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The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza, by James Kochalka (and a few other things)

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

You know how I said that Zita the Spacegirl could be enjoyed by all ages? The Glorkian Warrior…is not so much all ages humor. If you think peanut butter-clam pizza is funny, then this will probably be about your speed. It is silly, it is extremely silly, it is sillier than that. It has a Super Backpack who is the voice of reason–the Super Backpack Super-Ego, if you will. It is entirely possible that my seven-year-old goddaughter will be too mature for this book. I feel sure that it has an audience, because this kind of alien goofy banana joke humor always has an audience, but it’s the kind of audience that likes Gonk-goes-bonk jokes.

Ah, but! If you are looking for something for a small relative who has that sort of sense of humor, and you don’t want it to be toilet humor, this is not generally scatalogical. It’s very silly, and it’s sometimes gross, but the places where it’s gross are neither sexual nor scatalogical, so you can go forward with it, confident that the parent will not kill you for teaching the kid new poop jokes.

I read this very short graphic novel in something like ten minutes flat after sending my agent the latest draft of my latest novel and doing the page proofs for my latest Analog story with my latest writing Alec–wait, no, same Alec I’ve always written with. I just got caught up in all the latests. I also read my latest (arrrrgh! but it’s a good latest along with all the other good latests in this paragraph) story in the latest (I CANNOT STOP) issue of On Spec, also collaborative with Alec. This one is “The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Re-Capitation,” and we’re pretty pleased. You can get it from the nice folks at On Spec, I expect.

Anyway, after all those latests, I am feeling a bit like a puppet with cut strings, so a very silly, very short graphic novel was much more what I was up for than the large and heavy biography I was otherwise in the middle of reading. More when I can. Stay warm; that’s my big goal tonight.

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Books read, early March

Joseph Barry, Infamous Woman: The Life of George Sand. Lots of scandalous nineteenth century gossip to be had in this, and various artists wandering in and out and having their own way in various aspects of their lives, and being shoved into corners by illness and revolution and financial concerns. Interesting stuff. Recommended.

danah boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. A lot of what’s in here is stuff I already knew, but I strongly suspect that I am not boyd’s main target audience here. I think the main message is not “there’s nothing to be afraid of” so much as “most people seem to be afraid of the wrong stuff.” Also, holy crud do we need more genuine cross-generational public spaces. Also, people seem to believe things that are patently untrue, such as “I wouldn’t let my [sixteen-year-old] kid talk to strangers in person, so I’m just carrying that onto the internet.” Culturally we require kids of that age to talk to strangers all the time; what people who say that seem to mean is that they don’t expect their teenagers to have adult friends of their own with common interests apart from the parents. Because if a 16-year-old refused to speak to classmates they hadn’t been formally introduced to by their parents, or to the clerk at the grocery store? it would be considered rude and weird. And most 18-year-olds are dumped off and expected to live and construct entire social lives with strangers. But “I don’t let my kid talk to strangers” is one of those things that sounds like it’s probably true, so people are allowed to say it without having someone challenge them on what a dumb thing it is to say about a person who is allowed to operate a motor vehicle. Or even a bicycle.

Cathy Marie Buchanan, The Painted Girls. An historical novel about young Paris Opera dancers and their lives, dealing with what the impressions and views of artists such as Zola and Degas and the less savory characters around them would do to the impoverished women who were their object. In spite of that not at all uplifting theme, it has moments of great sweetness and beauty, and the women in question manage to claw out their own realistic happy ending despite their appalling circumstances. If you want the romance of the ballet, this is so not for you. I ended up entranced.

Mike Carey, The Unwritten: Orpheus in the Underworld. The worst Mike Carey thing I have ever read. Tedious, zombieful, wallowing in non-shocking attempts at gross-outs and shock-turns. I have not quit reading the series based on this volume but have started considering whether I will soon.

J. Kathleen Cheney, The Golden City. This is one of those books that as a writer I was glad I read when I did, because it bore extremely superficial similarities to an idea I was playing with, so now I can change a few details so that the deep differences will be clear and not obscured by superficial similarities. Hurrah timing! It was pacey and enjoyable, although I did wish that the historical Portuguese setting had been, well, more Portuguese. There was very little that was individually Portuguese about it, so I hope she can do more with that in future works. Still, even without much historical Portugal, murderous magic, selkies, and merfolk: want that? This is that.

Megan Crewe, The Worlds We Make. A mostly fitting end to this trilogy. It zipped right past, hitting the logistics strengths of the series hard (YAY LOGISTICS), and while the very ending was slightly not…hrmmm…hard-nosed? enough for me, it certainly made gestures in that direction considering that this was in fact YA. I will be eager to see what Crewe does next.

M. J. Engh, Wheel of the Winds. Did you ever say to yourself, “If only I had some Jack Vance to read without the sexism”? Worry not, here is this book. It is a planetary navigation adventure. Also, M. J. Engh thought very thoroughly about what it would take to have this kind of adventure with a mid-sized dog. This book very thoroughly understands not only where that kind of dog can be a useful companion but also where allowances must be made for the dog and where special accommodations must be arranged. The dog is not a prop that can be stuffed in the bag of holding. This seems like a small thing, and yet: dogs. Really.

Judith Flanders, The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. I am so fond of Judith Flanders, when I opened this book as a present from Mark, I blurted out, “Oh! Judith Flanders! She’s my favorite Victorianist who wasn’t in our wedding!” She lived up to that expectation here, going into murder ballads and broadsheets and sets of dolls, how murders were covered and how they were prosecuted, what expectations of evidence were and how people perceived the possibilities of the world around them. Well done, hurrah, more please.

John M. Ford, The Final Reflection. Reread. Interesting to read in proximity to some of Mike’s other stuff. It’s been awhile since I revisited this one, and the other thing it’s interesting to have in proximity to it is late season ST:DS9, which we are slowly rewatching as a household. They decided to go a completely different direction with Klingon culture, which makes me a little sad: this is the best Star Trek novel, and Mike’s Klingons really were much cooler. Ah well.

Ben Hatke, Zita the Spacegirl, Legends of Zita the Spacegirl, and The Return of Zita the Spacegirl. Discussed elsewhere.

Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo. I’ve been wanting to read this for awhile, ever since I read The Best of All Possible Worlds. It’s less polished and less balanced than her excellent later work, a completely different style of book, but still interesting, a fantasy of consequences, with African (specifically Senegalese) roots we don’t see often enough in fantasy. Well done, worth pursuing even if we didn’t know that Lord had gotten even better since (which in my opinion we do).

Mary Renault, The Friendly Young Ladies. I think this is the last Mary Renault I will try. I think me and Mary Renault are just not meant to be. There were five major characters in this book, three of them interesting. The other two got the most page time, and they got almost no character arc whatsoever, just an entire book of flatness. Someone does indeed deserve to get abandoned in this book, and someone does indeed deserve a sock in the jaw, and it is not the characters who received those fates. I understand that there are all sorts of things she could not do because of the censors of the time. But choosing to get around that by using a clueless protag who never does get any kind of clue…is not really a very sympathetic choice for me. And the ending, oh good heavens the ending. And then her notes about the ending later, arrrrgh. So: no more Mary Renault for me, I think, thank you, no; understanding why she did things in context does not translate to enjoying her doing them, even if Leo and Helen and Joe were all lovely and characters I would gladly have spent more time with.

Marie Rutkoski, The Shadow Society. Much more romance balance on this one than I am used to in my fantasy, but handled in a way that was not too visual for my tastes (my usual complaint about romance is not the love but the visual focus). The relationship between very different talented young people from very different parallel Chicagos is the center, but the worldbuilding is crucial to the ups and downs of their relationship–and the rest of the plot. All the good things that people say about blending fantasy and romance apply here. Also the positive foster parent relationship, the good friendships, and other factors made it a fun read.

Hiroshi Sakurazaka, All You Need Is Kill. This book looks like it’s doing two more typical things than what it settles into actually doing. The first is a battlefield military SF novel. The second is a Groundhog’s Day type time loop narrative. And then it goes on to do something more interesting than either one with the time loops. It’s very short, it’s very punchy, and if you don’t mind the violence that comes with a military setting (especially when it’s divorced from the baggage of a lot of American MilSF), it’s a lot of fun.

Janet D. Spector, What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village. This is a classic example of the Book of How Everyone Else Is Wrong. In this case it really does look like everyone else was wrong, and quite badly, too. One of Spector’s advantages seems to be that she worked with the local Dakota instead of ignoring them (this seems basic, and yet); another was cataloging organic material and handmade material, not just metal objects purchased from white settlers (again, obvious, right? and yet), and she did some reinterpretation that was very interesting and quite logical. This is very local to me–as in, I could get to her specific dig sites with very little more direction than what is provided in the book, could picture them easily–but I think it would be interesting to those who are not from this area also.

Jonathan Strahan, ed., Fearsome Journeys. Is there anything better than reading someone you like doing the thing you like them doing? Absolutely, and that’s reading someone you like doing something new. I got two of those in this volume, one from Scott Lynch and one from Ellen Klages. I also got stand-out stories from Elizabeth Bear and Daniel Abraham, whose novels are less unitary and who therefore have less of a “their thing” to deviate from. This is in the upper ranks of fantasy anthologies I’ve read in this decade, possibly the best–I haven’t sat down to do a total ordering, since that’s not my scene. But as fantasy anthologies go, it’s definitely worth the time.

E. P. Thompson, William Morris. Oh, E. P. Thompson, how I love you. Oh, William Morris, also with the love. This is a big thumping biography, and Thompson has the necessary background in poetry and also the necessary background in English socialists (Marxist and non-) to give context to the whole messy thing. And Morris was the Pre-Raphaelite who would get in there and dye stuff himself, and Morris was the one who would get in there and do the lead lines for the stained glass and figure out the exact colors when Rosetti had just tossed him a pencil sketch of roughly how something should look–oh, I did not come out of this a greater fan of Rosetti at all–and really, he was such a tinkery nerd. So fond, so fond. And I was even more fond because Thompson would make no bones about the parts of Morris’s work that were complete crap–he was a biographer who was clearly fond of his subject, but not at all reverent, he would just dive right in and say, “Despite Rosetti’s enthusiasm for Morris’s latest work at the time, this poem had no visible virtues,” or something like that, and you’d go and find it online and read it and go, oh, ugh, Uncle Will, what a thing to write, go and dye something, you’ll feel better after. It was so lovely. Towards the end it got to be a really diffuse accounting of English socialism of the period more than a biography of William Morris per se, but you can sympathize with that, given that Thompson was who he was and Morris was who he was. It was an awfully tempting rabbit to go running after. Anyway I highly recommend this if you are even remotely interested. And if you are not, then I will do the interpretive dance of Janey Morris and George Bernard Shaw and the blackberry pudding for you, and that’s almost as good.

Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and Shirleen Smith, People of the Lakes: Stories of Our Van Tat Gwitch’in Elders. The two different spellings of the group name are there on the cover, so I have replicated them faithfully, knowing well the problems of transliteration. These are people of the far north who are not Inuit, telling some of their own stories, with photos illustrating the lands where they live. Quite useful for filling in gaps in perception about the peoples of the far north.

Stanley Weintraub, Beardsley. Biography of Aubrey Beardsley. Does what it says on the tin, does not do a great deal more than that, except that the accompanying illustrations gave me a much more solid reminder of what stuff is Beardsley-influenced. (A lot. Really a lot.)

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What mid-March is, threaded through

We have all sorts of things going on, tasks and chores and ideas, attempts at healing and social things, worries and relief. And threaded over and under and around and through it is the fact that we are coming up on the fifth anniversary of my grandpa’s death. Like his mother before him, he died on March 16, cementing the next day’s St. Patrick’s Day associations for me pretty permanently. Maybe there’ll come a time when I don’t think of it, but I kind of doubt that. On the day he died, I was so glad and so grateful to have a loved one cooking corned beef and cabbage for us because it was hot food made with love, but now the association is so strong I hope I never eat it again.

I brought all his books home and cataloged them and stacked them up, and I have been reading through them. Some of them I bounce off, some I read through, and you see them in my book post. There were hundreds. Now there are less than twenty. When I realized the five-year anniversary was coming, I was grateful that there were not fewer, because I will soon be done reading Grandpa’s books, and if there had been two or three, if there had been only a handful, it might have felt like the right thing to try to finish on the anniversary, and I think that would have been wrong. I think that would have been too much synchronicity to bear, and yet it would have been hard to resist that kind of narrative pull. So I will just keep at it steadily, and I will finish reading them when I finish reading them. The universe is full of ragged ends and things that don’t come out evenly, and that is better than okay, it is good. The tidy packages, the tied-up strings, they are not how life works.

When I have finished reading my grandpa’s books that he owned, I will be okay. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I will cry. I will probably cry like my heart is breaking all over again, because it will be one more thing, one more piece of loss. But I can never lose my grandpa all the way. I knew that the day he died, and I was right; I know it just as much now. Every year for his birthday I buy myself a book for Grandpa and me. And it’s a good tradition, but that thing I said up there about things coming out evenly, I meant it, so if I’m somewhere in an odd little bookshop and I find a book for Grandpa and it’s not coming up on February 1, I buy it for Grandpa and me anyway. Or I get it from the library for Grandpa and me. Of course it’s not the same. It’s not remotely the same, that’s the horrible part. But I can only do the part I can do, and this is the part I can do, the stories, the remembrance, my side of the conversation.

And putting more of the protag’s grandpa in the book I’m revising. Because he belongs there, and because.

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The Zita the Spacegirl Trilogy, by Ben Hatke

Review copies provided by First Second Books.

First Second was really smart here. The most recent of the Zita books, The Return of Zita the Spacegirl, just came out, so instead of sending me just that one, they also sent me Zita the Spacegirl and Legends of Zita the Spacegirl so I could read the whole thing. Which I could do in a total of less than an hour, because they’re graphic novels for kids, or more to the point for all/most ages. I would say that the main restraint on the Zita books will not be age but temperament. There are going to be a few people who find their cartoon levels of threat frightening or bothersome, but that’s probably going to be as true at age 2 as at age 82.

Zita is extremely charming. She has adventures, she is extremely stubborn, and she makes a very wide variety of friends, including robots and a giant mouse and aliens of all sorts. (I am very much attached to Strong-Strong in particular.) Zita and her friend Joseph are thrown into their adventures, but she is very active and very much attached to virtues like justice, loyalty, friendship, and stubbornness, without being too didactic about them. She has a cool costume and all sorts of aspects one could easily attach to as “favorite,” and while the first story is pretty straightforward and sweet, the second and third ramify from there and have consequences that are not quite so obvious.

It’s rare that I can recommend something without regard to age, but I really can here. The question is whether you like mild, sweet, cartoony space adventure comic books. If you do, Zita will probably make you smile.

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using my words

I have been trying to find a way to say this that will not make the wrong people–which is really pretty much anyone–feel like I am guilt-tripping them.

I am pretty short of social/chatty email these days except for a very small number of the most usual suspects. While things may have turned a corner in terms of getting adjusted to this med, I am still not to the point where things are what one might call “good” or more to the point “highly functional and able to do things like drive and arrange for social outings and stuff.” So if you are a friend of mine and find that you have the time/energy for social/chatty email, that would be a good and useful thing to do. I would appreciate it.

This is the sort of request that is very hard to phrase for two reasons. The first is that I really, really do not want to nag or guilt-trip. Really. The second is that when you ask something like this and then do not get it, that is not always easy. And I have had the “I would like to hear from you more”/”yes I could do that” conversation with a couple of friends in the past and then not heard from them more, like, at all, and that was with individuals who knew that I was talking to them specifically and personally; a more general request is deliberately not meant to be a burden on anyone (anyone! really!) and yet leaves open the possibility that everyone will be unable to do an email blathering about what they read or what they are thinking about ancient Greek wind instruments or what line of paint color names they have thought of next, and will hope that someone else will take their turn at being helpful.

Still. Things have gotten enough better that I can say that this is a thing that might help make this next bit a little less rough. So I am saying.

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Cooking vs. gardening

I’m still working on revisions. I have two kinds of writing process. This kind is cooking. The other kind is gardening.

When I’m cooking, I have one project that I am working on, and I will work on it until it is done, and most of the work (vast majority) I am doing goes towards it. I will still sometimes open a file and write notes or even sometimes complete scenes on another project, so that I don’t lose those ideas (/complete scenes). Sometimes when I’m working on a novel, I write short stories in the middle of it. The longer it takes to write a novel, the more likely it is that I’ll write short stories in the middle of it. The longer it takes to write a particular short story, the more likely it is that I’ll write another short story in the middle of it. Or a novel. Things happen. But when I’m cooking, I might do bits of side project–I might finish chopping the rest of the broccoli that I’m not using in this particular stir-fry, so that it’s ready next time I want broccoli–but I’m not going to start cutting things up for stir-fry and suddenly find that I have chopped everything in the kitchen. Cooking is about knowing the task and working steadily towards the end of the task, which is the meal. Yum.

When I’m gardening, I’m not writing any less, but it’s less focused. I will write a thousand words on one idea and a thousand words on another. Sometimes less–sometimes it’ll be 500 words on a project, or 200. For some people this is a really bad sign. It means that you’re completely unfocused, that you will never get stuff done, that you’re just noodling around with things and enjoying the idea of being a writer without ever finishing anything. At this point I think I can stop worrying about that. I have the assurance from long experience that while some stories never reach the point where they get finished, many to most of the stories that I work on this way do. Most of the stuff I work on in “gardening” mode gets to the point where it’s ready to be “cooked”–it reaches a critical mass where I’m ready to just work on it until it’s done. So it’s not actually something I should feel bad about. It’s not pointless, it’s practice. It’s weeding, tending the soil, picking off aphids. Keeping the whole garden growing.

The weird thing about how I’ve been writing lately–other than the fact that it’s been a lot for months now–is that I haven’t been having to tell myself not to stress about what comes next. That’s…totally unlike me. It’s totally unlike me in general, and it’s not like I am going through a period of less stressing/fussing just now in particular. (Hahahaha no. Seriously, um, no. Nearly everyone who has vertigo ends up with at least some degree of anxiety, and I’ll tell you why. Because it is somewhere on the spectrum from stressful to producing of clinical anxiety to not have a reliable sense of the vertical and to fall over and stuff. Seriously, just on a physical level: your body wants a vertical. And to not fall over, and to not throw up, and stuff. Your body has opinions on that stuff. If you haven’t had vertigo problems, your body might not have made them known. But trust me, they’re there.)

So anyway: it’s not like I’ve generally become a more laid-back, chill person. I’m just…feeling like, yep, there will be a thing that I write next, and nope, I don’t have to be absolutely certain whether it’s Wielding the Stars or King of Flowers, King of the Sea or The Winter Wars or something else on the list or something I think up tomorrow in the shower. A few years back I was asking people to remind me that I didn’t have to figure out what book to write next, and apparently that’s become an automatic function for the time being. Which: cool, okay, plenty else to worry about, thanks, brain. The part of me that can’t resist poking things with a stick is kind of going, “But…why are we…?” But never mind, that part! We’re fine. We will write something else next. It’ll be fun. So okay then.

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short list…sorta

I have a very short to-do list this week, because nearly everything on my to-do list is large. I’ve handled the birthday present shopping and the letter writing and most of the errands and calls to get things fixed and thises and thats, or else I’ve put them off to next week.

So basically there is a flowchart with two questions on it, each with two outcomes. 1. Do I have a glass of water readily to hand? If not, get one. (This is not about some nonsense someone came up with about an abstract number of glasses of water everybody should supposedly drink every day. This is about the med I personally am on, which turns people into raisins. Seriously, this stuff makes you turn your head around and drink from the shower, because the length of time to wash and condition long hair is too long to go without water really.)

2. Do I feel good enough to work on book revisions? If so, do so. If not, go curl up on the couch with someone else’s book.

Seriously, that’s…pretty much the list. I have a couple of stories to work on also. But I have the revision letter from my insightful agent, and I don’t have a lot else on the list for the week, and (possibly not coincidentally) I’m not up for a lot either, so…it’s sort of a pure feeling, when it comes right down to it. Everything is very straightforward. You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball. No, that’s something else. Drink the water, pet the dog, revise the book. Yes. That’s the one.

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Books read, late February

Michelle-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden, eds., Rocket Dragons Ignite: Daily Science Fiction Year Two. I make a policy of not reviewing books I’m in, and I’m in this, so, hey: this exists, I’m in it, I read it.

Alan Bradley, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches. A mystery series that has a definitive ending other than the death of its author or its main detective is like a dancing bear, and this is no exception. Compared to the delights of the early series, this is not nearly so good, but goodness, look at that! it ends at all! The long-term plot threads are wrapped up, Flavia is more or less launched in the direction we have long suspected she would go…but while I sat down and read it in one big gulp in an hour, there was a lot about it that felt a bit perfunctory the minute I thought about it. I still recommend the series, and I expect that if you get going and like it, I’m not going to be able to talk you out of getting the last tidbits you can about who Dogger is and what happened to Flavia’s mother and that. But the exuberance of the first few was just not there for me in this series ending.

Susan Chitty, Gwen John, 1876-1939. All sorts of interesting tidbits in this bio, but uff da, what a mess these people made of their lives. It was like they were all 22 from age 15 until their deaths, and they forgot to pick someone to be The Sensible One in their group of 22-year-olds. Also I will never look at Rodin statues quite the same way again. My main complaint of Susan Chitty is that she never found a way to refer to her subject other than by both names, even though there is no indication that John went by “Gwen John” compulsively (and in fact every indication that she did not). And 200+ pages of “Gwen John, Gwen John, Gwen John” started to get to be a bit much. I understand that John is a common male name and so might feel funny for a female subject, and that on the other hand one might not feel chummy enough to be constantly calling one’s subject Gwen. Get over either one problem or the other.

Kate Elliott, Cold Steel. Very much dependent on the earlier volumes, so if you want to read this, you probably already know it. I was mostly interested in the worldbuilding, which did not get developed much more in this volume, but the momentum was enough to carry me through happily enough.

Isabel Greenberg, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth. The stories in this were mostly too similar and not twisted enough–“here is almost a Cain and Abel story but not quite, but not doing anything very interesting with the differences.” So mostly I would read them and want to say, “okay, and?” The “and” was the art. (It was a graphic novel.) Unfortunately I am the wrong audience for “weak story, nifty art.”

Anne Higonnet, Berthe Morisot. Quite well-done bio that managed to explain, without going into long digressions, the social and economic forces that led to women artists (particularly Morisot but also others) being a force in Impressionism in ways that were less possible earlier. Discussion of who could afford to paint and what would previously have kept people from it, as well as lots of personal and interpersonal stuff. Very pleased.

Bennett Madison, September Girls. This was the other thing I read in a gulp from the library yesterday while not feeling good. It’s very YA, male protagonist with some chapters of female perspective. I enjoyed it well enough, but I kept noticing how white it was, because I kept expecting it to be a plot point. Because “here is a town in North Carolina that is filled entirely with white people and all the crap jobs are done by teenage blonde girls” did not occur to me until most of the way through as potentially not signaling something interesting about plot, until…there was nothing political it was signaling about the plot. It’s just that everything else I’ve read about that regional setting…anyway, I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to say: nope. So there was that then.

Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety. A very long novel about the personal lives of French Revolutionaries. Screamingly funny in parts; I am still giggling about where the women started imitating Desmoulins. Having come to Mantel from her later work, though, I was a bit startled that she wanted to do something so conventional as these very well-known and central figures’ lives. Further, I felt that the explanation for the final rift was…I’m actually going to hope that “beneath her” is not inappropriate here. Certainly the very ending left a bad taste in my mouth. Not enough to ruin me on Mantel in general. I just felt that she was seeking for an interpersonal complication for something that politics entirely well explain, and also that the interpersonal complication she came up with was, in context, not great.

Jaime Lee Moyer, A Barricade in Hell. Discussed elsewhere.

Marie Rutkoski, The Celestial Globe. Sequel to her previous MG novel. I was a little disappointed because this one was set in Elizabethan London, whereas the one before it was set in Bohemia of the same era. Bohemia: little-used setting, very interesting. London with Queen Elizabeth, John Dee, Shakespeare, Marlowe: not at all little-used, been done quite well by quite a few people. I’m hoping that the third in the trilogy returns to a solidly Central European setting, because I found that a lot more unique and interesting.

Howard M. Sachar, Farewell Espana: the World of the Sephardim Remembered. This book was interesting in parts but not very well-organized. It was not entirely clear that it was going to start with Spain and then go on to the different regions and treat each mostly-temporally-sort-of, so when I got to twentieth century Jewish-Turkish-Armenian complicated relationships rather abruptly halfway through the book, I was pretty startled. Some gaps filled in, but this should definitely not be your first or even your third volume of Judaica/Jewish history/Sephardic history.

Mark Siegel, Sailor Twain, or The Mermaid in the Hudson. Discussed elsewhere.

Johanna Sinisalo, It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction. Kindle. Interesting stuff I couldn’t get elsewhere, although I don’t really like having excerpts of longer works in an anthology. I know tastes vary on that, but that’s mine. It contained the single most disgusting short story I’ve ever read, Carita Forsgren’s “Hairball,” which was good enough that I kept reading despite being more grossed out with every page, but uff da, what a thing. I was much more fond of Maria Saario’s “The Horseshoe Nail” and her time traveling blacksmithing and consideration of what suits which people, and also of Tiina Raevaara’s “Ospreys.”

S. E. Smith, The United States Marine Corps in World War II: Vol. II: Battering the Empire. Grandpa’s. This is all first-person accounts from much closer to WWII, from Marines and journalists who were with Marines. As such, it’s fascinating and valuable, and I’m looking forward to Vol. III. It does bear some caveats; there is a certain amount of racism of the sort that tends to be encouraged in war, and it has not been filtered or softened by time (or any other force) in these accounts. It’s particularly fascinating to watch some of the more virulent racists and how their racism was shaped entirely by propaganda cartoons, because I only know what they’re talking about because I’ve seen those cartoons. I’m referring to the idea that the Japanese, as a people, have buck teeth. At the time this was apparently considered a thing. From the perspective of someone who has seen a great many Japanese and Japanese-Americans while not at war with them, it is as though someone decided that all Germans have either gigantic chins or weak receding chins. I can think of Germans and German-Americans with either trait, but it’s just not a generalized ethnic trait at all. And the buck teeth thing is like that: you think, “What were they talking about?” You can picture the cartoons and think, okay, that’s what they were talking about. But when you try to picture actual Japanese people, you can’t make the propaganda link up with any statistical trait. It makes you wonder what we’re thinking now is just “how [group] is” that our grandchildren will look at and go, “Uh…what are you talking about? No, seriously, what are you actually talking about?” The other thing in this book that was just heart-rending, that I wished for more of, was the account of the surgeon. He was talking about the casualties, and his attitude towards the psychiatric cases was particularly interesting, because he treated them as real but beyond his expertise. This particular surgeon–maybe typical? hard to tell?–would basically say, “Sure, yep, stomach pains,” about the shell-shock cases who claimed they had stomach pains but didn’t check out with any injuries/illnesses, and give them water and leave them alone, saying he tried to talk to the first one and made him cry, so he figured psychiatric work was beyond him. And…I think that’s so much more interesting than the movie version we have, where either you have the gruff military doctor barking at soldiers to get back to the front, or else you have the understanding healer who can talk it all out, the Hawkeye Pierce if you will. This guy talked about how he was a lung specialist back home, how this was all beyond him, and he just didn’t want to make some poor shell-shocked kid worse. Really glad somebody bothered to write it down.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, War Master’s Gate. I am really torn about this book. Philosophically I completely approve of what Tchaikovsky is doing here. He is making the plot arc bend towards an ending! He is not just wandering around endlessly complicating things further and having his characters do ever more stuff and find ever more interesting bug species! This is good! This is what we like! Shaped plot arc, determined action, hurrah, this is artistically satisfying. But in my heart of hearts, I can’t help it, all I really want this series to do is wander around meeting interesting bug kinden and finding out what their different powers are and how they live and what they look like and what their habitats look like. Basically I want Lonely Planet: Bug People. I am not proud of this urge, and it is not one that Tchaikovsky should indulge in me. I will dutifully go and buy him doing the artistically better thing. But bug people. That is what I am reading this set of gigantic fantasy bricks for.

Michael Wolf, Chinese Propaganda Posters. This is what it says on the tin: it’s reproductions of lots and lots of Chinese propaganda posters. They’re sorted by category and translated into English, French, and German. There are some very ordinary ones and also some completely alarming ones like “how a gas mask is supposed to fit properly on Comrade Horse and Comrade Mule” and “we need a whole mess of children to haul this gigantic peach of immortality to Chairman Mao, that is just how much immortality the Chairman needs,” and of course the ever-popular “send your propaganda artist out in the street to look at babies, because I have seen Chinese babies and they do not look like spherical pinkish kewpie demons.” Fascinating stuff.

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A Barricade in Hell, by Jaime Lee Moyer

Review copy provided by Tor. Additionally, Jaime is a personal friend, and we share an agent.

As I read A Barricade in Hell, I kept thinking, “Why can’t I have a TV series like this?” Jaime does the research into her visual cues meticulously, from the flowers to the furriers to the Chinatown streets. They’re touchstones, jumping-off points for the narrative, grounding the fantastical in the historical. And the two main characters fit together so well: Delia’s work with ghosts and poltergeists meshes so well with her husband Gabe’s police work, each complementing and balancing the other, that I keep thinking, “This is such a good place for a scene break in a book…and it would also be a good place for a scene break in a TV show…if I could have a TV show in which a married couple had work strengths that complimented each other like this!” But honestly, it’s not that common in the written side of things either.

And 1917 in the US is such a volatile setting, such a fascinating time, with “modern” technologies just introduced but not ubiquitous (cars, telephones–present but not to be relied upon), and also of course with the US poised on entry into the First World War. A Barricade in Hell uses that and all its attendant tensions without being directly about the politicians in Washington, and without forgetting that even a country that’s been isolationist can’t be isolated. I was so pleased with this, so very pleased. Highly recommended. It doesn’t come out for awhile, which makes now your perfect time to catch up on Delia’s Shadow if you haven’t already.

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Sailor Twain, or The Mermaid in the Hudson, by Mark Siegel

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

This is a graphic novel with a very distinctive style. The art is all charcoal drawings, not at all period (the setting is 1887) but evocative of period, and when I saw the stag rising up from the Hudson River, I went, “Oooooh,” and wanted to fall in love.

I wish the stag in the Hudson had been, y’know, a great deal more important. Or that the references to Twain and Lafayette had gone somewhere interesting. Or that the two little boys had, or the black boiler workers or…or…something. This was a book of loose ends and missed opportunities. If you’re the sort of person who finds that graphic novels usually have entirely enough story to be satisfying, possibly you won’t feel that way, but if you often feel that there isn’t quite enough there in the best of times, then maybe give this one a miss.

Also…I have been trying to think how to say this tactfully. Some people are in a place personally where “protag is a jerk to disabled spouse” is a perfectly fine narrative component for them and doesn’t really interfere with story. “Oh, jerk to disabled spouse, okay, cool,” they might say, I guess? I don’t really know. I am not those people. I am not in that place. And this is a book with that narrative device, and it is not handled in a self-aware enough way that makes me think, “Well, at least there was the part where….” There is not that part. No. It’s just kind of jerkish. And I wonder if I’m supposed to be using the potential spaces in the narrative to make excuses for the protag? But the other narrative devices (the “cure” for mermaid “affliction” is…what, really? really?) did not really incline me to be in an excuse-making mood.

The acknowledgments thank Pete Seeger and the Clearwater gang, so that’s kind of awesome.