Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by Tor. Further disclosure: Jaime has been a personal friend of mine for years.

This is the third book in a trilogy. (Which begins with Delia’s Shadow.) While the characters have room for further adventures, they also have enough closure to be satisfying. So: people who don’t buy series until they know that they have an ending: this has an ending! (I felt that the previous volumes were self-contained enough to buy already, but I know some people are hard-liners about this sort of thing.)

In Against a Brightening Sky, it’s 1919. The Great War is over, the Spanish influenza is a worry, and the Russian Revolution has produced refugees seeking asylum in other lands, including San Francisco. Delia and her friends–cops, spiritualists, and assorted others–gather for a St. Patrick’s Day parade, but it dissolves into riots and chaos–and only they know the supernatural origins of the disturbance. A mysterious type of ghost warns Delia in time to keep them safe, but she seems to want other things of them, following Delia even into her dreams.

The ghost’s identity–and the identity of a bewildered girl they meet–soon become clear to any reader with knowledge of the period. But knowing the background does not mean knowing where Moyer will go with it. Gabe and Delia continue to be a married couple who trust each other, respect each other, and work well as partners with skills that complement each other. The greatest strength in these books in my opinion is not the mystery-solving, the adventure, or the supernatural element, but the genuinely caring and supportive relationships the characters share. That’s what makes them really special and worth seeking out.

Please consider using our link to buy Against a Brightening Sky from Amazon.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Penric’s Demon. Kindle. This is a novella in the Chalion universe. The Bastard is making his presence felt again. Unlike some of the other Bujold stuff in this universe, the characters don’t have the bite of experience to lend them interest–it’s a perfectly readable novella, but it’ll only scratch the setting itch here, not the character itch.

Joyce Chng, Xiao Xiao and the Dragon Pearl. Kindle. Kids’ book (MG novel) about an imperial family interacting with Chinese myth. There seems to be more coming, and I enjoyed this much, but note that a large portion of its very short length is taken up with recipes. Depending on what kid (if any) you’re dealing with, this may be part of the charm or a distraction.

Zen Cho, Sorcerer to the Crown. One of the most charming books I’ve read all year. Delightful without being lightweight. Regency setting with non-white characters as were realistic for that era (rather than the unrealistic whitewashing we’re used to), romance plot without the fantasy being overbalanced by the romance aspect. Faerie aspects all their own, global politics of great interest. I immediately added this to potential Christmas shopping idea lists for half a dozen quite different people, who would enjoy it in their quite different ways. Highly recommended. Great fun.

Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations. I think this book was trying to do too much and too little. It was covering mostly “lost” countries in Europe, things that were countries that have now disappeared from the map, but while Burgundy, for example, is instructive to the modern mind–while there is plenty to say about how the current map is by no means eternal and inevitable–trying to cover modern Irish history or the collapse of the USSR in less than 100 pages each is a bit foolish even if you have a focus on the rise or fall of each. Davies’ two-volume history of Poland shows much better focus and is a better use of one’s time.

Peter Dickinson, A Summer in the Twenties. Kindle. Labor relations and railroads and the Roaring Twenties. And Peter Dickinson! This should really have been the ultimate book for me, but I ended up feeling pretty lukewarm about it, I think because the characters felt more like types than like people. I’d recommend almost any of Dickinson’s other historicals over this one.

Alyc Helms, The Dragons of Heaven. The superhero intro and cover copy were not at all the meat of this book, which was a lot of kung fu human/dragon family relations. It reminded me of Kylie Chan’s first trilogy, except that Alyc’s book had a beginning, a middle, and an end, all in one book. The superhero plot did eventually tie back in, but I had been hoping for more of it–maybe in a sequel? because even more integrated superhero and Chinese mythology stuff would be so great.

Reginald Hill, Dialogues of the Dead. Another of the Dalziel and Pascoe series, this one themed around a very nerdy referential word game. It’s only the first half of its story, so don’t make the mistake I did and pack to go out of town without the second half in your bag. Well. Soon.

Gwyneth Jones, Castles Made of Sand. Second in its series. Family formation overlaps with trying to keep a nation together overlaps with neurological implant…interest. And magic. This is sort of a kitchen sink series, but I love every bit of it. This volume, however, makes me writhe substantially throughout, for various reasons (not that I don’t love it!), and I probably should not read it away from home again. Do not start here. This is not a stand-alone.

Judy Jordan, Kallie Falandays, and Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs, Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 2. Discussed elsewhere.

Charles Kingsley, Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time. Kindle. This is why we shouldn’t read really old history as a reference. Everyone in this supposed work of nonfiction was Incredibly Noble For Sure. Even when they disagreed. Especially when they disagreed! Oh So Noble. I believe I was looking for a lot more Throckmortons when I downloaded this, but I download a great many things, so who knows; anyway, it was not greatly satisfying, and I do not really recommend it.

Alethea Kontis, Tales of Arilland. Kindle. Tie-in short stories and outtakes from her series. Some fun stuff, some stuff that’s probably best suited for the true fan.

Nicole Kornher-Stace, Archivist Wasp. Post-apocalyptic ghost-hunting book, vivid and interesting, in no way to do with archives or wasps. I tried not to be too disappointed about the lack of archives, because it really was a fun post-apocalyptic ghost-hunting book. (But wasps who archive! Sigh.)

Jodi Meadows, The Hidden Prince. Kindle. Novella that’s interstitial to the main books of her Orphan Queen series, basically promotional material for the true fan.

Ty Nolan, Coyote Still Going: Native American Legends and Contemporary Stories. Kindle. These legends and stories come with recipes and a great deal of context and exegesis. Particularly useful for non-Native writers, teachers, parents, etc. who want to think hard about how they are using/teaching cultural material not their own. Far-ranging. Entertaining. Not very long, though.

Hannu Rajaniemi, Collected Fiction. Somewhat variable. Unsurprisingly, the more Finnish it got, the better I liked it.

Ruth Rendell, The New Girl Friend. When my mother-in-law gave me this volume, she warned me that it was not a volume of murder mysteries but merely a volume of murder stories, and this is entirely true: there was no mystery about it. Someone was going to bash someone’s head in, and you could usually tell who. This…is not a favorite mode for me. It is labeled “suspense” on the cover, but I think that’s as a genre label for “things we call mystery that have no actual mystery to them”; there was certainly no emotion of suspense, nor even dread. Other Rendell is better.

Jonathan D. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: the Chinese and Their Revolution and The Question of Hu. The former is a microhistory outside his period and definitely not where you want to start if you don’t have good knowledge of the Chinese Revolution(s). Interesting about three scholarly figures of those eras, if you do. The latter is about a translator/calligrapher hired for Westerners and shipped to France, and the problems of cross-cultural work, mental illness, and translation as a whole-body problem. Poor Hu. Oh dear. I’m glad it wasn’t much longer, because it was not much less upsetting than the Chinese Revolution(s).

Lynne Thomas and Michael D. Thomas, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 3 and  Issue 4. Kindle. Mostly I had read the contents of these online by the time I got to them on my Kindle–hard to know which direction that will go–but I had missed at least one really good thing that will go in my recs post next time. And it is nice to have them on my Kindle when airplane mode is required.

Helen Zimmern, The Hansa Towns. Kindle. A very old book–Germany was still finishing its unification–and it left out some of the things one would most want to know. For example, Zimmern wrote, “We cannot sully our pages by detailing the thirteen different ‘games’ or modes of martyrdom that were in use in Bergen. Our more civilized age could not tolerate the recital.” The hell we can’t! Sully away, lady! Still, stuff about the Hanseatic League is hard to come by, so we get what we can, even when it’s not as impure a recital as we might like.

Review copy provided by Upper Rubber Boot Books.

The Floodgate series is basically a set of three chapbooks worth of material, joined into a nicely produced trade paperback. They’re putting them out each fall. I love this idea–the poets don’t have to have enough material (or enough focused material or the desire to put it in this format or…vamp until ready) for a dedicated book, but the combination is more satisfying than a stapled-together chapbook volume. Finding poets is always a difficulty–at least I find it so–and so it’s entirely possible that someone will pick up one of these volumes for one poet and discover another, in more depth than a single poem or even a handful flashing by in a magazine can provide.

That said, this particular example was not entirely successful for me, I regret to say. I will try to say why clearly, because I think it was less “these are bad poems” and more “these are not mostly the poems for me.” The Kallie Falandays section, “Tiny Openings Everywhere,” was very much in the personal damage narrative school of poetry, which is one that has to hit just right or I am impatient with it. Her poem “Sometimes We Build Small Ships” did just that–but by its nature, it made me wish that more of her poems did build those ships, that the solar systems built out of our bruises (yes Kallie I have done that yes what a line your truth is my truth) were grander, deeper, or more lapidary, some direction–that they were more solar systems and stayed less with the bruises. I would have loved more small ships! I wish it had been a more frequent sometimes. I know, however, that this type of poetry touches a great many poetry readers deeply. It is not that she is doing a wrong thing or doing it wrongly. It’s that our small ships only pass each other glancingly.

Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs’s “Score for a Burning Bridge” section was the sort of poetry that is like going on a Midwestern road trip with a friend of a friend you will remember kindly but will never ask to do such a trip again. He has an eye for taking cell phone photos of the napkin dispensers in diners, that are perfectly fine photos, but there is no one photo of the napkin dispenser that says to me, oh yes, this is the one, this is where I finally see what he’s getting at with all the napkin dispenser photos in all the diners. (No napkin dispensers were harmed in the writing of these poems.) I’m not trying to be a poet myself here, I am not a poet, I am all prose, I just…I find it frustrating to talk about how and when I do not connect with poetry that is not doing its own things perfectly well, because it makes it difficult to actually get poetry recommendations, and the thing is, I know that there are people who love the diner napkin photos. They are fairly upset photos in this case without a lot of…well.

(Every time I find a poet I like and find the terminology/adjectives applied to them, I am heartened. I think “perhaps I like [group name here]!” And then I go find more, and no. I do not like group name. I like A and B but not C in the same group, and D is right out. Poetry is hard, let’s…read more poetry.)

Judy Jordan’s “Hunger” section was the one that struck deepest for me. It was keenly observed lack, hunger but also bills and illness, and yet not in a way that became a drumbeat of woe. It started with my favorite of the section, “These First Mornings Living in the Greenhouse,” and the entire section had the feel of a latter-day imperial fall in real daily terms–not what we imagine an imperial fall would be like, but what it actually was, dragged out, small, particular, personal ways. The greenhouse in the cold is vivid and rich and particular, and Jordan goes on from there to all the other particulars of a fall (not an autumn, a fall), the bulldozers, the algae-clogged ponds.

I will be interested to see where this series goes next year.

Simon Barnes, Ten Million Aliens: A Journey Through the Entire Animal Kingdom. Very, very short essays about animals. All sorts of animals. I thought my adult life would contain more of these, since one’s childhood does. Not a lot of depth, but gosh, animals; it was cheerful and nice.

Cole Cohen, Head Case: My Brain and Other Wonders. Too much memoir, not enough neurology. It was very interesting, although if you are in any way prone to reading memoirs of illness and thinking, “OH NO MAYBE I HAVE THAT,” be careful with this one; I am not so prone, and therefore I could cheerfully read this about what it is like to have a lemon-sized hole in one’s brain. (Also they have looked at my brain and given it a structural thumbs up. So.) It was interesting, but I was glad it wasn’t longer. If you, too, are interested in the wide variety of Ways The Brain Can Cope Through Quite A Lot, this is that genre.

Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Discussed elsewhere.

Carter J. Eckert, Ki-baik Lee, Young Ick Lew, Michael Robinson, and Edward W. Wagner, Korea Old and New: A History. I keep filling in my gaps in knowledge of Korean history as best I can despite the difficulties in finding things in English. This one was much more focused on the Japanese occupation than a lot of general Korean histories, which was interesting in itself–it read as though some specialists in that period had written some chapters, then decided that they didn’t want to expand them into a book on just that but rather wanted to stick on a few earlier and later chapters and sell it as a general history. Fine by me, no worse than other approaches, and hey, at least with a couple of people of Korean background doing some of the writing, it was not all “history begins when the US begins shooting, or possibly when the UK does; France at the absolute outside.” (I really hate that mode of history.)

Reginald Hill, On Beulah Height and Arms and the Women. Rereads. These may be my two favorites in the series. We’ll see what I think of the last few when I reread them, but right now I am feeling that On Beulah Height is one of the best mystery novels written since the death of Dorothy Sayers. I recommend reading one or two of the others in the series before it (Arms and the Women will do, although when I finish the series reread I will do a comprehensive “where do I start? what order?” post of some sort). It is a dark and lovely thing, and some of the emotional weight of it depends on having a strong feeling for who these people are to each other. It also depends on having had enough feel for Yorkshire dialect that when Andy Dalziel declares that he’ll not thole it, you don’t have to stop a minute to figure out what it is to thole something. If you have to stop for that minute, you won’t choke up at that point in the book. (Aaaaagh that SPOT and later with the DASHBOARD OH ANDY.) Arms, meanwhile, is the one I started with, and is lovely but not nearly so fraught. It’s an interesting one to have started with, because it has callbacks to books much earlier and only moderately earlier in the series, but the way they fit in the text are entirely fine if you read them as if they were just introduced at that moment.

Li Kunwu and P. Otie, A Chinese Life. This is a graphic novel memoir of the Cultural Revolution and Chinese history since. Other than its format, the main way it stands out from other memoirs of the time is that Li is clear and honest not only about what was done to him during the Cultural Revolution but also about what he did to others. He was a child at the time. If you know the Cultural Revolution, you know that that did not actually stop people from committing atrocities. It’s a harrowing read in spots, and if you have family/personal connections to the Cultural Revolution or are otherwise feeling sensitive, I recommend that you time your reading carefully.

Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness. Note: not actually surprising. I was hoping for quite a lot of octopus neurology and biology, and instead I got some very chatty accounts of hanging out with octopus at an aquarium. Which was nice, and it’s a short book, but…too many monkeys, not enough octopus.

Terry Pratchett, A Blink of the Screen and The Wee Free Men. (The latter a reread.) What different books. The former is a short fiction collection, which I feel is not at all his strength and frankly only worth the time for a Pratchett completist. The latter is one of his best works: the first of the Tiffany Aching books, a beautiful rallying cry for the stubborn, the precise, the caretakers, the people-herders, the over-prepared, the curious, the lookers-up…me, okay? It’s a rallying cry for me. One of my friends told me she pictured Tiffany as a young me, and when I reread this book, I got tears in my eyes over that comment, because I realized that it is the most overtly sentimental she is likely to get over our friendship, because she is also a one like that, and we mostly don’t go around saying things like that with our out loud words, mostly we say things like, “How’s your mom doing now?” and also we make soup. And Terry Pratchett: he understood that, and he wrote a book for us, and not only that, it starts for those of us who know it even when we’re little, it’s for my Lillian, my goddaughter who is already a people-herding little one of us, because this stubborn dark hilarious little book is for kids too. Oh, and also: I had not reread this since my grandpa died. And the important grandparent in it is a Granny, but: yeah. So. I will have to wait awhile before I read another of these, because there’s only so much of it in me at once. I knew when Pratchett died that I’d have to make a run up to Wintersmith, and I was right. But this is the beginning of that run. And now there’s the last one out. Crivens. Also quite funny, for those who for some reason don’t know.

S.E. Smith, The United States Marine Corps in World War II: Volume III: Death of an Empire. Grandpa’s. These stories were compiled from actual Marines and the journalists who were embedded with them, very shortly after the war. There is not the level of polish or perspective one might hope from a later account, but the value of the immediate version is very clear. The photo illustrations are smudgy and not really worthwhile, and the language is full of ethnic slurs on the one hand and elisions of the kind of crudity that they actually used on the other. And yet there is something very true and very useful about it, and I am glad to have it. This is the last in its set.

Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World. Wedgwood and Watt, Priestley and Erasmus Darwin and Matthew Boulton, plus assorted connections and hangers-on. They didn’t have the same lines that we do, they were just doing their cool things, and wandering about having their 18th century lives and affairs and stubbornness. I like Jenny Uglow a great deal, with one caveat that I would apply to more than one historian, and that is this: diagnostic medicine has improved so much even in the last fifty years, much less the last three centuries, that I am not at all comfortable with blithely labeling eighteenth century figures “hypochondriac.” That was a very small point in a very interesting whole, though.

Greg van Eekhout, Dragon Coast. Discussed elsewhere.

Fran Wilde, Updraft. Discussed elsewhere.

Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology. Winchester…really needs to get control of his footnotes. And this coming from a Terry Pratchett fan! It’s not that there are too many. It’s that he seems to be unable to know a thing without sticking it in a footnote without regard for whether it is relevant or even interesting in context. He has the sort of footnoting style that left me expecting to come upon “*I like cheese” as a footnote at any time. I am interested in very early geology, but Winchester’s style made this short book more of an eye-rolling slog than the length should have allowed. Seriously, you do not have to explain who Joseph Priestley is three times in one book–particularly not always with the same Priestley-you-know-the-oxygen-guy tagline. People who want to read about the beginning of modern geology either 1) already know Priestley, 2) got it the first time, or 3) don’t actually care (although they should because Priestley is a kick). Also if no one has ever required a dude to be married to be the Father of [His Field], no one should ever require a lady to be married to be the Mother of [Her Field], so PUT A SOCK IN IT, SIMON WINCHESTER: THAT IS MY MATURE AND CONSIDERED OPINION. Ahem. Yes. Well then. On that note.

Review copy provided by Tor.

Every once in awhile there is an epic fantasy that makes me say, “Oh yes, right, that’s why I read epic fantasy!” Even better when it’s a debut author, so I can say that and anticipate more of that person later. The Traitor Baru Cormorant is one of those books. It’s not perfect, of course, but this is not the universe for perfect. (Ours, I mean. Baru’s either.) What it does quite effectively, though, is show a young woman in the process of using the tools of empire to subvert the empire in question–and Dickinson has correctly identified bureaucracy and monetary policy as major tools of empire.

This, folks, is a fantasy of logistics. All the things that we talk about wishing there was more of–accounting, supplies, all of that–in exciting form. Any time someone tries to tell you that bashing people with swords is the main fantasy theme because supplying armies is boring should be turned around so they are pointing at The Traitor Baru Cormorant and then given a gentle shove.

(Also there is bashing people with swords. Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge…true love not in the direction one might expect….)

There is twistiness. There is plottiness. There is double-crossing, there is a sense of priorities not going where they necessarily would for the modern reader. More. More.

Please consider using our link to buy The Traitor Baru Cormorant from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books. I think I’ve met Fran in person one weekend unless I’m forgetting another time (if so, sorry, Fran!), but we’re friendly online.

The best first novels are the ones where you can tell that the author is having fun with tropes and images they particularly enjoy. In the case of Updraft, that’s human flight via gliders. The humans in these books live in giant, at least somewhat-living structures, towers, that are interconnected with a few bridges but mostly conduct their trade and social contact through glider pilots flying back and forth. The Singers in the highest Spire keep the secrets of the towers, enforcing the Laws and protecting the tower denizens from the monsters who fly around them.

Or do they? Kirit and her friend Nat are trying to earn the right to fly alone between the towers as adults, but their curiosity leads them to some strange places and even stranger questions. They don’t have the backing of rich and powerful adults like some of their peers do, and the evidence that there’s more going on in their home than they’ve been taught keeps piling up. They take more risks and then more to find out what’s going on, and soon their loyalties to their home and each other are at risk. They find relationships they thought were lost and gifts within themselves that they never suspected existed.

This is really fine adventure fantasy that made me feel fourteen again in the best way.

Please consider using our link to buy Updraft from Amazon.