Tag: bookses precious

Review copy provided by the publisher.

How many plots are there? You’ll hear different numbers bandied about–three, five, whatever–but they all seem to agree that you can boil everything down to just a few plots if you try hard enough. And this is definitely one of the classics: young person strives to find her place in the world, making a start on sorting out how she feels about parents, larger family group, immediate community, and larger culture.

Other than relatability, one of the reasons this is such a classic plot is that the details matter so much to it. It may be the same plot, but it’s not the same story over and over again, not by a long shot. Especially not when a writer like Ibi Zoboi uses it as the framework for the story of a contemporary young woman raised in a Black Nationalist household with community leader parents.

Nigeria herself is beautifully drawn, complex and conflicted, frequently angry and confused but never one-dimensionally so. She makes bad decisions–and good ones; she doesn’t always have a chance to have her say when she would like to do so, but she does speak up for herself a lot. Her relationships are complex and conflicted as well: a best friend with whom she’s drifted, a cousin with whom the larger family situation has gotten complicated, a couple of new boys with very different backgrounds, assumptions, things that they want of Nigeria. And then, especially, there’s her parents. Her father, whose expectations of her don’t leave a lot of room for the things she wants for herself. Her mother, whose absence has become a defining presence in her life. The shape of Nigeria’s mother’s absence and what exactly happened is beautifully done, with the light dawning for the reader in emotionally evocative ways before Nigeria is ready to talk about them directly herself.

I’m definitely not the target audience for this book. I’m a 44-year-old white lady, and this is definitely YA–and I firmly believe that no matter how much we adults can love MG and YA, we’re not the people it’s written for. But you can enjoy things that are not primarily for you, and I definitely did enjoy this. It is full of respect for the young people it portrays, it wrings joy from the hard places, it is just plain beautifully done.

Tobias S. Buckell, Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance. Discussed elsewhere.

Romilly Cavan, Beneath the Visiting Moon. This is a book in which things fail to happen. Sometimes their failure to happen is entertaining, sometimes frustrating, but mostly things do not change a great deal over the course of this book, and things do need to change for these characters. As a result there are entertaining bits that don’t really add up to anything satisfying–there’s a relief in a few metaphorical bullets dodged, but not a lot of it.

Heid E. Erdrich, The Mother’s Tongue. Loved these poems. Far-ranging, thoughtful, striking, personal, yes, absolutely. I immediately went to the library website to request more of Heid E. Erdrich–I had read her sister Louise but not her, and she’s definitely worth the time.

Daryl Gregory, The Album of Dr. Moreau. Genetically altered boyband plus murder mystery. I tore through this one in a very short time, because it’s good fun and also not particularly long.

Frances Hardinge, Unraveller. I love Hardinge’s sideways thinking about magic and worldbuilding and fairy tales. This is a world full of curses and some very cranky teenagers dealing with them–realistically and endearingly cranky.

Guy Gavriel Kay, The Last Light of the Sun. Reread. I hadn’t read this since it came out because my impression of it was “but no” and I stand by that. It is one of my least favorite of Kay’s works. Is it still readable, absolutely, I shelved it and will probably read it again in another almost-20 years, or possibly even before then. He’s a good writer and I enjoy reading what he’s written. But also: Kay and I have very fundamentally different takes on Norse culture in the Viking age, and that interferes with the kind of immersion I usually want from his books. Some of this is trivial: if you change the names of the gods you have changed many of the names of the people, because Norse names go like that, you have lots of people whose names are things like Thor’s Bear or Brightness of Freya, right? Norse names are plug and play. You unplug half of them and things go completely awry. But some of this is much deeper: you cannot take the mortality of the gods away from the Norse and end up with the same culture. It’s emotionally and interpersonally fundamental. If you’re going to quote “kin dies, cattle dies”–which he does, twice that I noticed–you cannot have your version removing the gods themselves must one day die and end up with something with the same weight. As a result this is the only Kay book that doesn’t give me those moments of “oh, OH” where the book rings like a bell. But at least I’ve verified that I feel that way, and why.

Patricia Kirkpatrick, Odessa: Poems. A local poet–the Odessa in question is within a few hours of my house, not on the other side of the planet–working with local images but also things like major illness, in interesting combinations.

Madeleine L’Engle, The Arm of the Starfish, Dragons in the Waters, A House Like a Lotus, Meet the Austins, The Moon By Night, A Ring of Endless Light, A Severed Wasp, The Young Unicorns. Rereads. Wow, okay, wow. There’s a lot here. I decided to reread the non-Time Trilogy (what do you mean Quartet, I don’t know what you’re talking about, la la la) L’Engles I had on the shelf to see which ones I still liked. And wow, the answer is definitely not all of them. A Severed Wasp is the only adult novel here, and it’s absolutely appalling about bisexuality and also, separately, about having sex with Nazi prison guards who were your own personal Nazi prison guard. What. Madeline seriously what. Also it goes so far along the line of “Jews were not the only people to suffer under the Nazis” as to focus almost completely on what random able-bodied rich straight people suffered under the Nazis. Madeline stop it. It’s also weirdly heartbreaking in historical terms because we know that the AIDS crisis is already happening–she’s writing about a bisexually active New York community in 1982, and one of the Cathedral staff has a weird pneumonia that won’t go away…and when I read this for the first time as a kid somewhere between 1988 and 1990 it didn’t occur to me that she didn’t already know what that was, but she didn’t.

Was that the worst of them, haha no, that was A House Like a Lotus, which is a completely prime example of kids getting different things out of a book than adults. When I was 8 and I read that, what I got was: some ladies like other ladies in a kissing way, that’s called lesbians and it’s fine. Good take-home message, 8yo Marissa! News you will be able to use (though not, in my case, firsthand) for the rest of your life! What I got out of it as an adult was: you have 5.2 seconds to forgive people who sexually assault you before you’re the problem, and also you’re probably the problem anyway for thinking they might be a good person in the first place; your own uncle will start hassling you to this effect but also the partner of the person who assaulted you will drag you back into the house and drug you after the assault; when you, a 16yo, turn to an adult friend who is a literal doctor at the literal only hospital near your home for help in injuries sustained, he should take this as a good opportunity to have sex with you. Also some stuff about sexy rich boys negging you later. WHAT. MADELEINE WHAT WERE YOU DOING. And then there’s the fact that Meg Murry O’Keefe is feeling “restless” doing nothing but raising children so she gets to go to the theater once for fun, and she has become a bland generic mother figure who doesn’t show her kids any of her interests. NOPE. I strongly, strongly anti-recommend this book.

Also anti-recommended: Dragons in the Waters, fairly badly constructed and centering on White Savior and Noble Savage narrative. No actual dragons harmed in the making of this book. Meet the Austins and The Moon By Night: zero of Madeleine’s batshittery around science, leaving you with just “isn’t our totally normal family totally great,” which works far less well when a huge amount of the narrative is the kids being outright nasty to each other with no resolution and an absolutely staggering amount of pro-violence narrative. How great it is to hit your children, how wonderful, what a sign of a good family, how much happier and better off kids would be if only their parents were of a social class acceptable to Madeleine and also “walloped” them. BIG NOPE HERE.

I started with three of the above five in a row and was really upset. Madeleine L’Engle was formative to my childhood! Didn’t I love any of her books any more? Thankfully I do, and the answer is: the more batshit the better. Possibly this is also because the more metaphysical the better? The Arm of the Starfish is not a coherent spy narrative, but I imprinted on it before I could care that it wasn’t, and I still don’t. A Ring of Endless Light is wrong about dolphins in ways that I do not blame her for, because we didn’t know the things about dolphin behavior that we do now, but it’s substantially right about slowly losing a grandparent and worth having for that. (Many of the Austins remain jerks, but less so than previously, and she doesn’t advocate for intrafamilial violence here.) And then there’s The Young Unicorns, in which the Austin family is the nicest it ever gets and the plot is the most off-the-wall randomly what-is-she-even and…I love it anyway. There are lasers and impersonations and the least plausible street gang ever in the world, and I am absolutely on board for it, sure, yes, do your batshittery, Madeleine, think about redemption and community and all of that, think wrong things about science if you have to get there, I don’t care. So the moral of the story for me seems to be: weird stuff made her a much better writer, always go for the weird stuff. Fair. Enough.

Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli. I did not know that some political prisoners in Italy during Mussolini’s rise were internally exiled rather than jailed. This is the novel one of them wrote based on his experiences of being sent to a small, isolated village in the south of Italy. I read it for the political prisoner narrative, but it’s much stronger as regional observations.

Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog. I think the last story of this volume was my favorite, which is a great way to structure a volume of short stories. Everybody goes home happy! Where by everybody of course we mean me. Each story had some connection with a fairy tale, but the connections were tenuous at best–which is fine, that kind of leap is what makes Link who she is, and you can read straight retellings pretty much anywhere. This is not the Madeleine L’Engle kind of “strap in we’re going to be very wrong in five directions at once but you’ll have fun with it” kind of off-the-wall, it’s a much quieter and more focused kind. And uh. Less wrong. And more consistently enjoyable for me at this point in my life.

Shion Miura, Kamusari Tales Told at Night. Gentle small-town Japanese fantastica, volume two. I would start with the first one if I were you. This one is somewhat more focused on the character’s romantic relationship, but there’s enough satisfying dog and gods that I enjoyed it and would read more if there was more.

Abdi Nazemian, Only This Beautiful Moment. Discussed elsewhere.

Vivian Shaw, The Helios Syndrome. This novella was an absolute banger. If you want to see someone nail novella pacing, this is it. If you don’t care about that sort of thing on a conscious level, consider that it is about a consulting necromancer for the NTSB, dealing in airline disasters. Interesting, different from other stuff out there, quite good.

Jonathan Strahan, ed., The Book of Witches. Discussed elsewhere.

Noel Streatfeild, Gemma, Gemma Alone, Gemma and Sisters, Good-Bye Gemma, Tennis Shoes, Theatre Shoes. Rereads. Regular readers may remember that I tried Circus Shoes last month and was appalled, so I was relieved that all of these held up reasonably well. Three of the four volumes of the Gemma series (all very short and written in quick succession, I wonder what happened there to make them four rather than two) were in absolutely dreadfully Americanized versions. I do not approve of changing books to make them fit the country they’re being sold to rather than the country they’re set in. Detail is characterization. A British man who only watches television when baseball is on is a very different person from one who only watches it when cricket is on–the former is a giant weirdo who watches way less television, but you know very different things about him than you do about the latter. Also what people call their mothers matters, and it doesn’t always matter in the same way. The distinction between Mom and Mommy is not the same as the distinction between Mum and Mummy, and what people call their mothers is, again, characterization. Ah well. Theatre Shoes has a bit of war-encouraged racism in references to the Pacific theatre, fair warning. It also has a Jewish uncle and cousin who are some of the most positive characters in the book or indeed in all of Streatfeild. (We stan Uncle Mose Cohen.) Also it has quite a lot of Making Do In Wartime, in this case written while the war was still on, which I found really interesting as a kid and still like. Meanwhile I completely did not spot how much Tennis Shoes, of all things, is a book where the author is coping with the loss of empire, and so are the characters. The father’s desire for the children to find ways to be champions is specifically because he feels that Britain has declined and continues to decline, and he wants the children to find ways to excel so that people will respect Britain–not for conquest but for having quite good tennis players, swimmers, singers, and so on. There are far worse ways to cope with this cultural shift.

Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. An old woman goes to live out her life in a little hotel with other old people in similar circumstances. The characters are very well-drawn, but it is fundamentally not a very cheerful book; very few of the people one encounters in it are actually interesting people, as opposed to people with distinctive quirks, and this makes me sad as most of the people I encounter are interesting people, so it’s a very large difference in worldview.

Wenfei Tong, Understanding Bird Behavior: An Illustrated Guide to What Birds Do and Why. This is another of the category of books I keep saying I’m liking: interesting facts about a particular area of natural history, for grown-ups. I find them very relaxing, and this one is a visually beautiful example of the type.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Buckell and I started publishing short fiction around the same time, so while we’ve never really been in the same place at the same time long enough to say that we know each other well, I sure know what to look for in his work. So if this is your first Tobias S. Buckell collection, what should you expect (that he totally delivers here)?

Clear prose. Transparency is not the sole virtue prose can have, but it sure is a virtue prose can have, and Buckell’s has it. When you’re in the mood to never have to read a sentence three times to figure out what the author is on about, these are good hands to put yourself in and know that the story will be primary.

Strong roots. Buckell knows his genre. Several of these stories are responses to genre classics, and genre furniture abounds. Do you like stories about robots? aliens? generation ships? jungle Venus, for heaven’s sake? Buckell has you covered here. But those aren’t the only ones of his roots that are giving him a strong grounding here. One of the stories here has a hero with an ethnic and racial background very similar to Buckell’s own Caribbean-American biracial heritage, giving the character a depth and context that absolutely makes the story. The single collaboration in the volume–with Karen Lord, whose work I love–describes in its authors’ notes how these two writers of Caribbean heritage decided to go deep into their own loves and backgrounds, only to find the story incredibly popular and resonant. Which it should be. It’s a great piece.

New twists. Even people who want their science fiction to come with familiar genre furniture could just reread their old favorites if that’s all they wanted. Buckell is intensely thoughtful about the shapes of these stories, the ways in which the old takes don’t quite satisfy, the ways he can make them his own. Even when you’re reading another of his several alien stories, it’s never “oh yeah, another one of those” but rather “oh, interesting, that’s a different place to take it.”

If you haven’t been reading Tobias S. Buckell, this is a pretty ideal place to start. If you have, at least some of the stories will probably be old friends–but I personally like to have stories I’ve enjoyed relocated to convenient collections for me to reread at my leisure, and also even I hadn’t read all of these.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Several authors published herein are friends or cordial professional acquaintances.

Jonathan Strahan knows how to put together an anthology. I mean, you might think, he ought to by now, he’s done enough of them! But sometimes repetition solidifies bad habits rather than good, and that is not the case here. The focus is broad enough to allow for a wide range of stories but narrow enough that it’s interesting as an anthology topic and can draw out worthwhile stories authors might not otherwise have sat down to write. The stories have an admirable range of subject, tone, style, setting, and cultural background. Basically this is a case study for how to do a well-constructed anthology.

I don’t think there was a dud in this mix, but several standouts–each very different from the other–included P. Djeli Clark’s “What I Remember of Oresha Moon Dragon Devshrata,” “Catechism for Those Who Would Find Witches” by Kathleen Jennings, “So Spake the Mirrorwitch” by Premee Mohamed, Emily Y. Teng’s “The Cost of Doing Business,” and the beautiful finale to the book, “John Hollowback and the Witch,” by Amal El-Mohtar. Here you will find good witches, bad witches, morally conflicted witches, witchhunters of every stripe, modern witches, postmodern witches, fairy tale witches, secondary world witches and witches from all around our globe. If you like fantasy short fiction, unless you actively dislike witches in every form and possibly even then, I think you’ll find something to love in this.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Sometimes you find a book that falls beautifully into its genre while also being so singular that you marvel that someone thought to do it. This is one of those books for me. It is absolutely, without question, queer YA of the 2020s. It is also a layered story of three generations of men in a Persian-American family, each with his own heartaches and secrets, converging on a present where one of them has become the father and another the grandfather in a family. Their relationships with love, art, and politics shift and change with time and circumstance; their approaches to family and ethnicity are also fluid. Sometimes they’re more easily able to see their differences than their commonalities.

It is so good.

Even just the writing of the first section, the introduction to Moud as a contemporary teenager with a fraught relationship with social media and a boyfriend who has seriously different attitudes than he does, promises to be a really lovely novel of personal growth and exploration, just the sort of thing YA does best at its best. And then the next section–expands, shifts, it’s more book than it might have been, deeper and better and with more perspectives.

In addition to the three protagonists, the minor characters are so well considered and so well drawn. This is a book that’s really thoughtful about everybody having their own stuff to deal with, some of it really large stuff. It keeps beautiful perspective on its own specificity as one example of the way the world can strive to be better, not the only example. I’m so glad I had a chance to read this.

Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace. Adler is very much a “use every part of the plant” cook, and it was fascinating to read this book–it’s prose, not a cookbook, though it has some recipes–with that in mind, especially as Adler’s tastes and mine are obviously not at all the same. I would, for example, never in my life claim that everything needs parsley. It did not occur to me that there were people who genuinely felt that everything needs parsley. So her approach is very congenial, her specifics are very not-me, and that combination is an interesting one.

Henri Alleg, The Question. This is another in my recent reading about political prisoners–a slim volume about being taken prisoner and tortured by the French government in Algeria when it was on its way out. Alleg was white but also bears witness to the treatment of other prisoners who were people of color. An extremely important book in its time and reminds me that of yet another part of spacetime I don’t know enough about.

Brandon Ying Kit Boey, Karma of the Sun. Do you need a postapocalyptic Himalayan SF novel? Do you not mind when rocks fall, everybody dies? Here you go, here’s the book. I ripped through it very quickly, kept wanting to pick it back up again until I was done.

Shannon Chakraborty, The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi. Rollicking, swashbuckling, absolutely a great deal of fun. Fantasy set on the Indian Ocean with all the cultures ringing it. Characters who are queer, characters who are trans, characters of a wide number of religions, characters with disabilities, characters who are parents…LOTS of HUMANITY in here, having adventures and buckling their swashes. Yes please. More of this.

Jared Farmer, Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees. Really old trees! Where are they! What are they like! How do we know how old they are! this and more very cool things to think about really old trees! It really is what it says on the tin.

Victoria Goddard, The Hands of the Emperor. Kindle. Approximately a third of my friends have already read this and others in the series. It was time. And I really liked the experience of reading it, I had a very good time with it, I will definitely seek out more in the series. You should know that its pacing is…stately. There are several elements whose repetition did not seem to be enriching to me. Also, and more importantly, I think I completely disagree with the politics of this book. I heard someone describe it as an ineluctably Canadian fantasy because it centers the ideals of peace, order, and good government, and it does, but…how it does so is pretty important. This is the story of the private secretary (and eventually other positions) of the Last Emperor, in a splintered many-worlds context, and the good government comes about because he is just goshdarn nice enough, hard-working enough, and a good enough friend to the autocrat who also turns out to be just goshdarn nice enough. And I…100% do not believe that the problem with autocracy is that we simply haven’t had good enough autocrats, and I feel like that’s a pretty dangerous idea and one that comes up all too often. That moves the argument onto the autocrats’ territory: arguing about whether Vladimir Putin is or is not an admirable specimen of Russian manhood concedes him too much ground, because the things that he does are not okay even if he was, and they’re not not-okay because he isn’t, if that makes sense. It’s just generally…do I have to say this? Autocracy is a bad plan, kids. It’s a bad plan even if your autocrat is a really really nice guy who is sad about the hand life dealt him. And also there are places where the “look how nice our protags are, they’re pals and we get to see them being nice pals” fun of this book–it is fun! I enjoyed that!–covers up for how much execution is on the table here. And sometimes happens. “Well, sure you might say that execution is not suitable for this crime but I can’t change the laws just like that, we have to go through processes [and in the meantime execute people who maybe shouldn’t be executed]” is actually part of this book. And that is a problem. Is it a problem that will be solved with later progress in this world? Because this is supposed to be a gentle and non-violent arc toward that process, and Goddard would really like us to feel that way. Also there is a focus on respect for minority cultures within empire, and again, I do not actually think that the problem with imperialism is that you just haven’t had a nice enough emperor and if you did there would be no problems for minority cultures within empire. I absolutely do not. There were moments that were deeply touching and brought a lump to my throat, but fundamentally I don’t actually think that you can nice your way out of autocratic imperialism, so this may continue to be a problem in this series for me. We’ll see. Friendship is magic, but it ain’t that magic.

Tristam Hunt, The Radical Potter: The Life and Times of Josiah Wedgwood. A reasonably good bio that situated Wedgwood and his life’s work in his times both artistically/creatively and politically. It wasn’t entirely written as an explanation of “how did you get from this guy to his grandson Charles Darwin in two generations,” but it did a very good job at that all the same.

Colette A. Hyman, Dakota Women’s Work: Creativity, Culture, and Exile. Unfortunately I was a bit disappointed in this book, because I felt like there were a lot of places where it wandered off into being a general history of the Dakota people in places where I felt that the balance and substance of women’s labor in that culture was getting more interesting rather than less. If you don’t know much about Dakota history, this is not the worst starting point–and I totally get that you have to retell a lot of that because a lot of people don’t know the context, I just wanted more on the title subject. A lot more.

Hettie Judah, Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones. Do you ever miss the kind of book that you’d get as a very little kid, that was basically “here are some interesting facts about birds” or “planets: I know some stuff about them and now you can too”? Well, this is that for grown-ups. It’s a collection of very short, light but not weightless, essays about a series of different kinds of rocks. Not gonna lie, I had it as a bathroom book, and it would be perfect for that or similarly interrupted circumstances: here, read a page about spinels, okay, now you can set the book down again no problem.

Mitch Kachun, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915. Look at those dates. That is not a typo. Kachun starts with all the ways that American Black people found to celebrate intermediate milestones on their freedom journey. It does not neglect the horrors of racism that prompted this–or that attempted to crush it–but it does focus on celebratory events and traditions in a community whose suffering is often more centered than its joy. Really good stuff to know.

Laura Kolbe, Little Pharma. I love all the things poetry can be. Many of these poems spring from medical training and interacting with patients in a medical setting, that view embodied reality. Fascinating stuff.

Laura Lam and Elizabeth May, Seven Devils. When I read Lam’s forthcoming Dragonfall (as LR Lam), I thought, this is really the kind of secondary world fantasy we all read a lot of in the ’90s, but with less bigotry. And I feel like that about this book, too: it’s the kind of adventure space opera we all read a lot of in the ’90s, but with less bigotry. Do you want that? Because here it is. I sure want that sometimes.

Maya McGregor, The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester. The speculative element in this book is a very gentle one–a ghost story that might almost (but not quite) be explained away in mimetic terms. Its main focus is that of a nonbinary teen who has suffered some pretty bad things finding peace, friends, and a home for themself–and also finding out the fate of a young person who died a generation before. There are some realistically harrowing depictions of homophobic and transphobic behavior, but they are not endorsed by the text and are triumphed over.

Shahan Mufti, American Caliph: The Story of a Muslim Mystic, a Hollywood Epic, and the 1977 Siege of Washington, DC. “You all certainly got up to a lot right before I got here,” I said to Mark as I was reading this book. Mark, at the age of 2, was not very much involved in the 1977 Siege of Washington, DC, but my general point remains: that in some ways I think the hardest part of well-recorded history to learn is the stuff that happened ten years before your birth and, depending on your personality and circumstances, 5-15 years after it. Because a lot of that stuff will be The Way The World Has Always Been, and yet the people who are in charge of telling you what’s gone on will not see it as historical at all. So this book was a lot about in-fighting in American Black Muslim communities, and I feel like I need a lot more context on that to judge whether it was well-done or biased or anything like that. But it was a start. It was a start, and I kept sitting there thinking things like, “Did they all think we knew about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar disavowing this guy? Was this just supposed to be part of knowing who Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was, in a vague cultural sense?” It’s…there was a lot. I need to keep learning.

Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms. I picked this up on a whim while the librarian was finding the thing I had actually come for, and it’s a weird little book. It’s about a woman and her elderly, dying mother more or less failing to connect, the mother choosing shallow interactions over personal depth every time. If you know someone who behaves like the mother in this book, as I do, you can see that it is startlingly well-done. That doesn’t always make it a pleasant read.

D. E. Stevenson, The English Air. I would not have read this book if I had not been reassured that it was not a Good Nazi book. It is not. It’s a book written and published during the Second World War, set immediately before it and then in the early days of it, when she had hopes but no certainty of how things would turn out, and it takes the position that if only German young people were exposed to life in England they would see how much better it is than the Nazi system, and a major part of the plot is that a young man has this very opportunity and is indeed converted away from Hitlerism as Stevenson understood it at the time. She didn’t have the full details we had then, but she had some, enough to know that it was Really No Good–and enough to know that there were Germans actually, actively fighting it, not doing its work but then angsting about it in romantic ways. It’s a very strange book because of its context, and in some places a sad one, but also fundamentally hopeful about humans–that given the chance they will absolutely choose to move away from absolutism.

Noel Streatfeild, Circus Shoes. Reread. So there’s this continuum within Streatfeild books between “kids get to learn cool stuff yay” and “stupid kids are shamed and mocked into being worthwhile members of society PS child labor is the greatest,” and this is definitely to the far end of the latter. Stupid kids, why don’t they know the detailed terminology for a highly specialized field they’ve never been exposed to before? Why were they taught useless things like the violin instead of useful things like [checks notes] acrobatics? Why don’t they have a detailed life plan at the ages of 11 and 12, which they will proceed to follow exactly? Why do they hang out with their sibling, literally the only person in the world they know, rather than adhering strictly to gender roles? Ughh they’re the worst for not doing all this stuff. Stupid kids. …so to recap, I will not need to reread this one. I was checking to see whether it was as bad as I remembered. It was. There’s not only all that stuff above (although that’s enough) but also a higher percentage of Streatfeild attempting to write Foreign Person Accents than in any of the other books. She does this very badly. Bleh. One thing that was unexpectedly good was that there were German characters who were…not unmarked, per se, they were just as much national stereotypes as the French and Russian characters, but in this book from the 1930s there was no sense of OH NO GERMANS, just, like, yep, here are some Germans. Balancing that out a bit, some of her practical advice was to become someone’s servant and you’d always have a steady life, also that becoming a horse groom was the height of practicality. In the Thirties. Had she noticed it was the Thirties? because. Gosh. This is like the anti-science fiction, this is the literature of Nothing Will Change Ever.

Sarena Ulibarri, Another Life. Discussed elsewhere.

Mai Der Vang, Yellow Rain. A volume of poetry raging–absolutely raging–justifiably raging–at the ways that the Hmong people’s experience of chemical warfare was covered up, downplayed, and outright lied about. I love how many things poetry is. This is a scream. It’s a good and varied scream.

Zach Weinersmith and Boulet, Bea Wolf. A heavily illustrated modern kids’ retelling of the first part of Beowulf. Alliterative and charming.

Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, Sorcery and Cecelia, The Grand Tour, and The Mislaid Magician. Rereads. Now it can be told: at 4th Street Fantasy convention this summer, I’m going to be doing a public interview of Pat and Caroline to celebrate the 35th anniversary release of Sorcery and Cecelia. I feel sure it will be a far-ranging conversation, but naturally I wanted to start with a return to the source material…and then I just kept going….

Cathy Yandell, The French Art of Living Well: Finding Joie de Vivre in the Everyday World. Discussed elsewhere.

E. Lily Yu, Jewel Box: Stories. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

It’s so satisfying when there’s a tendency in a subgenre that annoys you and then someone comes along and writes a novella that does the exact opposite. I get very frustrated with solarpunk that uses magic to move its characters into a more sustainable society–it depresses me, because it makes me feel like the author doesn’t see any way to a better world other than magic.

Ulibarri is doing the opposite here. There’s a speculative conceit that’s basically magic–very minimal handwavium applied to make it “sciency” but we all know it’s basically magic, it’s fine–and that is not the part where they build themselves a better community. The part where they build themselves a better community is hard work and human relationships. YES GOOD THANK YOU. And in fact quite a lot of this book is about how to do it but also how it can go wrong in significant but non-catastrophic ways and need a course correction.

It’s also about people having scientific access to their own past lives, and the various reactions this would cause as new tech. There’s quite a believable range of reactions from “I don’t care about that, it’s irrelevant” to “that is vitally important and I will treat you as equivalent to your past self” with a lot of spread in between.

I think one of the things that I like best, though, is that the protagonist, Galacia, is hard-working, well-intentioned, very determined…and no more perfect at self-knowledge than any of the rest of us. Even without her previous life woven in. She’s doing her best, her best will not make everything perfect, but that doesn’t mean she can’t make some things better. What a lovely balance for a solarpunk work.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

The title for this collection is not meant to be subtle: Yu’s stories are often described as lapidary, each one a perfect little gem, and this is entirely fair. They’re beautiful. Several times I said either, “Oh yes, I remember this one!” or “How did I miss this one?”

This is, however, in the category of “short story collections I recommend reading in pieces rather than all in one go.” It’s not just that all the beautiful language can overwhelm, although I think some readers will have that reaction. It’s also that stacked up, the places where Yu’s characterization tends toward not just cynicism but a rather surface or obvious cynicism. Standing on their own, each piece is allowed to shine. When taken all together the effect is rather lessened. Happily for all of us, it’s perfectly possible to read short story collections a bit at a time and take them in as the singular works they were meant to be.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is not the sort of book I generally read, but I thought I’d give it a go. The main result of this, unfortunately, was to renew my resolve not to read this sort of book. You know the sub-genre, it’s I Am Very Enthusiastic About This Country But Haven’t Focused Enough to Write Something Else About It (and Am Not Interesting Enough Personally to Write a Memoir). They’re out there about China, Denmark, loads of places. There were already several about France, but there seems to be someone eager to put out another.

As is often the case with this subgenre, the author makes assertions about French culture and its comparisons to the rest of the world that can be sorted into the categories of 1) trivial; 2) trite; 3) not unique to France; 4) not even correct. While they’re all eye-rolling, this last category is an abundant one, as Yandell chooses to gloss over major political issues of our time (and, importantly, actual French people’s time) with vague references to joie de vivre, the title concept she may well have chosen for her ability to warp it into basically anything she likes including the opposite of joy or zestfulness.

It would be bad enough to compare 19th century French novels to a single American Netflix series and draw one’s conclusions about all of the two cultures thereby, but it’s far worse when the level of depth of interpretation of those novels is lower than I’d expect from my godchild’s sophomore high school English class. She teaches French literature! Surely she knows there’s more to both French literature and the entire rest of world literature than she’s written here! What is she even doing? And how did she come up with so many bizarre assertions on so many topics?

Example: “In most of the world, ‘sixth sense’ refers to proprioception, or sensation of where our bodies are in space–but I’m convinced that, in France, the sixth sense is the intellect.” Jesus wept. What even is this. First of all, when people they have a sixth sense about something in English, they don’t mean bloody proprioception; second, different cultures identify different things as senses at all, so their numbering–and what’s a neglected outlier–will be different; third, the difference between a sense and the intellect is a major topic in philosophy, including by some fairly notable French authors you could read oh my God what.

It is all like this, friends. It is all like this. Just random stuff pulled out of an orifice and strung together with a “whee” that does extremely little to actually illuminate joie de vivre. Oh, Lord, saying “illuminate” reminded me of how incoherent her musings on Frenchness and light were. Why, why, why. I read this so you don’t have to.

PS It is, at least, short.

Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross, A Black Women’s History of the United States. This is a speed run through Black women in America, mostly American political life. (It is explicitly inclusive of trans women, as it should be.) It is quite short, sometimes very simplified but always very brief. If you know someone who needs to know more about Black women in the US and is not going to take the time to read a collection of longer works, this is a good thing to hand them, but don’t mistake it for something that it isn’t.

David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. I feel like I’ve read a lot of work in the last decade that is explicitly corrective of the assumption that if history did come out a certain way, that’s the way it had to come out, and there’s a lot of that here. There’s a lot of distinguishing between what was actually the “mainstream” or “establishment” body of Christian thought, as opposed to Gnostic groups, and what was a whole mess of different Christians thinking different things, some of which coalesced into an establishment eventually. (There was a lot of mess in this era. Which is interesting.) Brakke is also being careful not to make Gnostics into a monolith they weren’t in reality. Not a long read but a sharp one.

Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Aykroyd. Kindle. Mostly I’ve been reading the Agatha Christie novels a friend gets to and recommends, but this one was free on Gutenberg, so I picked it up. It was very readable, not terribly much toward the bigoted end of Christie prose…and then the ending was so gimmicky and stupid. Maybe I wouldn’t have thought of the ending if I’d been born in 1878 instead of 1978? but she explicitly telegraphed it in so many places. And relied on it for the appeal of the book. So. Meh. You could do better, and she did.

Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. There was so much J. Edgar Hoover in that J. Edgar Hoover. This book has a tone of “can you believe this $#@*! guy?” at many turns, and that was absolutely appropriate, but even with that choice of tone: wow was it a lot to have over 700 pages of J. Edgar Hoover. Important figure, useful to know what influences and effects he had, but I was so glad to be done reading this book. I think Gage made an important point in the last section: that while Hoover certainly sometimes chose to be a villain, he wasn’t the villain–that is, we can’t let recognition of his terrible choices let other people off the hook for theirs.

David Graeber, Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia. Malagasy pirates, traders, and their social experiments–with a strong element of one of Graeber’s favorite questions, which is: who gets credit for having agency and who is assumed to have been swept along with the “important” people, and where are those assumptions wrong? A very short book but interesting.

Barbara Hambly, One Extra Corpse. Second in her 1920s Hollywood mystery series. It’s an era Hambly clearly enjoys writing, and while it’s less compelling to me than the Benjamin January series, it’s still fun, and I’d rather that she try different things when she has the urge.

Patrick House, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness. You don’t have to have read Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei to enjoy this book, but gosh, you can, it’s so good! It’s one of my favorite books! And finding this, a book about neuroscience inspired by it, just made me so happy. Vivid, compelling writing about a topic that interests me, inspired by another piece of vivid, compelling writing about a substantially different topic that interests me. Dancing about architecture at its finest.

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, What We Fed to the Manticore. Animal-perspective stories walk a fine line between animals being basically humans in weird costumes and animals being completely other than human. Kolluri’s animals sometimes talk, which puts her toward the first end of that spectrum rather than the second, but she does try to keep their motivations rooted in as much of their actual experience as she feels we can understand. (This is a collection of short literary stories, all of which are from an animal’s perspective.)

Kien Lam, Extinction Theory. Lots of poems inspired by personal experience, scientific theory, or a combination of the two. I appreciated this more intellectually than emotionally, but that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You. Wow, wow, wow, this book. This book. Makkai is doing so much here. It’s about parasocial relationships in this millennium, sure, but it’s also about the process of reconsidering things that happened to you in your teens, things that were accepted at the time, and figuring out what you think of them now. And which of the people you know from that era are worthy of your adult trust. And it does an absolutely beautiful “but isn’t it all more complicated really? also sometimes no, sometimes really not” twist that has the intellectual honesty not to mush things together that don’t really belong together. All the content warnings here, because this is a book that is grappling hard with violence against women and with social pressures. And there are lines that just…absolutely capture being in that place and dealing with the news cycle of this decade. I feel like this is one of the books that it will be useful to hand the next generations to tell them: what was it like to be us, to be my demographic. All the little details, sure, but also the emotional arc of “wow that was super not okay and I’m going to need to deal with it, aren’t I, and what else is going to turn out not to be okay along the way.” Be in a good place if you’re going to read this, but wow is it so good.

Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom. For reasons that may or may not become clear later, I’m going to be reading a lot of political prisoner memoir in the next bit. This was an interesting volume of…not really that. Mandela is very, very much not focused on interiority here. This is a political document. However, it’s an interesting political document and one that gave me a much stronger understanding of how this person managed to come out of prison still a political leader rather than a venerable has-been.

Shion Miua, The Easy Life in Kamusari. This is a lightly fantastical Japanese novel about a young man who goes to work in forestry right out of school and learns about the forest and the people in the village near it. It is a nice book where nice things happen. The nice dog in it has adventures and comes out just fine. “There are trees and a dog and nice things happen” is something I absolutely need sometimes, especially in this decade, and now I have this one, and I’ve just seen there’s a sequel. Hooray.

Malka Older, The Mimicking of Known Successes. Discussed elsewhere.

Bianca Pitzorno, The Seamstress of Sardinia. I am worried about Italy, friends. Because this was a perfectly nice episodic novel about the work of a young seamstress around the turn of the last century–it wasn’t quite in the “nice things happen” category, closer to social realism, but okay–but when you read the blurbs it is hailed as a great novel of a woman’s liberation and a woman finding herself and that. And that kind of thing–what is considered liberating, what is considered a new sort of journey–varies with time. If the publication date on this had been 1922, absolutely I would characterize it that way. The pub date here is 2022. I checked three times. It’s a nice book, an easy read, a different view on the world than I usually get. But if this is what’s liberating in 2022 I am extremely concerned.

Gavriel Savit, Come See the Fair. Discussed elsewhere.

Steven Sharpin and Simon Schaeffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Age. Are you interested in the philosophical fights about what’s useful proof and what’s useful experiment that characterized the late 17th century? I SURE AM. But if you read that and went “Uhhhh…no? why? no!” then this is definitely not the book for you. Basically you know from the title whether it is the book for you. Personally, this is like a hockey brawl for me, I am immediately more emotionally invested than I feel speaks well of my character, but there it is. Get him, Hobbes! Get him, Boyle!

Margery Sharp, The Flowering Thorn. This is a 1930s novel of a young society woman who spontaneously adopts a little boy and the ways in which she grows and changes because of it. It’s funny and fun and very much in the “nice things happen to nice people” category–even her friends who are horrible don’t all die of scarlet fever or lose their fortunes or anything like that, they just become visible as themselves. There are some cultural assumptions built into this that did not hold up well over the last nearly-century, but on the other hand a lot of it is still interesting and fun. And, for this plotline, unsentimental! Which is an interesting tonal thing in itself.

Sahm Venter, ed., The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela. I read this before I read Mandela’s autobiography, and it is much less worthwhile, in my opinion. The focus away from interiority is understandable but also particularly hard when reading him dealing with his close relatives. He also had a character trait that I hope is either cultural or personally understood by his family members, where his attempts at expressing sympathy were to rehearse at length the details he had imagined of what you were suffering. If this was not something that was either “yes, that’s how we do it here” or “yes, that’s how Uncle Nel does it,” it’s kind of horrifying to go through all the times when he’s piling woe on woe in his own mind for someone already actually having a pretty bad time. I also found the formatting choices interesting. The names he mentions are footnoted every single time. That is: you will find a footnote explaining that Winnie was his wife, Winnie Mandela, every time she appears in a letter. This book is half footnotes of that nature. I appreciate that they didn’t try to make a cultural determination of whether someone would be known based on their fame in the West, but it just got to be a lot. I think it’s very much for people who are quote-mining more than people who are reading, honestly–“I’ll open these letters and read one and see if he says anything interesting to my sermon,” is a mode I can easily see this volume supporting. But honestly most people who are not specifically interested in Mandela will get a much better view from the autobiography, or possibly from analysis written by other people.

Helen Young and Kavita Mudan Finn, Global Medievalism: An Introduction. Kindle. A brief introduction to ways in which fictionalized medievalism shows up in pop culture and ways in which this can be global rather than Faux France all the time. A different angle on a familiar topic, since this is academic study rather than fiction writers getting down to brass tacks or any other fastening device.