Category: Uncategorized

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.

Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor. Reread. Gosh I still do really like this. I like the gentleness of it, how the earnest attempts to do things right don’t always or even mostly make things easy, the sudden immersion in largely unfamiliar social dynamics. I like seeing the beginnings of the pieces we’re later having drawn out in related works. I wanted something I knew I liked a lot, and this was a good choice.

Elizabeth Gaskell, A Dark Night’s Work. Kindle. This is not a Gothic per se, but it has a lot of the elements of murder and despair and cover-up and purity/innocence being touched incidentally by sin, and…yeah. I like to read Victorian works cold, and sometimes the result is that I have no idea I’m walking into, “Stop! You cannot hang this man, for he is NOT the murderer! He is merely an accessory to murder, which you think is great and will give a holiday in the country!” (Yeah, that was a spoiler. But there is much better Gaskell for your time.)

Rochelle Hassan, The Buried and the Bound and The Summer Queen. Back in the glory days of livejournal, I included both “interstitial arts” and “stitial arts” in my interest keywords list, and this is why: these two books are firmly in the middle of their contemporary YA fantasy genre, and I am here for it. They’re well done, the characters are compellingly drawn, and I had a good time. Are they doing something wildly different for their genre? They sure are not, and they don’t have to.

Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300 to 1300. Really lovely book, tracing the spread of Christianity, why and how it went where it did, without resorting to “it was just so darn right, is why.” When you look at how accurately Heather maps the spread of Christianity in Scandinavia toward the end of the book (blotches! rather than solid polities!), you will see why I am so happy with his analysis. He also looks at why various things wound up heresies rather than orthodoxies and how things could have gone differently there. Good times.

Sarah Henning, The Lies We Conjure. Discussed elsewhere.

Lawrence A. Herzog, From Aztec to High Tech: Architecture and Landscape Across the Mexico-US Border. Oh what a sad and disappointing book. Poor Herzog, he was talking to us from the ’90s, when the shopping mall looked eternal and NAFTA was going to make all borders in North America dissolve. So uh. There’s a lot of “uh oh, oh dear, nope” going on here.

Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735-1789. This one is coming to us from the ’50s, so it is very…which white men formed which science-related societies at which times. We live in a house where this information might be useful for any number of projects at the drop of a hat, but it is not more expansive than that in its scope, and in general you probably would like something else about this topic/period better. (Was I reading a lot in bed while sick? you bet I was. Did this mean I delved deep in the pile? I sure did.)

Sarah Orne Jewett, Old Friends and New. Kindle. Slice of life short stories about 19th century Maine. Gentle. Notable for me in their use of the verb “to matronize.” Let’s make matronize happen. (It doesn’t mean “the bad kind of to patronize, but done by a woman”! It means “to sponsor fun activities for younger people, to host them,” basically.)

Gideon Marcus et al, eds., Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963). My book club read one of the books in this series, and I bought this one with it as it technically comes first. We didn’t enjoy that one and won’t be doing this one, I don’t think; the editorial notes aren’t quite as maddening but are still pretty random, and the stories are not as well-filtered as one might hope. There’s that line between “I want to read the stories that aren’t immensely anthologized” and “oh I see why not.” Sigh.

John McPhee, Tabula Rasa Volume 1. This is the stuff McPhee isn’t going to get to, his false starts, things that he might have written at length about but won’t and how he thought about it while he was getting to that conclusion. It’s a very weird book and interesting for me as a professional writer. Don’t read it as your first McPhee, though, go read Annals.

Jo Miles, Ravenous State. The triumphant conclusion (gosh I love getting to say that) of its trilogy, and you’ll want to read the other two first. Good news, they’re available. Each one has a different sibling’s perspective, and it took me a minute to get used to Libbi, but I really liked what Jo was doing with point of view in the end, that this sibling really did not see the world the same way as her siblings did and that changed the dynamic a lot. Space opera, evil corporations, grass roots organization, yay.

Samantha Mills, The Wings Upon Her Back. Deprogramming from fascism, now, for mechas! There’s more depth to it than that, but also, really, if you don’t want to read a book that’s that, I don’t know what to tell you.

L.M. Montgomery, A Tangled Web. Reread. I remembered liking this as a small child and hadn’t revisited it in a while. The weird inclusion of the racial slur on the last page, irrelevant to the entire preceding book, is still jarring; the characters are still reasonably charming, but as I’m spending less time immersed in the dynamics of a giant family, I have less need of books like this that are basically “giant families, amirite?”

Su Fang Ng, Writing About Discovery in the Early Modern East Indies. Kindle. A short monograph about Portuguese and Malaysian writing about the era of early encounters between the two, highlighting some of the ways in which Portuguese travel writing varied from other European writing about early encounters with other cultures. Interesting, brief, would be happy to read more of this kind of compare-and-contrast.

Vaishnavi Patel, Goddess of the River. I really liked Kaikeyi, so I was pretty excited to see another retelling by Patel. I felt like this one was not quite as special–it’s interesting but very straightforward, a very linear narrative. Possibly if I was more immersed in the Mahabharata I would feel that it was wildly original in its divergences, but as things stand for this reader at least, it flowed from event to event following the mythic structure more than imposing novel structure upon them. Which didn’t make it a bad read, just not as outstanding as the related debut.

O.O. Sangoyomi, Masquerade. Discussed elsewhere.

Evelyn Sharp, The Youngest Girl in the School. Kindle. I’d read Sharp’s fantastical/fairy tale writing before. This is a fairly period-standard school story, complete with dramatic injury that draws the distant parent’s attention. (Gosh kids in that era fell off things regularly, if this kind of literature is to be believed.) If you like that sort of thing, this sure is a one of those, but it’s not particularly outstanding of its kind.

Noel Streatfeild, Skating Shoes. Reread. There was less in this than I remembered. Like–temporally, it just goes less far in the two girls’ lives than my brain had filled in as a kid. It is also very very wish fulfillment in the characterization directions. Which ends up being fine, it’s not one of the toxic Streatfeilds, but it’s not one of the best ones either, it’s just sort of there.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I’m usually not the person for comp titles. In fact I usually hate comp titles–I find they’re often of the model “thing you like meets thing you found super-boring, phrased in a way that makes it impossible to tell what elements they might be drawing on!” Yaaaay. But the comp for this book was “Knives Out with magic,” and it is basically exactly that, yep, that’s what we’ve got here, we’ve got Knives Out with magic.

Ruby and Wren really need money for college, so when they’re offered a few thousand each to play a rich lady’s granddaughters at a dinner party, it seems like a no-brainer. Stick close to her, make small talk, how hard can it be? When one of their fellow diners dies, their erstwhile grandmother disappears, and the people around them start doing actual magic, they find out exactly how hard. But it’s too late: they’re magically locked into this gorgeous estate with a bunch of scared, angry witches who think they’re the scions of a death magic house, and the main way out is to solve the murder, lest they be trapped forever–or just plain killed.

The other teenage heirs to magical lineages have a great many reasons to suspect each other of nefarious deeds–their elders are certainly getting up to enough. So Ruby and Wren have to figure out who they can trust among the impeccably dressed, super-privileged, immensely powerful young witches–because going it alone is definitely not an option.

So yeah, Knives Out with magic, basically exactly the same kind of beautiful clothes and setting but eat the rich story as Knives Out, fish out of water characters combined with the ones who absolutely assume they belong there. Lots of yelling and running around in search of clues and catching feels for all the wrong people. A novel for the ages, probably not. A fun romp for right now, yeah, absolutely.