terms so as to be clear which entities were when. An interesting resource for this era and region.

Tabitha Stanmore, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic. This is very centered on England with a little bit of France and the rest of Europe. It’s got a lot of interesting detail about practical magic, how it was used, how it was regarded, how it was not regarded though modern people assume it was. It’s short and interesting, so if you have any inclination towards this topic, it’s not going to be a big commitment.

Boel Westin, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words. This is more or less a work biography of Jansson. If you want more about her interiority, you’ll need her own work. There’s not a lot of depth of emotion, but there sure is a lot of information about what she did when, and that’s interesting and useful in itself.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Well, I don’t know if this is the last Flavia de Luce mystery Alan Bradley is writing, but it’s the last one I’m reading.

The trick of young protagonists is that they grow up if you give them enough story time to do so. Adults ideally grow as well, but I think we find more tolerance for an adult character, especially an adult detective in a series, who doesn’t change much. A kid, though…there’s a precedent for Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden to stay the same age forever, but those are not series for adults. The teenage-ness of those detectives is the magical “big kid” nature of looking up in age at teens, not looking down at them. Flavia de Luce has to progress in self-awareness to be satisfying.

Entire Cousin Undine, who allows Bradley to keep writing about a precocious, bratty little girl and also give Flavia a taste of her own medicine. I see why he’s brought Cousin Undine into the series and also I don’t really enjoy the result. “What if this was entirely about a more mature teenager” is not the series he wants to write. Okay. But as for what I want to read…well.

And one of the things that forced Flavia to grow up recently was dealing with death as real and immediate, dealing with dead people as people and not merely mysteries. This book has the kind of plot twist that I find unconscionable: it leans on a character’s emotional reaction for pathos and growth and then pulls the rug out with “surprise, that person faked their own death.” To avoid spoilers, sort of, I’m not saying which character it was who died and then turned out not to have died, but it was basically the worst possible choice for my enjoyment of the series. I was beyond annoyed and into angry and disgusted. If you don’t hate that particular plot twist the same way as I do, you might still be entertained by this series despite Cousin Undine, or even because of her if your tastes run that way. Me, I’m done.

The other thing is that the reasoning for the faked death is related to the way that Bradley keeps leaning into secret super-spy networks as this series evolves, and frankly I find his secret super-spy networks super-tedious, so if anything could have made this plot twist worse, it’s that it’s done for very boring reasons. The more I learn about this super-spy network, the less impressed I am. So this is my stop, actually, this is where I throw Gladys the bicycle in the grass and wander away. The early books in the series are good, they’re still there, you can read them. This one is a stinker, and not just because of the prevalence of fart jokes with Cousin Undine.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I have known Jodi on this here internet since forever.

This is an interesting category of book that I don’t think we saw as much of in years past: it’s a nerd book that’s not speculative. Ingrid, the protagonist, is deeply emotionally involved with her favorite fantasy novel series and her favorite online game; they are both crucial to the plot. But at no point does the game come to life, nor does she fall into a fantasy landscape. The realistic world is stressful enough.

Ingrid is terminally shy, and going into the eighth grade she’s been friends with Rachel, who is demanding and self-centered. Her best friend, Lorren, is through an online game, but having some in-person friends who don’t neg her and push her around–some friends who could notice the quiet girl in the corner–would be nice too. She also has a popular “scroll” on social media–under the name of Anony Mouse for a reason. Her hilarious wrong number texts have a large following, but only Rachel, Lorren, and Grandma know it’s her. Something has to change–and the arrival of new kids in town will be the spark of that change. Ingrid’s wrong texts lead to a new friendship just as her friendship with Rachel is crumbling to dust. But Rachel isn’t letting go easily–and the new friend maintains a mystery. She’d love to find out more, but he continues coy–for nefarious reasons or otherwise?

I really loved Ingrid’s relationship with her grandmother, and all the sensory details of the knitting and the food are spot on. Some of the social dynamics are frustrating, but they’re frustrating in the direction of realistic eighth graders rather than externally imposed melodrama. If you’re not in the mood for non-speculative older middle grade, this is definitely in that genre, but if that’s the day you’re having (or the stage of life you’re in!), this is a sweet story.