Category: Uncategorized

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

This is the second in a series, and I have not read the first, which is called Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant. Its content is easy to infer, since the titular characters are both in this volume: the Turkish Lieutenant, Mister Selim, narrates to the reader his role in events and his (slightly more sensible) opinions of Delilah’s exploits.

And exploits: they are many.

There is swashing, and also buckling. There are adventures on horseback, on sailboats, in carriages, at fancy balls, in gardens, at teas. There are adventures with multiple different sets of soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars. The swords, the muskets, the barrels of powder, and the written-out sound effects are copious. So there are many of you for whom this is going to be exactly your sort of rollicking adventure. If you have ever thought, “The biffs, bams, and pows of ’60s era Batman: if only they were attached to a young woman in the British Regency!”, then your long nightmare of waiting is over and this is the graphic novel for you.

Those of you for whom it maybe isn’t: the ones who care about the social mores of British society during the Napoleonic Wars. In the author’s note, Tony Cliff says that despite his best efforts there will inevitably be some conflict with the astute reader’s knowledge: boy howdy. And then he invites readers to help him with his research: um. This is a complete cop-out, basically, because when it comes to social mores he pretty clearly does not care. When can you, as an unmarried woman of good family, go introduce yourself to random other people of good family? How does that work in the Regency? Hahaha Tony Cliff patently does not care–I cannot imagine that a reader saying, “That’s not how it worked, actually,” would have gotten anywhere with the plot he had contrived. It looks very much like he wanted to write a rollicking adventure with a very modern heroine who does not care either. And if you, the reader, care–if you cannot un-know the things you know about the social interactions of the time–if you cannot set them aside to go biff, bam, and pow–this is probably not the graphic novel for you, swashing and buckling though it may have.

Please consider using our link to buy Delilah Dirk and the King’s Shilling from Amazon.

Tina Connolly, Seriously Wicked. Connolly’s previous book, Silverblind, was one I felt was a serious level up for her, and so I had high hopes for Seriously Wicked. But it was aimed in a completely different direction from her previous work, and I think it’s important to keep in mind that when we really like something an author has done, sometimes the best thing they can do with their next book is something different. Compared to Silverblind, this is frothy, bubbly fun. I felt like the resolution was somewhat obvious, but its teen target audience very well might not–and writing things that are genuinely fun is harder than it looks and generally underappreciated.

Laura Esquivel, Malinche. The prose of this is beautiful, particularly the places where it’s talking about pre-Columbian Mexico. There are several places where Esquivel skips over some of the most emotionally difficult stuff–where her heroine decides to accompany Cortes and leave her infant son with a nanny, for example, that decision is summarized in a paragraph. She’s allowed to talk about what she wants to talk about, but a book that’s about Cortes’s translator could have been more powerful if she had been less willing to flinch. That wasn’t her interest, though, and the lyricism is gorgeous. Also it’s very quick, so if you start to get annoyed at the places where Esquivel looks away, it’ll soon be over.

Judith Flanders, The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London. Exhaustive detail. Exhaustive. Really. There is an entire chapter about what the roads were made of, advantages and disadvantages of the different materials. If you’re writing a book set in Victorian London or similar city, you really do want this. There are a few missteps–mostly not related to her period but to ours–but in general Flanders is someone to follow if you’re at all interested in her period, and even if you’re not.

Christine Ingebritsen, The Nordic States and European Unity. This says a lot of things about the Nordic states and their relationship with the EU and its predecessor, and it’s one of those books where if you know a reasonable amount about the differences in the economies of those countries, it will all seem a tiny bit obvious. But here it’s laid out with graphs and charts and numbers, so you can quote the things that seem obvious if you need them later, so there’s that, I guess.

Astrid Lindgren, Ronia the Robber’s Daughter. Reread, twenty-five or so years later. This was a favorite when I was little, and revisiting it after a hiatus of my entire adulthood does not make me love it any less. If anything, I love it more now, because I see the things it’s doing clearly from a different angle. Lindgren writes with clear-eyed love about childhood friendships and time in the Swedish wilds. Death, dirt, illness, hunger, and prejudice are all here, but none of them win–none but death, because in a Swedish children’s book you’re allowed to tell children that the people they love will someday die. Which is one of the reasons I love them. The horses, the forests, the snow and the river and the rocks, Ronia and Birk together in the summer, oh how I love this book.

Jan Morris, Hav. This was the perfect book to read while planning a trip. It’s a travel guide to a Mediterranean city that doesn’t exist, and it’s chatty and wonderful. It feels real. It feels like, oh well, we chose to go to the Baltic in May, but if we hadn’t, we could have gone to the Mediterranean instead and gone to Hav. So it was like having a friend talking about her own vacation while I was planning mine. And the bits that loomed, the bits that were plotty around the edges–the bits that smelled like plot in the corners of your brain without coming right out and being plot–those were fascinating.

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient. This is such an encapsulated world book. Onddatje wanted to be telling such a very particular kind of wartime story, and the places where he’s playing with other pieces of English literature keep fascinating me. Kim and A. A. Milne, I keep going back to pick at what he was doing there, I’m still not entirely sure I’ve got it. I do know that if I had charge of him for the week I’d make him read a lot about Gertrude Bell until he apologized for the idea he had about the desert being a men’s world. But never mind that, there was stuff about love and choices and pieces of English literature, and I’m not sorry I took the time. Even if I get stern about Gertrude Bell sometimes.

Diriye Osman, Fairytales for Lost Children. Short stories, queer Somali surrealist immigrant experience, and if that doesn’t make you want them, then you don’t want them. Family relationships around all that. Not like anything else, like itself. I think many of you do want them, though. I think many of you were waiting for queer Somali surrealist immigrant family experience short stories in this kind of illustrated prose and didn’t know you were.

V.E. Schwab, A Gathering of Shadows. Discussed elsewhere.

Wade Shepard, Ghost Cities of China. This felt very much like expanded magazine articles. It did not, at the end, feel like it had enough insights to be a book instead. So: China pre-plans and pre-builds its cities, intending to fill them with people, and they don’t always fill as quickly as the west would expect, since we don’t do things that way. Okay. And the environmental destruction involved in China’s building industry is staggering, but is it more so with the pre-planning than it would be if they were waiting until the people were clamoring to get in? Do we have any indication that the cities in this book will stay ghost cities? Well. Not really. Disappointing, written probably ten years before there’s book to be had, meh.

Lavie Tidhar, ed., The Apex Book of World SF, Volume 2. A varied volume in location, style, theme, etc. In such a volume of course there will be some that appeal far more than others. For me the two standouts were Anabel Enriquez Piñeiro’s “Borrowed Time” and Shweta Narayan’s “Nira and I.” Shweta is a personal friend, and I had never even heard Anabel’s name before. Very divergent topics and styles also. I look forward to finding gems like these in the rest of the volumes in this series.

Charles Watkins, Trees, Woods, and Forests: A Social and Cultural History. In an email to a friend, I compared this to being the more informative, intellectually stimulating version of looking at puppy pictures on the internet. Because it was calming. It was so pleasant. And yet: informative! Not mindless in the least! I think I need more things like this, full of scientific and social facts about a topic of interest and yet not at all likely to make me fume and want to punch things. Forestry may be fertile ground here. So to speak. But this volume in particular is great, many lovely facts about trees, almost as good as trees themselves. You can even combine the two when the weather is a tiny bit nicer.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

This is the sequel to A Darker Shade of Magic. I think that reading the first book adds a lot to the reading experience of this one, and it’s definitely a classic middle book structure–there is plot that is resolved here, but there’s a pretty big cliffhanger at the ending. However, if you want to start here I think it actually would do a pretty good job of giving you the clues you need of who is who and what is what–not quite all the emotional depth/implication that you’d get if you read both, and the previous volume is readily available, but still. Should work.

There are four parallel Londons, with differing types and levels of magic, and a few lucky (har, har) people can cross between them. None of these is happy fun-fun land, but some of them are nastier than others. We spend most of A Gathering of Shadows in the most interesting, Red London, which is the least gratuitously vicious and the most magically endowed. If you’ve been missing formal elemental magic tournament battles since Avatar: Legend of Korra finished its run, wow, is this ever the book for you. There’s a lot of battling with earth, water, air, and fire here in formal tournament duel structure.

In addition to the fighting, there’s also torture, revenge, something that might be true love if you look at it funny, and definitely murdered by pirates. Murdered by pirates is good. There are some messed up nobles/royals–messed up multiple ways in multiple worlds–and a few fancy balls with fancy ball gowns, but not so much of it that I think it’ll bog you down if it’s not your thing. It is not really a kissing book, but there is a little kissing. Betrayal. More betrayal. Perceived betrayal. Serious loyalty. Pain shared that is not, in fact, pain halved. Some of you will be serious suckers for this book and find that it pushes your own personal buttons very, very hard. For the rest–if you’re feeling like a fun fantasy adventure, it can be that, as it was for me, even if the buttons it’s pushing aren’t quite yours. And there’s very clearly a big finish yet to come.

Please consider using our link to buy A Gathering of Shadows from Amazon.

John Bierhorst, The Mythology of South America. This is an anthropology-level overview, talking about common features of myths among different ethnic groups of South Americans. It starts out pretty dubiously, talking as though myth-formation is a thing done by Those Primitives, you see, and not by Us Civilized People, so you have to take it with a grain of salt–it’s mostly interesting as a source of avenues for further exploration–oh, this motif here, let’s explore what that really means in detail with people who know what they’re doing.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. A gentle mid-life romance among the Vorkosigans and the alien fauna of Sergyar. At 76 Cordelia is not yet even a little bit old by Betan standards, and for me this is a shame; I am looking for more books that are about protagonists who actually feel old. But “more time with these characters you like” worked just fine for me in general, even if I want even more time with them later–and it was definitely a book full of grown-ups, and there are not enough of those either.

Mike Carey, Linda Carey, and Louise Carey, The House of War and Witness. Intertemporal ghost stories weaving back to a crisis moment in the 18th century. I was disappointed in this–it was reasonably well done, but compared to their previous collaboration, The Steel Seraglio, it was not at all my thing. The different ghost stories through time were quite well done, as was the 18th century main protagonist whose life was pretty awful. It just was hitting various tropes that are not at all of interest to me fairly hard, and in a narrative featuring an abusive relationship that was sensitively handled but difficult to read.

Edwidge Danticat, Untwine. Heartfelt YA about a young woman learning to live without her twin–her entire family learning to live without, really. The Haitian political references Danticat is known for were around the edges–this is a Haitian-American family, its relatives multilingual and naming their cats after politicians, but the core of this book is where the personal does not much overlap with the political.

Albert Goldbarth, Across the Layers. Reread. Lots of prose poems and borderline-prose poems. Not much snagged me this time through, and I don’t know that I will give it a third go. The interesting things he was doing with his family immigrant voice were not immigrant things that really caught me much with individual moments or lines.

Rachel Hartman, Seraphina. Come for the early modern/premodern musical instruments, stay for the saint culture. What, shapeshifting dragons? Yes, all right, I suppose you can have some of those too. It adds up to familial relationships with alien psychologies in some ways, which I am much more interested in than “fire thing go swoop.” Although there is fire thing go swoop, if that’s what you’re here for.

David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. Wow, what a book. Soil science. Politics of erosion and soil depletion laid out in multiple places worldwide, throughout time, with explicit parallels drawn. Fascinating, lovely, much recommended. It made me want to scream and swear and punch things sometimes, but not without hopeful spots also. And dirt! Dirt is great!

Julia Rios and Alisa Krasnostein, eds., Year’s Best Young Adult Speculative Fiction 2014. I have a policy of not reviewing books I’m in. So much potential to be tacky. So: this exists, I’m in it, I read it. You can read it too.

Bogi Takacs, Changing Body Templates. Kindle. This short was a bonus from a charitable donation I made, and was interesting in its cultural reference points.

Chris West, A History of America in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps. Each year I buy myself a book for my grandpa’s birthday. I pick something I would have wanted to share with him, since I am not actually done sharing things with my grandpa yet despite the utter stupid inconvenience of death. As 300-page histories of the US go, this is not the worst you could do, particularly if you wanted something to hand to someone who is not from the US. It suffers from a few quite glaring flaws. Its sexism, racism, and classism are the benevolent sort, but still present. It has a strong and annoying present-day skew–three hundred pages of all of American history and culture and you can fit in Monica Lewinsky, really? Alice Paul is irrelevant, never mind Grace Hopper, but Monica Lewinsky must appear? And on the other hand I started to wonder whether its author was merely clueless or an extreme Tory in his own country and trying to shore up his own party’s allies, because while the aforementioned Affaire Lewinsky did appear, the election of President Geo. W. Bush came and went without the least hint that it was the tiniest bit controversial in its practicalities. So while he did a good job of explaining some of the American history things that Americans generally take for granted, there were also some tone-deaf notes.

G. Willow Wilson, Ms. Marvel: Generation Why. I enjoy Kamala Khan. I enjoy her even more with a very large teleporting doggie.