Tag: bookses precious

Brian R. Dott, The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography. This is, thankfully, exactly what it claims to be. Dott goes through 16th and 17th century rural gazetteers to trace when and where surplus peppers are offered for sale and what they’re called; he looks into when folk heroes are given chili-related nicknames. It’s a study of how and how quickly the pepper pervades a culture and its food and (inextricably in this case) medicine, and it’s brief and interesting.

John M. Ford, The Scholars of Night. Discussed elsewhere.

Yan Ge, Strange Beasts of China. Gentle fabulism with different humanoid “beasts” focused on different emotions in each section. This is not, as I initially thought, a series of vignettes about them, in travelogue style, but instead an exploration of a city, a culture, some people who study “beasts” and how they feel, what they think. Poignant and interesting.

Rachael K. Jones, Every River Runs to Salt. Novelette I think? perhaps very short novella. Anyway it has the offspring of glaciers kidnapping the ocean and trying to hide under the protection of a university, and it is fun and interesting and does not do more than its length can support.

Kim Bo-Young, I’m Waiting for You and Other Stories. Three melancholy, romantic science fiction stories translated from Korean. I mean both romantic and Romantic, I think. Each story comes in multiple parts, two of them epistolary stories that are each other’s counterpart and the third something else completely, something a great deal more metaphysical. I’m interested in what else Kim does.

Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance. This is about that point in time when some books started to be printed and others were still hand-copied, and about the people who sold books then and what they sold and to whom and how. I don’t think it’s the strongest of King’s works, but it’s full of fun digressions and generally worth the time, very much the sort of angle on history I like to have.

T. Kingfisher, Paladin’s Strength. Kindle. Not a very direct sequel to Paladin’s Grace, but it nevertheless features the paladins of the Saint of Steel in their lives after the death of that Saint, in their collective life as an order as well. And it also features the Sisterhood of St. Ursa, whom I love, who are lovely and varied and…I want to keep them all, I want to visit them on a trading route, yes please, more of St. Ursa’s sisters. There were some moments of unusual recoil for me–when Kingfisher (Vernon) goes creepy with a villain, she goes all out–but it stayed firmly on the side of fantasy rather than horror. I enjoyed this a lot.

Erik Loomis, A History of America in Ten Strikes. This does not do what it says on the tin. It’s really more of a general history of labor and strikes in America; it goes into far more than ten strikes rather than doing a careful detailed history of ten. I felt like it would have been better served by either being longer or by sticking to its stated focus, but you could do worse, as introductory US labor histories go.

Katharine Norbury, The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream. I feel like the worst kind of nerd about this book, because it is a lovely memoir about finding your roots, figuring out who you are, and yet I…I thought it would be about fish. I like fish. I rallied, I enjoyed it for what it is, but do not be like me, do not go into it looking for fish, it is about a woman who was adopted looking for her sense of self, she does go upstream a little bit literally but that is hardly any of the book and there are hardly any fish at all.

Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun. The way this book sets reader expectations with the opening chapter is so beautifully done. This is historical fantasy; bad things happen in it, including bad things happening to children. The protag will try to fight past them, but: they will happen on the page, and Parker-Chan just does such a great job of laying out what tone and what range of consequences you can expect in this book. Which…is a mildly fantasy version of the rise of the Ming Dynasty. It was incredibly gripping, any time I was not reading it I wanted to be reading it again, and I can’t wait to see what Parker-Chan does with the sequel. But this is very much a case where the beginning is doing exactly its job, and if the tone is too dark for where you are right now, wait for when you’re in more of the mood for it, because there is not a part in the middle where the future Hongwu Emperor and the teddy bears have a picnic together.

Amy Stewart, Miss Kopp Just Won’t Quit and Kopp Sisters on the March. This is further catching up on this series as the US moves toward WWI. This series is based on the exploits of a real-life family of sisters, and the perils faced by the women in the books are quite real, including but not limited to forced incarceration on trumped-up mental health issues and threat to livelihood due to sexism. The ways in which women were badly treated historically are on parade through this series. There are fun things but also there are extremely upsetting things. Be aware as you go in. I do think that they stand reasonably well alone, though, as evidenced by the fact that I accidentally skipped from book 1 to book 7 with no loss of enjoyment. I only have one left at this point.

Giles Whittell, Snow: A Scientific and Cultural Exploration. This is such a strange book. It’s about snow, just as it says, but it’s by an Englishman who seems to treat snow as something that you visit, mostly to ski on, or else something that you witness through your window before it disappears. And while he seems upset about the prospect of snow dwindling with global warming, he does very little to immerse himself in the mindset of any of the cultures for whom that would be…more overarchingly meaningful. Canada, the northern (non-skiing-focused!) US, and the Norden are all equally neglected here. He has lots of interesting scientific facts about snow and ideas about downhill skiing…and almost none about cross-country, sledding sports, snow sculpture, or any of a number of other things that someone actually culturally exploring snow might want to go into. Russia…is mostly in this book as a place that has skiing in inappropriate places, manufactured in Sochi, not a place that has snow in appropriate places. So what’s here is interesting, but what’s not here is just weird.

Isabel Yap, Never Have I Ever. Short stories, many of which draw on Filipino stories for their context and speculative elements. There are stories here that are beautiful, horrifying, tender, angry…basically Yap demonstrates that she has range, that if one story is not your sort of thing the next one very well might be. Will be glad to see more from her.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Dear Mike,

Well, they’ve re-released another of your books in a lovely new edition. The cover is brilliant. I think you’d love it. The introduction to this one was easier to get through, because Charles Stross was talking about the Cold War rather than talking about you.

But then there was the book itself, and you know what you did, Mike. You know all the things you left for us to find after you were gone. The lines about grief about the loss of a mentor–knowing you would understand how that hurt just when the thing that hurts is your loss. Gee, thanks for that, friend. (I mean, seriously, thanks for that. But also, ow.)

The thing about this book is that we’re always talking about how much you were ahead of your time. But Charlie was right to talk about the Cold War in the intro, because this is the book of yours that is most of its time. This is the one that reminds me that you live in the past now, that’s what being dead means. I can’t talk to you about the gender dynamics you portrayed and what you were thinking about them, some of which is pretty strongly implied and some is a little trickier to tease out. And I definitely can’t hear what you’d think of them now, in 2021. Because this book is of its time, and that’s where you live, and I don’t live there any more, and I can’t even visit you there.

One of the things that delights me about this book is how keenly you’ve observed that one of the joys of spy novels is men’s fashion. Women’s, too, but you can find more of that in other genres. You had a note-perfect eye for what the end of the Cold War was wearing, and you juggled that in as you were doing the Christopher Marlowe and the war games and all the rest. And I smiled every time.

And then the ending. Here, this part: The children were growing up angry, without any help at all. If he could teach Paul Ogden to think through his anger–If anyone could teach that to anyone, then there was hope. Oh Mike. Oh friend. Well, we’ll just keep trying, on that front. Because I’ve got to tell you, the children have not stopped having cause for that since you wrote it. Since you left us.

It’s a book of very different battles than we’re fighting now, Mike, but the overlap is definitely there. It’s much more of a period piece than The Dragon Waiting, strange though that is to say. And yet it’s so well-constructed, it’s so well done, that I return to it again and again, for all the snapshots, all the moments, all the ways you handled tension in this book. And: this is the book that made me go read all of Anthony Price. Because it works in either order. Now it’s out again, and the people who are missing you can read it again–and the people who missed you the first time around can read it too.

I hope they do.

As always, thanks.

Marissa

Cassie Alexander, Year of the Nurse: A 2020 Pandemic Memoir. Discussed elsewhere.

Andrea Barrett, Archangel. Reread. This is a bunch of short stories with loosely linked characters, historical fiction around a theme of scientific exploration of the world. Beautifully done, and they hold up very well on the second go-round.

Carolyn Fourche, In the Lateness of the World. I kept failing to connect with these poems of global exploration. We did not meet each other the way I wanted to. Perhaps another of you will.

Kathleen Jamie, Findings. Perfectly nice naturalist essays but not my favorite of her books, not where I would recommend starting with this part of her work.

Katherine Johnson, My Remarkable Journey. An autobiography from one of the outstanding “computers” from NASA’s era when that term was a person’s job description as a mathematician rather than a machine. This is labeled a memoir; it is not. It is very dates-and-places autobiography, very little internality. Both have value, but know that going in; there’s more factual material here than in Hidden Figures, but not a lot more of what was deeply personal to Dr. Johnson.

Abbie Gascho Landis, Immersion: The Science and Mystery of Freshwater Mussels. Does what it says on the tin, although it’s quite focused on mussels in North America, and particularly in the east of North America–it comes as far west as I am but really not much farther. But mussels: they’re interesting, here’s a bunch of stuff about them.

Ada Limón, Sharks in the River. This was the absolute perfect book for the day I was reading it. I kept marking poems to come back to. So many beautiful moments, start to finish. Highly recommended.

Sujata Massey, The Bombay Prince. The latest in its series, focused on the visit of the future Edward VIII to India and the protests thereof–and of course on a murder mystery unfolding around it. I think this is a series you can start in multiple places, and this is a fine enough place if you’re not attached to starting at the beginning or are having difficulty getting hold of the beginning.

James Morrow, The Cat’s Pajamas and Other Stories. Reread. Upon reread a lot of these felt shallow and self-congratulatory, and I really hope I like other things I remember liking of his better. Sigh.

Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?. I didn’t find this late-1940s mystery as charming as her clerical slice-of-life, but it was still fun to read when I needed something to sort of refresh myself after one of the books below (it’ll become obvious).

DaVaun Sanders, B. Sharise Moore, et al, eds. Fiyah Issue 17. Kindle. Occasionally Fiyah has an issue of well-done stories that aren’t really my jam, and you know what, I think they should, I am not the center of their target audience. This was one of those. Glad they’re doing what they’re doing.

Anne Sebba, Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy. Oh lord, what a difficult book. Sebba is not setting herself the task of proving that Ethel Rosenberg had zero Communist sympathies (good thing, because that’s clearly untrue) or any of a number of other things some people felt they had to do in talking about her case. She simply wants to examine: what evidence was there that she committed specific crimes, especially the crimes for which she was executed, specifically that she committed those crimes and not some other member of her family such as her husband, brother, or sister-in-law. Evidence looks pretty sparse, and there is clear and specific evidence that the people who tried her knew they were using perjured testimony, and that her brother knew that he was perjuring himself and never understood why she didn’t do the same. This is a book that is incredibly sad and upsetting in a number of ways.

Amy Stewart, Lady Cop Makes Trouble and Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions. I’m catching up on this historical semi-fiction adventure series, and I continue to enjoy it. One of the things I particularly liked here is that a young person with a dream doesn’t have that dream magically realized on the first try, pivots, and manages to make other things work for a bit, while still trying to figure out what might work for her long-term. I think too often “follow your dreams” narratives are presented as binary success/failure rather than very weird tangents, and this is a weird tangent one, which is kind of great.

Carrie Vaughn, Questland. Some of Vaughn’s books are a perfect fit for me as a reader and some are well-written but just…fine, I guess, not special for me. This is one of the latter. It’s a love song to the segment of geek culture that’s now mass market, and many of the places where its commentary could have gotten deep or trenchant didn’t. Not sure why, since Vaughn certainly has that in her. Anyway, if you want animatronic dragons, this is that (literally, I am not being metaphorical), but I didn’t really feel like the plot threads came together into a greater whole.

Hywel Williams, Emperor of the West: Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire. Lots of good stuff about what was actually going on in Western Europe. If you ever feel like genre fantasy is too based on medieval Western Europe, go read up on the Carolingians and their squabbles with each other and their neighbors and find out that, lordy, does genre fantasy have a lot more to draw on. Anyway I think they’re fun, and this was fun.

Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a Twitter-and-sometimes-conventions pal.

Cassie (not her real name) is an ICU nurse in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is a very raw, very immediate memoir of how her year in went, in nursing and in life. It’s got all the blood, all the tears, and all the swearing left in. In another decade someone will write a cool, polished, considered memoir with considered perspective about what it all meant now that we’ve thought it through; in another century, a series of bugcrusher histories of nursing in the pandemic, using primary source. But this is what we have right now.

This is what we need right now.

Because Cassie talks not just about what she experienced but about what she doesn’t know how to do next. How she doesn’t know how to rebuild relationships with those who said they loved her and then turned away from her experience of this last year, trying to save lives in grueling and heart-rending conditions. And we all need to think about that, not just nod sagely about yes, how hard, but really think about that.

If you’ve lost someone in an ICU situation, COVID or not, there are going to be some tough moments, and maybe you’re going to want to time this carefully. If you feel like the previous US presidential administration did a great job with COVID response and you don’t have a lot of patience for blaming it for any choices…frankly I don’t have a lot of patience for that, read this anyway, maybe especially you. And if you’re prone to suicidal ideation and may be triggered by reading about someone else’s suicidal times, okay, yeah, skip this one, because it turns out that trying to save people’s lives while constantly being thwarted by an extremely toxic system is very hard on a human being, it was very hard on this particular human being, and this is not a book that lets you look away from that, but I think Cassie would be the last one who would want to harm you with the things that harmed her.

She says over and over again: she just wants us all to be okay. I believe her. Let’s just…do the best we can, okay? Let’s all do the best we can.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Do you want a retelling of the story of Empress Wu as a teenage mecha pilot? because that’s what this is. It is a retelling of the story of Empress Wu as a teenage mecha pilot.

Do you need more information than that? Okay but WHY though. SIGH. FINE. It is an utterly ferocious flail against institutional sexism, “a triangle is the strongest shape” comes up in context, the Four Symbols get mecha forms, and there are aliens for the mecha to fight in dramatic battles. But really: Empress Wu as teenage mecha pilot, that’s the sort of pitch that sorts out the people who want it from the people who don’t pretty fast.

(I am a people who do.)

It makes me sad and angry that Zhao needed an author’s note saying that the institutional sexism examples in this book were Chinese because that’s the culture they were drawing on in this case not because Wow Those Sexist Chinese Good Thing No One Else Has Institutional Sexism. They were absolutely right that they did need that author’s note, because people absolutely would make that inference, and by “people” I mean “a certain subset of racist white people unfortunately too large to ignore.” I wanted to stand whitely next to them and make mean faces at anyone who did make that inference. Institutional sexism: it’s not just for one culture! It should be for no cultures, but here we are! In any case: if you can’t cope with portrayals of institutional sexism at the moment, put this aside until you can, but if you want to watch Wu Zetian absolutely trouncing the sexists, with help from lovely people of various genders, on with the show, here’s Iron Widow.

Daniel Abraham, A Shadow in Summer. Reread. I had forgotten how this starts with the trope from every abusive fantasy school and then spits in its face. I had forgotten how it ramps up the beginning of this thing. I’m going to reread the whole thing, eventually, but this: yes, this is a good start.

David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. They don’t let me pick the titles for these things, or I would have called it @#%&%$ Proto-Indo-Europeans, How Do They Work. But this was good too I guess. Lots of stuff about what we know about Proto-Indo-European and the people who spoke it and how to figure out things about animal domestication. I enjoyed it a lot.

Aldous Huxley, On the Margin: Notes and Essays. Kindle. Gosh, he was willing to just lean into his opinions, wrong or not. Mostly quite wrong, with the perspective of a hundred years. Just thoroughly, enthusiastically wrong, in very readable prose.

DaVaun Sanders, Sharise B. Moore, et al, eds., Fiyah Issue 19. Kindle. The first two stories of this issue were the stand-outs for me, in very different ways. I liked the non-traditional shape of “To Rest, and to Create,” by L.A. Knight; I liked that the conflict mostly predated the story and that the shape of the story was mostly the realization that it was okay not to be wracked with conflict now. And “Meditations on Sun-Ra’s Bassism” by Yah Yah Scholfield was a more traditional shape of science fiction story but with different cultural references than this shape of story usually has, and I liked that too.

Danna Staaf, Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods. Short, pithy, full of lots of squid taxonomy and archaeology. Squids have a fairly similar organ for direction sense to ours, did you know that? which means that squid could have a balance disorder similar to one of mine, which I find companionable.

Amy Stewart, Miss Kopp Investigates. Discussed elsewhere.

Tasha Suri, The Jasmine Throne. Lush and full and lots of hard choices and people struggling with fantasy worlds full of unknown consequences. So much fun with this.

Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art. A long and thorough look at what we know about our Neanderthal cousins and how they did things in various aspects of life and development, very cool stuff.

Lynne Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, et al, eds. Uncanny Magazine Issue 41. Kindle. My favorite thing in this lovely issue was Octavia Cade’s poem, and I can’t wait to share it with you in August.

Nghi Vo, The Chosen and the Beautiful. In case you hadn’t heard the press about this one, it’s a retelling of The Great Gatsby with fantasy elements, and frankly I am not sure our neighbor Scott deserved it, but he got it anyway, thank you copyright term expiration. There’s papercutting magic, there’s literally demon rum (well, demoniac), there’s Jordan Baker getting dimension of her own, there’s Vo deciding that she wants her own set of metaphors and just going out and making some, and it’s lovely, as I said far lovelier, I think, than the original possibly deserved.

Helene Wecker, The Hidden Palace. The sequel to The Golem and the Jinni, and it is very very sequel-y, so really read the other one first, but just like the first one it had that very compelling nature, the quality that made curling up with it the thing I most wanted to do while I was reading it. Early twentieth century cultural clashes and combinations, yes please, so magical even in addition to the magic.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Oh lovely! I said to myself when I saw this title available. She’s written a sequel to Girl Waits With Gun. So…it turns out that this is the seventh in the series, not the second. Oops! Luckily for me this did not interfere with my enjoyment in the slightest, and I have all the middle volumes in the series waiting for me. (Whew.)

So. The Kopp sisters. They’ve been up to quite a lot since last I saw them, maybe less since last you saw them if you’ve been keeping up with the series better than I have. But still quite a lot. They’ve gone their separate ways in the First World War, which is now over, and their brother has died, and what on earth are they going to do to keep body and soul together and help their sister-in-law with the children in the changing postwar economic landscape? The answer varies quite a lot by personality, although none of them is quite pleased with the way that circumstance and family need have overturned her personal plans.

The center of this particular book is the youngest Kopp sister, Fleurette, whose plans for a life on the stage have been upended, and whose new experiences as a professional divorce co-respondent are showing her a side of domestic life that she did not anticipate and does not entirely like. And the things that Miss Kopp has to investigate are not the traditional murder mystery, but something entirely itself, historically based and interesting and well-characterized and frankly a lot of fun.

Pat Barker, Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road. Rereads. I read these more or less in one go, as a trilogy, and that’s how I recommend doing it. There is an interesting phenomenon with some books that break a lot of ground in their time, because they sometimes do not look as astonishing in retrospect because people have gone on so much further after. Which is not to say that these are not still quite readable books–in fact I tore through them–but Barker was doing so much less with both sexuality and the war poets than I remembered. The first volume had such an incredibly light hand with sexuality, in fact, that I think a new reader to it would say, “I thought she said a theme of this trilogy was….” And the war poets rather the opposite: Siegfried Sassoon is a protagonist of the first, certainly, but I remembered him and Owen looming much larger throughout than they did. In short what she was doing here was not what I remembered her doing. Was it interesting, yes; but the things that were striking to me when I first read it nearly twenty years ago were less so now, and there were different directions. I’m still not sure what I think of the use of Rivers’s ethnographic work in the last volume. Huh. I’m not sorry I reread it, and I probably will want to reread it again in another twenty years for another look.

Nancy Marie Brown, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women. Discussed elsewhere.

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Assassins of Thasalon. Kindle. I like watching Lois think through all the different implications of the theology of this world and what it would do to actual people, and the compassion she approaches it with. This is very much the latest in a long series and I wouldn’t start here, but I enjoyed it as such.

Stephanie Burgis, The Disastrous Debut of Agatha Tremain. Kindle This was light and fun and just what I needed at its moment, the kind of 19th century-inspired fantasy that Steph does so well.

Elias Lönnrot (Eino Friberg trans.), The Kalevala. I was told that there was a new translation of the Kalevala, but alas, there is a new edition of a 1989 translation, and it does not even have new introductory material that could discuss use of words like “sq–w” that have no place in a translation of a Finnish poem, honestly what on earth was Penguin thinking. What are new editions even for. Why do they put introductions on things that tell me the entire plot of novels I haven’t read yet if they can’t put them on other things to apologize for (and/or amend…) racist language from past translators. Among my many gripes with the Friberg translation: it is mostly metrical but only mostly, so the places where it breaks meter are extremely glaring and do not appear to be for poetic emphasis or characterization, and mostly I could see how I would fix them myself in the moment I was reading it, which threw me out of the poem narrative. Also Friberg uses very cutesy translation words to try to keep meter in some places, like “snackbite” and “bigly,” which: stop that, Eino, what are you doing. Bigly. Now really. And when you have an epithet that breaks meter, returning to that epithet again and again when you could choose an epithet that does not break meter–oh, it’s dreadful. This is not what I meant when I said I wanted to compare translations. I hope the next version is better, or I’m just going to huddle in the corner with Francis Peabody Magoun and glare. (Magoun also uses “sq–w.” Why the fascination. Stop it.) Where is our Finnophone version of Maria Dahvana Headley? Where Emily Wilson? Whither Shadi Bartsch? I would give that person several of my very own cash dollars. I would rally my friends. I know several people. Is there a reverse Kickstarter where you put cash on the barrel and sort of a rope snare and translators wander through the forest that is the internet and when there is enough tasty cash they try to take it and translate poetry. I also want a Kalevipoeg more recent than W. F. Kirby in 1895. I don’t ask much. I’m a reasonable person.

Tehlor Kay Mejia, Paola Santiago and the Forest of Nightmares. Discussed elsewhere.

Zin E. Rocklynn, Flowers for the Sea. Discussed elsewhere.

Dorothy Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon and Lord Peter. Rereads. Here is where my sense of Bunter comes from. There is more Bunter here than in the rest of the series. I had been thinking my reader’s 50% was really more like 80% when it came to Bunter–which would be understandable for class reasons–but there’s a lot more of him here, hello Bunter, I’d missed you. There were some really interesting things here, and also some appalling ones. The last story in Lord Peter, in particular, is that thing that happens with people of that era: it is an entire story that is more or less completely written in defense of capital punishment. If you ever get to making the mistake that people of past generations who are sensible in one regard are sensible in all, read “Tallboys” and you will be soundly disabused, because it is start to finish a whole-hearted defense of beating quite small children with sticks and how great it is and how much they love it and how much people who say one oughtn’t to beat children are hypocrites who would do it at first opportunity. You often see this sort of thing among science fiction writers of the same age as well. It’s horrifying particularly in the context of a series that has been seriously considering the problem of equality in heterosexual relationships. It’s a very weird note to end on and makes me very strongly anti-recommend reading the short stories last.

Fran Wilde, The Ship of Stolen Words. I read an earlier version of this in manuscript, and I’m delighted that it is now published and available to the rest of you! Goblins steal Sam’s ability to apologize, and he has to chase them and their word-hunting pigs through Little Free Libraries to get his words back. Sam’s frustrations and struggles and joys are utterly charming and delightful. Highly recommended.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This debut novella is listed as both epic and dark fantasy, and I would say it trends strongly toward the latter. Until we got to the ending, I was inclining toward calling it horror–there is a strong component of what I would describe as body horror here, subcategory pregnancy body horror. If that’s a theme you struggle with, you may want to leave this one for another day (or even another reader), because pregnancy (and nursing) body horror is a substantial portion of what we’re doing here.

This is a story of the outcast, and it is a story of the sea. I was wondering if there would be sharp twists, but no, it’s more like the tide, it’s inexorable like the tide. The razorfangs, the sea, the survivors and their treatment of each other including the ostracized other among them…the question of her humanity…it’s all there, you know this song, it’s a question of how vividly Rocklyn brings it to its conclusion, and the answer is, very vividly indeed.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I found this book both interesting and frustrating.

Interesting, because there was a lot of good solid information about textiles and trading. Much archaeology, lots of reconstruction! If you want the details of what kinds of paint substrates were being used in the Viking era, Nancy Marie Brown has your back. I do in fact want that. I want that a lot. So this is very useful to me. I expect to some of you also.

Frustrating, because she is very much willing to make assumptions based on herself personally and go galloping forth with them. There is a little note after the main body of the book where she blithely tells the reader that Neil Price encouraged her to take a complex view of gender and she decided not to do so. Oh really, says this reviewer. Well, isn’t that a choice you made.

In Brown’s favor, she is willing to revisit previous positions when there is evidence that they are utter nonsense. Unfortunately this means that there are long sections of this book where the person she is arguing with is not me, not Neil Price, not any of a great number of other people who have been thinking thinky thoughts about the Viking era and gender for decades now (I have restrained myself from listing half a dozen personal friends in this location), but in fact…Previous Version Nancy Marie Brown. For example she says out loud! without prompting! that she personally did not used to believe in women wanting to fight with swords, which was so phenomenally stupid that I nearly shut the book and went off to go reread Neil Price instead. It’s always possible to consider other people having preferences unlike oneself, the more so when they are removed from oneself by an entire millennium, sort it out before you visit it upon the rest of us in several published volumes.

But really there’s quite a lot of useful stuff about dyes and paint substrates and that. Even if her “reconstructed” fiction sections demonstrate why she is not a fiction writer. If you’re thinking of a project in this era you might well want it just for what furs are common where and so on. If you take it all with a grain of salt about how willing this particular author is to generalize from the particular person she has closest to hand.