Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author has been my friend for–oh gosh let’s get my other friend the large-number mathematician out to calculate this one.

Some of my favorite words in book note land are “triumphant conclusion.” I just love when someone sticks a landing. The Tomb of Dragons is listed as the third in a trilogy. There’s room for more with these characters/in this world, but this is also an ending ending, a trilogy ending as well as a book ending.

Thera Celahar came out of his previous run-in with dead forces battered and damaged. His very calling as a Witness for the Dead was shaken. Shaken–but not obliterated. He’s found ways to pursue the peripheries of his calling even without the core available to him. Helping a younger Witness find her way and sorting through a morass of paperwork aren’t the same as hearing the needs of the dead, but they make some positive difference in the world, at least. Until he’s kidnapped and pulled under a mountain. Because yeah, the title? It’s pretty literal. And the haunted dragon bones are only the beginning for Celahar.

In addition to ending both book and series in a highly satisfying way, this volume ties back rather more closely with The Goblin Emperor than its predecessor. If you’ve been wistful for a glimpse of where it all started, this will very much satisfy. I was so glad to have it to read this week. The rest of you have to wait a few months, more, but I promise, it’ll be worth it.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I know the author from cons and online and stuff.

This is the second volume in its series, following Sweep of Stars and preceding…something big, given the ending. Luckily for you the first one is still in print, because this book dives right in and never quits, and there’s a lot of momentum left from the first one, that you will miss out on if you don’t read it.

What this is: African diaspora-tinged space opera. We got your clash of cultures in space, we got your people doing unwise things in the name of science, we got your massive cast with different goals but all striving against the vacuum, we got your family relationships splattering their consequences over the whole galaxy, you want it in a space opera, we got it right here. With a substantially Black cast.

Doesn’t that sound nice? doesn’t that sound like the sort of thing you could laugh and flinch and gasp along with right about now? It comes out Tuesday, so if you start now, you can get there before you know it.

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. Briskly written and cheerfully done, short chapters examining different aspects of the history of the notebook as an object (plus a little bit about objects we might consider predecessors). Kind of a romp honestly.

Clara Benson, A Case of Duplicity in Dorset and A Case of Suicide in St. James’s. Kindle. The next two in this series, probably fine to start here if you want–1920s historical British setting, mildly feckless journalist hero. I am finding myself in the mood for mysteries lately–the endings are comfortingly settling when I’m nervous about issues national and personal.

Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School Chapters 10-13. Kindle. You can tell I was away from home, because I caught up on reading my serial! Boarding school hijinx on Mars, protagonist extremely disgruntled, don’t start here.

Stephanie Burgis, Wooing the Witch Queen. Discussed elsewhere.

Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life. “Double life” has a preexisting colloquial meaning, and it’s not at all what Carlisle is using it to mean in this title. And…it could. She could very easily have been talking about the pressures and tensions between being Author George Eliot with all of her art and the problems attendant thereto and being George Lewes’s partner with all of those attendant problems. There’s not a lot of that, though. I had a few quibbles with interpretations of the fiction, but mostly she means “double life” as “life with another person,” and it doesn’t go particularly deep on that front. Honestly I was a bit disappointed.

Agatha Christie, The Big Four and The Murder on the Links. Kindle. The very early 20th century had some very weird international conspiracy novels–of course there was Chesterton, and Rose Macaulay had one, and then there’s The Big Four, which is…look, we’re distant enough from it now that I have a hard time even seeing how they thought of it then, whether it was ridiculous along the lines of Goldfinger in the late ’50s (book)/’60s (movie) or whether it was, oh yes, this is a popular entertainment but also this kind of flamboyant and yet super-secret international conspiracy, well, you never know. Anyway The Murder on the Links was a much more standard Christie mystery, same faults and virtues as she generally has.

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring. There was a misprint in the jacket copy and thus the online bookstore copy about this book. It claimed to be about an English painter in 1913 Russia. In fact it was about an English printer, and his work as a printer is plot-relevant. I had been specifically looking for something about visual artists to read that day, so it took me half the book to realize and get recombobulated, that no, the protag was not going to suddenly start painting things or even thinking about painting them, that’s not the book you’re reading. Its sense of humor and mine weren’t very congruent, I don’t think.

Margaret Frazer, The Hunter’s Tale (Kindle) and The Widow’s Tale. Two more of the Sister Frevisse mysteries. I’ve gotten a little out of order because not all of them are available in ebook formats and of course ebook retailers have every reason not to advertise that if instead they can get you to buy the next one they do have available. Still, for this late in the series she’s still gong strong.

Barbara Hambly, Saving Susy Sweetchild. And this one is only third in its mystery series, and it’s got a Shirley Temple-like child star being kidnapped, in with all the other elements of this Golden Age Hollywood setting. It’s fine? I keep reading them, I’ll read the next one, I definitely wanted to read this one, but also I don’t feel like this is one I’m going to point to if asked to explain what I particularly like about Barbara Hambly’s mysteries.

Mary Robinette Kowal, The Martian Contingency. Discussed elsewhere.

Sharon Kay Penman, Here Be Dragons. Reread. But this is the first reread since 1997, so a lot of the detail had not stuck with me. This is an historical novel, the first in a trilogy, and its focus is King John’s daughter Joanna and her role in Wales as the wife of Llewelyn Fawr, with all the political complications attached. It’s a huge brick of a book, but it moves along briskly, very readable throughout, will probably reread the rest of the series as well now that I’m at it.

Brenda Peynado, Time’s Agent. Pocket universes whose timelines run at different rates, combined with environmentalism and corporate depradations. This was a fast read but a depressing one.

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Pomeranz argues vigorously against all comers about when and how the economies of the two regions in the title diverged, and he’s pretty persuasive about avoiding western exceptionalism and the sense of the inevitable that dogs some otherwise-fine historians. If you’re not interested in imperial economies, this will not be the book for you. He manages to remember that Denmark exists, and the Germanies, and some other examples of Europe that writers of this genre of history often don’t mean when they say Europe.

Carole Satyamurti, The Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling. This is a kind of a weird thing to label a retelling, because it is a very, very straight-up retelling, it is aiming to replicate in poetry what the original did in its own native poetic meters, and that…is mostly a translation? But Carole Satyamurti is using multiple translations to get there and is not working from the original, so it falls into this weird in-between category. In any case it was extremely readable and gripping, and I was struck by the places where it felt absolutely familiar to my own cultural epics and then also the places where it was different.

Sascha Stronach, The Sunforge. A sequel to The Dawnhounds, this is full of ecological disaster, weird biotech, and trans characters who are fiercely themselves. Couldn’t put it down once I picked it up.

E.M. Tran, Daughters of the New Year. The story of three Vietnamese-American daughters and their immigrant mother, and then the generations proceeding back in time. The ending disappointed me–I know that not circling back to the present was a deliberate stylistic choice, but what it meant was that I felt like I had a piece of a novel rather than a whole one, that no one’s story had a satisfying ending.

Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm. Kindle. I don’t recommend this one. On the one hand, it has a bit of casual Antisemitism and quite a lot of both casual and structural sexism. On the other hand, the ending is completely boring in its main thrust and leaves half the characters you’ve been extensively introduced to in the first half of the book hanging or just stops them abruptly. He did better, several times.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. A study of Indonesian rural mountain communities and their contacts with the outside world, hits the gaps between the outside world and these communities and the developments from that friction pretty hard, undermining the supposed universality of “globalization.” The other thing I’ve read by her is mycological, and she was apparently James C. Scott’s partner until his death.

Patricia C. Wrede, The Raven Ring. Kindle, reread. Another book it had been decades since I reread. This one is the kind of fantasy I read all the time in high school but not, y’know. What’s the phrase. Staggeringly sexist. Right, that. It’s a fun adventure fantasy whose general non-sexist approach has gotten to be far more normal than it was at the time.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I know the author a bit from cons and things.

This is the latest Lady Astronaut book, alternate histories of a 20th century international space program developed in a panic when Earth’s atmosphere is catastrophically changed by a meteor strike. The series uses its premise to illuminate challenges of our past and present, and of course future. This is not a good place to start with it, I will say right up front. The characters are well-established with their foibles, strengths, and relationships, and this is not a book that wants to spend a lot of time reminding you who’s who and why you care.

But if you’re someone who *does* care, if you’ve already read the series, Elma York and her husband and colleagues are back for an adventure on the surface of Mars and in Mars orbit. While some of the same themes carry through from previous books, they’ve had more of a chance to ramify, with the characters allowed to make different mistakes at different points in their lives–and with some skills and assumptions picked up from space stations and the Moon not applying to their new Martian home.

Kowal has worked with actual astronauts to try to make this series as lived-in as possible, and it shows. Some details are just–“just”–texture to make the book feel more real, but some turn out to be plot points in ways that amuse and delight–and occasionally horrify.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a dear friend.

MAGIC NERDS IN LOVE. For some of you this is enough, you’ve just navigated out and clicked pre-order.

For the rest of you: Felix and Saskia are both nominally the rulers of their countries, but politics dealt each one a difficult hand. Felix’s Regent is deeply controlling and abusive, to the point where he quite reasonably fears for his life–he has no control over his lands despite his nominal Archducal title. Meanwhile Saskia–the titular Witch Queen–has taken her throne reluctantly. She’d rather experiment with potions and reagents, but her evil uncle couldn’t be left in control–he was viciously oppressive of all of her people even remotely connected with magic–and she has to deal with the shambles he’s left behind him when he was ousted.

The two of them find each other in stressed and unlikely circumstances, not knowing nearly all they need to know about each other (people who have read this book just started giggling about what an understatement that was for lack of spoiler purposes), and they have to find their way to trust in each other not only for their personal relationship but for the sake of their countries and people.

For me this was an extremely cozy book as well as a fun one, but it got me thinking about how people read coziness differently. Both of the protags are coming out of abusive situations that are clearly though not graphically described, and for some readers, that throughline cannot be cozy–even though the plot is entirely focused on escape from it into building something better. This one has a determinedly nurturing troll housekeeper, an amazing modern invention called fountain pens, and lovingly described meals–but it also has the bite of the world actually having consequences. Cozy is in the eye of the beholder, but this is a good read whether you end up thinking it’s cozy or not.

Clara Benson, The Treasure at Poldarrow Point. Kindle. In the first two volumes of this series, its protagonist had an energetic idiot for a foil. This is no exception, but this time the energetic idiot is literally twelve years old, so she has some excuse for some of her less wise, plot-furthering behaviors. Whew.

Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song. Gorgeous. Not like anything else, a very verbal and yet very grounded fantasy. The ending was the perfect combination of surprising and inevitable, really liked this. I would say “more like this” but only in the most theoretical sense–this is not a book for a dozen sequels, this is a book for “yes, I really love singular books like this.”

Genoveva Dimova, Monstrous Nights. Discussed elsewhere.

Emran Iqbal El-Badawi, Queens and Prophets: How Arabian Noblewomen and Holy Men Shaped Paganism, Christianity, and Islam. Best book I’ve read so far about pre-Islamic history of the Arabian peninsula and adjacent areas, does a really solid job of indicating which groups controlled which regions when, situates Judaism and Christianity in their original geographic context. Really interesting stuff, only wish it was longer. Lots of historical figures I had never heard of or heard very little of, who turned out to be quite worth knowing.

Margaret Frazer, A Play of Dux Moraud, The Bastard’s Tale, and The Clerk’s Tale. Kindle. The second volume of the Player Joliffe series, and Frazer was having a great time with making the medieval plays relevant to the genre mystery; and then two more volumes of the Dame Frevisse series, very much in the “if you liked this here’s more” category. They’re not the most elevated mystery series ever, but they’re solidly doing what they do, and as you can see I am still on board for it.

Frances Hardinge, Island of Whispers. Lavishly illustrated and quite short, melancholy, a fantasy of life and death and the different (mostly non-romantic) ways people love each other.

Jo Harkin, The Pretender. Discussed elsewhere.

Nalo Hopkinson, Blackheart Man. A fantasy that handles its colonialist past a lot more explicitly–and relevantly to the plot–than we’re used to seeing, very Caribbean-inflected, very cool. The protagonist is kind of a jerk a lot of the time, but Hopkinson knows that, and portrayal is not endorsement.

Freya Marske, Swordcrossed. Some of you might want this for the duels, some for the gay sex. Me, I am in it for the wool merchants. MORE WOOL MERCHANTS. MERCHANT CULTURES OF ALL KINDS.

Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist. Reread. For a book club. I feel like the immediately post-Victorian nature of this book is what jumped out at me most this time. The Victorians were just yesterday, and you can tell, and in a fun way. I’ve been part of conversations about how fantasy would have been different if this rather than The Lord of the Rings had been its pattern text, but one of the things that jumped out at me about that this time is that it’s a fantasy where a parent is attempting to save their children. Very very different from the family structures in Tolkien.

Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson, We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People. I’ve read missionary narratives before, and this was very much structured exactly like them but with the opposite conclusion: here are some stories of when I was a small child, here’s what I knew about my world and my people, here’s when I learned from the missionaries about Jesus and the western world……and now, here’s why that was a terrible experience and my life path and activism is very different. The parallelism really struck me given the conclusions.

Megan E. O’Keefe, The Bound Worlds. The last in its trilogy, wherein everyone is generally horrible to everyone else but eventually pulls themselves together and figures their space fungus shit out. Definitely don’t read it if you haven’t been enjoying the first two, it is not an entry point.

Nadi Reed Perez, The Afterlife of Mal Caldera. An absolutely beautiful and sensitively handled book that I will be recommending to very few specific people, because what it is beautifully and sensitively handling includes a lot of material dealing with depression and suicidality. I loved the voice, I loved the whole thing, but–think very carefully whether you want something this intense.

Sarah Pinsker, Haunt Sweet Home. I have long had a theory that there’s a period of “omg, I will put this NEW SOCIAL THING in my SFF story as a novelty! Look how new!” before the genre settles into, “Yep, we sure do have that, anyway here’s an actual story.” Haunt Sweet Home is a marker that we’ve arrived at the maturity stage–or at least Sarah Pinsker has–regarding reality TV shows. They’re a thing that exists, and if you’re going to put one in the story you still need a story, and this has one. It’s not the most beautiful ghost story I read this month because The Afterlife of Mal Caldera exists, but it’s a lot less harrowing than that, and a lot more fun.

B. Pladek, Dry Land. For some reason I thought this was going to be a completely different genre of book, but it is gay WWI environmentalist fantasy. If you like the war poets, sad gay boys, and modern environmentalism, this might easily be your jam. It’s mostly melancholy throughout but with glimmers of hope in the mud.

Ruben Reyes, Jr., There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven. This is the sort of weird short story collection that genre science fiction/fantasy readers don’t always hear about, but you should, because the stories are just as speculative and alien and profoundly cool as anything labeled SFF. If not more so.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique, The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Consent, and the Making of the Early Modern British World. An interesting take on how British colonizers used recordkeeping and other knowledge management types differently in different colonies because of their varying assumptions and goals, very cool.

Dana Simpson, Unicorn Time Machine. The latest Phoebe and Her Unicorn collection, and it unexpectedly made me cry, because there are some things with Phoebe’s dad in it. To be clear, they are funny sweet things, not sad things…unless you had that kind of nerdy dad and you miss him….

Sam Kyung Yoo, Small Gods of Calamity. Urban fantasy with gods and spirits making a great deal of trouble, fun and will be on my Christmas-buys list for several people.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

A member of my family saw this book sitting on the kitchen table and said, “Ohhh, somebody gonna get eaten.” This is what we call “setting reader expectations appropriately with the cover design.”

Kosara and Asen have had six months since the events of the Foul Days in the book of the same name–six months for things to get back to normal. Things…have not done that. Nor do they look likely to. Kosara is still hearing the Zmey’s voice. Asen is no longer comfortable on the mundane police force. And there are monsters…where there should not be monsters. So: normal? really no.

Giant plague-bearing cockerels, unexpected werewolves, uncertain vampires, Asen’s late wife’s kikimora, the gang’s all here. Kosara’s dozen shadows are unruly at the worst possible times. There’s more trouble than they realized between the human realm and the realm of monsters, and it’s going to take everything they’ve got to set the balance right–and a few things they don’t have yet as well. Vivid and particular, this is a fun successor to the excellent first volume.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is so good, and many of you will want to read it when it comes out.

What it is: a very close third-person POV story of the pretender to the throne of Henry VII best known to posterity as Lambert Simnel, who in his life had many other names. And it does such a good job of that tight perspective. It starts with him as a little boy on a farm, with the perspective on world history that a little boy on a 15th century farm would have, without making him twee or precious or stupid. What it does with his perspective moving through the tumultuous events of his life, with the fall of Richard III and the rise of Henry VII, the uprising for which he was the figurehead and its aftermath, is a development of intimate character voice as good as any I’ve ever seen, and with lots of eventful historical material rather than just interior ponderings.

In the hands of a lesser prose stylist and character observer, this could have been the kind of rote historical fiction you often find in the late 19th century: here is an historical figure, his life and times, hurrah, the end. But a really good writer has always been able to make a book of that pattern into something more, and Harkin does as well as, say, Naomi Mitchison at the job. Which is high praise indeed.

Gina María Balibrera, The Volcano Daughters. Beautiful Salvadoran-American historical fiction/magic realism. Harrowing and wonderful. There’s running commentary from a Greek chorus-style group of politically murdered women. I gradually realized as the book went on that one of the main characters is a fictional version of someone real, and it blew my mind, because I was all in without that and then–wow what, reality is so weird. Recommended.

Clara Benson, A Case of Conspiracy in Clerkenwell and The Mystery at Underwood House. Kindle. The next volume in each of the two series I’m reading by her. I felt that the former was the weakest in its series so far but still reasonably interesting, kept me going in the waiting room for a stressful medical appointment for a family member, hurrah for reliable historical mystery series.

Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places. If you’ve been reading Chris’s newsletter, you’ll recognize some of this material, but it’s polished and considered here rather than regurgitated whole. If you haven’t, you’re in for a treat, because his nature writing about American cities is excellent, he brings a combination of lawyer’s eye, science fiction writer’s perspective, and just plain enthusiasm about the world he’s living in, with all its flaws and foibles.

Agatha Christie, The Missing Will. Kindle. This was actually a short story, and not a very substantial one at that, but it was one of the things that was available for download from Gutenberg–they’re not particularly well-labeled, and I haven’t done the work of sorting which are which, I just find out by reading them.

James S. A. Corey, The Mercy of Gods. Human scientists taken by aliens who may be cruel, may be indifferent, or may just be alien, but they sure give the human research group a thoroughly unpleasant experience–that is by no means over, this is book one in a series. I liked the range of aliens but the entire reading experience of “series of variously unpleasant alien experiences” made me morose.

Edwidge Danticat, We’re Alone. A series of essays centering her experience of being Haitian/Haitian-American. Look, seeking out art from the perspective of a currently-slandered ethnic group is not actually activism, but it’s still a great plan. This is a short collection and, like everything else of Danticat’s I’ve read, beautifully done.

Margaret Frazer, The Reeve’s Tale. Kindle. I feel like she’s changing up the structure more in the mid-late series here, and I’m pleased by that; knowing that the corpse would show up at the 55-65% mark was not actually one of the things I liked best, and she’s keeping up with the things I do like about the Sister Frevisse mysteries.

Kate Heartfield, The Tapestry of Time. Oh gosh this was lovely. I didn’t read the blurb, I just saw that Kate had a new thing and snapped it up, so I went in completely cold. I can recommend that experience, but also I know that not everybody does well that way, so I will say: WWII clairvoyants at war, also the Bayeux Tapestry, yes it absolutely makes sense in context.

Peter Hessler, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education. Hessler taught in China twice, with a generation between the experience, and in the second case he had small twin daughters who went to a Chinese school, so there’s all kinds of non-standard perspective about China and education and recent history. This was complicated for him by the fact that in the middle of the second experience…the Covid pandemic hit us. So there’s all kinds of stuff about living in China during that as well. Extremely interesting.

Jenna Satterthwaite, Made for You. I didn’t find the ending of this very satisfying, but it was compulsively, horrifyingly readable. Its protagonist is an android who was made to fit a man on a dating show, and half of the narration is that thread, their time on the dating show (I said horrifying already, right), and the other half is after they’re married and have a child and he’s disappeared. Very hooky, kind of disappointing in the end.

Bill Schutt, Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans. Too many humans in this book. (Do I have that reaction too often, yes, probably.) But still lots of interesting stuff about other species, and maybe you’re more interested in human teeth than I am, I expect a lot of people are. Maybe not a lot. But some. And even I could stand the human part.

Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920. I feel like Sinha had about six books her research could have supported, and what she didn’t manage to do was either narrow the focus to write only one of them or make her overview broadly compelling. The wealth of small details felt scattered and didn’t quite come together. I especially wanted more about the people she wrote about in the introduction–for example Northern Black schoolteachers who went South to teach during the Reconstruction. Let’s get a whole book about them. This one was mainly frustrating.

A. C. Wise, Out of the Drowning Deep. Do you like weird space religion? Because this is absolutely full of weird space religion. It’s a novella that just goes hard on the weird space religion front and does not quit. Wise is another author I find compellingly readable, even if I’m often a hard sell on angels.