Year: 2020

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I know the author a bit socially.

This is the third full-length book in the Lady Astronauts series. There’s a change of protagonists–this one is from the perspective of Nicole Wargin, an astronaut who is also a politician’s wife–but the events of the previous volumes are important to this one. I’d recommend reading the others first rather than diving in with this as your entry point.

The astronauts and colonists have gotten settled enough into a moon colony that there can be such a thing as routine, but back at home the Earth Firsters still think they have a chance to derail the entire project. So Nicole Wargin not only finds herself separated from her beloved husband by thousands of miles just when he’s trying to run a presidential campaign–she’s also dealing with a saboteur on the moon. And, oh, by the way, a polio outbreak. And trying to help Earth with its problems from a distance, with satellite service not as reliable as it should be.

She’s dealing with a lot of shit here, to paraphrase Bull Durham. But for as long as this book is, it never drags; I was always in “just one more chapter” mode while I read it. And I have never been so happy about a scene where someone eats applesauce in my life. Despite the quarantine aspects being far more relevant than I expect Mary ever would have wished, this was still a fun read, and I’m glad I had an alternate universe worth of problems to contemplate for a few hours.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author has been a friend of mine for Quite Some Time Now.

This is what used to be called a fix-up: where an author has published multiple stories in a setting, with one or more characters in continuity, and they go and write material that goes between the stories and make a book out of it. Driftwood is a really fertile setting for the fix-up that bears its name, because it features a potentially infinite number of worlds colliding, annihilating in slow-motion and leaving scraps of people and customs as they go. A Driftwood story could feature nearly any ideas, brought in from another wave of worlds.

The continuity in this book is provided by the character Last, undying, wandering from world to world. The other characters aren’t quite sure what to make of Last–Last is not always sure what to make of himself–but sometimes having a guide is enough, even if you’re not sure what he’s doing until the end of the section–or after. The nature of Driftwood gives a chance for others to serve as foils for Last in different directions–almost in a Doctor Who style, where part of the Doctor’s differences are due to his Companions at the time. But Driftwood steers clear of our history, its cults and cultures its own, its fate its own–and Last is shaping his own fate too.

I had a good time with this even though I’d read some of the stories already. Having them in a different context illuminates them differently–and, of course, you may not have read any of them at all. It works perfectly well as an introduction to this setting, no preparation required. Just dive in…perhaps a tiny bit carefully. There are kind people here, but it’s not a place of sweetness and light.

Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. This biography is nearly 1200 pages, and it took up a lot of my time and attention in early April. I picked it up hoping for interesting anecdotes that were not related to the current situation, for conversational diversions of the sort that start, “Did you know….” Unfortunately what I got was almost all of the format “did you know that Robert Moses was a jerk in the following way:” and after the first 200 pages or so, my near and dear had something of a rough outline if not all the details. I still feel that it was a really well done biography and worth reading if you’re interested in city planning and/or (metaphorical) trainwrecks. Caro managed to keep his eyes on the people Moses victimized and not get caught up in the perspective of his subject to the point of giving him a pass for terrible behavior–an accomplishment many biographers do not manage. But still, it was nearly 1200 pages of Oh Robert Moses No. So that’s…quite a thing.

K. Chess, Famous Men Who Never Lived. This is really good and I recommend it a lot. It’s a parallel universe story where a group of refugees from one parallel universe into another actually is treated like refugees, they have the problems with resettlement that real refugees have, in very interesting ways, including wanting to maintain their previous culture and not having good internal agreement on what the important facets of that culture are. This book features a fictional Golden Age science fiction novel that people have a very plausible range of emotional reactions to, from completely imprinting on it to finding it boring and pointless, and it works really well as the core of this book. It’s not at all like Susan Palwick’s The Necessary Beggar, but it also is a bit–they’re doing very different kinds of parallel universe–and I’m interested to have someone else pick up these themes and have a very different take on them that’s still so good.

Aliette de Bodard, The Dragon That Flew Out of the Sun. Kindle. Some of Aliette’s delightful short stories, collected previously for a Hugo packet and now sent to her mailing list. Such fun.

K. A. Doore, The Unconquered City. Discussed elsewhere.

Karen Joy Fowler, Black Glass. Reread. A short story collection ranging through Fowler’s many and varied strengths–literary forms, pop culture remix, definite genre influences, all present and accounted for beautifully.

Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban. This novella prefigures the Monster Boyfriend trend and does it far more literarily than some. The sex is inexorable but mild, and the aforementioned frog monster boyfriend is appealing as a conversationalist who actually bothers with the protagonist as a person. Unlike her husband. Then it all unravels in a spectacularly genre-literary kind of melodrama. Mid-century American Women’s Fiction, now with frog monsters, okay, yes. Good thing I had avocados in the house while reading this, there are a lot of avocados in the text, be forewarned. (Not in a gross way. They just eat avocados.)

R.B. Lemberg, The Four Profound Weaves. Discussed elsewhere.

Rose Macaulay, The Lee Shore. Kindle. Another of her early novels that isn’t quite like anything else. It’s full of familial loyalty and aesthetic longing and all sorts of other interesting things, and the place where it ends is profoundly unconvincing to me but feels like probably the best she could do with what experience she had; it is yet another book I enjoyed while reading it that made me want to use a time machine to kidnap Rose Macaulay and bring her to live among civilized people.

Troy L. Wiggins, DaVaun Sanders, and Brandon O’Brien, eds., Fiyah Issue 14. Kindle. This felt like one of the more even issues–one where I had trouble picking one story as standing out from the others for me–but I do continue to enjoy reading it regularly.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson. This was the other large (not nearly so large) biography that took up a bunch of my time this fortnight, and I was frankly disappointed in it. Wolff decided after Dickinson’s mid-twenties that she didn’t want to do a biography, she wanted to do thematic criticism with some biographical elements. As a result, there are huge chunks of Dickinson’s life that are traceable but not traced by this book. There’s no coherence about which relationships overlapped in importance and influence. I’m not sure Wolff fully understands that there is such a thing as an intense friendship carried on substantially through text; as someone who finds those crucial, I had hoped to read a biography of someone else who clearly found those crucial, and instead I got a mishmash of thematic thoughts. So I guess I’ll be looking for another Dickinson bio.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a personal friend and shares an agent with me.

This is the triumphant conclusion of the Chronicles of Ghadid. Previous protagonists make appearances for more than cameos–they have substantial roles, they have been allowed to grow in their lives, and it’s so much fun to see how. But this book belongs to Illi.

Illi is a braid-wearing, truculent cousin who has been serving as Heru’s research assistant as well as training as an assassin and guul-slayer. She has already lost so much in the first two books of this trilogy, but Illi puts her head down, sets her chin, and keeps going.

Until now. Now Illi is caught between powerful forces–including Heru–who are not treating her like a person, and there’s a sajaami at stake. Powerful, manipulative, ready to eat souls at a moment’s notice. Including, if necessary, Illi’s. The people she can trust are all people she wants to protect–the people with enough power to help her? She can’t trust. And between Ghadid, only now beginning to rebuild, and strange, sea-side Hathage, the answer has to be somewhere. Illi has the skills she learned from both magical research and assassin training, but she needs more. She needs her cousins. She needs Canthem, the intriguing caravan guard. She needs…missing pieces from centuries ago. And she needs it all last week.

Resplendent, definitive, and recommended.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I know the author online.

Hope cannot be given away to you, or to anyone. Hope is the song which arises from silence where all our voices had been; all those locked away against their will one day will surge again, come forth with great exuberance, sweep the world in a reverberation of rainbow….

Do you need a book that has the concept of hope seriously woven through every thread of it right now? I bet you do. I bet you did even in January.

And here it is, The Four Profound Weaves, centering on transformation, expectation, and hope. This is a story in Lemberg’s Birdverse, a place we’ve started to learn from short stories–and characters we’ve seen in those stories as well. All the things that I have loved about the stories, the magic of weaving air and sand and more, are developed, pondered, iterated here. The desert and the city beyond it, the people who don’t quite fit in one culture or another and have to find their own path, they are all here with space to breathe, to learn to breathe, to care for each other in imperfect human ways and to find their own paths out of the human difficulties before–and behind–them.

I picked up The Four Profound Weaves after reading a long book about horrible people, and it was incredibly restorative. It was fun and gripping and a very fast read, and the book design was beautiful. But along with all those things it was refreshing at a time when my heart needed to be refreshed. Highly recommended.

Katherine Addison, The Angel of the Crows. Discussed elsewhere.

Lawrence Block, The Burglar in Short Order. A little bit ago I read the Collected Janet Kagan and found some of the pieces in it to be really pointless trifles, and someone (Beth I think?) said that they were glad that everything had been included so that they could be sure that there was nothing else lurking out there that was worthwhile. Well, this is another volume where you can be absolutely sure that you have all the Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery short works, all of them, no matter how trifling. If you don’t know whether you like the Bernie Rhodenbarr stories, this is definitely, truly not where to find out; if you’re lukewarm, steer clear. This is only for people who want to be absolutely sure they have not missed any Bernie Rhodenbarr fiction of any length. (I turn out not to be in that set after all. Ah well.)

Chaz Brenchley, Mary Ellen–Craterean! Chapters 1-2. Kindle. This is the beginning of a bouncy fun new Crater School serial. I have in my Kindle the beginning of something in the same world with a different tone, so the contrast should be interesting.

Stephanie Burgis, Good Neighbors. Kindle. This is the first in a short fiction series: light, fun, mad scientist stories with I think a romance coming if the main characters can dodge the torch-wielding mob for long enough….

E. L. Chen, The Good Brother. This is a ghost story about Hungry Ghost Month and a young Chinese-Canadian bookstore clerk whose brother died. It is also about depression and suicide. I found the characterization really well done, but I was concerned with how the mental health issues were handled in this fantasy context. Specifically…I have serious issues with books where the entire fantasy content can be read as a metaphor for mental health issues, and the more so when that seems to carry the possibility for multiplying rather than assisting with real mental health issues. I’d recommend this one only with extreme caution.

Hannah Abigail Clarke, The Scapegracers. Discussed elsewhere.

Eleanor Shipley Ducket, Carolingian Portraits: A Study in the Ninth Century. This was a treasure I was startled to find, a chatty mid-century volume about kings and monks and scholars. I always want more about the ninth century–really, always–so I was delighted to find the prose lucid and readable, because I would totally have been willing to put up with a slog for what it says on the tin. Gender issues are almost completely absent, but I’ll take what I can get of the ninth century sometimes.

Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan, An Embarrassment of Witches. I am not the target audience for this comic–it’s very new-adult, very focused on finding your path in life through relationship confusion and weird magic–but I enjoyed it anyway.

Julian Jarboe, Everyone On the Moon Is Essential Personnel. This is such a prickly gem. The title story in particular grabbed and held me, but the shining anger and love in the other stories, ranging all over the genre world, was worth the price of admission.

Jenny Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society. Very much what it says on the tin. Some extremely useful stuff in here, and some gaps that I would expound on for hours, but in general recommended if you’re interested in this topic.

S. A. Jones, The Fortress. Discussed elsewhere.

Kapka Kassabova, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe. This is about Thrace, more or less; it’s about Bulgaria-Greece-Turkey, particularly Bulgaria but the borderland of all three of them, and how people live along that border. It is full of anecdote. It won’t be a particular favorite to reread, but it held my attention well enough.

Jane Kenyon, Collected Poems. I got interested in Kenyon’s work because of the poems her husband wrote grieving for her–I had no particular interest in reading more of his work, but the person he was mourning sounded worth mourning. And indeed this is so. Her poems are keenly observed, specific, often very daily/familial or very nature-focused, and I liked watching them unfold.

William Bryant Logan, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees. I need to remember just not to read Logan’s books any more. He’s one of those people you read and find that he’s untrustworthy in the small details you already know, and then how can you trust him in the ones you don’t know? This book is about coppicing, about which he is an extreme evangelist. Along the way he makes such unacknowledged and unforced errors as attributing a slogan from disability rights activism to the Crips street gang. Not recommended in the least.

Lydia Millet, The Bodies of the Ancients. The third in her middle grade fantasy series. This follows the pattern of Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quartet (…I know, don’t @ me) less closely than the previous two. There is no jump forward in the characters’ lives, and the plot is very differently balanced as to which characters get to be active–so in that sense I feel like Millet is coming more into her own as a children’s author. For me it didn’t quite work–it leaned into a trope that I find annoying at best–but it was a near miss, and I’m sorry she doesn’t seem to be doing a lot more with different children’s books using her own patterns.

Premee Mohamed, Beneath the Rising. This is 100% not my usual sort of thing, being cosmic horror. Premee is a friend, though, and she’s done cosmic horror really, really well–and the central relationship in this book is just impeccably done. It’s entirely a relationship-focused piece of fiction, and that relationship is funny and sweet and mean and loving and horrible and human at every turn. If you’re up for horrible creatures from outside our universe trying to remake it and us to their liking–if you’re even a little bit up for that–this is such a good one of those.

Suzanne Palmer, Driving the Deep. Discussed elsewhere.

Caroline Stevermer, The Glass Magician. Discussed elsewhere.

Breanna Teintze, Lady of Shadows. Discussed elsewhere.

Emily Tesh, Drowned Country. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a friend of mine after these years of sharing our awesome agent.

This is the direct sequel to Silver in the Wood, and I strongly recommend reading that before this one, because Henry Silver and Tobias Finch and all the complications of their relationship with each other and with uncanny creatures and the land start there.

The course of true love, we know, never did run smooth…especially when one of you is the Wild Man of Greenhollow. Henry and Tobias are, at the moment, more intrigued with monster hunting and saving a lost girl than they are with each other, or so they’d like to pretend. But the lost Maud Lindhurst is not what either of them expected–and neither is the shabby seaside town where they have to go to find her. Its connections with Fairyland are not any nicer than you’d expect from the previous volume’s encounters with Faerie, and Henry and Tobias have to marshal their resources together–together, dammit–to get themselves and Maud back to the woods safely.

The beach is a very stressful place. Take a friend. And definitely take this non-traditional beach read–or read it at home under a good blanket. Delightful.