Novel Gazing Redux

Clara Benson, A Case of Intrigue in Islington. Kindle. The latest Freddy Pilkington-Soames mystery, entertaining enough if you’re already reading that series.

Eiren Cafall, All the Water in the World. A post-apocalyptic novel that starts in flooded New York City and ends up the Hudson. It is doing all the things that an eco-focused post-apocalyptic novel does. It does them well, but also if you don’t want another one of those, this is another one of those, it’s not doing something new, it’s doing something established nicely enough.

P. F. Chisholm, A Season of Knives, A Surfeit of Guns, and A Plague of Angels. This is books two through four of the Robert Carey mysteries. I have the first six books of the series in two omnibus volumes, so you’ll be seeing more of these soon, I expect. In the last one they have adjourned to London, which is slightly disappointing because I like the Scottish Border, but I’m hopeful we’ll get there eventually. And for an historical mystery that featured Marlowe and Shakespeare as characters, it was not doing the same thing as several of the others, so there’s that.

Joseph Cox, Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever. I wouldn’t have read this if someone else hadn’t brought it into the house, but it’s interesting though outside my usual interests. It’s crime nonfiction from the last decade with a tech focus. Much of what I got from it was “you’re kidding, they what.” Welp.

Jack Dann, ed., Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Science Fiction. This was a book club read, and many/most of the stories traded in stereotypes of Jewish women. Some of them also were pretty stereotypical of Jewish men, while others walked the line of “I’m allowed to make that joke, it’s about myself.” I think there are a lot of interesting Jewish SFF authors and would not start here for which of them to read, but it’s quite an old anthology and was clearly doing something that was not otherwise being done at the time.

Tananarive Due and Patricia Stephens Due, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. The structure of this is a bit weird, because it alternates who is writing each chapter, and Patricia Stephens Due is doing basically a linear memoir, and Tananarive Due is doing…whatever she can to fit the thoughts she has about this topic in a thematic order that informs her mother’s memoir. It is definitely worth reading if you are interested in Civil Rights memoirs, which I am, but the amount that it speaks to any intersection with Tananarive Due’s other writing interests is fairly small.

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems. Reread many years later. My late beloved Aunt Judy’s poetry collection is making its way to people who will appreciate it, and this was one of the volumes I got. It’s technically a reread–I know I read this in college, and have revisited pieces of it since–but not coherently, not for many, many years. The thing that struck me this time around was how many SFF titles come from The Waste Land. It’s not all that thematically relevant, as modern poems go! It was almost an, “I went to see Hamlet, it was just a bunch of famous quotes strung together” situation, but for SFF titles.

Nalo Hopkinson, Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions. Hopkinson notes that she’s published in a wide variety of places, and she’s correct, there are fewer of these stories that were in the “oh, I remember enjoying this somewhere else” category than in most collections by authors I’ve been reading and enjoying for nearly 25 years. More fresh work. Good.

A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad. Reread. This was the other of the Aunt Judy volumes I got, and I had reread it much more recently. I always feel this bleak protectiveness about Housman, with the Great War bearing down on him and he has no idea, poor dear.

Karl Smari Hreinsson and Adam Nichols, eds., The Travels of Reverend Olafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627. Nonfiction, sort of a travelogue/memoir, but very much in the “there’s a religious lesson here if we have to turn it upside down and shake it” vein. The thing that weirded this guy out–this 17th century Icelandic pastor who was kidnapped by Barbary pirates–is that Turkish people of the time did not wear socks. I mean, possibly other things weirded him out? It seems likely? But there is a heck of a lot of “we trust in the Lord our refuge” and then “OMG THEY DON’T EVEN WEAR SOCKS.” Bless.

Katherine Rundell, Impossible Creatures. I wanted to like this. I really loved her book on John Donne. I did not like it. There was a lot of death for a children’s book, and all of it felt off to me, most of it felt absolutely gratuitous. Also some of the references to grown-up literature felt extraneous to the heart of the thing–I could see what Rundell loved and wanted to pay homage to, and I could also see it largely not working for me in this shape of book. Sigh.

Arwa Salih, The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation in Egypt. Salih was part of the 1970s leftist movements in Egypt and has some interesting and some personal and some absolutely scathing things to say about them. It makes me want to know more of the backdrop against which her stuff took place. Books! They’re self-reinforcing, you read one and it makes you want to read five more!

Dana Simpson, Unicorn Book Club. This is another installation of the running comic strip, which I enjoy. It doesn’t have a lot of book club material, but that’s okay, if you like Phoebe & Her Unicorn or want to find out if you do, this is a perfectly reasonable one of them.

Stephen Spotswood, Dead in the Frame. The latest in the Parker & Pentecost mystery series, and the previous volume and this one both have clear signposts for what the next mystery will be while still solving the one at hand. This one dealt with women’s prisons in general and the House of Detention in New York City in specific as a major element, well-researched, good stuff.

Chris Thorogood, Pathless Forest: The Quest to Save the World’s Largest Flowers. I would have preferred less of Thorogood in this, but that’s not a reasonable thing to ask someone who is writing a book. I kept reading largely because I was interested in what he was saying about rafflesia, and I don’t expect there will be another readily available book on that topic soon.

Carrie Vaughn, The Naturalist Society. I was enjoying this 19th century fantasy, but it veered off into idiot plot (multiple idiots plot) in ways that annoyed me, and I found the end unsatisfying. I wanted this to be one of her books that I love (see for example Bannerless) but instead it was more in the “well okay I guess” category. I do like 19th century naturalists. Sigh.

Nghi Vo, Don’t Sleep With the Dead. Discussed elsewhere.

Olivia Waite, Murder By Memory. Discussed elsewhere.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Pilgrim Machines. I like a far-future/highly advanced aliens space opera as well as the next person, but the characters in this barely cohered at all, and I couldn’t attach to any part of it emotionally really. I wanted to think that Wijeratne was doing things with Buddhism that I was missing, but the end notes do not seem to point in that direction.

Rita Woods, The Edge of Yesterday. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This novella manages to pack generation ship SF and cozy murder mystery together into one compact package. We hit the ground running with the speculative premise about memory and life extension on page one and do not stop the whole way through. Some of the SF is beautiful–the liquid memory stuff is great–and some of it is fun plot engine.

Because of the novella length, we only get a handful of characters, but what we see of them is fun–and the relationship of aunt (protag), nephew, and nephew’s newish husband is not at all a standard relationship dynamic. It’s realistically done and affectionate, and I look forward to seeing more of these characters’ adventures in the next volume.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

The premise of this book is that two upper middle class Black people from Detroit from a century apart can sometimes see and talk to each other through the expedient of Greer, a ballet dancer from 2025, going briefly back in time to 1925 and meeting Monty, a doctor. The parts of this book that are about upper middle class Black Detroit, in both eras, are great. Extremely well written, and if you have any fondness for Detroit at all (I do), you’ll see some of the stuff you love there. Woods is herself a Black woman from Detroit, and this is a love letter to her community.

It’s the science fiction side that lets me down, unfortunately. It’s not that the science of it is handwaved, I’m totally fine with that. It’s that the personal relationships are. Greer has a chronic illness that seems to be somehow related to the time jumps, but how is not clear, and that’s the sort of thing that comes with pitfalls when you’re writing about chronic illness. Sure enough, at one point Greer’s best friend Leah chides her that she has to stop the time jumps because she’s changing the timeline too much–but her control over them is very minimal–and Leah’s logic is that Greer is being selfish in trying to find enough changes that she doesn’t have a chronic illness, because what she has will not kill her. But…it’s undiagnosed. It is a major plot point that this mystery illness is undiagnosed. So who knows whether it would kill her? Why is it not okay for Greer to want to not be debilitated? And also why is Leah so sure that the tiny interactions Greer has with the past–she doesn’t, for example, warn Monty about the stock market crash or anything like that–are going in negative directions? None of this is fleshed out because it isn’t Woods’s focus.

At the very end, but only the very end, Greer is trapped in the past, unable to get back to her family, friends, or career. It’s made very clear that she still suffers her chronic illness and dies with it. Meanwhile Monty…gets to pursue his restless dreams in Paris due to Greer’s influence. So…the woman with the chronic illness is punished for having a largely volition-free interaction with this condition, but the able-bodied man gets to live his dreams because of it? I was not left feeling great about the ending to this book.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is listed as a standalone companion novella to The Chosen and the Beautiful, which is a Great Gatsby reimagining. I would quibble with that: I don’t think it would stand alone very well. It opts not to lean in on the explanations of the magic, which is great for the pacing of the novella IF you’ve read the novel and remember it reasonably well. Which I have. I also think that “standalone” is a pretty weird adjective for this novella, since it seems to me to lean heavily on you knowing The Great Gatsby well to see what it’s even doing.

Which to me is not a problem. The Great Gatsby is a very famous book, readily available, and The Chosen and the Beautiful is in print and also available. And I want novellas to be doing different things, I want there to be a range of types of connectedness that stories can have. But don’t kid yourself. This is very much a “what about long after” sort of story of consequences, this is about “what next” for those two books in combination. This is not a standalone meditation about the consequences of the 1920s as WWII is breaking out, or about the fate of people magically created as doppelgangers for other people that it, in this volume, has talked about the process for extensively. It doesn’t have to be, in order to be an interesting read.

Nadine Akkerman, Elizabeth Stuart: Queen of Hearts. Akkerman is very, very opposed to calling her The Winter Queen, which is a shame because it’s one of the most awesome regnal nicknames a person has ever had. Other than that I really liked this, it was very thorough and also told you important contextual things like what Christian IV and Axel Oxenstierna were doing at the time, which a great many histories of British and German people forget to do.

Mary Beard, Emperor of Rome. This is not a chronological study of individual emperors, it’s a conceptual study about the experience and trappings of emperorship in Imperial Rome, which is far more interesting than who poisoned whom which day. There’s a reason she’s one of the big popular historians of antiquity at the moment.

Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School, Chapters 17-22. Kindle. We’ve entered the school dramatics phase of the school story trope!

Tim Clarkson, The Makers of Scotland: Picts, Romans, Gaels, and Vikings. A short and straightforward history of first-millennium Scotland and how it coalesced into an actual country, with attention to several major influential groups as listed in the subtitle. Not flashy but fine.

Siddhartha Deb, Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India. Kindle. Helpful point of view on history that I lived through on the other side of the planet but was substantially unaware of, really glad to have more context as this seems unlikely to get less important over time.

Joshua S. Levy, Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop. Full disclosure: I wanted this to be a Jewish Sal and Gabi, and that is an unreasonable expectation. Instead it is a very nice middle grade science fiction novel about two boys from very different strands of Judaism sorting out their very important weekend in Groundhog’s Day fashion, a good time.

Robin McKinley, Beauty, Rose Daughter, Spindle’s End, and Sunshine. Rereads. It was interesting to watch her develop her fairy tale novel approach, because Beauty was written when novels based on fairy tales were very rare, and it is a very straight-up retelling. And Rose Daughter is a bit later and has a bit more personality, and Spindle’s End is after that and has a lot more personality. Spindle’s End is more of a fantasy novel with a fairy tale structure, rather than just a fairy tale expanded into a (short) novel form. Sunshine…well, I was glad that I intended to do some baking that day anyway. And it’s still got such a weird ending. But worth it.

Naomi Novik, Buried Deep and Other Stories. I found this to be a very mixed bag, which might mean that there’s something for everybody or might just mean that it’s a very mixed bag. I was surprised by how much I liked the crossover between her dragon universe and Pride and Prejudice, because that is usually the opposite of my sort of thing, and while I can’t say it’s in the running for my favorite story of the year, it was a good time.

Morgan Parker, Magical Negro: Poems. Trenchant cultural commentary in very biting poem form, glad to have read this.

Hache Pueyo, But Not Too Bold. Discussed elsewhere.

Arthur Ransome, Winter Holiday. Reread. The most comfort of comfort rereads. The thing about it is that I haven’t reread this since I learned that winter in England–even in northern England–doesn’t mean what it means here, and it’s all there on the page once you know–the idea that the lake freezing is rare, that they’re incredibly lucky to have this grand adventure. The other thing about this book is that it is so entirely pro-quarantine about infectious disease that the rambunctious children do not try to break quarantine. None of the adults seriously considers sending kids who might have been exposed to mumps (but do not in fact end up having mumps) to school to give it to the other children. This is a plot device, but it’s also a deeply held belief that I think will be something of a relief to some of my friends in the current era.

May Sarton, Collected Poems, 1930-1973. I know there was some May Sarton in an anthology I read and reread as a child, but for the life of me I can’t find it here, it just…didn’t stick. And that’s sort of how the rest of this collection went: I could read it, I wasn’t annoyed reading it, there was a stanza here or there that hit what it was aiming at, but I don’t think Sarton is ever going to be one of the poets I really love. Well. They can’t all be.

Jo Walton, Farthing, Ha’penny, and Half a Crown. Rereads. This…is maybe not the most cheerful time to read an alternate history trilogy about the rise of fascism in midcentury Britain, but also cheerful is not the only thing we need, and the voice in these is so solid. Also though I spent an entire afternoon upset that [redacted] still dies in the last book on this reread.

Alison Weir, Queens of the Conquest: England’s Medieval Queens. Parts of this book drove me absolutely up a tree, parts were fine, and then we got to the last section, about the Empress Maud, and I was absolutely done with Weir, just plain done. Instead of taking into account the absolute hostility many chroniclers had to a woman exercising solo power ever, Weir speculates that maybe the Empress Maud sucked because of menopause. What. What. Stop that.

John Wiswell, Wearing the Lion. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a close friend.

John Wiswell has a lot of thoughts about monsters, and a lot of thoughts about family. We’ve been treated to musings and permutations in various short stories and in his first book. Now with his sophomore effort, these themes come into play in a new playground: Greek myth.

Specifically, the Labors of Hercules.

Why does the most famous product of Zeus’s philandering bear a name that gives glory to his wife? What did Hera think of the whole situation–and what did Heracles? Is there anything to the labors other than roaring, stomping, and carnage? If you’ve ever read anything by John before, you’ll be unsurprised that finding a way forward through vengeance involves a lot more gentleness and humor than in the original. When the Lion of Nemea gets a name and personality, you know you’re in for some very different labors than ever before, and the sly commentary on both Greek myth and our current mores had me startling the people around me with my giggles. Wiswell’s Heracles is one of the most earnest heroes you’ll ever find–and his deeply felt sincerity has a piquant contrast in Hera’s vengeful rage. Highly recommended, John does not disappoint.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

First: arachnophobes should not read this novella. No, seriously. Do not. The cover is not an overdramatization of how arachnid-laden the book is, if anything the cover is an understatement. It is constant spiders up in here. Flee while you still can.

Okay, for those of you who did not run screaming from that: I am not the target audience for this book, I think. I’m not actually opposed to wall-to-wall spiders (seriously, literally), but this is the kind of sapphic monsterfucker book that I think would be intolerable if it was about straight people, and I don’t actually find it less intolerable this way. “Sure she literally eats people on a whim, but she has never felt truly seen and I truly see her” uh cool story pal but not actually a cooler story with “she” than it would be with “he.”

I know that there is a target audience for this book! That “she is a horrible giant spider lady who does horrible things in a vividly described setting, and then the sex” is something some people really, truly want. If that’s you, here it is, no shaming here, just: wow is that not for me, I will be somewhere else.