Olivia Chadha, Fall of the Iron Gods. A sequel, very much a sequel, with mechas and an environmentally devastated world. Betrayal and reunion, fun stuff.
Vajra Chandrasekera, Rakesfall. Generation-spanning weird experimental book with echoes of the Sri Lankan Civil War throughout spacetime including onto a dying planet. Even in the weirdest parts, very well-written.
K.A. Cobell, Looking for Smoke. A mystery about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, centering around Blackfeet teenagers. It’s really well done and really emotionally wrenching, particularly if you have a personal connection to this issue. I clutched the pages so hard I had to be careful not to tear them.
Emily J. Edwards, Viviana Valentine Goes Up the River and Viviana Valentine and the Ticking Clock. The second and third volumes of an historical murder mystery series, set in 1950-1951 so far. Fun but not impeccable, so if you’re picky about historicals, this may not be the one for you.
Erin M. Evans, Relics of Ruin. Another very sequel-ish sequel, returning to interesting characters and setting. No reason not to read the first one first in this fun secondary world fantasy setting.
Rebecca Fraimow, Lady Eve’s Last Con. To continue the fun reads theme of this fortnight–which was not wholly deliberate on my part, it’s partly just what the library happened to get in–this is a frothy delightful space opera romance with a con artist main character. I particularly liked the artificial beach scene for being a very science fictional intervention in this type.
Sara B. Franklin, The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America. Brief and delightful biography of a person who was influential across multiple kinds of writing. Not everything that happened to her was delightful, but that’s the nature of the 20th century….
Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire. This is a bug-crusher of a book, and it’s just what I wanted, recounting the revolutionaries and revolutionary movements of South and Southeast Asia in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It successfully centers the perspectives of people in those regions, touching on the rest of the global political scene only as appropriate rather than centering US/European white perspectives. If you’ve ever felt like you’d like to sort out a bit more of who knew whom and who was doing what when, in the anticolonialist movements of Asia, this is a very useful book.
Allan Kaster, ed., The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 8. I make a policy of not reviewing books that I’m in, and I’m in this one.
L.M. Montgomery, The Blythes Are Quoted. Kindle. Oh, what a disappointment this was. The premise is that Anne Shirley Blythe is reading her poetry to her family and we get their reactions in stage dialog form, interspersed with short stories in which other people star but are obsessed with the Blythe family. This is lampshaded by various characters saying that they’re sick of hearing about the Blythes…only to be completely undercut by them all feeling great about the Blythe obsession once their own lives are sorted out. She died before this got published, and perhaps if she hadn’t an editor would have asked her to fill out the poetry scenes with, well, scenes. And it would be better if I liked her poetry, which I definitely do not. This is the last bit of Anne of Green Gables fiction I had unread, and I wish I’d left it there.
Jay Owens, Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles. About literally what it says on the tin, and a lot more interesting than you might expect dust to be. Science! with dust! Good times, also not terribly long.
Noel Streatfeild, Myra Carrol. Kindle. A novel about the life of a woman who falls into decadence and climbs back out again through the love of her children. She uses the word “decadent” a lot, which is not particularly comfortable for me in a book from the World War II era–especially when the proper thing the character is returning to is very kinder, küche, kirche. She’s explicitly anti-Nazi, but she’s not always advocating positions as far from them as I’d think.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, House of Open Wounds. Look, it’s got it right in the title. If you feel like you’re going too read a book called House of Open Wounds and expect it not to be gory and gross, that’s on you. This is a fantasy about battlefield medicine, which is something you don’t see nearly enough of, and I thought it was really well done, but it is what it is. Go in forewarned. (Also it’s a sequel, but I think it’s a pretty stand-alone sequel.)