Month: November 2024

Review copy provided by the author, who is a friend I met through being represented by the same agent.

Back in the day, one of my friends grumpily reviewed a book by saying, “too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby.” They would never have to have that reaction to Blood Sweat Glitter, which is absolutely full of roller derby, and also the romantic connection builds between two women, zero boyfriends involved.

Eleanor is a charge nurse who pours her heart and soul into her roller derby team. The stress of the job comes out in the rink. Her team isn’t one of the big ones–their league is pretty small-time–but she loves the game for itself, and she keeps hoping to build a team that will love it with her. When new girl Robin shows up–and shows off–Eleanor finds her abrasive and annoying. She’s constantly acting silly and ditzy, and why is she even in roller derby? She’s a good skater, though, Eleanor has to admit that….

As the team’s season progresses, Eleanor realizes that Robin is not the airhead she appears–and her candy-pink bubbly presentation is covering over some trauma. Nor is Eleanor entirely free of it herself. If she can get past some of her prickly habits, they might make a pretty good team, on the rink and off. Lovely fun read but–like the character of Robin–not an insubstantial piece of cotton candy after all.

Katherine Addison, The Tomb of Dragons. Discussed elsewhere.

Lisa Baril, The Age of Melt: What Glaciers, Ice Mummies, and Ancient Artifacts Teach Us About Climate, Culture, and Future Without Ice. Gosh so many ice mummies. I think I learned more about the ice mummies than anything else here, but it really was nicely procedural.

Clara Benson, The Incident at Fives Castle and The Riddle at [slur]’s Mile. Kindle. Honestly why did she feel the need to use that slur in the title, there were literally no Roma people in the book. It gave me serious pause over reading it at all. And the unfortunate part is that it was the better book of the two; in terms of the entire rest of the text if I could advise you to skip one it would be Incident because the political conspiracy was not particularly well-drawn. I did not intend to become an expert on political conspiracy mysteries but they keep popping up, and also I don’t dodge in the least, if you have more in mind please do tell me.

Maurice Broaddus, The Breath of Oblivion. Discussed elsewhere.

David Brown, A Hell of a Storm: the Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War. Did not do what it said on the tin: specifically this was a book about the lead-up to the American Civil War more generally and not really about Bloody Kansas in any more detail than anything else. It’s a fine enough “lead-up to the American Civil War” book but not the best I’ve read. Oh well.

J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country. Very short and very quiet. This is a book about a recently demobbed soldier whose life has generally fallen apart, restoring the art in an old church in a small town. It’s an older book, but it was written as an historical, not contemporary to the 1920s, but I felt that it did a really good job of combining the feel of the books of that era with perspective from later–that is still the perspective of forty years ago now.

Cathy Coats, To Banish Forever: A Secret Society, the Ho-Chunk, and Ethnic Cleansing in Minnesota. A short book but not an emotionally easy one. Apparently there was an entire secret society–very well documented and in locally prominent positions–in the Mankato area in the second half of the 19th century, dedicated to the genocide of the Ho-Chunk people. I lived four years in that area and knew nothing about it, which is a flavor of horrifying in itself. Extremely useful for opening my eyes, but not a light read, of course.

Sarah Beth Durst, The Spellshop. This, by contrast, is a light read, a cozy fantasy with jam and books and talking plant friends and a romance. The obstacles to the protagonist’s happiness were so readily overcome that it felt frictionless, a bit insubstantial, but honestly that was just fine on the day I read it.

Margaret Frazer, A Play of Knaves and The Squire’s Tale. Kindle. One each of the Player Joliffe and Sister Frevisse series, and I really continue to like how organically these characters are different in a similar setting. I am finding these to be quite reasonable comfort reads and will keep doing so until I run out.

William Gibson, Burning Chrome. Reread. Gosh, he can write a sentence, always could. There’s a lot of sexism here, and I haven’t found early cyberpunk particularly compelling over time, but on a sentence level this is some of the best science fiction writing of its time.

Holly Gramazio, The Husbands. Very small-scale science fiction: the protagonist, who starts the book unmarried, comes home to find a life and a husband she doesn’t remember having, and every time he goes up in the attic, he disappears and a different husband/timeline takes his place. This is the sort of story where prose voice is everything for me, and I enjoyed the prose voice here, it was warm and compelling. The different shapes of relationship possible to her, the different ways that would direct her life, and the way that she exercises agency among them, is thought-provoking and fun.

Jack Kelly, The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America. Very much what it says on the tin, and I fear that the Gilded Age is all too relevant to our time, so I was glad to learn more about it.

Hildur Knútsdóttir, The Night Guest. Very short and creepy. I felt like the strength of this book was how Knútsdóttir wrote about chronic illness and the reactions people have to it. The plot twists were…not very twisty. The ending was unpleasant but unsurprising. But the writing about chronic illness early in the book was absolutely solid stuff.

Naomi Mitchison, To the Chapel Perilous. Not a reread, this is my first exposure to this one, miraculously enough. The journalism spin on the Arthurian tale was charming–the commentary on perspective and legend. Very glad I read this and will want another go at it.

Lauren E. Oakes, In Search of the Canary Tree: The Story of a Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World. Oakes puts a lot of herself in this book–possibly too much depending on how much you’re interested in her personal life while doing the research she describes here, but it’s still an interesting account of how this kind of botanical research works.

Simon Parkin, A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II. Other suggested titles: Not All Nonfiction Needs a Three-Item List In Its Subtitle: Now Conclusively Proven! Sorry, it’s just been a heck of a pattern lately. Anyway, this is an interesting take on how strategizing itself evolved and who got to be involved in it, in the UK dealing with the U-boat problem.

Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Science. A warm and charming account of the different young women who followed directly on the path she blazed–the lab assistants and fellow scientists who had opportunities in her lab. Good stuff.

Ashley Spencer, Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel’s Tween Empire. I don’t know much about this part of culture, and I don’t like ignorance, so I picked this up from a library display. I was disappointed in its depth and type of analysis–this was more a straightforward account of what there was than why it succeeded and failed–and I think the reason is that Spencer is a celebrity journalist of a type that has and needs access. She’s less likely to dive into problems with streaming or other networks’ competition in ways that might jeopardize future interviews, and this book is much shallower than I hoped as a result.

Jonathan Strahan, New Adventures in Space Opera. I will be so glad to have this book in another five years. Today, though, I was frustrated that it has this title while being entirely a reprint anthology. Adventures in Space Opera that you’ve already read in the last few years, and you liked some of them is a less-catchy title. It’s a solid volume, it’s just that I didn’t realize that it was reprints.

Nghi Vo, The City in Glass. I am a hard sell on demon perspective–also on angel perspective, when it comes to that–but Vo is engaging with this ages-long (but reasonably short) fantasy of a city.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Of Cats and Elfins. This short story collection had moments of racism and animal cruelty. There’s a sharpness to the fairy stories here that has its good sides but also its quite negative ones. Not the place to start with her work, I wouldn’t think.

Ovidia Yu, The Angsana Tree Mystery. And speaking of not the place to start, this series does such a satisfying job of unfolding its plots as the history of Singapore progresses that it would be a shame to miss what’s come before. We’re now in the post-WWII repercussion section of this series, and I continue to really enjoy it.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author has been my friend for–oh gosh let’s get my other friend the large-number mathematician out to calculate this one.

Some of my favorite words in book note land are “triumphant conclusion.” I just love when someone sticks a landing. The Tomb of Dragons is listed as the third in a trilogy. There’s room for more with these characters/in this world, but this is also an ending ending, a trilogy ending as well as a book ending.

Thera Celahar came out of his previous run-in with dead forces battered and damaged. His very calling as a Witness for the Dead was shaken. Shaken–but not obliterated. He’s found ways to pursue the peripheries of his calling even without the core available to him. Helping a younger Witness find her way and sorting through a morass of paperwork aren’t the same as hearing the needs of the dead, but they make some positive difference in the world, at least. Until he’s kidnapped and pulled under a mountain. Because yeah, the title? It’s pretty literal. And the haunted dragon bones are only the beginning for Celahar.

In addition to ending both book and series in a highly satisfying way, this volume ties back rather more closely with The Goblin Emperor than its predecessor. If you’ve been wistful for a glimpse of where it all started, this will very much satisfy. I was so glad to have it to read this week. The rest of you have to wait a few months, more, but I promise, it’ll be worth it.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I know the author from cons and online and stuff.

This is the second volume in its series, following Sweep of Stars and preceding…something big, given the ending. Luckily for you the first one is still in print, because this book dives right in and never quits, and there’s a lot of momentum left from the first one, that you will miss out on if you don’t read it.

What this is: African diaspora-tinged space opera. We got your clash of cultures in space, we got your people doing unwise things in the name of science, we got your massive cast with different goals but all striving against the vacuum, we got your family relationships splattering their consequences over the whole galaxy, you want it in a space opera, we got it right here. With a substantially Black cast.

Doesn’t that sound nice? doesn’t that sound like the sort of thing you could laugh and flinch and gasp along with right about now? It comes out Tuesday, so if you start now, you can get there before you know it.

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. Briskly written and cheerfully done, short chapters examining different aspects of the history of the notebook as an object (plus a little bit about objects we might consider predecessors). Kind of a romp honestly.

Clara Benson, A Case of Duplicity in Dorset and A Case of Suicide in St. James’s. Kindle. The next two in this series, probably fine to start here if you want–1920s historical British setting, mildly feckless journalist hero. I am finding myself in the mood for mysteries lately–the endings are comfortingly settling when I’m nervous about issues national and personal.

Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School Chapters 10-13. Kindle. You can tell I was away from home, because I caught up on reading my serial! Boarding school hijinx on Mars, protagonist extremely disgruntled, don’t start here.

Stephanie Burgis, Wooing the Witch Queen. Discussed elsewhere.

Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life. “Double life” has a preexisting colloquial meaning, and it’s not at all what Carlisle is using it to mean in this title. And…it could. She could very easily have been talking about the pressures and tensions between being Author George Eliot with all of her art and the problems attendant thereto and being George Lewes’s partner with all of those attendant problems. There’s not a lot of that, though. I had a few quibbles with interpretations of the fiction, but mostly she means “double life” as “life with another person,” and it doesn’t go particularly deep on that front. Honestly I was a bit disappointed.

Agatha Christie, The Big Four and The Murder on the Links. Kindle. The very early 20th century had some very weird international conspiracy novels–of course there was Chesterton, and Rose Macaulay had one, and then there’s The Big Four, which is…look, we’re distant enough from it now that I have a hard time even seeing how they thought of it then, whether it was ridiculous along the lines of Goldfinger in the late ’50s (book)/’60s (movie) or whether it was, oh yes, this is a popular entertainment but also this kind of flamboyant and yet super-secret international conspiracy, well, you never know. Anyway The Murder on the Links was a much more standard Christie mystery, same faults and virtues as she generally has.

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring. There was a misprint in the jacket copy and thus the online bookstore copy about this book. It claimed to be about an English painter in 1913 Russia. In fact it was about an English printer, and his work as a printer is plot-relevant. I had been specifically looking for something about visual artists to read that day, so it took me half the book to realize and get recombobulated, that no, the protag was not going to suddenly start painting things or even thinking about painting them, that’s not the book you’re reading. Its sense of humor and mine weren’t very congruent, I don’t think.

Margaret Frazer, The Hunter’s Tale (Kindle) and The Widow’s Tale. Two more of the Sister Frevisse mysteries. I’ve gotten a little out of order because not all of them are available in ebook formats and of course ebook retailers have every reason not to advertise that if instead they can get you to buy the next one they do have available. Still, for this late in the series she’s still gong strong.

Barbara Hambly, Saving Susy Sweetchild. And this one is only third in its mystery series, and it’s got a Shirley Temple-like child star being kidnapped, in with all the other elements of this Golden Age Hollywood setting. It’s fine? I keep reading them, I’ll read the next one, I definitely wanted to read this one, but also I don’t feel like this is one I’m going to point to if asked to explain what I particularly like about Barbara Hambly’s mysteries.

Mary Robinette Kowal, The Martian Contingency. Discussed elsewhere.

Sharon Kay Penman, Here Be Dragons. Reread. But this is the first reread since 1997, so a lot of the detail had not stuck with me. This is an historical novel, the first in a trilogy, and its focus is King John’s daughter Joanna and her role in Wales as the wife of Llewelyn Fawr, with all the political complications attached. It’s a huge brick of a book, but it moves along briskly, very readable throughout, will probably reread the rest of the series as well now that I’m at it.

Brenda Peynado, Time’s Agent. Pocket universes whose timelines run at different rates, combined with environmentalism and corporate depradations. This was a fast read but a depressing one.

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Pomeranz argues vigorously against all comers about when and how the economies of the two regions in the title diverged, and he’s pretty persuasive about avoiding western exceptionalism and the sense of the inevitable that dogs some otherwise-fine historians. If you’re not interested in imperial economies, this will not be the book for you. He manages to remember that Denmark exists, and the Germanies, and some other examples of Europe that writers of this genre of history often don’t mean when they say Europe.

Carole Satyamurti, The Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling. This is a kind of a weird thing to label a retelling, because it is a very, very straight-up retelling, it is aiming to replicate in poetry what the original did in its own native poetic meters, and that…is mostly a translation? But Carole Satyamurti is using multiple translations to get there and is not working from the original, so it falls into this weird in-between category. In any case it was extremely readable and gripping, and I was struck by the places where it felt absolutely familiar to my own cultural epics and then also the places where it was different.

Sascha Stronach, The Sunforge. A sequel to The Dawnhounds, this is full of ecological disaster, weird biotech, and trans characters who are fiercely themselves. Couldn’t put it down once I picked it up.

E.M. Tran, Daughters of the New Year. The story of three Vietnamese-American daughters and their immigrant mother, and then the generations proceeding back in time. The ending disappointed me–I know that not circling back to the present was a deliberate stylistic choice, but what it meant was that I felt like I had a piece of a novel rather than a whole one, that no one’s story had a satisfying ending.

Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm. Kindle. I don’t recommend this one. On the one hand, it has a bit of casual Antisemitism and quite a lot of both casual and structural sexism. On the other hand, the ending is completely boring in its main thrust and leaves half the characters you’ve been extensively introduced to in the first half of the book hanging or just stops them abruptly. He did better, several times.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. A study of Indonesian rural mountain communities and their contacts with the outside world, hits the gaps between the outside world and these communities and the developments from that friction pretty hard, undermining the supposed universality of “globalization.” The other thing I’ve read by her is mycological, and she was apparently James C. Scott’s partner until his death.

Patricia C. Wrede, The Raven Ring. Kindle, reread. Another book it had been decades since I reread. This one is the kind of fantasy I read all the time in high school but not, y’know. What’s the phrase. Staggeringly sexist. Right, that. It’s a fun adventure fantasy whose general non-sexist approach has gotten to be far more normal than it was at the time.