Novel Gazing Redux

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.

Clara Benson, A Case of Murder in Mayfair. Kindle. Second in its series, keeps the 1920s upper class England vibe up, if you liked the first one you’ll like this one but you can also start here, it’s the kind of mystery series that will fill you in on who’s who and what’s what when you need to know.

Agatha Christie, Nemesis and Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?. The latter of the two is a fine enough Christie mystery, not one whose solution provides enough information to try to guess it but a reasonable read if that’s not what you’re looking for in mysteries. The former has a few absolutely vicious moments of sexism, including a firm fixation on repeating a really horrid view of rape, and it reminds me why I was letting other people filter my Christie reading for a while until I got impatient. So I’ll have a bit of a break before getting more of these.

Gwynne Garfinkle, Sinking, Singing. Discussed elsewhere.

Susanna Gibson, The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women’s Movement. The middle of the 18th century was a fascinating time for a lot of things, and this history (group biography?) does a beautiful job of combining larger themes and fascinating nuggets of trivia. The organization of it is occasionally a bit scattered, but not enough to ruin the book.

Rigoberto Gonzalez, ed., Latino Poetry. Four hundred years of American Latine poetry, organized chronologically, gets to poetry I consider “recent” quite quickly but then is hundreds of pages of that from highly varied voices. Really worth the time, will almost certainly introduce you to at least a few poets you didn’t know before (and possibly several, depending on your reading habits). And as with most large poetry anthologies, if you don’t like one, you’ll be on to another soon.

Sarah Hilary, No Other Darkness. Second volume in its mystery series, grimmer and darker than most of the mysteries I’ve been reading. This one has child injury and child death very much front and center, so if that’s not something you’re interested in coping with in a novel, this one isn’t for you. Hilary seems to be grappling in fiction with what we currently think and know about post-partum psychosis.

Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance. Two ballet dancer sisters deal with the mental health crisis one of them has while the other attempts to maintain her career. Beautifully written, but almost all the characters are absolute jerks, so if you don’t like reading an entire novel about jerks trying to work in the arts, this will not be for you.

Laurie R. King, The Art of Detection. Kindle. This one did not work for me. I’m not sorry I read it, it’s in a series I like and it was not a terrible read, but it featured a lengthy (lengthy, pals) Sherlock Holmes pastiche in the middle, that was treated as if it was a good pastiche, and I didn’t think it was. I know her Mary Russell mysteries are quite popular, but the few I read of those (I prefer this series, the Kate Martinelli series) were attempting to go on and do their own thing, not just neatly pastiche Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The interesting part was that it was a contemporary novel from just long enough ago that a few things made me gasp with remembering what it was like then.

Lydia Moland, Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life. This is a really good biography of a writer and activist who is not as well known as she might be, and whose abolitionism led her to feminism without letting go of its focus. Moland does an excellent job at liking but not lionizing her subject, making Child’s flaws clear but also placing them in their larger historical context. Recommended.

Ben Orlin, Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. This is my friend Ben’s latest effort in the direction of helping people who aren’t as comfortable with math understand it a bit more, or perhaps in the direction of helping those of us who are super-comfortable with math understand some different ways to talk to people about it. Amusing and not a big time commitment, towards goals I support.

Sarah Rees Brennan, Long Live Evil. This is one of the recent trend of portal fantasies where the protag is the villain in the fantasy world. It’s tropey and snarky, but I think the thing that makes it stand out from the other tropey snarky books in this sub-genre is that Sarah Rees Brennan draws on her own experience of critical illness in ways that go counter-trope, in ways that are completely and heartbreakingly real. In with the villains having a dance number from the musical version.

Cynthia Saltzman, Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast. Lots of stuff about Veronese’s painting, lots of stuff about Napoleon’s relationship with the material goods of the lands he was attempting to conquer. Not a particularly long book but interesting.

Laura J. Snyder, Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society. John Stuart Mill and William Whewell did not agree on a lot. Snyder points out some of the stuff they did agree on, and for the most part also points out how they did not acknowledge even those points of agreement. But in any case it’s a lot of interesting stuff about what science even is, how it is supposed to work or has to work, all kinds of stuff where everybody was wrong (at least by our current, probably also wrong, standards), but it was interesting to see how we got here from there.

Noel Streatfeild, Caroline England. Kindle. Do you want a novel-length thing with the same theme as Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”? (You know, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad….”) Because that’s what this is. It predates the Larkin by several decades, but yeah: “wow do people’s family relationships and childhoods mess them up in varying ways.” Okay, I guess, if that’s what you’re looking for.

Sara Imari Walker, Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence. The main thing in this book that I didn’t already have a solid grasp on was assembly theory, but that was a very cool thing to be exposed to. I think it’s a well-written popular history that should be clear to people at a wide variety of levels of prior knowledge of biophysics and astrobiology. A trivial but interesting feature of this book is that Walker decided to use the convention of referring to people by their given names instead of their family names after first reference–I would have said “Sara decided” if I’d been writing it the same way she did. So Mary Shelley became Mary, Albert Einstein Albert, and so on. Very cozy and collegial but I can’t see my way clear to doing it; not only am I entirely too comfortable with the distinction between “I had the nicest chat with my friend Fran” and “Wilde’s prose really shines in the jewel stories” distinguishing the personal from the analytical, but many of the eras I like to consult have a dozen and a half of Mary, Elizabeth, and Anne, with never a respite into Rotrude or Jennifer, and having to resort to Mary A. and Mary S. to distinguish whether we’re talking about fossils or novels would make me feel like I was back in Mr. Habrock’s kindergarten class. Still, it was fine for a book worth of someone else doing it.

Review copy provided by the author, who has been a friend On Here since forever.

This is a compact short story collection, reprinting Garfinkle’s work on this theme rather than attempting to be a Complete Works or even a Greatest Hits situation. In these pages you’ll find work reminiscent of her novel, Can’t Find My Way Home, in its focus on mid-late twentieth century and music through a speculative lens.

It’s a quiet volume, none of the stories flashy and high-concept. What it does well is focus on small moments of yearning, epiphanies or more often longing for epiphanies that might prove elusive, because this is not a tidy collection, this is a not a collection where the protagonists get what they want at the end of each story, neatly in a bow. It is always, through all its timelines, more human than that.

Beth Cato, A Thousand Recipes for Revenge. Cooking themed fantasy with strong (disapproved of by the text and POV characters! but still!) threads of cannibalism throughout. Very much the sort of fun magic adventure a lot of friends have said they’re not getting enough of, if the cannibalism mentions (again, none of the positive characters is in favor!) don’t bother you too much.

Camille T. Dungy, ed. Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. I really liked that this volume was organized thematically rather than chronologically–the sections are different things Black American writers have done with nature poetry rather than decades. Dungy takes a broad view of what nature poetry is, which I appreciate in general, and is not afraid to recast some famous poems in that lens.

Louise Erdrich, Original Fire. This book of poems has sections that are each doing very different things, thematically and structurally, which is very cool–historical persona poems done differently from prose poem legend retellings and so on. A lot going on here.

Martín Espada, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed. I really like the title poem and was delighted to find that there are more collected in a convenient format, just as ferociously political and searing, hooray.

Megan Fernandes, Good Boys: Poems. There were only a few poems in this volume that really hit me hard, but I think that’s a mismatch between me and the material rather than any lack in the material per se. Also while these posts are alphabetical rather than chronological, I did read this one after the three previous volumes, which is a hard act to follow and I probably needed to breathe a minute first.

Sally Franson, Big In Sweden. Franson appeared on a Swedish reality TV show, and this is about a protagonist who did that, but it appears to be a “novel based on” rather than a novelization of Franson’s own specific experiences. The exception is: if you share the friend in common with her that I do, that friend is very visibly herself at all times. (That is, I hope that’s the exception.) This was light-hearted and reasonably fun, but the protagonist’s decisions were always and in every way opaque to me, which is a shame, because I was hoping to get more of a sense of “people on reality TV shows: why these decisions, what is it like.”

Margaret Frazer, A Play of Isaac. Kindle. This is the first volume in her second series–I’ve been reading the Sister Frevisse mysteries, and these are a spinoff series based on a traveling player character from early in that series. I often find that mystery writers only have one series I like, and I blame this on trying too hard to distinguish the main characters and ending up with one of them being unappealing or forced (most people have at least some things in common, most people with a similar profession or hobby even more so). The circumstances of Joliffe the traveling actor and the perceptions of those around him are naturally so different from Sister Frevisse that Frazer is not contorted into an unnatural angle to make the two series different. Hooray. So I expect I’ll be continuing with these as well.

Laura Gao, Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American. Very forthright biographical comic, lots of immigrant experience material and young artist material.

Erich Hoyt, Planktonia: The Nightly Migration of the Ocean’s Smallest Creatures. This was more photographs and less text than I expected, but the text is high quality and the photos are even better. Want to think more about plankton, here you go, lovely.

Dan Jones, In the Reign of King John: A Year in the Life of Plantagenet England. Jones wanted to give us a sense of what else was going on in 1215–yes, the Magna Carta, but what was life actually like for people around that. A lot of it was stuff I already knew (sometimes from a previous Jones book), but this was lavishly illustrated and briskly written.

T. Kingfisher, A Sorceress Comes to Call. One of the things that sometimes happens in a Kingfisher book is that the villain is so evil that you end up with an alliance of everyone else, more or less. And I like that. I like that this was largely a middle-aged woman/adolescent girl alliance story and then more people were added to the alliance. The sorceress in question was hugely creepy and evil, one of the most hateable characters in fiction I’ve read recently, but she cast a deep shadow that let everyone else shine.

R. B. Lemberg, Yoke of Stars. The contrast of different society’s forms of restriction and oppression makes for rich character relationships in this latest Birdverse book, beautifully done, recommended.

Jorell Melendez-Badillo, Puerto Rico: A National History. This is a whistle-stop tour of Puerto Rican history. I wanted to know more about basically everything. It had barely started before it was finished. On the other hand, if you don’t have a large commitment to learning more about Puerto Rican history, this is definitely not a large commitment, you can just dip a toe in the water and see what’s going on.

Sas Milledge, Mamo. A young witch’s self-discovery, in graphic novel form. Conflicting views of home and wandering. Which young witch? Well.

Hope Mirrlees, Paris: A Poem. Extremely modernist in some lovely ways, a portrait of an interwar city. I wonder how it would hit if you didn’t speak French–it’s mostly in English but there’s French interspersed. This volume was more commentary than poem, and still not much of either to make a separate book, but I wanted to read it and this is how it’s available.

Liz Moore, The God of the Woods, Long Bright River, and The Unseen World. I discovered this author and immediately got the two other things the library could get me that she’d written, and I read them all in quick succession. The titles seem custom-designed to give speculative fiction readers a misleading view of what they’re about–the first two are very non-speculative thrillers, and they work on me in a way that most thrillers do not. Specifically: the short chapters and scenes really do pull me along through the text just as I’m told short chapters and scenes are wont to do. “Can there be good rich people” and “can there be good cops” are both answered no, at length, but it’s interesting length. Then there’s The Unseen World, which is historical fiction about AI development in ways that aged weirdly. It’s mostly about human relationships, though, so that part is fine. The least fine part is the ending, which is attempting to be speculative in ways that have not really considered speculative fiction takes on the same ideas and so manages to be trite. If you don’t fall in love with Moore’s work from the first two, I’d skip that one.

Annalee Newitz, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. Newitz takes a beneficially broad view of what counts as psychological warfare and upon whom it has been waged. Lots of interesting material in this comparatively short volume.

Emilio Ocampo, The Emperor’s Last Campaign: A Napoleonic Empire in America. A book with this title could have taken its emphasis one of two ways–a NAPOLEONIC empire in America vs. a Napoleonic empire IN AMERICA. I was hoping for the former and got the latter. I ended up shelving this under French history/politics rather than any Latin American country, as there was basically no perspective from people living in Latin American countries at the time. It’s very well-researched if you’re looking for internal French or English politics, it’s not a worthless book, it just…does not do what I was hoping.

Nnedi Okorafor, She Who Knows. A prequel of sorts, with sequels to come, and I think that knowing that there is already more of this world and these characters makes this novella interesting rather than unsatisfying, made me able to settle into the salt magic and the family dynamics.

Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Lost Ark Dreaming. Sea level has risen with a vengeance in this one. It is all post-disaster, the disasters we can make of trying to recover, trying to survive. Interesting characters and personal dynamics, glad I read this.

Jacqueling Riding, Jacobites: A New History of the ’45 Rebellion. What a mess, what an interesting mess. Straightforwardly about the most powerful people involved in this rather than the least, but still good to have it all laid out like that with clear arrows for where it all goes.

Jonathan Scott, How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800. Extremely interesting to watch someone tie together the cultural forces that found common points between England and Holland in that time period–I’ve read a lot of English history and a lot of Dutch history, and it’s absolutely valid and interesting to consider how strongly they were influencing each other.

Sarah Seltzer, The Singer Sisters. This is not a subtle novel. It’s about a couple of generations of a family of musicians, and if you would like any plot points, any emotional insights, in this book to be less obvious than giving the people in that family the surnames/stage names Singer, Cantor, and (the more slick and Hollywood one, obviously) Foley (God help us), you will be disappointed. It’s not a long novel, it’s reasonable prose, I wasn’t angry about it, it just…sure took the easy way at every turn. I wonder what people who know nothing about the music of the ’60s and ’90s would make of some of it, because it is very referential to both.

Danez Smith, Bluff: Poems. I rushed to get this the moment I saw it had come out. Also, it is not meant for me. Both of these things can be true at once. Smith is saying all sorts of things it’s important for them to say, important even for me to hear, to think about…but still, I am pretty peripheral to this one. Anyway I’m glad they wrote these poems after all that happened in our mutual city in 2020, all that is not, horrifyingly, done happening.

Sheree Renee Thomas, ed., Dark Matter: A Century of Science Fiction from the African Diaspora. I read this for a book club that does a handful of short stories per meeting, and it was one of the better things we’ve done that with, more stories that sparked discussion and interest. I was also impressed that Thomas managed to find some authors I’d never read, because I read a lot, and because this is a volume from 2000, so the shifts that some of the essays at the end of the book predicted for the demography of SFF writing are with us now, they happened, they’re here–so some of the “new voices” of this book are now extremely established. This is a good thing.

Dashun Wang and Albert-László Barabási, The Science of Science. Specifically the data science of science: lots of graphs and analysis about which papers are influential, how to build effective teams in modern science, etc. They actually do the math on diversity benefitting science and have pretty clear illustrations of how. There are a few places where I think they’re overly optimistic–I don’t think that sexism in economics department tenure committees is going to be particularly strongly influenced by changing from listing collaborative papers’ authors by in contribution order rather than alphabetically, and I think they could have found that out for themselves by comparing tenure committee behavior with other fields that have the alphabetical convention–but I’d rather that than the opposite I suppose.

Martha Wells, Wheel of the Infinite. Discussed elsewhere.

G. Willow Wilson, The Hunger and the Dark. A fantasy comic that is dead-center of modern not-quite-grimdark secondary world fantasy, vivid and interesting and probably of more interest to people who are more visual than I am.

Kelly Yang, Finally Seen. My second MG book by Yang, and this is just as earnest and heartfelt–and deals with similar immigrant themes–to the previous one.