Novel Gazing Redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarena Ulibarri, Another Life. Discussed elsewhere.

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

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

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

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

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

Review copy provided by the publisher.

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

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

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

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

Review copy provided by the publisher.

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

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

Review copy provided by the publisher.

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

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

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

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

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

PS It is, at least, short.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gavriel Savit, Come See the Fair. Discussed elsewhere.

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

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

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

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

Review copy provided by the publisher.

When orphaned Eva has a chance to escape the horrible person who has been using her to run fake seances, she jumps at the chance–especially when it leads her to the glitter of the 1893 World’s Fair and to Henry, her first real friend. The Pavilion of Magic isn’t open to everyone–but its denizen, Mr. Magister, assures Eva and Henry that she are welcome to stay as long as they like.

Of course it isn’t that simple. The scars of the Great Fire are still a deep part of Chicago, changing those who have lived there forever in ways that Eva struggles to understand. And how can something that seems magical–that seems to replicate the home she never had–be anything but a delight? Well, you’ve all read YA fantasy before. I bet you have some ideas of how.

This book was a smooth read but in some ways very structurally weird. The climax depended on Eva’s character insights into people she (and we) had never met, and the ultimate answer seems to be “don’t trust things that seem magical and bright.” I appreciated that character sacrifices were not undone by the narrative, but at the same time, “don’t look for anything magical in the world, it’s all bad” is…not actually a message I find very resonant. Savit has done a lot of research on the period but also uses magic to handwave a lot of socially inconvenient things. For me it was one of those books that’s better to be in the middle of reading than to consider when I finished.

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.