Year: 2021

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I have once again known the author just short of forever On Here.

Jo is a young actress trying to make it in New York in the mid-1970s. She’s got a role on one of the few soap operas still filming there–not her dream job, but steady work she unexpectedly loves. It’s all interrupted by the reappearance of her best friend Cyn from her younger, activist days protesting the war movement, who is determined not to let Jo settle into complacency in her new life.

Cyn does not happen to be alive any more. She died in a protest bombing of a draft office gone wrong–and Jo was supposed to be there with her.

So what does her ghost want? How can Jo exorcise Cyn, or help her find peace, or…whatever it is that falls between antagonism and collaboration in their complicated friendship? She keeps being thrown into might-have-beens in her own life that last longer and longer, showing her more and more of her own potential, roads not taken but worth considering…but why? How will they help her with the ghost of her best friend?

I am a total sucker for explorations of mid-twentieth century women’s work lives and choices, and I don’t mind a bit if the speculative element of something takes awhile to unfold, so I was absolutely the target audience for this book. Jo’s soap opera work was not something I’d really thought about before, but Garfinkle clearly did her research into the details of that field and treats it with respect but not reverence–just the right balance. Jo’s reconsideration of what was needed, what was useful, what was right, in regards to her past activism is well-situated in the ’70s–she is close enough to our own attitudes to be engaging but not unduly contemporary, and some of the questions she grapples with are still of interest today. This one is frankly feminist and takes its time with some very worthwhile questions, and it allows its humans to be human rather than insisting on Good Guys and Bad Guys. I’m so glad I got this copy.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I have known the author since the beginning of forever.

One of the problems with writing a lot is that it’s hard enough to have people compare your work to other people’s work–you can quite justly object that you are not someone else and cannot be expected to write their stories–but an entirely different kind of frustrating to have it compared to your own previous work. And I…loved Phoenix Extravagant more than anything else Yoon has written. And Tiger Honor is not Phoenix Extravagant.

But it’s not trying to be. It’s a different category–middle grade–a completely different genre and tone and characterization. Sebin is a young would-be spacefarer–spacefaring officer–in a long tradition of proud tiger spirits in their family serving in the Space Forces. They are just preparing to start their cadet term when disaster strikes: their admired Uncle Hwan, a respected officer in the Space Forces, is disgraced, stripped of his rank. Instead of using their time as a cadet only for the usual purposes of learning the ways of Space Forces and gaining a toehold on the ladder to fame and glory, Sebin now has to do those things and attempt to figure out what went so badly wrong with the relative they so admired. Surely he can’t be guilty of the things he’s accused of–so what happened? And who among the other cadets and officers can Sebin trust?

Sebin is believably guarded and focused, given their upbringing in the ruthless Juhwang Clan. The other cadets’ characters are mostly hinted at in outline, but that’s totally appropriate for the shape and length of the story. This is related to Lee’s previous MG book, Dragon Pearl, which I haven’t read yet, but now I want to–it worked perfectly well in this order, leaving me wanting more, but it seems like knowing more about the titular object would also have made this an interesting story. Not everything can be Phoenix Extravagant, and not everything should. Tiger Honor, like its protagonist, comes into its own as it progresses and is very much what it needs to be in itself.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I often say that the failure mode of a novella is to have the exposition of a novel and the payoff of a short story. I was concerned about Servant Mage because so much of Kate Elliott’s work is so epic. How would she adjust to the novella format?

Well, I find the results interestingly mixed. Servant Mage reads to me like the beginning of a longer work rather than a truncated stand-alone. There’s a lot of exposition going on here–five types of mages and several political factions with characters attached to each, which is exactly my jam. The ending is not so much anticlimactic as it is an opening of possibilities. Our heroine Fellian remains inquisitive despite her difficult circumstances, an ideal character for exploring a large and varied world. Which is what we’re getting here, I think; we’re getting the beginning of a world with a lot going on. But this is only the beginning. It’s Kate Elliott, and it’s Tor.com. We can feel confident that there will be more.

Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, eds., The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation from a Team of Visionary Female and Nonbinary Creators. Discussed elsewhere.

Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising. Reread. I’m fascinated by the ways in which this holds up despite the ways in which I intellectually feel like it somewhat shouldn’t. Specifically the gender roles. It’s as though Cooper internalized that women are basically mums, sisters, and old ladies. The places where women are among the Old Ones, they often fade in and out of even counting, they do things like sitting at each other’s feet, just…being there. She is doing certain myths in the modern world without apparently even thinking of modernizing some aspects of those myths. And yet. And yet Will’s is a vividly syncretist story that I find just as compelling as I did when I was a midsized child. And nothing, after all, has to be perfect in order to be loved. One more thing, though–now that I understand that the south of England gets nothing like proper winter, I see that it’s all there in the book–that they don’t have, for example, snowplows, that the amount of snow I assumed would be required is in no way described, it’s much less than I assumed as a northern child who was familiar with the “and then they had to go out the second story because there was snow over the door” blizzard stories. That is simply not here. This is in part the story of southern England being brought to its knees by a freak ordinary snowstorm. The reader’s 50% is so strange even when I’m the reader.

Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live. This book traces a field taken too much for granted, looks into what its focus was assumed to be in different eras and why, what it has to offer and who offered it, who did the work and who got credit and who got forgotten. Dreilinger doesn’t mince words about the places where some figures were racist or others had racist ideas perpetrated upon them, she’s absolutely clear about how sexism shaped this field, but she also is straightforward about the power it has had and can have. And that’s very interesting.

Mike Duncan, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution. Duncan is sometimes a clunky writer, and he doesn’t always bother to research the figures who are peripheral to his main quest. (“He writes about John Jay and Gouverneur Morris in the same way!” I said indignantly to a family member on DMs.) But this is still a pretty entertaining biography of someone who saw a lot of interesting history.

Joseph J. Ellis, The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783. Ellis is attempting to give perspective of what the people involved (both sides) thought they were doing at the time, sorting that out from what we think they were doing now. Not the most outstanding work on its period, but a reasonable place to either start or continue.

Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Franklin would like to yeet Jackson’s mother and husband into the sun, and she has extensive documentation for why this would have been a great plan if only we’d been able to get there in time. I think that some of her well-intentioned commentary about contemporary attitudes toward Jackson’s weight may still be triggering to some readers, so heads up there (on the other hand, this biographer is distinctly well-intentioned in that direction, so good), and there’s also a need for serious content warning about sexual assault. And…it’s Shirley Jackson, so be aware that this is not going to be a happy read. But interesting.

Alexandria Hall, Field Music. I picked up this volume of poems because one of them spoke to me in a poetry newsletter I read, and it turned out that was the poem that still spoke to me most out of the entire volume. A lot of this was sort of a ships passing in the night volume for me, poems where I could see what was going on but not quite touch it. Perhaps it will reach you better.

Darcie Little Badger, A Snake Falls to Earth. Compelling. Deceptively simply told and pulled me through the alternating strands of narrative with eager attention to both. I hope she does more in this universe–there’s room but not necessity. (Young adult. Fantasy. Native inspired, own cultural roots.)

Kliph Nesteroff, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy. I picked this up on a whim because I was seeing it recommended, and it’s short and interesting. Like a lot of writing about comedy, it’s not itself particularly funny, but that’s all right. I was a bit startled by the amount of connection it had to places and people I know personally, but not in a bad way.

Nnedi Okorafor, Noor. A novella with a wind-storm eye in Africa forming an interesting cultural locus for highly modified characters. Went very quickly.

Mayukh Sen, Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America. These profiles are only slightly longer than a long-form magazine profile–it’s a very short book. So while it’s interesting, don’t expect a lot of depth here. On the other hand, even having a start on this topic is lovely and a good idea.

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses. I always want to read Solnit right away when I can, and this was no exception. It is literally about some roses planted by George Orwell, and also about various other things sparked by thoughts of them, in the interesting and unconstrained way that she has. I immediately ordered a copy as a Christmas present.

E. Catherine Tobler, Sonya Taaffe, David Gilmore, et al, The Deadlands Issue 7. Kindle. Once again haunting and interesting. Glad this is here.

Sarah Vogel, The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm. I don’t feel like I know enough about the US farm crisis of the 1980s, and this is a start on that. I hope to find more soon. (Recommendations welcome.) Another thing it is, quite unintentionally…look, Sarah Vogel is from where I’m from, this is about my people, but she expects that you, the reader, will not be where we’re from. And so she explains, translates, and even footnotes a lot of cultural stuff that made me laugh or left me speechless by turns to have it so earnestly set forth for outsiders. If that’s an experience you want, well, there it is, even aside from a bunch of farm crisis stuff that will be very enlightening. (I called my mom. “Mor. She footnoted ‘uff da.'” Silence, then: “Well. I suppose you could.”)

Subtitle: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation from a Visionary Team of Female and Nonbinary Creators. Review copy provided by the publisher.

Well, this was a complete joy. In addition to having several stories that were individually lovely to read, it was extremely thoughtfully composed in terms of which story preceded which other story and where the essays on translation were seeded through the volume. It’s so satisfying to find an anthology that’s so well-balanced and -assembled.

Usually I consider an anthology a rousing success if I can call out two stories as particular favorites. In this anthology there were four–and with the way it’s assembled, their translators were listed so accessibly beside the authors that it’s easy to credit them here. The anthology started off in beautiful style with “The Stars We Raised,” by Xiu Xinyu, translation by Judy Yi Zhou. Its poignancy set a tone that kept me eager to find out what the other stories would do.

Xia Jia has long been one of my favorite Chinese authors in translation, but I’m not sure she qualifies with her quite short story “What Does the Fox Say” in this volume, because she experimented with writing it in English–in my opinion entirely successfully.

Later in the anthology, “A Brief History of Beinakan Disasters as Told in a Sinitic Language” by Nian Yu, translation by Ru-Ping Chen, and “The Painting” by Chen Qian, translation by Emily Xueni Jin, were stories of types that don’t usually appeal to me but in this case managed to transcend my subgenre preferences, which is high praise indeed. The other stories were interesting and charmingly done as well, but these were my favorites. I also really appreciated the inclusion of the essays about genre, gender, and translation, as I felt they added a lot to this particular volume. Very well done, will be looking for a physical copy as soon as I can get one.