Month: December 2023

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a dear friend and I read an earlier draft of this.

I am so excited that the rest of you are going to get to read this in only a few months, because John and I have been making jokes based on the protagonist for the entire time since he wrote it, and soon you can too. Shesheshen is a shapeshifting slime monster! She is a blob! She is my favorite blob ever! She is grumpy and eats people! And this is endearing as only John can do it. She has a pet bear named Blueberry, and rosemary is poison to her, and humans are a lot of trouble but sometimes good for parts.

And sometimes interesting.

So that’s a surprise, really, because who would have thought that humans would be interesting. But don’t worry, it’s definitely not all of them. Some of them are interested almost exclusively in hunting monsters, which in addition to being single-minded and unpleasant, is bad for Shesheshen and Blueberry. But maybe…just maybe…there’s a human out there who’s different. A human who’s worth more than the use Shesheshen can make of her bones and pancreas.

Worth more than bones and a pancreas? Seems like you’re gonna have suspension of disbelief issues with that one, huh? Seriously, John gives us monster perspective with all the warmth and humor he’s always brought to short stories, but this time he’s got room to really get comfortable in the voice and let Shesheshen’s revelations develop and her choices ramify. You’ll be rooting for this monster all the way through. I know I was. This book hooks you like a pair of borrowed steel jaws and pulls you in like a persistent tentacle. You won’t be sorry you formed eyeballs to read this one–or ears to listen to someone read it to you if that’s your thing. Highly recommended.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a cozy mystery about a TV journalist investigating the murder of Rush Limbaugh.

He’s not called Rush Limbaugh, of course; enough of the details are changed that it’s a different shape of story. But this is very much a “right-wing blowhard gets poisoned; plucky TV journalist pursues the story and also tries to promote her own career.” Estes is definitely getting some mileage out of how satisfying it is to watch the loathsome people who gather around such a horror show snap at each other over the corpse.

In the interest of making the protagonist not too saintly to be real, she comes out a bit the other side, whining about how hard it is to do her job and seething with jealousy for a local rival. Estes’s enthusiasm for the Phoenix setting comes through positively, but I didn’t actually like her detective as much as I wanted to. I felt she was supposed to come off beleaguered and instead read self-pitying to me, and on the whole I don’t really want to spend as much time with loathsome people as this book required me to do.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I can’t actually decide which thing to tell you first, that this is funny or that it’s toward the gory and horrifying end of science fictional examinations of human nature and the nature of the universe.

Because both turn out to be critically important to what kind of book this is. It’s not a slapstick, it’s not a “skidding in the pool of blood” kind of funny. The humor is wryer and better done than that, deeper than that. But also the gore is deeper, it’s not an incidental “and then one of the sidekicks was shot but you won’t have to think about it, you won’t have to think about them as a person or what shooting them really means, how it might affect the protagonist to do it.” It’s entwined like a nest of snakes.

Anna Sinjari is a young Kurdish-American whose past has left her not particularly engaged with her life as an office worker. An encounter with a disturbing alien no one else seems to see quite as she does tips a series of dominoes that puts Anna in line to try to save humanity–because her alien is not only not entirely pleasant, she is not the only alien with an eye on the planet earth and its inhabitants. And, apparently, their souls.

Because yeah, there’s a lot of guns-and-shooting SF here, there’s a lot of different-mentalities-aliens SF here…but we’re also doing shape-of-the-universe-itself-and-sentient-soul SF. It’s a big book. There’s a lot going on. Most of the SF that gets described as breathless is a bit dewy-eyed, a bit young, and this is the opposite, this is breathless because it has been running an obstacle course of varied human bullshit to get here and you will have to excuse it if that’s a *little* much sometimes. There’s a lot to juggle, but Dickinson manages the flaming torches, the chainsaws, and the bowling balls with aplomb.

A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye and Elementals. Rereads. These were not my intended memorial rereads when A.S. Byatt died, and in fact I still have that intention (Possession) on my pile. But I just sort of fell back into these, the familiar cadences of semi-fairy tale language and the places where she is thoughtful about creative work happiness and the chill of grief and all the other places.

Catherine Chidgey, Pet. A disturbing novel about a young girl in the thrall of a manipulative teacher who also has most of the adults around her conned. I didn’t like the way that her epilepsy played into some of the twists in the end–I don’t think it was entirely thoughtfully handled–but the prose and characterization were well-done.

Samuel K. Cohn, Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425. I can’t think of a better way to handle subtitling something when you want to talk about a small but not clearly defined subset of Europe so you can’t say “Western Europe” (because it’s not all of Western Europe) or any other category like that, but really the subtitle vastly overstates the case here, Cohn is only going to talk about Italy, France, and Flanders. Which is a shame, because I was really interested in the whole–I was particularly interested in the overarching comparisons, but I think what was going on in the Germanies was interesting and hoped that he would have insights into Eastern vs. Western Europe that he obviously isn’t going to have if Italy is as far east as he goes. There was interesting stuff here, but it really wasn’t the book I wanted, and also he had a disconcerting habit of referring to France as Northern Europe (stop that, Cohn).

Camille T. Dungy, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History. After I finished Soil, I went immediately to find out what else the library had, and this did not disappoint, a collection of explorations of place and reception of herself and her daughter. Beautifully done.

Max Gladstone, Wicked Problems. Discussed elsewhere.

Hilary Leichter, Terrace Story. This was a very short novel, interesting in its way, about a couple with a toddler, living in a cramped apartment, who discover that when one friend comes over–and only then–they have a beautiful terrace. The handling of the speculative conceit as it unfolds is very literary, but the fact that additional speculative elements are introduced into this story with a fundamentally literary focus and resolution makes me feel even more like the speculative genres have made their way into the culture–it feels like the kind of short surreal novel that would have been trying to distance itself from genre fiction 20 years ago, not matter-of-factly ending with some characters on a space station.

Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown. Reread. I was reading The Blue Sword for book club last month, and this one was always more of a favorite. One of the things that interested me about it was that when it shifted the geography of Damar, it also substantially shifted the culture, so that it felt like all the references to things in The Blue Sword were very much “oh yes, they’ll have that later” and not “I have to deal with the cultural choices I already made about what will be important here.” I still love Aerin’s experimentalism so much. I am completely confounded by some of the age differences in characters now, though, and while I don’t think it was written as an explicit argument against monarchies (“don’t have a king, kids, or you might end up with the one guy in charge being barely functional while he’s personally grieving for decades, and that’s in the event that you got a halfway decent one to begin with!”), it sort of came out like one.

Megan O’Keefe, The Fractured Dark. The second in its series about mind-control parasites taking over a space opera series. Er, I mean humanity. And the humans who love them. And would like to not love them, but can’t, because see above. Do not, do not, do not start here, it’s very much a second book.

O No Yasumaro, The Kojiki: An Account of Ancient Matters. This very much read like a listing of spirits and how they came to be. It was a very different kind of origin epic than many of the origin epics I’ve been reading. I can’t say that it resonated as strongly as a narrative, but taken in small chunks it’s fascinating, all the ways people can enumerate parts of spirituality and place.

Paz Pardo, The Shamshine Blind. It feels deliberately hilarious to describe something as noir that’s so full of color, I really appreciate Pardo’s sense of humor about this. This is a novel in which mood-altering pigments allowed Argentina to win what we know as the Falklands War and become a world-dominating power, and the subtlety and thoughtfulness of the worldbuilding from there is only one of the novel’s many charms, since it’s by turns an investigative mystery, the story of someone pulling her career together, and the story of someone sorting out her interpersonal relationships (of various shapes) in a very difficult time for doing that. It was simultaneously doing something no one else is doing and behaving as though the good parts of cyberpunk hadn’t died all those years ago.

Namwali Serpell, Stranger Faces. A collection of essays about different aspects of how we interact with human faces and expectations thereof. Slim and well-done.

Genevieve Warwick, Cinderella’s Glass Slipper: Towards a Cultural History of Renaissance Materialities. Kindle. A monograph about luxury goods, particularly in dowries and marriage goods, in the Renaissance and their influence on the specific shape of the stories we get told as fairy tales. Small enough not to overplay its hand.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.

The world is on fire, so I did not successfully hold off reading Max’s book about how the world is on fire until closer to its release date. Also, I’m not sorry.

Okay, look, middle books in trilogies are the traditional place for the wheels to come off, right? Everything has been set up in the first book with Tara’s apprentice Dawn making some god-level dubious choices with the Craft, and now’s the time for all the pieces on the board to scatter into chaotic woe, that’s how trilogies work. But this isn’t just a trilogy, it’s also the culmination of the Craft books from before the trilogy, so when we say all the pieces on the board—

The gang really is all here, friends. Is there a major character you’re missing from one of the previous Craft books? Because Max has dropped them in the shit here. Basically all of them. Many of the fires are literal, people die (gosh that’s inconvenient and hard on their clothes), and the conviction that you and your team are saving the world…doesn’t actually guarantee that the world will get more saved by the stuff you get yourself into.

Because wicked problems are not just “problems! wicked!” They’re the ones with no stopping point, the ones that are complex to the point of insolubility. They’re the ones where attempts at solution reveal more problems. And all of that, absolutely all of it, comes up here, as literal apocalypse bears down on gods, priests, lawyers, family, friends, and whoever else they can rope into helping. Or hindering, or…if they can even tell the difference.

Seriously don’t start here, but if you think you might be excited about all this? Yeah. You’re excited. Because this book just does not let up.