Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

Dragons Beware! has strong messages of teamwork, loyalty, and self-acceptance. Sometimes they’re strong enough to overwhelm the actual story, which doesn’t do very much that’s new with its team of varied dragon-slayers. The art is cute, there are some cute asides, and generally…yep, cute. I think this is one of the graphic novels that probably has a strong age component to its audience, because people who haven’t read a quest tale of this type before are more likely to find it interesting/less predictable. And the age this series is aimed it is the age that can’t have read much of anything before, because they haven’t been on the planet long.

A note: this is the second book in a series, apparently, but I haven’t read the first one and did not find that I was missing much. All of the backstory was filled in quite clearly.

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Christopher Benfey, A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Johnson Heade. There is less Twain than a person might hope if they were partial to Twain, but there is quite a lot of Mark Johnson Heade, and if you’re partial to obscure bird artists–which frankly I kind of am–that works out all for the best.

Jennifer Coopersmith, Energy: The Subtle Concept. A history of how we have thought about energy (in a physics context, not a colloquial one). Worthwhile even for the physicists among us for how it covers dead ends and experiments that reinforced wrong notions as well as covering progress towards decent approximations of understanding. I love mad scientists and wrong science. They are the messy way the world works.

Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard. Reread. The thing that struck me on this reread is how astonishingly filmable this story is. I am completely boggled that it has not become a movie yet. There are aspects that fall away as the series deepens, and it gets much, much better from here, and yet the basic elements are there, Kit and Nita starting to work as a team, personality from unusual places starting with Fred the white hole but also including the cabs in the dark universe, and always always placing oneself squarely against entropy. I’m going to keep rereading this series. This was a good reminder of why I love it–and how simply complex things can start successfully.

William Gibson, The Peripheral. I respect this book a great deal. A friend suggested that it might be the best thing Gibson has done, and she may well be right. The science fictional thing he’s doing with information traveling through time but not matter–that’s not something I’ve seen much before if at all, and he does it very well. I did not, however, find it particularly well-characterized. I had difficulty caring about the characters. So I respected but didn’t enjoy this book. Ah well; these things happen.

J. N. B. Hewitt, Iroquois Cosmology. Kindle. Highly archaic language, retelling origin stories from more than one Iroquois group. Somewhat repetitive and not very good quality prose, but beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to recognizing diversity/variation of Native American/First Nations pre-Columbian thought.

Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism. Kindle. Very weirdly structured. Because this was on my Kindle, I couldn’t tell that fully 40% of it was endnotes, and that therefore it was going to stop once two of the sisters were married. Their careers and interesting behaviors did not stop at that point, nor did they sink into obscurity (one married Nathaniel Hawthorne, the other Horace Mann), so I’m not at all clear why Marshall decided that this was all the Peabody we got. Other than that it was quite good, digressing in a most engaging way into the history of canals and Unitarianism in the US and all sorts of stuff, just the right amount to be sparkly and interesting but not enough to lose coherence. I also added to my list of “women Bronson Alcott screwed over; reasons Bronson Alcott should have been shaken until his teeth rattled,” which latter act I would not even have thought of without Louisa May Alcott, so…appropriate I guess. But Bronson Alcott did not take over the book, and I have hopes that he will not take over Marshall’s bio of Margaret Fuller.

E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. This is the book with which my ability to read nonfiction ran aground in March when I got sick. There’s a lot of dense chewy stuff about poaching and commonly held lands in English history. Worthwhile, but not for when your brain is not at full capacity.

Jo Walton, Lifelode. Reread. I still love how this all fits together, how the worldbuilding works with something this complicated. Before it came out, I was saying that there weren’t many people other than Jo I would trust not to make something like this a hot mess, and that’s still true. For those who haven’t read it: the main characters are a complex family, and time runs differently depending on where you are geographically. And it’s substantially domestic. It’s lovely, and I love it, but I can’t think who else could have written anything even with a similar setting, much less the whole thing.

Jacqueline Winspear, Maisie Dobbs. The first in a mystery series that focuses more on the effects of WWI on the heroine’s life than on the mystery, but since that mystery is also WWI-related, the imbalance doesn’t grate. I’ll be interested to see how the rest of the series works, though, since it doesn’t seem all that repeatable. The best mystery series don’t rely on repetition…but most do.

Zong In-Sob, Folk Tales from Korea. This is from 1952. All sorts of interesting pieces and parts in it, useful thoughts for later projects. Does not have everything one could want; duh, really, it’s only one book. Very glad that Half Price had it, though.

Balak, Sanlaville, and Vives, Last Man: The Stranger. Discussed elsewhere.

Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, Hostage. Kindle. Sequel to Stranger, very dependent on its events and characterization. If you were wanting more of that, here it is, but this is not the place to start. Implication and ramification, though, both in terms of the world and individually. I don’t see that coming out nontraditionally did a thing to harm this book.

Roz Chast, Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?. A memoir of her parents’ old age and her experiences in eldercare. In comic form. Wry and in some places dark, not as much depth as I would have hoped.

CJ Cherryh, Tracker. The latest atevi novel. For the love of Pete don’t start here, but! We have plot progress! This is not merely another book in which people drink tea, pick out coats and furnishings, and try not to get assassinated! Not that I didn’t enjoy those, but: serious plot progress hurray! (Of course, I flipped immediately from being thrilled with the plot progress to being impatient for more. Readers, man. You just can’t win.)

Adam Christopher, The Machine Awakes. Discussed elsewhere.

Mary Robinette Kowal, Of Noble Family. Discussed elsewhere.

Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings. This is why I keep reading epic fantasy: because sometimes there is a book like this. So immersive! I found my sense of how much more it was reasonable to read before doing laundry/making supper/etc. stretching out as the book went on: “Oh, only 100 more pages in this section? sure, that sounds like a sensible amount to read before eating.” The influence of the Chinese classics was so structurally pervasive that I think it even changed how I saw POV shifts. There is a thing in classical Chinese literature where you get a POV character for a short time but it doesn’t feel like head-hopping, and that came into play for me very early on in Ken’s book, that the short-term perspectives felt signaled to be an homage to that instead of just random. Other people have talked about how there aren’t very many women characters early in the book, and this is true, but I think that the last part makes up ground quickly and promises good things in future volumes, and considering the literary influences on it, it is jam-packed with women doing both traditional and non-traditional things in awesome ways. Very much recommended. Looking forward to more.

Robin McKinley, The Door in the Hedge. Reread. Wow, am I glad I didn’t pattern short story writing off this. Her structure is so weird. Most short stories–even novelettes and novellas–are not better with a prologue, an epilogue, and then two chapters. That…is not really how this goes mostly. Also she was doing lots of early-career trite stuff–if I never see a tiny sprinkling of freckles described as keeping someone from being perfect/too beautiful again, it will be too soon. Still immersive and lovely.

Nayad Monroe, ed., Not Our Kind: Tales of (Not) Belonging. I make a policy of not reviewing books I appear in. Therefore I can tell you: this book exists, I read it, I wrote part of it.

Marie Rutkoski, The Winner’s Crime. This is very much in the “characters dig themselves a muuuuuch deeper hole” school of second books. Do not, do not, do not read this first. Go read The Winner’s Curse first. Then if you don’t want to keep going, The Winner’s Crime was not the book for you anyway. Revolutions, negotiations, politics, star-crossed lovers like whoa.

Salla Simukka, As White as Snow. Finnish YA suspense novel. Second in its series but not as dependent upon the first one as some other things I read this fortnight. Very, very Finnish. Matter-of-fact romance with a trans character, very structurally weirdly handled though: it’s the sort of thing that feels like it somehow didn’t fit in the first book where she was setting backstory/expectations and needed to be there (I’m guessing) before the third book where she wants to have some kind of continuation/plot/payoff, so…it goes in the second book, but basically offstage. Strange place for a romance plot. (I mean that the romance plot itself was offstage, not just the sex scenes, which were at least highly suggestive-to-pretty-onstage for this type of YA. That inversion confused me, too.)

Jo Walton, Ha’penny and Half a Crown. Rereads. After I finished Farthing last fortnight, I basically just wanted the whole arc. I think there’s enough backstory in these to make them readable at any point, and the three non-Carmichael voices are so vividly different. I found the follow-through into Elvira’s attitudes particularly wrenching. I said last time that Jo is one of the best at theory of mind stuff, and this comes through particularly, I feel, on something like her characters’ reactions to Hitler. It appears to be really difficult for people to put themselves in the mindset of someone who doesn’t think of Hitler as they do, or else they feel insecure about whether everyone will understand that they know Hitler was really bad? or something. But Jo gets it just right, the chasm between what someone under a fascist system will think of a charming politician they’ve just met and what we know, or the things that growing up under a particular system can normalize. I love these, but I can’t reread them too often.

Robert Charles Wilson, The Affinities. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

(I could have sworn I posted this review earlier. Apparently not.)

The visual style of this slim graphic novel is clearly influenced by French-language comics of the past (French and especially Belgian). It’s doing a plot that shows up in anime a lot: basically a tournament with lots of fighting, a tiny bit of subplot for the characters but not much. But the faces don’t look like anime. The fight style doesn’t look like anime.

This is not quite Tintin Goes To A Tournament, Manga Style. But it’s pretty close.

Nor is this a complete story. If you’re someone who likes fight comics that don’t get too gory, and you don’t mind stories being stretched over several installations of blam, peuh, and thwok, this may very well be your thing. I’m going to try it on my favorite 12-year-old and see whether he likes it, but for adults it’s likely to revive feelings of being that age. You can judge for yourself whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. So far, it’s executing reasonably well, but if it’s doing more than dead-center genre-standard things, I can’t see what they are.

Please consider using our link to buy The Stranger from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

This is the second book in a series, and I have not read the first. The rule for reviews is that I start reading, and if I don’t quit until the book is done, I review it; while there are some things that probably would do a bit better with the context of the first book, nothing was too glaring. I don’t see any reason not to start here, if you have a copy convenient.

This is an entirely readable military SF thriller. There’s nothing innovative in the SF concept, and the characterization is not deep enough to provide its own novelty, but on the other hand, an unobjectionable military SF thriller with readable prose is just what I have heard a great many people yearning for (albeit usually in more glowing terms). There are Psi-Marines, if that tells you what genre-space we’re in. I could wish that it was doing something more with the characters, but the action zipped along, and I didn’t regret the time I spent reading it. And it may be just what you’re looking for.

Please consider using our link to buy The Machine Awakes from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor.

Nerds like taxonomies. This is a truism we use around here a lot, but there it is. In The Affinities, Robert Charles Wilson manages to write about a highly taxonomized future without telling us more than the tiniest bit about those taxonomies. Sixty percent of people, this book postulates, fit into twenty-two “affinity groups.” Okay? But what these affinity groups are, how they work, why they work, remains sketchy at best. Many of the characters are part of the Tau affinity group, and all I could make out of the Taus is that they are “nice enough, I guess.” Their main competitors for resources and political power are the Hets, who are not nice enough, who are in fact frankly villainous. So we have the good guys, the bad guys, the 40% unclassified, and…twenty other affinity groups, of which we know that…one of them is kind of flaky? That’s pretty much it.

For this book to work, we are asked to believe that the affinity groups work amazingly well together…but this is repeatedly told and never even remotely shown. They are to be mentally, emotionally, socially, and neurologically amazingly compatible–but couples who share the same affinity group and find each other without help are supposed to be rare? And no one says, “eh, this is all right, but I’m actually more compatible with” any of the other affinity groups humans already form. Fraternities and sororities, bird watchers, alumni of particular colleges/universities, folk dancers…well, yeah. The number of things people already form clumps around is large. And those clumps already give advantages to some over others–I, for example, would go farther for a randomly selected Gustavus physics major than I would for a randomly selected member of the general population. I don’t have a lot of pull in getting people jobs etc.–but I absolutely would try at least a tiny bit harder for one of “us.” Or one of another of a dozen “us”es I have. But in The Affinities, the affinity groups discovered are so powerful that they completely crush any other possible ways of forming kin and affines. For nearly everybody. And yet! And yet they are distributed more or less randomly, so that you always have the useful profession you want available, whether it’s substance-abuse counselor or helicopter pilot–and never discover that, eh, nobody in your affinity group really likes to do [job], so you can’t really rely on them for that.

Further, the affinity groups have enough time to get themselves deeply embedded in a society that is clearly (from the grandmother’s class year) the future and yet behaves like ten years ago or so. Other than affinity groups, nothing has changed over the course of this entire future. There are tensions in South Asia; people use cell phones but not for anything interesting; the same cars are prestigious and the same behaviors are denigrated or lauded by society at large and its more reactionary members in particular. When people complain about SF novels not addressing the present, much less the future, this is exactly the sort of book on their minds.

This is a lot to swallow, and in fact I couldn’t swallow it. Robert Charles Wilson’s books are always readable on a sentence or even paragraph level, so it was a painless read in that sense. But the social thinking…just did not work for me. I found it unconvincing in its particulars and as a whole. I didn’t even find it interestingly wrong, because it wasn’t engaging with any depth on the topic of what makes people work well together or not, and which ways of working well together engage the wider world in positive and negative ways. It just sort of skated over those questions for a shallow action plot and a deeply obvious “twist” ending. I wanted to like this book or, failing that, find it interesting to argue with. I can’t say that either happened.

Please consider using our link to buy The Affinities from Amazon.