Novel Gazing Redux

Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes. When Mark finished this, he said, “Very middle-book,” and I agree. It’s very hard to discuss this book outside the context of the rest of the series. I understand why some people had problems with the end, and I didn’t, and I would be happy to discuss it over email, but–giant giant spoilers, new book, so: email. Yes. (My gmail is marissalingen. This is available on my website, on my main lj site…I am really easy to find on email.)

Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor. Discussed elsewhere.

Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents. Discussed elsewhere.

Emma Bull, Finder and War for the Oaks. Rereads. I have reread War for the Oaks multiple times over the years, including when we were house-hunting all over the Twin Cities, which was lovely. So that was more a familiar friend. I don’t think I’ve picked up Finder since I was a teenager, which meant, among other things, that when I encountered the minor character of Milo Chevrolet, my jaw dropped. When I was a teenager, I think what resonated for me with Finder was the idea that the things you’re good at can in some way be used to maneuver you into stuff you don’t want to do. That felt very familiar at the time, and it still works quite well.

Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent, Heaven is for Real. I read this as a favor to someone, and there is really no reason you should read it unless you want an exercise in subcultural dogwhistles and confirmation bias. Here’s what happened: a preschool-age kid had an experience during surgery that he described a few months later–I believe quite sincerely–as an experience of heaven. I believe that his parents, one of whom is an evangelical pastor, were very sincere in their attempts to elicit details from him about this experience. However. They didn’t even start writing down what he was saying until months after he started talking about it–so several months after the event. Of the things he said, they don’t seem to have asked any more pursuing questions about the single thing that was outside their theological orthodoxy (that Jesus has a rainbow horse). In addition to seeming to hold firm beliefs in their own verbatim memories and ability to not influence a three-year-old in the form of their questioning, they also hold the dubious belief that if they do not specifically recall sitting a three-year-old down and personally telling him a thing, there is no way for him to acquire knowledge that is common in their subculture. If that was the case, the human race would have died out long before now. Kids are sponges for information. And the more of an industry this becomes–it’s a movie now–and the more it’s used to support very very narrow ideas, the sketchier it looks to me, and the less the original little kid’s sincerity matters. Anyway: if you already believe in a right-wing evangelical Christian heaven with very particular trappings, there is nothing in this book that will be new or even very inspiring, and if you don’t, there is nothing in this book that has sound or convincing methodology to change your mind. No reason to read it.

Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos. This should be subtitled “Dorothy McKibbin and the Secret City of Los Alamos, because Conant used her grandfather’s connections (yes, that Conant) to talk to not just the scientists–everybody talks to the scientists–but the administrative staff. And as a result this book stands out from the common run of books on Los Alamos by chronicling and valuing the administrative and logistical work done by the women involved. Very much worth the time.

John M. Ford, The Scholars of Night. I would say “who else could center a spy novel on a lost Marlowe manuscript?”, except that, of course, the cover and the obvious inspiration provide the answer: Anthony Price probably could have. He didn’t, though, and he almost certainly wouldn’t have spent quite so much time on the wargaming as Mike did. I like this, but it does get a bit obscure in spots, I can see that when forced to.

Felix Gilman, The Revolutions. Discussed elsewhere.

Karen Healey, When We Wake. Someday, someday, some sweet sweet day, people will be done talking about how the Beatles are everything. But Karen Healey is approximately my age, so I’m beginning to think that I will not live to see that day. Don’t get me wrong, this was fun cryogenics dystopian YA SF–I enjoyed it and will look for the sequel quite happily. But I am so over the centrality and overwhelming brilliance of the Beatles in SF novels, I really really really really am.

Erik Hildinger, Warriors of the Steppe: A Military History of Central Asia, 500 BC to 1700 AD. (Yes, that is the way the title put it: 1700 AD, not AD 1700. Would that I could say that this was not indicative.) This was published in 1997, but it read more like 1957. Hildinger is the sort of historian who just goes around blithely saying that it’s hard to believe things for which there is perfectly good evidence, when what he means is that he doesn’t wanna. Which: tough toenails, little boy, the Sarmatians had female warriors. Honestly, some people’s kids. Also, if for some stupid reason you have decided that the Manchu count as steppe warriors (don’t decide this, just–don’t), you should notice that a book that would cover the rise of both the Yuan dynasty and the Manchu dynasty–and then, like, the Mongols in Europe and ten other things–would really need more than 240 pages not to do a shoddy job of it. There are some interesting bits here, but so much argh. So. Much. Argh.

Michael Holroyd, Augustus John: The New Biography. I kept coming up with alternate titles for this, such as Surrounded By Women More Interesting Than Himself and To Know Him Is To Loathe Him: The Augustus John Story. The up side was that Holroyd had the intellectual honesty to admit that he was greatly more interested in every single other person in Augustus John’s life including many of his servants, and so he would go off on lengthy tangents about them. (Many of the episodes in this book were also covered in the Gwen John bio. Gwen John’s biographer had no trouble whatever focusing on her, I’ll tell you that for free.) The down side was that this gave almost no narrative thrust to the rather weighty volume, and, given that the paintings were in the first set of illustrations and the sketches only in the second one, I was left very puzzled for quite some time as to why on earth anybody cared about this horrible, horrible man at all. Some of the sketches are rather nice, but in general, save yourself the trouble and go read Susan Chitty’s bio of Gwen John, even if she can’t stop calling her by both names, and then you’ll have the best of the John family. Or skip them. Skipping them is fine too.

Paul Kane and Charles Prepolec, eds., Beyond the Rue Morgue: Further Tales of Edgar Allen Poe’s First Detective. The main reason to read this, for me, was to restore my faith in Mike Carey after the latest volume of The Unwritten, and it did that beautifully. (Tammany Hall! I am such a sucker for things featuring Tammany Hall well-handled in era.) The other stories varied considerably but did not win my heart.

James Kochalka, The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza. Discussed elsewhere.

Ian McDonald, Empress of the Sun. I like some of the bits with the evolved dinosaurs, but in general I was less engaged with this than earlier bits of the series.

Reader’s Digest Editors, Great Biographies: Johann Strauss & Son, Adm. Richard Byrd, Heinrich Schliemann, etc.. Grandpa’s. Given the dates of it, possibly Gran’s first, not sure. I hesitate to give these bios by original author and title, because the flaws in them may well have been induced by the Reader’s Digest Editors, who did not care to give their own names. They were choppy and weird–the “Johann Strauss & Son” formulation, for example, when the “& Son” is the Johann Strauss most of us actually know well, and his father is something of a nonentity, comparatively. But the thing that really leapt out at me was how much sexism can kill, in the Byrd autobiography. This man got left by himself in a polar situation without knowing either cooking or organizational skills, which everyone would have thought was beyond horrible if he had been a girl. And the stories of what he tried to do to that poor polenta and those canned goods–he said he could have died, and I believe him, and gahhhh sexism kills. It kills women and girls in tiny rural villages every year. It could have killed Adm. Byrd. Sometimes our continuing survival as a species is a wonder, given the stupid crap we manage to come up with, I tell you what.

Jane Ridley, The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, The Playboy Prince. If you were saying to yourself, “Gosh, I’m feeling very positive about Queen Victoria just now, I would really like something to temper that,” do I have the book for you! Jane Ridley has read ten million pages of letters and other papers on Queen Victoria’s relationship with her heir, and she is willing to pass the near-toxic levels of emphasis on to you, dear reader. Seriously, this is a fascinating book that doesn’t feel nearly as long as it is, and it’s got all sorts of horrible Victorian stories. The press’s reaction to the death of Edward VII and Alexandra’s child, for example, was brutal. Jaw-droppingly brutal. Put quite a lot of things in perspective.

Marie Rutkoski, The Jewel of the Kalderash. The conclusion to this MG series, it returned, satisfyingly, to Bohemia and some of the characters from the first volume. Very series-y, so I wouldn’t start here, but I’m glad I read them all.

Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki, This One Summer Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

In the last 3/4 of The Goblin Emperor, I caught myself making excuses to get up and do other things. Sort the laundry, write an email, get another glass of water. Not because I wasn’t enjoying it, not because I didn’t want to see how it ended, but because I knew that when it was over, it would be over. And I didn’t want it to be over quite yet. I wasn’t ready to be done yet. The Goblin Emperor is, as its author indicated in Q&A yesterday, a stand-alone. So it’s not just “it’s over, until the next book in the trilogy, which is scheduled for October,” or, “it’s over, until the sequel which is due next year if all goes well.” It’s, well, over.

And, I mean, this is great, because there is the whole story, no waiting. There is no biting your nails through another volume or three or twelve wondering if the whole thing will fall apart (it doesn’t) or turn out to have a point after all (it does). All your cynical horrible friends–you know you have them–we love our cynical horrible friends–can be presented with this volume with full assurances that this is the whole story, no cliffhangers, no to-be-continued, no chance of bloating into a thirty-volume epic. Beginning, middle, end, airship crashes, court politics, astronomy, all right here. Airship crashes! Court politics! Astronomy! These are the things Mrissas like best! Also architectural proposals and people tripping over things they assume other people will know (but do not) (in mutual directions) and more court politics! And layers of etiquette and loyalty and more court politics!

But I want more goblins, she whined ungratefully. And more steppe nomads. And more elves would do, but really: goblins and steppe nomads, this is what I want. Not in this book, I hasten to add. This book had the proper proportion of these things.

This is a fantasy novel, and will get labeled with fantasy court politics and steampunk tags–and rightly so, I think, although some of the things I find most annoying about steampunk are absent–I think the group who might miss out and should hear about it is people who love Cherryh’s atevi books. There is even tea (albeit more pleasantly, in samovars), there are very interesting servant and bodyguard characters, there is attention to logistics, there is intercultural diplomacy, there are pieces where people think they understand just when they do not and things go awry…it’s not the likeliest “if you like this, you should try that,” but it seemed worth mentioning.

One of the things I’ve seen in a few other reviews that also seems worth mentioning: Maia, the main character, is very concerned with treating others well. My father once told me that our parents are patterns for us whether we like it or not, but we get to choose whether they are positive or negative patterns, whether we follow their lead or make sure we don’t do whatever-it-is, large or small scale, as they did. And Maia is a character who is living that, sometimes with his literal parents and sometimes with other figures who have passed in and out of his young life in parental surrogate roles. But the thing I said in the comments section of my Gilman review, about how I can deal with all sorts of darkness if people are kind to each other: Maia is kind. He does his best to be. Even without airship crashes and court politics, that would have been worth a lot to me.

Review copy provided by Tor.

There is a line about 2/3 of the way through this book: “One could glimpse horror in a can of soup.” And I read it, and I thought, well, you could, that’s clear enough.

This is a stand-alone, not going along with the Gun and the Line books, and yet like those it is just about as far out on the edge of dark fantasy with a drumbeat of dark dark gloom despair woe woe gloom despair as I have any patience for. Most of Gilman’s characters do not have very functional relationships with each other. There is a bit of the middle where the really quite sensible option would have been for the people who are romantically involved to break up with each other, and I honestly can’t tell you why they didn’t. (Because it would have messed up the plot. But other than that.)

I kept reading this book. Gilman’s prose is readable, very readable. On the sentence level, I can always go on with him. And I always think, “Well, maybe this time–” And then no. Not this time. Not any time. No no no no. This one is about late nineteenth century Britain and its fantasmagorical notions of the spheres, Mars in particular but all of them really–and I am interested in that. I am interested in the ways that fantasy can take that on, can take that different places than the world did. Secret societies, secret computing machines and their alternate results, this is of interest to me! But then the drumbeat of Felix Gilman ground it into muck, as he always does, because that’s how he thinks books go.

I really need to remember this. Some of you like that sort of thing, and more power to you; he does it quite well, and here is where you can find it.

Review copy provided by author, who is also a personal friend under another name.

The Victorian naturalist’s memoir is in my opinion an untapped gold mine for fabulists, and Marie Brennan does the genre well. I would love to see more of this sort of thing in fantasy: the secondary world, the functioning and creatures not the same as ours, but treated with the same attitudes and approach as in that era of our history. Or an earlier one: a Linnaeus of a fantasy land would be like catnip to me.

Lady Isabella returns here from her adventures in A Natural History of Dragons, which volume I think would be helpful but not necessary to appreciating the events of the current one. In this installment, she has come through early widowhood, pregnancy, and her son’s infancy, is now a published naturalist, and is ready to face new challenges with new companions, all of whom come with challenges of their own (none of which are allowed to overtake the story’s momentum). The set of dragons and near-dragons this particular expedition is investigating is located in a jungle known as the Green Hell, on a continent seemingly inspired by our world’s Africa. Unlike most fantasy scenarios, this inspiration involves awareness that African cultures are far from being monolithic. There are three imagined Erigan cultures in this volume alone, and our heroine, while being far from a modern enlightened thinker at points, has some level of exasperation for her own compatriots for treating the continent as a monolith. It’s a fine line to walk, taking inspiration from a colonialist era, and I think Brennan does it extremely well, especially with a later ceremony that would be a major plot spoiler.

The thoughts on colonialism are mostly a background process. The foreground is adventures with dragons and their investigation, with progress towards a more modern scientific attitude juxtaposed with (literally) high-flying feats. No one becomes a dragon rider here. They don’t have to. There are plenty of life cycles, breeding grounds, and fanged things sinking their teeth in at inopportune moments without anyone having to stick an apostrophe in their name for fun. Highly recommended.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

This is more or less the exact opposite of The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza, as far as graphic novels for young people go, and it’s sort of amusing that the two arrived in one package. This One Summer is a moody coming of age story about a young girl and her family and friends, about the ways that she finds that the people she admires and the people she is mad at sometimes need to switch places for awhile, and that she doesn’t know quite everything she thinks she knows.

Rose and her parents come to the same cabin every year, and she’s friends with a younger girl there, Windy. I think that one of the things I like best about This One Summer is the way that it depicts the tension in Rose and Windy’s friendship, as Rose has gotten a little bit older and more sophisticated than Windy, and yet not quite as much older and more sophisticated as she hopes. Those delicate cusp moments are difficult to get across in a few drawings and lines of dialog, and the Tamakis pull it off perfectly. And Rose and Windy are in turn not quite old enough to be part of the circle of teenagers around the cabins–they’re on the outside looking in, and they don’t understand all of what they’re looking at, and the ways they try to make sense of it all can sometimes be self-serving, and sometimes cruel, but ultimately neither.

The same is true of Rose’s relationship with her parents: she has been dragged into their issues and did not ask to be, and she is not always perfectly understanding of that, as who could expect her to be. She is prickly and frustrated and herself, but ultimately she has a sense of who they are as a family, and who their family is to the world, that shines through.

This is very much a relationship book. The plot is quiet, though the girls are often not. While I frequently complain that there isn’t enough story in graphic novels, there’s as much story here as in many a YA novel with the same number of pages. The expressive faces and body language account for a great deal and carry through mute hurt and joy and much more.