Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Zinnia Gray is back in this sequel to A Spindle Splintered. It’s a sequel that leans hard on the knowledge of character and situation from the first novella–which is still in print and, hey, a novella, so no reason not to read it first. Zinnia is still world-hopping. Still helping other Sleeping Beauties into the best possible version of their story, the best she can. It’s getting a little old, all the happily ever. She’s getting a little tired. But it beats going home to her loving family, to her best friends, to the chronic illness that is slowly killing her no matter what heroics she learns or improvises in other fairy tale landscapes.

Until she gets pulled sideways into a different story. With Zinnia’s understanding of fairy tales, she has the sinking feeling that she knows exactly who the hot older lady with the apple and the mirror is, and why, exactly, she should not be underestimated. There are just as many worlds of Snow White as there are of Sleeping Beauty, and some of them are just exactly as messed up–and Zinnia has to figure out how to get herself out of there, fast, because things are getting weird in world-spanning ways, and there are sure a lot of people willing to cut other people’s hearts out in this story.

Not all of them figuratively.

Zinnia continues to be winning, fierce, and realistically scared about her own reality, and it was lovely to see her getting a chance to break the mold she’d made for herself–and for other people too.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I have really enjoyed everything I’ve read in the Rick Riordan Presents line, but I admit that I had started to form a certain expectation of them, and with it a worry. They have not only all been middle-grade fantasy, they’ve had a very similar shape of subgenre/plot: a tween or young teen from modern America discovering the mythology of their heritage in a rather firsthand way. Some of them have been amazing books, but I’m very glad to see that this line is open to a somewhat broader age range and plot type.

Which is to say: Ballad and Dagger is young adult, not middle-grade. Its hero, Mateo Matisse, is a high school student whose vocabulary, life concerns before this book, and plot arc in this book are definitely a notch or two more mature than, say, my girl Aru Shah in the wonderful books that bear her name. And the world Older has created draws on his heritage but is very much his own creation.

Mateo is a high school junior living in Little Madrigal in New York City–the diaspora community formed after the secret magical island of San Madrigal sank beneath the waves. The people who had originally formed the community of San Madrigal were a mix of Santeros, Sephardim, and pirates; over the centuries the fusion of cultures has made its own unique combination–but not one the outside world is allowed to know much about. The people of San Madrigal have been fiercely proud of the way they stood aloof from colonialism, and they’d like to keep it that way. And if observant teens like Mateo and his friends have moments of wondering how a country that was never touched by the icy hand of colonialism managed to replicate some of its worse features, well…history is full of mysteries, right?

Some of those mysteries are about to get solved. Because the powers of Little Madrigal want to raise San Madrigal from the waves. If only they can find the children of San Madrigal’s three central spirits: a creator, a destroy, and a healer. Mateo’s focus is his music, but he also loves his friends, his aunts, and his community–and would love to be able to help, if only he had any power to do so. If only…well, this is a YA fantasy, right? Something’s bound to turn up. But Mateo’s music forms a strong central thread to a book with compelling characters and fun worldbuilding. While there’s almost certainly more to be told of Little Madrigal, this book surprised me with how quickly things pulled into a satisfying ending for this piece of the story.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.

One of the central things a review is supposed to do is say who might like a thing, and genre is one of the major ways of doing that. So right away we have the question: what genre is Last Exit? When I was much younger and less concerned with being fair, I drew the line between dark fantasy and horror at my own taste: if I liked it, it was dark fantasy; if I did not, it was horror. Last Exit, then, is dark fantasy.

I grew up, though, and I recognized that that was not very helpful to other people, nor even, necessarily, to myself. (Growing up and recognizing when you’ve oversimplified is not irrelevant to this book! but onward.)

So: horror is the genre that is attempting to horrify, to terrify? Well then. Some sections of Last Exit are very certainly horror. Because there are scenes of rot and decay both literal and moral, there are scenes of monsters too relentless to flee effectively, there are good people snuffed out not just in fangs but in the worst of the culture that you will recognize yourself to live in right now–the kind of horror that you can’t escape by reminding yourself that zombies aren’t real, because it’s not about zombies, it’s about the worst thoughts that whisper in the minds of Americans. Last Exit, then, is horror.

But what if, instead, horror is about worldview. What if whether a story is horror or not depends on the hostility of the universe in which it is set–a universe that is out to get the protagonists at every turn, a universe in which good deeds and intentions will always turn to nothing, a universe in which all shelter is inherently temporary and the permanent condition is always, eventually, fear and despair–well–if that’s the case, is Last Exit horror or fantasy? That…is a spoiler. Because that’s one of the central questions of the book. That is, in fact, one of the major things the characters are wrestling with. Can we get to something better, can we make something better–is it possible.

But what’s the book about. Oh, well then. Zelda and Sal, Sarah, Ish, and Ramón are college friends who have learned a knack of passing between alternate worlds, and they were determined to find or make the way to something better. And they failed. And in that failure, Sal was lost, and has stayed lost for ten years. They’ve grown apart, each into their separate ways of coping, but that no longer looks sustainable. Now they have to find Sal again and fix what they broke or–well. The details of that “or” look pretty nasty not just for them but for the entire array of worlds they can manage to see. It’s full of road trips and first loves and growing into yourself and figuring out who your friends are when you’ve been apart for awhile and recoiling from all the worst things you can’t pretend aren’t out there in the world, and also it has a couple of places where it made me cry hard enough the entire front of my body seized up at once. (Good job, Gladstone.) Is it dark, yes. Is it only dark, no, absolutely not. It is really, really, really good. For me it was also a book I described as a full-contact sport. This book is not going to fight Marquis of Queensbury Rules with you, and if you want a gentle book at this exact moment, maybe keep this one on the pile until you’re ready for something that isn’t. Because it isn’t. Not everything is. And this one really needed not to be, to get where it’s going in the end.

Chaz Brenchley, Rowany de Vere and the Traveler in Gin. Kindle. A short work in the Mars-that-wasn’t that Chaz is having such fun playing with, juggling genres, and this is in Rowany’s spy genre rather than the school stories.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Knot of Shadows. Kindle. The Penric series returns to where this world started: death magic. But as one might expect, not at all a tidy kind–the title is extremely appropriate. Not all is happy here, but for once the gods seem to be paying a bit of attention to justice at a human scale…eventually.

Robert Chaney, The Grizzly in the Driveway: The Return of Bears to a Crowded American West. Every year I buy myself a book for my late grandpa’s birthday that the two of us might have enjoyed sharing. This one is about the rocky coexistence of humans and bears and how that’s changing with development of the American West, its recreations and economics. Chaney not only makes a really good case for giving bears the space to be bears, he also acknowledges a lot of places where he has an easier time selling readership on charismatic megafauna where other species face similar problems without the easily marketable face. Interesting stuff, glad I chose it.

Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places. A series of essays about white expectations vs. Native realities in cultural areas such as music, early movies, technology, etc. Deloria’s family is extremely prominent in Native activism and scholarship, and he easily earns his place among them with this work, although if you are not–how do I put this delicately–a racist shithead, at least some of your education from this book will be in what horrifying things white people used to expect of Native people.

James A. Estes, Serendipity: An Ecologist’s Quest to Understand Nature. Quite often I will say that a book I’m talking about in these book notes does what it says on the tin. This emphatically does not: if you pick it up expecting a broad ramble about serendipity as a concept, understanding nature as a philosophical generality, this will definitely not be the book for you. This is a book about one ecologist’s specific career studying the balance of predator-prey relationships among sea otters, sea urchins, and kelp, with orcas later considered in the mix. There are some comparisons with other predator-prey relationships for reference, but it is toward the technical end of popularizations and is very much a retrospective of his career specifics. Am I interested in this topic, absolutely, but if you are looking for more of a general approach and are likely to be bored with how such studies are performed in the field, this is not the book for you.

Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe. Oh, this was a romp. Gabriele and Perry (the latter of whom is a personal friend) absolutely danced through the Middle Ages. Their thesis–that this was by no means a Dark Ages but a time when Europe was in high contrast, when things were illuminated from various directions and were a great deal more diverse than they get credit for–is beautifully illustrated. If you’re deeply familiar with the history of the Middle Ages this will be less new information and more different–often deeper–ways of thinking about what you already know.

Andrea Hairston, Redwood and Wildfire. Discussed elsewhere.

Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual. Kindle. Oh, the Edwardians. There is absolutely nothing like the Edwardians for being elegantly, confidently wrong. Harrison, for those of you who don’t know, was Hope Mirrlees’s housemate, chosen family…something. And she has all these theories about art, and it’s fascinating to watch what is so obvious to her that it isn’t even worth constructing an argument about it, she can just assert it (textile arts, for example, are not art, obviously…oh Jane). And then, of course, there are the things where she is constructing her beautiful theories on completely wrong data and cannot help it–they didn’t know, when she was writing this, that ancient Greek statuary was brightly painted. This is less interesting to me for its thoughts about its topic than for its reflection of what people were thinking in its time, especially a passionate, vigorous, educated woman like this one. I found it so very readable. Disagreeing with her at every turn was no problem really.

Hebi-Zou and Tsuta Suzuki, Heaven’s Design Team Volume 4. If you like this thing, it’s more of this thing! The joke is: various design constraints have to go into making animals. Real animals result in the strangest ways.

Balli Kaur Jaswal, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows. Another book that really does not do what it says on the tin. I’m very glad a friend recommended it, because I would not have picked it up based on the title. It’s actually about a young woman finding her path in life through teaching English at various levels in her community and finding connection with the older, more traditional women in it–who have quite different life experiences. There is a thriller B-plot and a romance C-plot that tie in with the main plot of these women connecting, sometimes through racy fiction, and figuring out what they really want in their lives and how to get there from where they are.

T. Kingfisher, Paladin’s Hope. Kindle. Third in its series. Having now read one of Kingfisher’s (that is, Ursula Vernon’s) horror novels, I keep noticing how much creepier her fantasy villains are than the average of the genre. Not necessarily more evil–hard to be more evil than Sauron–but scarier, nastier, more…skin-crawlingly real, even when what they’re up to is entirely fantastical. In any case, this is another paladin from the order of the Saint of Steel finding love with another weirdo, in this case the city’s lich forensic pathologist. Gnoles abound.

Lucian of Samosata, The True History. Kindle. Some people call this the first science fiction novel(la). It does not have novel structure. It is very much like talking to a four-year-old but less sticky. I like four-year-olds a lot. I find the part of talking to four-year-olds that goes “and then those guys flew on giant bugs and then there was a whole island full of owls and then me and my friends fought with the mean ladies and they ran away and we ran away and um and um and um we met ODYSSEUS” to be amazing and great. Especially if there is not that much of it total and you take it in small bites. And there really is not that much of this total, and I took it in small bites.

Naomi Mitchison, Anna Comnena. This is a very short biography, and it in no way pretends objectivity. It is like sitting down with a dear and very nerdy friend who has been reading a lot of history and takes sides, and then she tells you all her opinions about her favorite historical figures and what they were up to, and if you make yourself tea and remember that she probably drank a lot of tea while she was writing it, it’s approximately the coziest thing you can get in biographical or historical reading. You all have friends like that, right? well, you have me. And several of you are friends like that. So Naomi: she is another one. And death and time and space cannot stop you having her over for tea to gossip over the late Byzantines if that’s the sort of thing you want, because she wrote this down.

Polly Morland, The Society of Timid Souls, or How to Be Brave. This one is what it says on the tin. Contrary to trends in novel titling, this is not a novel. It is nonfiction about the topic written right there on the cover: bravery. Morland has gone around interviewing people about various kinds of bravery and what they feel like and whether they are inherent or developed and if developed, how, and so on. Odds are very good it will make a change from most of whatever else you’re reading.

Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Woman. A very breezy end to its series, but for heaven’s sake don’t start here, this is all conclusion, start at the beginning so the characters and their setting make sense.

Helene Tursten, An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good. This is a tiny volume of stories about an old lady who solves her problems by murdering the deserving and getting away with it. Do you want that? because that is 100% what this is. I admit that when I saw the title, I had hopes that she would have more variation in her up-to-no-goodness. I have read other books where the protagonist unapologetically kills people the author has constructed to be more or less deserving (I’m thinking particularly of Bradley Denton’s Blackburn), and I read this one, and I will need a pretty good reason to read another.

Matt Wallace, The Supervillain’s Guide to Being a Fat Kid. Max is not thrilled with the damage done to his community by the superheroes it lauds, and he feels like he needs guidance in his life, so he reaches out to the least likely source: a supervillain named Master Plan. Who is, like Max, a fat guy, and who has some theories about how Max can deal with bullies without running afoul of the authorities as Master Plan has. Do things unfold seamlessly? Well, Master Plan’s master plans seldom do…. Charming, fun, a very warm and fast-paced read.

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, Hero’s Choice. Kindle. A novelette satire on destiny, chosen ones, and high fantasy. Good times with fluffy doom ponies, swords, and evil wizards.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a reissue, and I read this book about ten years ago, when it was fairly new, so when I got the ARC of the new edition, I knew it was a book I would like, because I’ve liked it before. Still, this isn’t a book I’ve seen discussed as often as I’d expect for being a Tiptree winner, so it’s great that it has a new edition with new fanfare from Tor Dot Com.

The subject matter, the theme, is if anything even more timely, because this is a book whose characters keep returning to the idea of free people. One of the two title characters is of Seminole and Irish heritage (the other is Black, and most of the characters are Black), and he uses the Seminole words istî siminolî, free people, as a refrain through the book: even without legalized slavery in their milieu, the characters are still struggling for true freedom with and for each other and for their communities.

The setting ranges through the late 19th and early 20th century America, taking Redwood (Sequoia) and Aidan Cooper/Wildfire from sharecropping and swamps to the World’s Fair, traveling theater life, settlement houses, and early moving pictures. Redwood, her late mother, and her little sister Iris all work hoodoo as a major element of this book, but it is not easy being a hoodoo worker in Reconstruction or the beginning of the Great Migration and trying to find where and how to feel right with yourself, in your own skin and with your own actions.

This is not an easy book. A great many horrible things happen to the characters. There’s sexual violence, there’s substance abuse, there’s exactly as much racism directed against the main cast as you would think there might be–and I’m not even sure I’ve got all the relevant content warnings if I was writing a comprehensive list. But there’s also love between friends and family, people making good food and art and hope, and yes, even a happy ending. While it’s not a fluffy romp, not everything has to be to get to be ultimately positive about its characters and their ability to make a loving place for themselves in a world that didn’t hand them one.

Charlie Jane Anders, Even Greater Mistakes. Anders’s work is very bifurcated for me–the hits really hit and the misses really miss–but not in a way that’s offensive, just in a way that’s, oh, that’s definitely not for me. Which makes a short story collection a great format for me to read her, because it’s very easy to go YAY YAY skip skip YAY skip YAY (not necessarily in that order), which for me is a much better reading experience in a short story collection than fine-I-guess fine-I-guess okayish sure-fine.

Marc David Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs. This book’s main thesis is that treating the Ottoman Empire as a thing apart from Europe because it is a thing (mostly) apart from Christendom (except for the parts of its population that aren’t) is…not very justifiable, actually, and let’s stop doing it. And when you look at that point, uh, yes? Actually? And Baer makes very clear points throughout about the Ottoman Empire’s participation in various movements in European cultural and intellectual history in ways that seem embarrassingly obvious to have pointed out. I hope this book is one of those popular histories that people find baffling in a decade or two: like, yes, of course the Ottomans were not completely isolated from the Renaissance except to throw old manuscripts on it and run away, literally what are you talking about. It did sometimes feel rushed, but, well, there is a lot of Ottoman Empire to cover in a not very long book. So.

Freddie Bitsoie and James O. Fraioli, New Native Kitchen: Celebrating Modern Recipes of the American Indian. I got two cookbooks by Indigenous chefs (and cookbook-writing assistants) for Christmas this year, an interesting theme gift. This is the more elementary of them. If you’re looking to give a cookbook to someone who has very little knowledge of First Nations peoples in North America and will want to use a lot of familiar European-transplant ingredients in any recipe they make, this is the correct choice of the two.

Michael DeLuca, Gabriele Santiago, AÏcha Martine Thiam, et al, Reckoning Issue 6. Kindle. What an issue, what a barnstormer of an issue. I am going to be tweeting out links to favorites all year long as they come out. Brianna Cunliffe’s essay “Sweetwater, Poison.” In fiction, Nicasio Andres Reed’s “Babsang Luksa,” Wen-yi Lee’s “Rooted,” Mari Ness’s “Footnotes from ‘Phosphates, Nitrates and the Lake A Incident: A Review.'” In poetry, Russel Nichols’s “Move, Mountain, Move,” Tom Barlow’s “Surprise,” Cislyn Smith’s “Water-logged Roots,” Grace Wagner’s “Onions,” Ellie Milne-Brown’s “Carcinisation,” Laura Adrienne Brady’s “Tyrni.” There was just so much in this issue. I couldn’t believe it, it just kept going.

Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy, eds., Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World. This is a collection of BIPOC nature essays. Many of them touch either directly or indirectly on the question of why there isn’t more nature writing from BIPOC viewpoints, which is an interesting and valid question. This is more a starting point than an ending point for that question, I think.

Brian Jay Jones, Jim Henson: The Biography. As I have read a bunch of biography lately I have gotten a feel for the spectrum of approaches biographers can take. Brian Jay Jones is very much in the “my subject can do no wrong, and any flaws he might happen to have automatically do not matter because what a great guy” camp of biographers. And in some ways this is good, because…let’s be honest, very few of us pick up a biography of Jim Henson for heaven’s sake looking for muckraking. Do you? Really? About the guy who came up with the Muppets? No, you want wonder and coolness and a little bit of pathos from time to time. I do too. And this delivers that, absolutely. It gives you what you really want in a biography of Jim Henson. Even if…even if there are places where you should stop to say, wait a minute. Even if there are places where Jones sweeps things under the rug about Henson’s general sexism, pushing his wife Jane out of the Muppets that she helped create, sowing difficulties at work by sleeping with multiple employees in ways and at times that caused definite problems in how the work got done…even if there are places where Jones deliberately creates a fine haze of that not really mattering, because it isn’t the vision of Jim Henson we want to see. It isn’t, is it? Surely not. Well. We’ll just…gloss over all that. This is definitely the biography of Jim Henson we wanted, then. Good.

Michael Kleber-Diggs, Worldly Things. A poet close to my home–closer than I knew, as a few references clarified. Some shattering and gorgeous things here in his debut. The kind of poetry that makes me go off and write response poems.

Hope Larson and Rebecca Mock, Salt Magic. A graphic novel about a young girl whose brother comes back from WWI changed, and the changes she makes in turn–and the desert witches she meets in the process.

Yoon Ha Lee, Dragon Pearl. I read this series out of publication order, but it worked fine that way. This one was full of shapeshifter foxes trying to find their own way in a galaxy that did not particularly welcome them.

Ken Liu, The Veiled Throne. Let me make it clear that I enjoyed this book. However. It is not the length it is (nearly a thousand pages) because it could not have been any shorter. No. Liu is having fun here. Each scene has the theme and variations he wants, and each scene in turn contributes to the larger baroque structure that he wants, and could I honestly say that not a word is out of place, not a scene extraneous? Absolutely I could not say that. But you know what? Not every piece of prose has to be trimmed to the bone. Minimalism is not an unlimited virtue. So know going in that this is the third book in a series full of ramifications–for heaven’s sake do not start here–and that it is not going as fast as it could, and be prepared to enjoy the pace that this book is taking. There will be more.

DaVaun Sanders, B. Sharise Moore, et al, Fiyah Issue 21. Kindle. My favorite piece in this issue was C.L. Polk’s poem “Delivery.”

Sean Sherman with Beth Dooley, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen. Obviously this is the second of the two Indigenous-themed cookbooks I got for Christmas, and for me the more successful–this one will probably take specialty shopping for ingredients like maple vinegar, but it’s proposing recipes that aren’t things I’ve basically made before, and it doesn’t assume I need my hand held on very introductory cultural elements to the people who live around me. We’re all in different places in cooking and in Indigenous studies; this is the one that better fits where I am.

Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner, eds., Apex Issue 129. Kindle. The standout story for me in this issue was Bianca Sayan’s “Sheri, At This Very Moment.”

Lynne Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, et al, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 44. Kindle. Several favorites in this one: Kylie Lee Baker’s “Lily, the Immortal” on the fiction side, and in poetry Sonya Taaffe’s “The House Snakes” and Lisabelle Tay’s “Weaver Girl Dream.”

Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens. Here is how good Claire Tomalin is: I don’t actually like Charles Dickens that much, and I already read her book about his relationship with Nelly Ternan, so when the library’s copy of this came through on my hold requests, I thought, I’ll just glance at it. Probably I don’t want that much Dickens, ever, and I’ll send it back unread, and that’ll be fine. And within a few pages I was absolutely convinced that I was going to read this entire biography of an author I don’t even like, and I was right to do it, it was a sharp, keen perspective on a fully-fledged person and the era he lived in, she takes no prisoners, she turns over all the stones and thinks very hard about the invertebrates beneath them but knows that beauty can be found there as well as squalor, she is so good. Gosh I’m going to be glad to be reading another of her books. Especially when it’s not about Charles Dickens, though, because while I came out with a greater cultural appreciation of his place and time, that did not translate to “I should reread some of this.” At all.

Matt Wallace, Bump. Middle-grade fiction, no speculative elements, about a young girl (Maya/MJ) who is struggling to figure out her place in a world with family upheaval and begs her mother to let her train as a luchadora at her next door neighbor’s school. Maya and the school both have challenges to overcome, and this is fun and lovely and goes very quickly.

Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon–and the Journey of a Generation. So you have to ask yourself: are you willing to put up with an entire book about the music of the 1960s and ’70s by someone who thinks that furniture appraisal is a crucial part of “Norwegian Wood.” Because that is the level of missing the mark Sheila Weller achieves here, and no, that is not a made-up example. Weller is one of those incredibly tedious upper-middle-class coastal Boomers who thinks that the Sexual Revolution fixed several varieties of “everything” (she is willing to concede that AIDS later un-fixed some of them but only some), blithely stating that now if a female musician gets pregnant the baby is a marketing accessory, and Sheila, unless you’re providing free babysitting to the working-class women who got pregnant as teenagers and are trying to break into the music scene, I’m going to need you to shut your yap on that one. Also, every time you make a claim that now reproductive care is completely available, yay! in a book about Roberta Joan Anderson goddamn Mitchell, you have to donate ten bucks to a clinic somewhere sparsely populated, preferably the prairie, I don’t make the rules, wait, I do, I just made that rule, but it’s a good rule. So this book is full of brilliant women, and also hey, some brilliant men, that’s great, but for some reason Weller decided that it was a great opportunity to carry as much water as possible for as many shitty men as possible. Like. This is not a he-said she-said situation. I have read interviews with Chuck Mitchell where he freely says just loads of stuff–boatloads–that indicates, without any apparent self-awareness, what a piece of shit he was, both in general and to his ex-wife Joni. You absolutely do not have to make excuses for people that their own testimony and behavior does not make for them. That’s not journalism, that’s…well, that’s a lot of things, but in this case, it starts to add up to look like the damn patriarchy. She makes classic victim-undermining statements about domestic violence. She strongly implies that Carly Simon not only should have tried harder to stay married to James Taylor (to what end, Weller? and who asked you? because I sure did not) but also that Simon was somehow to blame for Taylor’s heroin addiction which he had before he met her. So–there was all kinds of good stuff here, but also it is not, when you get right down to it, a good book, it is not a book I can recommend, it is clueless about its own privilege in some staggeringly important ways, it misses understanding of several pieces of art crucial to the artists in question, it’s politically incredibly shallow, and WOW is it mired in the sexism it would like us to believe is a thing of the past. Oh, and the font changes a couple of times from one section to the next for no reason. So. Yeah.