Novel Gazing Redux

Juliet Barker, 1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt. Very much does what it says on the tin. Do you want to read more about revolting peasants? Have thoughts about Jack Straw and Wat Tyler? Here we are then.

Gloria Dickie, Eight Bears: The Past and Imperiled Future. There are eight species of bear on earth now, and Dickie gives each of them a chapter, talking about their habits and habitat and relationship with humans. I learned particularly about the bears most distant from me here–there was little I didn’t know about the black bears we have here in Minnesota but quite a lot about the sloth bears and the moon bears. I find reading natural history soothing even when the news about habitat is not itself soothing, so this was a good book for its timing for me.

Heid E. Erdrich, New Poets of Native Nations. I’d already read about half of these poets, but in many cases I’d read them with great enthusiasm. It’s a really good volume, lots to discover here.

Joshua Hammer, The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird. This is an excellent example of how reality does not always produce delicately nuanced villains for us. Sometimes in reality people who do awful things are just people who think they can get some (often fairly low-grade) material benefit from an awful thing and get away with it. I learned a lot about falcon racing and the rare bird’s egg trade in the modern world from this book. Was I happier for knowing it, no, but I was probably better for knowing it, alas.

Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (reread) and The Woman Warrior. Read in opposite order. I can definitely see why The Woman Warrior was revelatory both for Asian-American Studies and for memoir at the time. It shouldn’t be the only perspective you have about any Chinese-American ever, good grief, should I even need to say that–but it feels like some of the in-community criticism of it is of the “we’re not all like that” and no, absolutely, nobody’s memoir can be asked to stand for everybody, but that’s not the fault of a memoir, that’s the fault of trying to use a memoir, one person telling the story of one life or at most one family, to represent an entire gigantic group of people. It’s vivid and personal and familial, just don’t read it like it’s trying to be the word from on high about The Chinese Experience.

Karen Lord, The Blue, Beautiful World. I feel like I’ve been seeing more of 1970s tropes done in contemporary books without the sexism and racism, and this is a prime example of that. This has secret human space colonies and telepathy! But actually thinks about colonialism and human variation not in a horribly racist way! I felt like the pop star aspect was less pop star at the end, though, ah well.

Sujata Massey, The Mistress of Bhatia House. The latest in a series of reasonably well-written historical mysteries. It’s one where I’d recommend starting at the beginning of the series because there’s ongoing character relationship stuff here, and this one was not my favorite of the bunch, but it was still a worthy entry in series context.

Nisi Shawl, ed., New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color. A really lovely anthology with several quite good stories and a bunch of entirely fine stories that weren’t as directly aimed at me, which is good, not everything should be aimed at me. Stand-out stories from Darcie Little Badger, John Chu, Nghi Vo, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and Malka older. Great addition to the shelves.

D. E. Stevenson, Vittoria Cottage. Ah for the days when a book could just be called after its protagonist’s house, more or less regardless of its importance. This is a low-key story of middle-aged love and intended self-sacrifice. I was startled by how quickly it wrapped up until I found out that there are two more in the series; that explains it, I suppose.

Alice Winn, In Memoriam. Oh what a gorgeous book, oh what a wonderful, wonderful book. It’s about two quite young Englishmen–teenagers really–who go from their prep school to fight in the Great War, and they attempt to figure out their romantic relationship within the context their times have given them, and also within the literature they know very well, and it is not any “nicer” than you would expect from the trenches and the wounds and the POW camps and PTSD of the Great War, and I cried a lot and they thought about Tennyson as per the title, which I love, and lots of other poetry, and yeah, this was written straight at my heart. I’m so glad to have read it. Whatever Winn writes next, I’ll want to read. There was a moment when a character’s father says a particular thing and I said “OH NO OH NO OH NO” out loud and I was not wrong but also not sorry I was there for it even with the way it ended.

Patricia C. Wrede, The Dark Lord’s Daughter. The first of a duology, and you can tell that Pat isn’t done with everything she wants to do with this very Dark Lord Tropey book. It’s a portal fantasy. I hope this means MG portal fantasies are a bit more available now. I particularly liked the tablet that became a familiar.

Stephanie Burgis, The Raven Throne. Second in a duology, and you should definitely read the first one first, because this is a lot of follow-on consequences from it. It’s very much a “you thought your problems were solved? no, they’re just beginning!” novel. Some problems that might be more frustrating in older characters (why don’t they talk to each other!) are entirely understandable when the protagonists are literal adolescents: this is the time in their lives when they’re learning these exact skills, this is exactly when they figure out to do this, and having them behave like adults would be silly when they really are 12 even though they’re 12-year-old shapeshifter royalty. With a kingdom to protect from all sides but still, as with being 12, themselves to figure out.

Octavia Cade, You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories. Discussed elsewhere.

Matthew Connelly, The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets. This is one of those books that’s good to have read but not much fun to read: so much of it is banal and depressing with so little prospect of comprehensively fixing it. It really does what it says on the tin, though.

David Cooper, Badon and the Early Wars for Wessex, Circa 500 to 710. Archaeology focused military history trying to match up the written record and the artefacts we can find. Dang is Cooper mad when people get fixated on the “historical” King Arthur.

Robertson Davies, World of Wonders. The last of the Deptford Trilogy, and in some ways the most sordid–quite a lot of it is dedicated to the carnival boyhood of the entity eventually known as Magnus Eisengrim. Quite a lot of literal filth, some repeated anal rape of a child, this is not a book to read if you’re not up for an unpleasant time. It contrasts with the previous volumes and ties them together, but if you want the most magical version of stage magic, this sure is not it. But also you should know that by the time you get to volume three.

Deva Fagan, Nightingale. Stand-alone MG fantasy adventure about an orphan girl fighting a system that is designed to grind her down. Now with fun elements of worldbuilding and friendship. Aetheric swords, soda fountains, labor unions!

Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World. This is about 90-95% what it says on the tin and a quite good version at that. Lots of interesting facts about fabric! Finlay in top form! The other 5-10% is Finlay grieving for her parents. If you are not up for a parental grief memoir, it is not one, but it’s not not one, either, so…maybe wait until your own grief has settled another 6-12 months if that’s newly your situation, yeah? Because if this had been fresher for me, it would have set me off far more than the details about ramie and kinte cloth (consecutive, not concurrent) would have been worth it.

Carol Gigliotti, The Creative Lives of Animals. Gigliotti is very clear-headed about the places where people have decided that animals are not being creative as a matter of definition and…sort of deconstructing those, looking at the actual behaviors rather than being defensive about how special humans need to feel. Lots of good stuff across a range of animal kingdoms here, hurrah.

Theodora Goss, The Collected Enchantments. This is structured as a few poems and then a short story, repeat. Several old favorites and some stuff new to me.

Nick Harkaway, Titanium Noir. Harkaway understands all the important notes of classic noir, including/especially despair about the class system, and he hits those notes here in a science fictional context without bringing in the incidentals like the staggering sexism. Sometimes a bit too on the nose for my tastes but worth the time all the same.

Sarah Hilary, Someone Else’s Skin. This is a mystery novel with a cop protagonist, and it features loads of sexual violence and domestic abuse, and it has the most common and most annoying twist for that kind of book. If you’re willing to deal with all that, it’s a good one of those. I will probably read the next one in the series the next time I’m willing to deal with one of those. But it sure is one of those, nothing in the world will make it not one of those.

Jordan Kurella, When I Was Lost. By turns tender, haunting, lovely, this is such a good collection, I’m so glad to have these stories all together. I’d read most of them, but it’s a case of being able to return to them whenever I like.

Emily Monosson, Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic. Lots of stuff about fungal plagues and heat-resistant fungus, very interesting, not very cheerful.

Doris Langley Moore, Not at Home. The jacket copy made this look like a comic novel–the funny story of a middle-aged lady who takes in a lodger in the straitened circumstances of postwar London and devolves into an Odd Couple comedy. It was not like that at all. The lodger was not comic-awful, she was just awful-awful. The worst of this is that she borrows a friend’s dog and gets it killed and lies about it. The moral of the story seems to be “put your contracts in writing,” or possibly “have good boundaries,” or both, which is all very well but not worth a couple hundred pages of novel to say, and certainly not with horrifying illustrations of that type. Especially when one is looking forward to light fare with low stakes and instead gets two neglected children and a dead dog and some dead parakeets. Yuck.

Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians. And can we find them, the answer is no, no such persons. But a lovely exploration of why not, how we know what we know about ancient identities, what the people in that area were thinking about themselves instead.

Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown. Kindle. One of Sharp’s upbeat funny books in which a midcentury young woman looks at the world and thinks, well, gosh, surely not like that, I’ll just do something different, then. And everyone around her is horrified but she’s basically right. As this book was set but not written in 1939 (it was in fact written in 1944), the bits where all the upper class people were terribly concerned about the impending war and whether the Polish political refugee character would be all right had a different shape than if it had been written in 1939 or in 2023. He is all right, it’s not the sort of book where he’s not all right, it’s a nice book where everyone is confused about their world and what it’s going to be like, which: scoot over, pals, I can sit on that bench with you.

Noel Streatfeild, The Winter Is Past. Kindle. If I had started with this one I would have thought that Streatfeild’s adult novels were fairly slight takes on serious matters. The protagonist of this book has suffered a miscarriage, and everyone’s attitude seems to be that she should get over it because loads of people have miscarriages, and the plot of the book is that she does. This is an oversimplification: there’s interesting business about having evacuees living in her house and learning to be nice to her mother-in-law, but it’s one of those plots that takes early 20th century women by the shoulders and says, look, nothing in your world is ever going to change except your own attitude so you just have to decide to accept your lot in life. Treat everyone around you, especially men but basically everyone, like giant children whose mother you are, including the fact that you are honor-bound to just deal with their temper-tantrums, and…yeah, no, I cannot really recommend this, and I really extra super cannot recommend it if you have had any experience of miscarriage/infant loss yourself. She has some astonishing gems and this is sure not one of them. If you’re fascinated with interactions between evacuees and their hosts and ready to steel yourself for the rest, go ahead, otherwise nope.

Daniel Abraham, Blade of Dream. Second in its series, more tightly focused than the first and more conventional, in some ways more successful in terms of pulling me in but less structurally interesting. I find myself not knowing where the third one is going, which is a place I like to be. But for heaven’s sake don’t start here.

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Hill does an excellent job of not assuming inevitability: knowing what we do of which groups survived does not mean that they “had to” be the surviving groups. Absolutely full of Quakers, Diggers, Levelers, all the sort of thing you’d want, and I do want, and I’m glad to have it.

Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society. This actually disappointed me a bit. It spent quite a lot of time on theories of the body that I already knew–which you might not, and if so, go nuts, this is the book for you–and not nearly as much time on work and social organization as I had hoped. The chapter on work was brief and fairly general, which felt to me like the exact opposite of what was called for to overturn assumptions about medieval women’s roles in society. Ah well.

Elizabeth Lim, Her Radiant Curse. Discussed elsewhere.

Anna Neima, The Utopians: Six Attempts to Build the Perfect Society. This is about utopian societies after WWI and the effects of that war on people’s theories of what a better world would look like. That makes it basically catnip for me. I also appreciated Neima’s willingness to go around the world to look at communities in different regions, not just one country or continent–especially as they interrelate in this period. Good stuff.

Noel Streatfeild, Saplings. Another of the books that has a surface-happy ending whose entire point is that it is really, really not happy. This one is about how war, in this case the Second World War, terribly damages children even when they’re on the “home front” rather than the front lines. It’s beautifully observed and well-characterized and terribly sad, and it further cements my belief that part of Theatre Shoes is not as it seems. (This is for adults.)

Stephan Talty, Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day. Briskly written and interesting work about a Spanish man who basically forced his way into being a double agent. Not terribly long.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, City of Last Chances. I have a gift for picking up grimdark I might otherwise like at the worst personal moments. Tchaikovsky does some really good worldbuilding with the gods of this world and with passing the story from character to character in a way that almost reminded me of Yourcenar (but without the coin), but he also writes some very successfully dark scenes, so be braced for picking it up on the right day.

Brenda Ueland, Strength to Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings. Ueland was more a newspaper opinion columnist than an essayist, and that was very clear from the depth or lack thereof in these writings. Sometimes it was charming to see how she presented social elements that now wouldn’t have to be explained; some ideas aged much worse than others. (Seriously, just…do not propose corrective rape of people whose opinions you disagree with. Just. Don’t. Not charming. Not okay.)

Izzy Wasserstein, All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From. A fun and varied SFF collection, some of which I’d enjoyed previously and some of which was new to me, glad to have it all in one place.

Katy Watson, The Three Dahlias. Three actresses who have played/are playing the same iconic detective are in a country house for a convention of her fans when murder strikes, and everyone is–of course–a suspect. They must use the skills they’ve learned from playing her onscreen to solve the case before one of them gets blamed. This was light and charming, but for me it ended up spreading the characterization a little too thin among a few too many characters, not leaving me with a strong sense of any one of them, including the one who eventually turned out to be the killer. I would probably read another if there was a sequel, but probably from the library rather than purchasing it.

Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems, 1943-2004. A lot of “collected poems” volumes start at the beginning and you get to watch the poet get better, and this did the opposite, and…it turns out I like that better? I don’t necessarily think that the latest work is the best work, but when someone does start to get more callow and less skilled, there’s that sinking feeling of “oh dear, this is it then,” and I definitely had that in the middle of this volume. Wilber turned out to be another poet I mostly connected with intellectually, and that’s okay.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a stand-alone prequel in the world of Six Crimson Cranes; if you know the characters and the events of that book, some events of this one will be enhanced, but this is a perfectly reasonable entry point to this world and its people.

Channi’s life revolves around her amazing and beautiful sister Vanna, and it always has. When she was a toddler, Vanna was born with a special magical glow–perfect, beloved, amazing. Her father attempted to sacrifice Channi to the jungle witch Angma to save his wife, and it failed–she was cursed with the face of a serpent and poisonous blood, and her mother died anyway. In all the years since, Channi and Vanna have grown up together, each other’s polar opposite in looks–but always the best of friends.

Now their father is choosing a suitor for Vanna. Kings from all around will come to bid on her hand. Her sister Channi, however, is more concerned about her sister’s happiness than about their cruel father’s wealth. Her friends the snakes of the jungle are willing to try to help her protect her little sister–but the entire endeavor gets, as one would expect, quickly complicated, with dragons, demons, and armies pursuing them around the island landscape.

The relationship of sisters and snakes is devoted and charming, and this book serves well either to add dimension to a world already known or to introduce the reader to its environs.

Alison Bashford, The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution. This did not do what I hoped. It was organized conceptually. Several of the people I have said this to have gasped, “Oh no!” but it isn’t as bad as all that, but it isn’t amazing either. It made the ending less predictable than a chronological biography, but on the other hand there are just great heaps of what I would find interesting missing. I’m reading another book that has the edges of Julian in it already, absolutely accidentally, and already I’m muttering, “why wasn’t there any of this in the other thing.” Not enough Huxley per unit Huxley is not a complaint I expected to have here, and yet here we are. There’s absolutely nothing like the bit in the Haldane bio where Naomi Mitchison bit him. Surely with this many Huxleys somebody had to at least kick somebody sharply. I would have. Maybe it was even Naomi Mitchison, she had several chances. Well, someone else will have to tell me, it’s not apparently Alison Bashford’s job, she was doing something different.

Stephanie Burgis, Claws and Contrivances. Kindle. The second in a series, but it stands alone–frothy fun that has a little bite to it as animal welfare is at the heart of the plots. The animals in question are dragons, and the title format should tell you what era they’re drawing on. Just what I needed for an adventurous escape in a stressful time.

Jackson Crawford, trans. etc., The Wanderer’s Hávamál. I really like this edition of this very old Norse poem: side by side original and translation, followed by lots of translation notes and then a much more loosely done “cowboy” dialect version that was a tribute to the translator’s grandfather and made me smile–I know the Mountain West US dialect he was using pretty well, and he did a good job of it.

Jan de Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500-1700. Lots of tables and facts about what was going on in those Dutch towns, some interesting bits but mostly I read this because it was here and I was waiting on my birthday, probably only interesting if you are really interested in the topic.

Edmund de Waal, Letters to Camondo. Like me, like Auden, like several of my friends, de Waal is in the club of people who write letters to friends who have been dead since before they were born. In this case he became interested in a neighbor of his family and how that life had unfolded for a Jewish person in that part of Paris in the early 20th century. It is not a story with a happy ending, as you can expect from the first half of the 20th, but de Waal notices all the good and bad his absent “correspondent” has along the way, and it’s poignant, lovely, and brief.

Samuel Delany, Empire Star. Reread. I read this for a book club, and I’m afraid I won’t have much to say in the book club. There are things Delany wanted to do here with time and mentality that were fine but not particularly exciting to me at this point in the genre. I’m not sorry I read it but I didn’t engage with it strongly either.

Rebecca Fraimow, Iron Children. Kindle. A novella that explored the sense of grinding permanence only to explode it, looking into questions of loyalty and personal transformation…with mechas and survival in the snow. I tore right through it, lovely stuff.

Margaret Frazer, The Novice’s Tale. A nice little medieval mystery from the reign of Henry VI, who ever bothers with Henry VI, well done Frazer for even remembering him. It’s the first in a series, so it looks like I will have several ahead of me to enjoy when I want nice little mysteries.

Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. My favorite part of this wasn’t actually the main thread of it, although that was fascinating–it was the parallel case of the werewolf. This was “sure, we’re witches, but we’re good witches, and we fight crime in our dreams”: oh bless, well done, neighbors. But there was also a person on trial for being werewolf and he gave the judges an absolute epic hecking about where they would be without the werewolves going down and harrowing hell for them. This period was a wild ride and I love them for it. Early moderns, bless. Trying to sort out worldview, bless.

Sophus Helle, trans., The Complete Poems of Enheduana, the World’s First Author. Translations from the Sumerian, wow, and then lots of essays and notes about what we know about this poet (or poets) and how poetry and its composition was regarded and who this poet’s contemporaries were, really interesting stuff.

Beth Lincoln, The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels. A Wacky Family Reunion novel and also a MG mystery novel and also an exploration of how much one’s family can predetermine one’s identity vs. how much one gets to choose one’s own. The trans characters’ identities are handled with a light and deft touch in this context. Generally an interesting read and certainly as fast as you would expect for being MG. Walks right on that line of “how much murder can be in a MG mystery really.”

Premee Mohamed, No One Will Come Back for Us and Other Stories. Premee, on the other hand, has no limits of how much murder. A lot of this is overtly horror, in the vein of cosmic/existential/personal rather than chompy chomp horror, and it’s beautifully done, and also maybe plan to read it a bit at a time so as not to be overwhelmed by the aaaaaaah because it’s beautifully done. Some previously known favorites here and some new to me.

Susan Palwick, Shelter. Reread. I don’t feel like this aged well, but then I look again and some of the problems were problems I feel like Palwick could have seen in 2007 as well, they just…got worse instead of better with time. If you want to talk about failures of compassion in modern society–and it’s explicitly a near-future American setting–I feel like making up a fake environmentalist religion as central to the near-future society and having those people fail in their community and compassion is…passing quite a lot of buck. There were also some pretty serious issues with the portrayal of mental health and its treatment, and yes, some of that was that Palwick was trying to point at lack of compassion, but some of it was Palwick herself conflating symptoms and rushing past potential treatments with a handwave in order to get to the desired science fictional result. This was a book where choice of point of view was a serious problem, because there were two main points of view, both of whom were almost completely isolated–which was deliberate, it was a statement, but it meant that when they held horrifying views and the people contradicting them were also pretty terrible, there was no ground to stand on, you were just stuck in the horrible with nowhere else to go. I don’t intend to return to this; the parts I remembered fondly turned out to be a tiny fraction of the whole. I read it for an online book club, and other people found other things upsettingly handled as well, including adoption.

Pierre Riche, The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe. More Carolingians, yes, but also more about their aftermath and periphery, which I enjoy.

Margery Sharp, The Eye of Love. Kindle. An adult book about an artistic little orphan girl who is about as far from Anne of Green Gables as you can imagine. I love them both. Martha is a stolid, laconic little soul who doesn’t give a rip for the neighbors’ opinions, who almost entirely wants to be left alone to draw, and who only really wants to draw things that matter to her. She does not gush. She occasionally, with distaste, uses people’s preconceptions about small girls, but it is not something she enjoys doing and only does it out of dire necessity. Meanwhile there is another plot going on, about her aunt’s domestic situation and whether it will resolve satisfactorily, and the theme ties in with Martha as a young artist seeing the world her own way as per the title. There are two more in this series, which is good because it only got up to about the first third of a coming of age young artist novel while doing the whole plot about Martha’s aunt, but also I am now really curious about what other plots will go alongside Martha’s.

Noel Streatfeild, Aunt Clara and It Pays to Be Good. Kindle, both. What a fascinating pair of her adult novels to read at once. They’re both character studies, extremely well-done character studies. The former is an absolutely hilarious portrait of an extremely nice unfashionable old lady who inherits disreputable property and responsibilities and goes around taking it in her stride and doing the absolute best she can with it while her supposedly respectable relations have fits and try to keep her from realizing what it all is. It’s lovely and also makes some pretty good points about how goodness is not stupidity, thank you very much. The latter, on the other hand, is also talking about respectability, but in its case superficial respectability is rewarded in just the way other novels of its time (and especially the time preceding it) believes that it should be. It is one of the most appalling tragedies you can ask to encounter. Both just beautifully observed.

Amy Wilson, Shadows of Winterspell. A MG fantasy with kids trying to figure out how to make the world better on the limited information given them by adults, but their world has ghosts and all manner of fey creatures. A fun read.

Serge Zenkovsky, ed., Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales. Primary sources in translation, so this varied highly from “oh wow this is fun actually” to “how appalling,” as one might expect from several centuries and varied topics and genres. One of the notes I would make on this is that it was published in the late 1960s, and its editorial staff/annotator saw no particular reason to be careful about the distinctions among Kievan Rus, Muscov, Russia, and other polities. I don’t entirely blame them for this; I don’t expect that a Russian writer of the time would have been exacting about Mercian vs. English vs. British vs. Scottish–heck, some American writers aren’t–but there are times when things are discussed or translated with a rather sloppy hand in that regard that’s a bit wince-worthy in the current political climate, and worth keeping an eye on when you’re thinking about what’s actually being claimed about the history of the region (as in, not what certain parties would love it if you thought).