Category: Uncategorized

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary. This is the scraps of observation, literally scraps, that Barthes scribbled down about his feelings after his mother died. I had been hoping for the sort of communal experience of grief across the years that I got with Tennyson, and this is definitely not it. Barthes focuses almost entirely on himself here, rather than on memories of the person he lost–I can tell you very little about his mother, from this book. Some grief experiences turn out not to be universal at all.

Gwenda Bond, Girl in the Shadows. This is a YA in the same universe as Girl on a Wire with overlap of characters but different protagonist, so I think it would be fairly easy to pick up without reading the first one. The protag here is a teenage girl who wants to be a magician despite the dearth of girls in that profession–and then finds out that more than one kind of magic is real, and her control over the stage kind does not extend to the other kind right away. There are the dangers of being involved in a circus plus the dangers of the world beyond it. This was fun, and I raced through it.

Stephanie Burgis, Moontangled. Discussed elsewhere.

Thomas DuBois, ed., Sanctity in the North: Saints, Lives, and Cults in Medieval Scandinavia. Lots of good essays here about the pre-Protestant saint cults and also which elements of saint worship survived into the Protestant era in this region and why. Thoughtful and interesting, rounded out some views of a region where I have a lot more context of the religions of the period surrounding this one.

Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma, Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night. Kindle. Oh this was so lovely. It’s a story of found family and lost love and daring magic rescues, and if you’ve ever felt on the outside of a Christmas movie looking in, this might well be for you. It is the very best kind of inclusive and fun, and I sat on a bench waiting for Orchestra Hall to open up reading and laughing helplessly at how funny but also how true some of the passages were.

Tim Flannery, Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds: On the Track of Unknown Mammals in Wildest New Guinea. Every year for my grandpa’s birthday I buy a book that we both might have enjoyed. This was this year’s choice, and it did not disappoint, it had all sorts of things about rare species that were just the sort of thing I would have called Grandpa up to read to him over the phone, or vice versa. I think it’s clear that Flannery would write it somewhat differently today, that his more recent books have learned more modern language approaches to talking about different people’s customs, but there was enough about the tree kangaroos to be going on with.

J.E.A. Jolliffe, Pre-Feudal England: The Jutes. This was a book from the ’30s and was a grave disappointment. Not recommended. The time spent on land deeds was all right, but Jolliffe was muddled about who he was talking about and tracking his own assumptions vs. proven fact and I yelled at it and really, you don’t want this.

Andrew Lang, The Pink Fairy Book. Kindle. Probably a reread, but I read the fairy books so long ago that I have no record of it. Lots and lots of Lang’s own cultural assumptions heaped onto other people’s fairy tales in ways that are very transparent now that we don’t share them, but on the other hand he was trying to get worldwide fairy tales to an audience that wasn’t necessarily getting them other ways, so…we can get them other ways, but thanks for your service, Andrew Lang.

D.H. Lawrence, ed., Some Imagist Poets, 1916: An Annual Anthology. Kindle. What a hilarious thing to read immediately (immediately) after Rose Macaulay and see exactly what she was making fun of in the poetry of this era, because yes, okay Rose, yes. There were some lovely things in it but not by anyone you wouldn’t expect, unfortunately, if you’d read any Imagists before. No hidden gems, alas.

Rose Macaulay, Dangerous Ages. Kindle. This book, good heavens this book, where has this book been. (We all know where this book has been.) It is from 1920, it is about a woman who has raised her children and finds herself at loose ends with them more or less grown, and is trying to figure out what next, in an era when that question was regarded with a certain bafflement by most of the people around her, and it’s about middle age and work and family and…it’s amazing, it’s sharp and tender and funny and does all sorts of things, and I would say no one else thinks of doing them, but I didn’t know she thought of doing them, so who knows who else is out there. It’s free on Gutenberg whenever you want it.

Arkady Martine, Danika Dinsmore, et al, eds., Reckoning Issue 4. Kindle. Another really good issue of this magazine, which I have consistently enjoyed. My favorite pieces were “The Last Good Time to be Alive” by Waverly SM, “Thank You For Your Patience” by Rebecca Campbell, and “Ambient and Isolated Effects of Fine Particulate Matter” by Emery Robin. I was particularly glad I’d read the Campbell right before my ConFusion panels because I talked about it on two or possibly all three of them, it just kept applying, it keeps applying to everything. I got to hear the Robin piece read aloud by its author in New York in October, so that was an astonishing treat, and I can’t wait for it to go live in the online edition so I can link it for you in my short story round-ups; especially those who have lived in the East Bay will, I think, find it rings particularly true.

Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II. This is more a social than a technical history, but that’s all right, there are loads of codebreaking technical histories, this tells you how the women involved with the American codebreaking projects lived, where they lived and how they ate and what their families knew and how they kept them from knowing. I loved this.

Delia Sherman, Young Woman in a Garden. Reread. Mostly historical fantasy shorts, but in quite a variety of settings and magics, and I did enjoy the variety even on its return visit.

Lilah Sturges and Polterink, Lumberjanes: The Shape of Friendship. Shapeshifting friendship to the max! Never Not Lumberjanes.

Mariko Tamaki, Lumberjanes: The Good Egg. This one is a Lumberjanes middle grade novel, and even more Never Not Lumberjanes, because I will take it in graphic novel form if that’s how they’re serving it, but I would always rather have interiority than illustration. That’s obviously a personal preference, but it is in fact my personal preference. Yay.

Review copy provided by the author, who is also a personal friend.

This is the latest installment in the Harwood Spellbook series of romantic fantasies, shorter than novel length but longer than short stories. In each one the romance and the fantasy are very strongly entangled: while the plot can be framed as a standard romance plot such as “secret engagement” or “miscommunication about true intentions,” these elements are always inextricable from the fantasy worldbuilding–a reader who hated fantasy couldn’t just “skip that part,” nor could a reader who hated romance. Both parts are crucially built into the structure of the piece, nothing wasted or extraneous.

This is no exception. Julianna Banks, a brilliant magician, has been working tirelessly in her studies at Thornfell College of Magic, determined to prove her own worth and the worth of the new class of women magicians–not only for herself but for her secret fiancee, Caroline Fennell. Caroline’s letters, on the other hand, have been distant and strange. Caroline’s fortunes have changed, and she fears that their relationship must change with them. On the night of Thornfell’s ball, the two stumble into problems of their own making–and of magical origin–in the moonlit gardens. It takes not only Julianna’s magic but also Caroline’s diplomatic insight to extricate them from their troubles with gorgeous ball dresses more or less intact.

This was just the kind of fun I needed on the day I read it, and I think fans of the series will appreciate it. I have low tolerance for miscommunication plots, and I think in this case the shorter nature of the work helped a lot–I didn’t have to squirm through hundreds of pages of JUST SAY IT, they could get to the good honest trusting parts much sooner because it is SHORT, which made the entire enterprise easier on my nerves. Hooray.

Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House. This was a period of reading when I needed to spend a lot of time on the couch, so books I could dive into and not come up for air until I was done were very welcome, and this was one of them. I am a gigantic sucker for college novels, and this is very much a college novel, but it’s a college novel that has considered how much privilege informs the American college experience, it’s a college novel that is not writing about Yale as though, tra la, really anybody could have a lovely time at Yale because people get to go there at random! There is no tra la. There is a certain knowing fondness for various Yale things, as with Pamela Dean writing about Carleton/Blackstock, but with an edge to it. The magic is dark but with hope baked in. I was so glad I had this to devour when I wanted to devour something all at once.

Stephanie Burgis, Renegade Magic and Stolen Magic. These two were a completely different kind of couch read, equally appreciated. They’re the end of the series that started with Kat, Incorrigible: Regency magic, but with an adolescent protagonist, so while there are society balls, trips to Bath, weddings, those things are all around the edges of the young protagonist’s real focus, which is magic, magic, and more magic. Kat continues to be spirited, determined, and a lot of fun.

Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. This is a graphic novel about what it says on the tin. For me the graphic novel aspect didn’t add much, but I’m not a very visual person; it was reasonably well done, and if you want to read about this topic without committing an entire month of your life to a volume about it, this is a reasonable place to start.

Liliana Colanzi, Our Dead World. Short stories of the fantastic in translation from a Bolivian writer, and the title gives you a hint on their level of good cheer and optimism. They’re beautiful, but I was glad it was not a longer volume for the sake of my mood.

Andrew S. Curran, Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. A brisk and interesting intellectual biography of Denis Diderot and his place in French philosophy and revolutionary thought. This is very accessible and goes into his relationships with other thinkers of his era in touching but not tedious detail. If you’re at all interested in Diderot or 18th century France, this is probably a good one for you.

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. This book did not come to play. The author states outright that he included the contemporary photographs of the famine victims as an indictment of the colonial governments that ruled them, and his analysis makes it clear that that indictment was justified. He did clear comparisons of how the British government in India handled famines, for example, compared to how the previous Mughal governments handled comparable famines (with data to prove that yes, they were comparable). He went through the hows and whys of the horrific choices that lead to so many deaths. It was a terrifying read, but it was extremely worthwhile, because even if you have consciously rejected the just universe hypothesis, it creeps into all sorts of assumptions, and having it thoroughly stomped is very useful.

Christopher Ingraham, If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now: Why We Traded the Commuting Life for a Little House on the Prairie. Ingraham is mild-mannered and entertaining, and there are all sorts of things about Minnesota that he likes that I could squint at and say, oh, well sure, I guess we do that. There are other places where he utterly, utterly fails to distinguish between Minnesota and rural Minnesota, which is particularly frustrating when so do other coastal people, constantly, so hey, Christopher, thanks for telling them we don’t have varied food in Minnesota, that’s grand, I already wasn’t fighting that inaccurate stereotype. He also…is not going for depth here. This is a light book that does not particularly want to spend time on why his family has replicated a lot of cultural gender patterns, whether other family members might find that a bit less, golly gee whiz keen than he does. So it’s good for a smile, this book, but not a lot more.

Gwyneth Jones, The Buonaratti Quartet. A small volume of short alien stories. I incline to Jones’s more recent and earthly work, but it was thought-provoking about humans and relationships all the same.

T. Kingfisher, Minor Mage. I see why the author and her potential publishers disagreed about whether this was a middle-grade book or not, and I don’t think it’s the reason she stated in the notes, I think it’s that the protagonist ends up taking rather violent actions rather consistently and on-page in the ending. For most of the book, however, it could almost have been the kind of MG that is enjoyed by adults and kids alike; including the ending, I think it can still be enjoyed by a wide age range as long as you’re careful for kids who are okay with processing violence by their main characters. It’s funny and smart and has a clever protag and an armadillo. I’m glad I read it. I just also see where it fell between the cracks in traditional categories.

Sarah Kozloff, A Queen in Hiding. Discussed elsewhere.

Laurie Marks, Air Logic. Finally the conclusion to this amazing series, pulling together threads of timeline and culture and character and ways of thought. Definitely do not start here, definitely read the whole thing…but I do recommend reading the whole thing, it’s only four books, it’s complete and it’s out and it’s human and humane and complicated. I’m so glad I read this when I could have it all in a relatively short time frame. Yay this series. Yay.

Helen Mitsios, ed., Out of the Blue: New Short Fiction from Iceland. There were some very weird trends in this, lots of vacationing on beaches further south, lots of men being jerks to their partners or families…a kind of literary fiction I don’t read much of, but with an Icelandic angle. Interesting.

Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea. This was another college-ish literary fantasy novel, but it was completely different from Ninth House, so reading them in quick succession was actually fine for me. I felt like it was a little in love with its own imagery and could have been shorter, but on the other hand some of its imagery was pretty fun.

Abir Mukherjee, A Rising Man. I really want to find my new mystery series. This one…had a bit too much of the “obsessed with the same things everyone else is obsessed with about that period” going on (WHY do so many mystery writers find opium addiction interesting, opium addiction is so fundamentally boring to me), but on the other hand the cultural interplay of the characters in Calcutta in 1919 is interesting, having Mukherjee’s deft hand on more than one perspective is interesting, so I will probably try another one and see if he lets up on the tropey elements or takes them somewhere fresh.

David Northrup, Africa’s Discovery of Europe. This was a later period than I hoped–it was post-Moorish Spain, for example. But it focused on African perspective of encounters with European cultures, African agency in assessing those cultures, and on documentation of those perspectives in the fifteenth to nineteenth century, which is a good counter-narrative to what historians mostly focus on.

Amanda Owen, A Year in the Life of the Yorkshire Shepherdess. This does what it says on the tin. Lots of sheep, lots of children. Less of me wanting to kick her husband in the shins than her previous volume, so there’s that going for it–there’s no particular need to read the previous one, either, so if you want to skip the bit where you want to kick her husband in the shins and read about a modern woman farming sheep and children in the north of England, just go on ahead with this one.

Rebecca Roanhorse, Race to the Sun. Discussed elsewhere.

Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner, The Fall of the Kings. Reread. I just love this so much, all its scholarly research and magic and earnest and angry and disillusioned and hopeful people and…this has always been my favorite in this entire series and I said I was rereading it for Present Writers, but mostly I was rereading it because I like to. And also because I was seeing the Mad Duke as thwarted scientist and wanted to see that ramify, and it does.

Adam Shoalts, Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada’s Arctic. This guy canoed solo across the Canadian Arctic. If you’ve just said, “But–but the rivers don’t do that,” then congratulations, you win a geography prize. Much of Shoalts’s canoeing was upstream. This was not a sensible thing to do by any stretch, and for me it kept falling on the side of “but why, sir, why” instead of “okay this is just random enough to be cool,” but there were enough encounters with northern fauna to keep me going.

Sherwood Smith, Time of Daughters (Book I). This is set in the same world as Sherwood’s Inda, which is my favorite of her books, but further on in the timeline, when Inda’s legend has had a chance to settle into people’s minds and change how youth and their elders think about their world. Some of the impact of that is here–sometimes in ways that would have surprised Inda and his friends. This is a piece of a larger story, still centered on responsibility and leadership as the Inda books were.

Django Wexler, City of Stone and Silence. Discussed elsewhere.

Troy L. Wiggins, DaVaun Sanders, and Brandon O’Brien, eds., Fiyah Issue 13. Another solid issue, always a pleasure, but for me the first two stories, “All That the Storm Took” by Yah Yah Scholfield and “Roots on Ya” by LH Moore were the ones that really stuck with me in the best ways.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

Okay, so here is what you need to know about whether this book will drive you up a tree: the princess is for no reason explained in the book called a princella instead. Just to be more fantasy-y. And the princella and her mother the queen are the only two people in the world who grow naturally blue hair as a mark of their royalty.

Now, if you got through that and thought, what the hell, I grew up on Mercedes Lackey’s white horseys and I’ve been sick, yeah, pretty much, let’s go with it, this is that book, this is exactly the book to read when you want to curl up on the couch with a fantasy adventure where all the queens for hundreds of years have had the same first initial and there are loads of specially special signs and animals talk to young girls in their heads but never about anything really upsetting and uncouth.

I want a book like that sometimes. I don’t usually want it twice, and I never read through it telling myself it’s perfect. But there are sea battles, there are thrilling escapes, there are wicked schemes, there are loyal retainers, and if you want a one of those, it sure is a one of those. By cracky it sure is. (The duke and duchess’s kids are duchettes. I. I just. Duchettes, they are duchettes. Sure why not.) The ending has a twist that is not really supported by much of anything except the need to proceed into the next three books, all of which are coming out this year. And the more I thought about it after…well, don’t think about it after, is my advice.

Once I was away from the adventure of it, one of the fascinating things about this book is how its surface politics and its deep politics contradict each other. One of the things that the villains are angry with the good nice queen about is her support of equity, wanting workers to get paid well and not exploited! Buuuuut when you look at how the actual farmers are treated by the book, farming is treated as stupid and brainless at every turn, completely unskilled. Spending her entire childhood with farmers gives the princella zero insight into the skills necessary for farming even though she can speak to animals, because animal husbandry apparently takes no skill at all. (Spoiler alert: this is wrong.) The very spirits of the world are constantly demonstrating how special the royals are compared to the common folk, and given an entire childhood to learn about the ways of the common folk, mainly what the princella seems to learn is wow, these people sure are dumb and boring. So what we’re getting here is noblesse oblige, not equity.

It does not get better from there. Maybe the sequels will. Or not; they’re already in production, so there’s no chance for Kozloff to take a breath and learn. It’s all coming on very, very quickly for the princella and her…I can’t really say friends, because she spends her childhood with one best friend who never gets a personality. I can’t say allies. Subjects, though. It’s all coming on very, very quickly for the princella and her subjects, and if that’s the kind of fun you want, here it is.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

If you’ve been following the new releases from the Rick Riordan Presents imprint of kids’ fantasies, I think you’ll be pleased with Rebecca Roanhorse’s addition to the line, a tale of modern Navajo (Diné) kids fighting exploitative monsters on behalf of the world. If you’ve been reading Rebecca Roanhorse’s science fiction fantasy thrillers set in a ravaged American Southwest, I think it’ll be exciting to see her do a kids’ take on the same region and legends. If you haven’t been reading either–welcome, you’ve got a lot of fun stuff ahead of you.

And this is one.

Nizhoni Begay has never quite figured out how she’s going to shine in the world, but she’s sure there’s going to be something. She’s in the midst of crossing basketball and internet stardom off her list, but surely something else will come along where she can dazzle. It turns out there is! And it is monsters! Or the hunting of monsters! So that’s…well, it’s a lot, honestly. It is a whole book worth and possibly then some. Nizhoni’s little brother and best friend have special gifts of their own, not just along for the ride, and so do some unexpected other cast members, sometimes in disguise.

So this is a heck of a quest. Trains and giant birds and personal growth and magical arrows and things that you would want on a quest! It is fun and it has brave kid protagonists and they eat Cheetos and fight baddies and basically I think you will like it and also some kids you know might like it! Okay? Okay!

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also Django and I have taught workshops together and generally hung out at cons etc. I have his and his wife’s Christmas card right here.

This is the sequel to Ship of Smoke and Steel, and while I think it would stand alone fairly well practically, a lot of what’s missing here that was there in the previous volume is…the monsters and the magic. A lot of those things are in this book by implication, brought in by their more extensive presence in the previous book, so this one can focus more on character relationships and further development of the worldbuilding.

I would hope it would go without saying that this is no bad thing? But what it is, to my way of thinking, is a reason to read the first book first, to not attempt to pick up mid-series and hope to have the relationships and stakes handed to you on the fly, when the first book actually takes the time to lay them out for you and give you that arc.

Some of the late-book twist is…a known trope, which is not inappropriately deployed here, which remains nevertheless not my favorite trope, but I know some people love it. It’s a genre-crossing fave for a great many people, and I don’t want to be too spoilerific about it, but if there’s a particular SF/fantasy bender that bugs you more than spoilers bug you, message me and I’ll talk about it. I don’t think Django does it badly, I hasten to add, it’s just a thing that doesn’t excite me nearly as much as the character relationships do. I’m really glad that this is a book with the strong motivations it has, the focus on how and why these people care about each other turned up to basically eleven on every page. That’s worth far more to me than more giant crab fights. Even if I missed the giant crab fights a little.