C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher, Defiance. This is the latest atevi novel. Don’t start here, seriously, oh my goodness, do not start here, when you have to stop and count how many trilogies this is it is way too deep in the series to start here. There’s a lot of backstory piled up here and meaningful to the story. The set pieces are exciting and fun, the politics are moving along, it is very much not its own thing but rather a chunk of larger story. If you like that ongoing story, here’s some more.
Robert Darnton, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris 1748-1789. Darnton does a really fascinating, thorough job of tracing where Parisians of the pre-Revolutionary period were getting their ideas about the world, from formal and informal sources, local to international. Very cool as a window on worldviews before they solidified into our expectations, as well as this period of history in specific.
Emily J. Edwards, Viviana Valentine Gets Her Man. A mystery novel set in 1950, full of slang and clothes, short and zippy.
Margrét Helgadóttir, ed., Nordic Visions: The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction. Dang, if it weren’t for the Finns this would be a very grim lot. Sit with that for a moment if you will.
Rosemary Kirstein, The Steerswoman’s Road, The Lost Steersman, and The Language of Power. Rereads. This was for book club, and there are so many things I like about this series…and I ended up putting a PostIt note in the first book to say not to read it again, because it’s very clearly not a thing Rosemary would do that way now (she has in fact said so), and…it makes me enjoy the other books less to watch the same characters enthusiastic about torture as a method of gaining reliable information, in a way that is supported by the narrative. The books are otherwise quite good at allowing characters to be wrong and find out their errors in ways that fiction is not always great at, and I enjoyed talking about how it all unfolded in book club. It remains one of the hardest series to pitch without spoilers.
Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity. This was brief and pithy, a reflection on how we categorize who counts in which groups and what we take from our roots.
Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Warrior of the Wind. A sequel and very reliant on the events of the first one for its weight, but interesting once you’ve enjoyed that first one.
Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain’s View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships. Lots of good descriptions of weather and sailing, interesting in a genre we don’t get much of these days.
Christopher Rowe, The Navigating Fox. A very different–very fictional–meditation on roots and identity and belonging and loyalty. The fox and navigation in the title are not metaphorical.
Nisi Shawl, Kinning. Discussed elsewhere.
Georgia Summers, City of Stardust. Discussed elsewhere.
Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I. Does what it says on the tin, and these are good details for us not to take for granted in the present world. I think especially if we’re reading a lot of fiction where evil is required to make sense, it’s good to be reminded that neither good nor evil is required to do so in the real world.
Susan Wels, An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder. Nineteenth-century America was very, very small and also folded funny, so the Oneida Community had cousins in all sorts of places. This was brief and written rather vividly; the title by no means gives too expressive a sense of how sensationalist it intends to be.
Laura Zimmerman, Just Do This One Thing For Me. A really well-written YA novel that deals with difficult themes of child neglect without veering into “problem novel” territory. It is particularly outstanding in its loving and accurate portrayal of the protagonist’s eight-year-old brother. It also is quite good at small town Wisconsin life. Some readers will not want to read it because it’s too well done for its topic–a group of one grade school kid and two teens without reasonable adult supervision will be hard for some adult readers–but the characterization and writing is absolutely top-notch if that’s a topic you can cope with.