Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by the publisher.

It is extremely hard to combine a science fiction story and a mystery so that the emphases and the pacing and everything else comes together for both, but Older has done it here. Centuries out from an environmentally devastated Earth, settlers on (well, above–and that is significant as well as scientifically obvious) Jupiter

Mossa is an Investigator. Pleiti is a Classicist–combing through examples of old Earth literature for details about ecosystems–what plants were eaten by what animals and so on–in hopes of an eventual Earth restoration. They were close in college but haven’t seen much of each other snice–until a mysterious disappearance brings their orbits back together. Crime follows upon crime, in the very most science fictional of crimes–it all came together to my great satisfaction, the world building holding the mystery arc just so.

That said, this novella also features a love story–a “we broke up but maybe that was a mistake” love story, specifically. I am a really tough sell for that shape of love story (in my experience and observation, most of the time people break up it is for at least one quite good reason), and I didn’t find myself believing in this one. But on the other hand, I found it entirely plausible that people would try anyway, so onwards I guess.

I can easily imagine this being either a stand-alone where Older has said everything she wants to say about this setting and these characters or the kind of mystery series where each one stands reasonably alone but is doing somewhat different things. Either one would work with what we see here.

Diana Athill, Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter and Somewhere Towards the End. These are two memoirs of old age, more or less, and I read them in reverse chronological order, which is interesting for the places where Athill has changed her mind about various aspects of her age. They’re slim volumes, fast reading, like having a conversation with a forthright elderly pal who is sometimes wrong but always interesting.

Sarah E. Baires, Cahokia and the North American Worlds. Kindle. Particularly interesting to me for its reach into the rest of the Mississippian cultural world and what we can know about that.

Agatha Christie, The Secret of Chimneys. Kindle. Most of the Agatha Christies I’ve been reading are because a friend filtered them first. This was not, this was just one that was free on Gutenberg, and it’s a very weird book, international spying not being her forte (so many ethnic stereotypes oh goodness)–but there’s sparkly banter, quite a lot of it and quite well done. So it’s one of those “hee hee hee [next line] OH AGATHA NO [next line] heeeeee” reading experiences.

Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code. Should be subtitled “How Racism Makes You Stupid”–not this author but the people who came before his cadre and had all kinds of awful racist assumptions about the Maya that, go figure, made it much harder to understand their written language. An object lesson in how letting That One Powerful Guy bully everyone makes a field much, much worse.

Robertson Davies, Fifth Business. Mid-century Canadian mild fantastika, the relationship of someone proximate to but not part of the rich and famous. Cranky and determined to be cynical and defeated, in some ways, by hopeful aspects of life and human relations in the end. This is my first Davies, and I’m looking forward to more.

Michael DeLuca, Tim Fab-Eme, Priya Chand, Octavia Cade, et al, Reckoning Issue 7. Kindle. Lovely issue. Particularly enjoyed the poem from Naila Francis and the stories from Aparna Paul, Mo Usavage, L Chan, and T.K. Rex.

Isaac Fellman, The Two Doctors Gorski. I’m not sure why Dark Academia has gotten to be such a thing, but I enjoy it a lot, and I enjoyed this particular example. Academia can destroy you, now with magic and gender politics! Yes good. More from this person, please.

V. V. Ganeshananthan, Love Marriage. This is the first novel from a local author whose upcoming novel about the Sri Lankan Civil War and its effects on a young woman studying for med school I recently enjoyed. This is also about the effects of that war, but it’s told from the perspective of a young woman in Toronto, looking back on her family and the ways their country(ies?) shaped them. Its extremely short scenes, ranging from a paragraph or two to three pages, felt like a very different kind of novel to me, and paradoxically made it easy for me to keep muttering, “just one more” in exactly the way people say they do with short scenes in James Patterson novels. That I do not. But these were beautifully written and interestingly separated. So. I think Brotherless Night is a richer and more mature work but it turns out we don’t have to choose, and hurrah for that.

Richard Harris, How Cities Matter. Kindle. A short work that does what it says on the tin: explores how cities go beyond being the sum of their parts.

Cynthia A. Kierner, Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times. There’s basically no reason to read this book when Catherine Kerrison’s Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America exists. The Kerrison is clearer about Martha Jefferson Randolph but also is fairly clear-sighted about, you know, other people’s needs and existence. Less prone to making excuses, which it turns out is not an inevitable part of biography. So.

Kris Lane, Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition. Lane goes into the demographics and lifestyles of various groups in Quito, which is not something I’ve gotten a lot of in this period before, so that’s pretty cool

Natalie Livingstone, The Women of Rothschild: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Famous Dynasty. I was a bit disappointed in this. I see why Livingstone was appalled that the dynastic histories of the Rothschilds tend to focus on the men, because the women were doing a whole heap of other things–but my level of interest always remained sort of at arm’s length, and I feel like the book was a bit at arm’s length too. Useful if you’re interested in the topic.

H.M. Long, Barrow of Winter. Third in a secondary world fantasy series, and I think structurally the weakest/least compelling–but still a fun read, and if you’ve enjoyed the others, you’ll definitely want this angle on it. Just probably don’t start here.

Sally Wen Mao, Oculus. Mao has a lot of poems about Anna May Wong, about the view of the world and Hollywood and everything else through that lens. Which is far enough off from the usual things–even the usual assumptions about Asian-American poetry–to keep this collection moving to its own beat and not adopting someone else’s.

Mia V. Moss, Mai Tais for the Lost. Moss is having a lot of fun here with the mashup of noir tropes and undersea science fiction environments. It’s got all the bad life choices and class examination of noir, and at least one of the femme fatale figures is an intelligent octopus.

Julie Nováková, Lucas K. Law, and Susan Forest, eds., Life Beyond Us: An Original Anthology of SF Stories and Science Essays. I found this collection to be a very mixed bag. The essays were not for me–I’m enough of a science nerd that I was going “yeah yeah we know we know” through them, and: “we” don’t, necessarily. But stories by Premee Mohamed, Bogi Takács, Peter Watts, Malka Older, and Simone Heller provided a nice variety of things I really enjoyed–and five stories is a lot of “ooh cool” for one collection.

Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford, Business As Usual. An illustrated epistolary novel from the ’30s, focused on a young woman going to work selling books in the kind of department store that still had a book section. There is a romance plot, but there’s a lot more detail about making it on your own as a woman in the city, how work looked at that time, and various other quite interesting things. Also watching the perspective shift in the letters with the plot is half the fun. I think people who enjoy illustration might find these slight but charming; I didn’t mind them, but I’m truly not the audience.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia. Brief vivid recollections of a grim childhood.

Nisi Shawl, Speculation. I was actually a bit disappointed in how much of this seemed to be self-consciously writing an Edward Eager novel in this decade (not set in this decade), with Black kids in it–Eager was himself self-consciously copying E. Nesbit, and also I know from the experience of Everfair that I like Shawl a lot when she’s doing Shawl. It wasn’t offensive or bad, but it also didn’t seem to have engaged with the last seventy years of MG fantasy much. Ah well. Possibly it’s just that I have very low tolerance for characters who speak in rhyme. (Just one character! but still.)

Sascha Stronach, The Dawnhounds. This is some of the most vivid worldbuilding I’ve read in a long time. Mushroom cities, people! Come for the action plot, stay for the mushroom cities! Very much looking forward to the sequel.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Elder Race. I really like the “many generations after planetary colonization, colonists interact with someone representing their past” sub-genre of science fiction, and this was a fun example. My particular favorite bits involved fun with translation.

Moniquill Blackgoose, To Shape a Dragon’s Breath. Discussed elsewhere.

Cynthia A. Bouton, The Flour War: Gender, Class, and Community in Late Ancien Regime French Society. Lots of in-depth analysis about the different riots that arose in the mid-18th century over the price and availability of bread in various French cities. Bouton looks into what professions the rioters belonged to, what punishments they received, all kinds of interesting information. I think one of the elements of this book that made me think the most was how thoroughly people believed in natural rights that were in no way covered in any form of any legal code–to the point of ascribing opinions to the king that he had at no point expressed, simply because they were such obvious natural rights to the people in question. This…seems like it might have applications elsewhere in spacetime. Just spitballing here.

Emma Mieko Candon, The Archive Undying. Discussed elsewhere.

Agatha Christie, A Pocket Full of Rye and Murder With Mirrors. Two more books that had passed through the filter of “my friend who is reading a bunch of these said they were reasonably fun and didn’t have an unbearable amount of Christie’s personal bigotries.” Fascinated to watch Christie allow people to be wrong about mental health stuff even by the standards of the time. Quick library reads.

Pamela Dean, The Hidden Land and The Whim of the Dragon. Rereads. I love these so much, particularly The Whim of the Dragon. Oh, particularly that. Because of the way it sticks the landing, and because the landing Pamela chose is not one I recall seeing anywhere else. Love it, love them. Every time I read these they make me happy. I know portal fantasy is not cool right now but…I love it anyway.

M.K. England, The Disasters. Have you been complaining that not enough YA SF is like Heinlein, full of teenagers who want to be space pilots? Well, this is about that. Except uh. Very modern and queer and mental health aware and voice-y. So not really what a lot of people who make that complaint mean–but probably still a fun thing to give them just to see. Me, I’m giving it to a teen in my life for whom “Space Disaster But Make It Gay” will provoke an emoji-like set of heart-eyes. (Note: when I say “gay” I do not mean “sexually explicit.” Should I have to specify that? absolutely I should not, but this is the world we live in, so.)

Julie Flavell, The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain’s Wars for America. I am a sucker for the Seven Years’ War, and if you want Howe brothers, boy does it have Howe brothers. Howes as far as the eye can see, that war. But the strength of this book is, so far as I can see, that it treats the Howe sisters as interesting and worthwhile in their own right. This also gets you some different and useful perspective on the brothers. Funny how that works. Flavell is definitely a Howe booster, but not to the point of being obnoxious.

James L. Flexner, Oceania 800-1800 CE. Kindle. Another very short monograph on a very large topic, very much walking the boundaries of archaeology and history here. Mostly good as an introduction to the topic.

Jaymee Goh, ed., Don’t Touch That! A Sci-Fi and Fantasy Parenting Anthology. Really lovely stand-out stories from K.A. Doore, Melissa Caruso, and Karen Osborne. I wish there had been more stories of parents and children having adventures together rather than figuring out that they could/should, but I often want the former, and it doesn’t make the latter bad.

Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. Want to know how rich white Americans were particularly jerks in 1919? This is your book. Seriously this is useful historical context, and yet also…not a pleasant read.

Ed Bok Lee, Mitochondrial Night. Local poet with some interesting perspectives. Not as sciency as I’d hoped, oh well.

Sally McMillen, Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life. McMillen is clearly passionately interested in Lucy Stone’s life. If you’re also interested–if you want to read a book about social justice movements in 19th century America, or about Stone in particular–this is useful and good. She does not, however, get to the point of being a biographer I would recommend regardless of prior interest in the subject.

Jim Moore, Prognosis. Local poet, from the perspective of an older person who is, and whose friends are, going through a lot. Not going to be my favorite but worth having.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human.

Janika Oza, A History of Burning. Discussed elsewhere.

Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. One of the categories listed for booksellers on the back of this book is “lyric essay.” (The other, of course, is poetry.) And I keep thinking about that, lyric essay, sure, yes, why not, let’s do that. I also keep thinking: this is probably a fallacy, but from the reader perspective it looks like this book is doing exactly what Claudia Rankine wanted to do with the material and not what might have been dictated by outside forms. And that’s kind of amazing. It’s about loneliness, of course, and death and race and America and politics and families and all sorts of things. It’s a very weird little book and will not take you very long to get through (but to think about, though…).

Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England. And how it wasn’t what you think. Specifically the images of the community shunning and isolating lepers mostly come from the 19th century and were very much politically motivated. “Victorians Wrong About Medievals: News At 11” is once again our headline. Welp.

Bernard F. Reilly, The Medieval Spains. All the weird bits of Visigoths becoming Spaniards as we understand them, all the in-betweens and nubbly bits. Still much shorter than I would like for its topic; I’ll keep looking. Very solid on the geographical inputs to the whole thing though.

E. Catherine Tobler, The Deadlands Issue 20. Kindle. Enjoyed reading as I generally do, but this felt like a shorter issue, and I don’t know if that’s a trend or not.

Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914. “Exactly how bad was a lot of rural France, and why, and also what were some of their weirder folktales and funnier bits of folk wisdom.” That’s this book. It was staggeringly depressing in spots, when you consider that I not just knew but knew well several people who were alive in the latest section. Really super-interesting for all that, though. I feel like what I want is a sort of…sense of the middle ground? the richer farmlands and the mid-sized towns, what was life like there. Because I have this, and I have a fairly good sense of Paris in this era. So. More to look for. Oh, caveat: he does not translate a lot of the French, and he does not translate a lot of the patois. So if you’re not comfortable in French (which means you’re probably really not comfortable in most 19th century rural French patois) there will be some things where he’s talking past you. If that annoys you a lot, dodge this.

Fran Wilde, The Book of Gems. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Sometimes you start reading a book and realize that it is the thing you most want to be doing at that moment. There’s just that sense of “oh yes, this, this is what I wanted.” And To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is absolutely one of those books for me.

Have you read some of the magical academy books published for adults in the last sixty years? Brilliant, so has Moniquill Blackgoose, and she knows where all the beats in them go. However, Blackgoose is an enrolled member of the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe, and she brings every bit of that perspective to this book. And it is delightful. There are so many places that Anequs, the heroine, has very little patience for colonizer bullshit. In our world where the “correct a character flaw” arc plot is some people’s idea of How You Tell A Story, Blackgoose has the vision and the courage of her convictions to give Anequs the courage of hers. She’s a teenage heroine who knows where she comes from and where she wants to go, and she doesn’t have to have that shaken to have a compelling narrative.

And compelling it is. I had so much trouble putting this book down to do silly things like eat and sleep. The narrative is flowing and assured, and the characters are compelling enough that a glance at the first line of the chapter was often enough to draw me in for “just one more.” Anequs makes friends, loves her family, has a great relationship with her dragon, messes with magical chemistry, fights stupid rules, does all sorts of things. It’s so much fun, it’s so fierce, I’m so very glad there is this book.

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

This is that rare but lovely thing: a book that does equally well as an entry point to a series as it does for readers who’ve already read the others–in this case, as one might expect from the title, the Gemworld series.

Dev is a young scientist whose study of gems, their past, and their properties is her great passion. Unfortunately the man who was supposed to be her mentor has stolen her work and left her to the part of their work that is drudgery without credit. He’s gone off to the valley, where Dev’s family is from (though she is careful about who she tells that information)–the home of the gems that present such fascination to scholars.

And now he’s disappeared, and Dev has to go after him if the work is to be completed. She has a plan that will allow her to speak at the Symposium–which should make her academic career–if only she isn’t caught for going into the valley completely without permission. As long as her limited funds can get her where she needs to be. Provided that her long-lost family is welcoming or at the very least indifferent. And then, of course, there are the dangers of the gems themselves. She’s swamped. And the mysterious messages she starts receiving certainly don’t help….

This is a perfectly sensible place to start reading this series or continue it, a pageturner that I read in one sitting. Recommended.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a gorgeous family saga, the kind of book that gives you a hundred years of one family, following from one generation to another including in-laws (but not friends/peripheral characters as POV). It’s about an Indian family that immigrates to Uganda while both are still under British rule, and…the twentieth century plays out from there, the Partition, independence for both regions, the rise of Idi Amin, another round of immigration (hello, Toronto!), all of it. It is harrowing but not only harrowing; it is heartbreaking but not only heartbreaking. There’s joy, there’s hope, there’s camaraderie, there’s all the emotions of family and community life.

I don’t want to say “one doesn’t often see” because perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps there are loads of books about this and my white American self has just not found them. But. I don’t often see books that are about the fraught ground that comes of being a colonized people that is then part of colonization for another people. And that complexity is beautifully handled here–the characters have a wide range of reactions to each other, and being someone we care about does not mean that you’re necessarily right about any one thing–or that rightness is achievable in your circumstances. These characters are all doing the best they can, but their bests vary wildly–as people do.

This is a warm and rich and compelling book, and I’m so glad that it’s coming soon so the rest of you can read it too. Read it when you’re in a place to deal with difficult things, but absolutely read it.