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Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is an online friend.

This is a debut novel of a kind of science fiction loads of my friends are constantly (no, CONSTANTLY) telling me they do not see enough. It’s planets-and-aliens science fiction! It’s got space stations and settlements and lots of divergence/diversity of human culture and a very big universe and spaceships that think and people disagreeing about who counts as people! Adventure! Excitement! We may know that a Jedi craves not these things, but that doesn’t seem to stop the majority of my social circle.

Well, here you go, friends, here’s a one of these, and it is fun and satisfying and has an ending that leaves a lot of room without being maddeningly open. This is a book, not a chunk of story approximately book-shaped. Fergus Ferguson (under various aliases) and his allies (maybe friends? They’re working on that?) unravel mysteries, fight bad guys, and come up with plans so zany they just might work.

Or not, but then something else needs to, and that’s okay too.

I don’t want to spoil too many elements of Finder, because turning a corner and finding I was not quite where I expected to be was part of the fun of this book. I will say that there are a lot of elements that I’m used to having set up for two, three, five books later, and while there is plenty of room in this universe for interesting stories, Palmer is not hoarding her ideas. She’s giving us a fireworks-filled book. Or sometimes a tennis-ball-filled book. Um. Just go read it, okay? You’ll find out.

Full disclosure: we are friends who are represented by the same agent, and I got this review copy from passing it around among our agentsibs.

However.

I am entirely sure that I would love this book anyway, even if I’d never heard of Claire Eliza Bartlett before, because it is so full of things I love. The setting is a fantasy world version of WWII-era Russia, which is something I don’t see nearly enough of–and then to make things even better, Claire draws on the real history of the Night Witches to create a group of girl witches–pilots, navigators, and engineers using this setting’s magic to fly missions against the enemy.

Revna is the daughter of a supposed traitor to the Union, a man whose main crime is stealing waste scraps of “living metal” to fashion prosthetic legs for Revna herself. Linné is the general’s daughter, spending years hiding in a regular regiment as a boy until she gets caught, dedicated to the Union. They find themselves in very different precarious situations within their very different worldviews, that lead to the same flight training, the same missions, the same perils.

It’s as good as it sounds. It’s better. It’s full of varied and complicated relationships with a morally compromised homeland under siege. Friendships form in all permutations in a war zone: the shallow ones, the easy ones that find their own depth, the treacherous ones, the difficult ones that almost don’t happen at all. Trust, friendship, and making your way through a situation with no clear answers are the heart of this book, and I love it.

Mary Alexandra Agner, The -Ologists. This is a beautiful chapbook of poems focused on women who do science. Favorites included “Dark Matter” and “Song of Steel,” but really I’m glad to have this entire thing. It’s a tiny treasure.

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion. Reread. My records show that I haven’t returned to this since it was new, and I find it holds up pretty darn well. There is some reliance on coincidence in the plot, and there are some places where favorite themes are quite transparent, but I still really enjoyed the world and the worldbuilding, and of course the characters. I am a sucker for setting inspired by medieval Spain in general, actually.

K.A. Doore, The Perfect Assassin. Discussed elsewhere.

Larry Hammer, trans., One Hundred People, One Poem Each. Discussed elsewhere.

Sam Hawke, City of Lies. This was a freebie in my WFC bag, and I didn’t really know anything about it or its author. It’s about poison and siege and trust and families, and I really thought it was fun. You might too.

Justina Ireland and Troy L. Wiggins, eds., Fiyah Issue 9. Kindle. Another very solid issue from the Fiyah team. I felt that Jonathan Kincaid’s “The Ishologu” and Nicky Drayden’s “The Rat King of Spanish Harlem” both really stood out.

Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle. Reread. Another book that holds up charmingly–I’m doing a project, and it’s great, basically. Sophie’s level-headed adventures delight me.

Kelly Jones, Murder, Magic, and What We Wore. This is a YA Regency fantasy featuring a heroine on the verge of penury, saving herself with her undiscovered dressmaking skill. It’s a particularly interesting thing to read in close conjunction with Howl’s Moving Castle, although Mary Robinette Kowal’s glamourist series is a closer comparison point.

Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks. A glossary of regional terms for landscape features. Delightful, probably most useful if you own a copy to refer back to or are using it for a specific project. Still delightful, though.

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire. Discussed elsewhere.

Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings and Bandwidth. These little dips into Oliver’s work are great, but I find I’m wanting to immerse more, to treat it like a cold spring lake and get my head soaked with the shock of her poetry. We’ll see if I can manage that; in the meantime this is what came in at the library.

James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape. I loved this. Loved. Rebanks is quite thoughtful about herding sheep and also about how our systems are sometimes inadequate for rural kids in ways that are different from the ways in which they’re inadequate in general. But also lots of just plain vivid experience of herding. Very useful if a person happened to want to write a novella in a sheep farming village. You know, just. Hypothetically.

Mary Rickert, The Memory Garden. Reread. While this is still a beautiful book (mostly about women’s relationships and flowers) on the second read, I find that it relied a bit more heavily on its revelations than I’d realized. Still not sorry I reread it.

Vandana Singh, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories. Some of these stories are searingly great, others merely interesting–“merely”–but a Vandana Singh collection is basically always a good life choice.

Caroline Stevermer, Magic Below Stairs. Reread. I still feel like the ending privileges the nobles too much at the expense of the main characters, but I enjoyed the details of how the young servant’s work fed into the magic plot and setting quite a lot, if anything more than the first time.

G. Willow Wilson et al, Ms. Marvel: Damage Per Second and Ms. Marvel: Mecca. These are not good graphic novels to read if you want a break from the horrors of modern politics–there is, for example, an image of a hate-filled attack on a mosque–but I still absolutely love Kamala Khan and am so glad to have these, knowing that they are going to take on issues of the current day, knowing that they will do a darn good job of that.

Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing With Dragons. Reread. And for the moment this is the last of “rereads that really held up.” I had a moment quite early on when I didn’t remember whether it was one of those books, that sneers at people for having blonde hair or liking domestic things, and then of course it wasn’t, of course that’s not what Pat was doing at all. It blew the Bechdel test out of the water before the said test was even formulated, and I think that all fantasy novel heroines should have best friends willing to try fireproofing spells with them. Yay.

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

Arkady Martine has a lot to say about empires. Luckily for the reader, she’s very clear on the difference between an academic monograph–that’s her alter ego’s job–and a space opera. A Memory Called Empire is full of bombs, spaceships, intrigue, poisons, and neurological devices. It is also full of thoughts about empire and its periphery, of how systems eat people and how those people can resist–before death, and beyond it with their influence.

It’s fun. It’s thoughtful and action-packed and well-balanced, and there are friendships (with more than one outcome and more than one focus!) as well as a flirtation. The main character, Mahit Dzmare, is poised at exactly the line between knowledgeable and lost that’s so much fun to read as she navigates a tense and dangerous diplomatic situation that’s fascinating not only to her but to me. I easily tuned out hours of airport with this book. I love its barbarians and am fascinated by its empire.

And it’s doing the thing that science fiction claims to do but often does not: examining fundamental questions from new angles. More than one person, more than one culture, has a particular answer to the idea of where the self begins and ends, and they’re all vital to this book, with its explosions and catastrophes. I can’t wait to see what the next one brings. Highly recommended.

Review copy provided by the translator, who is a friend on this here internet for many years.

This is a famous and formative collection of Japanese poetry, first compiled in the 13th century and referenced often in the centuries since. There are names in this volume that have remained famous in the time since–there’s a Sei Shonagon poem in here, and one by Murasaki Shikibu, and several emperors–but also there are names that are less famous even to someone who’s studied Japanese literature. Looking at how that kind of compilation can end up assorted is fascinating.

The themes here are the expected ones because this volume did a great deal to set those expectations–so when there are lots of lovers crying into their sleeves, seasonal references, meeting in dreams, it’s interesting to watch them develop. The layout is similar to the previous translation volume I read from Larry, where the original and the translation are both given, and also contextual translation notes that point out where something is wordplay in the original, what significance a location had, the sort of thing that’s sometimes crucial and always set apart so it doesn’t nag at the poem itself. The poems are all five line formal ones, all very brief, so this is not a long read but a very rewarding one all the same.

Review copy provided by our mutual agent. Also we’re friends.

Every system, every society, every government, has its drawbacks. People differ on what those are and how to address them–in the real world. In too much fantasy, this disagreement gets flattened out into pure antagonism: this is the obvious problem, and if you’re not at least sort of aligned with me on the solution, you are The Baddie.

The Perfect Assassin doesn’t do that. Even in a system that features, well, secret assassins. And I enjoy that a lot.

Amastan is an historian by day, assassin by night. He and the others of his age group have been training for years, learning the rules that keep them in check as well as the skills that will be the difference between life and death for them and others. But someone else isn’t following those rules. Amastan and his friends discover not only a corpse, but one whose jaani (spirit, more or less, sort of) has not been properly laid to rest. This unexpected danger spurs him to find out more about the people around him, and about the past he is supposed to be studying.

Amastan is a beautifully cautious protagonist. He thinks things through, he tries his best–and he still gets himself into heaps of trouble. You will never have the “UGH THINK THINGS THROUGH” problem here, because ‘Stan does think things through–and the results are beautifully, humanly messy anyway. I was nearly late for a lunch meeting when I picked up this book, and it remained fun, exciting, and especially compelling throughout–for me, substantially because its protagonist is so well-drawn. Definitely recommended.

Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night. I read this space opera in draft and loved it then. I love it now. And not just for the Mantis Cop! Although: Mantis Cop. Seriously there is fun with space travel, there is fun with alien species, there is, most importantly, fun with the human brain! How do we become civilized people, what alters free will and what is a means of asserting it…there are some huge questions in this book, and also loving chosen family, and also quite a lot of vacuum along the way. Highly recommended.

Mary Beard, How Do We Look and Women and Power: A Manifesto. Both of these books are Beard’s generalist side, turning her extensive knowledge of history to wider questions. They’re not going to revolutionize ideas about art and gaze or about women, but they’re solid works, the sort of thing that helps bolster reasonable views. She has the lovely skill–not all that common in a Classicist or Classical historian in my experience–of being able to write without assuming that Rome is the world’s eternal center, which makes things 1000% more readable for me. I’d previously read her book about Pompeii but will pursue more.

H.W. Brands, Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants. This book was a bit disappointing for me. It did what it said on the tin, sort of; the epic part was lacking. But I felt that there was less of the zany context of the era than I was really hoping and more focus on these three dudes, most of whom should have been kicked sharply in the shins. There are better books about the early Republic out there.

Zen Cho, The True Queen. Light and frothy and fun. Some of the plot twists are visible from space, and yet it’s experiencing the specific way that Cho writes them that provides the joy. Recognizes that pre-20th century England was the center of a global empire and not an ethnic monoculture, and used that fact as the basis for a glorious romp.

Louise Erdrich, The Birchbark House. Children’s historical novel about a young Ojibwa girl. It is mostly bright and suffused with light, but there are moments where history makes the shadows in this child’s life very deep indeed.

Meg Frank and Julia Rios, eds., Hope in This Timeline. This is a beautiful collection of hopeful stories from Fireside. I had read them already, but having a copy to shelve makes me very happy.

Tessa Gratton, The Strange Maid. This is the second book in a deeply weird series about Norse gods. It is the right kind of deeply weird; I am so fond and so pleased and I cannot wait to get the third one. Also it’s the kind of series that doesn’t just do more of the same but goes into different ideas and places and perspectives. Yay for this Valkyrie book.

Larry Hammer, These Things Called Dreams: The Poems of Ono no Komachi. Discussed elsewhere.

Kate Heartfield, Alice Payne Rides. Discussed elsewhere.

Carlos Hernandez, Sal and Gabi Break the Universe. What a lovely way to spend a snow day. I bounced around full of joy at the adventures of Sal and Gabi. Which are not always joyful adventures! There’s some deep stuff going on here! But it’s fun, it’s funny, it’s serious, it’s full of parallel universes, and the protags and their families and friends are immensely charming. I loved Carlos’s collection of short work for adults. This MG novel won my heart in a totally different–and very much similar–way. Highly recommended.

Kelly Jones, Are You Ready to Hatch an Unusual Chicken? This is the sequel to the previous chicken superpower book, and I love them so much, they make me so happy, I am all in on whatever Kelly Jones wants to do next, because: yay super chickens.

T. Kingfisher, Swordheart. This was funny and adventurous and very sharp about problems with our world while also taking on genre tropes. I laughed and gasped and enjoyed the heck out of this. More.

Sonya Taaffe, Forget the Sleepless Shores. These stories remind me of a certain era of Elizabeth Hand stories in their beautiful prose, but with somewhat different roots. The ones that drew on Jewish sources were my favorite, but honestly there’s not a badly-written piece in here.

Natasha Trethewey, Domestic Work. Poems about everyday life, mostly not in the poet’s immediate present but in her past, through photos of her family and thoughts about what that past has meant. Also some beautiful poems on the line between domestic and nature poetry. I’m very glad I read these.

Anne Ursu, The Lost Girl. A book about sisterhood, about making space for other people and finding what you want to do with your own space, about friends and stubbornness and saving each other. What a fierce book this is. Yay.

Review copy provided by the author, who has been a friend on this here internet for…gosh. A minute.

This is a selection of 9th century Japanese poems, with translation notes and images of their author from various sources. The images are very high quality reproductions and add to the sense of what was going on with Ono no Komachi, whose life is more speculated about than firmly documented.

The poems themselves are short and evocative–mostly in one genre of love poetry or another, with room for playfulness. Larry’s chosen layout does a good job of letting the reader appreciate the translated poem as a poem, just as it is, and only then transition to the translation notes, which are easy to understand even without a strong grasp of Japanese and give cultural as well as linguistic context for each poem. Where there is wordplay that’s impossible to translate, that’s noted–but not in the middle of the poem where it would distract from writing that is on one layer still easy to enjoy on its own terms over a millennium later and in a different language. This volume is short but rewarding.