Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I know the author through this here internets.

Some of the fiction that gets labeled post-apocalyptic is actually during-apocalyptic. This is actually post-: the settlement in question, the town of Osto, has achieved a pretty stable state, farming and making clothes and trying to figure out how the people in the before times managed their weird materials and lives. They’re not perfect–there’s infighting and nastiness and domestic violence and disrespect. But they’re managing.

Until the infamous band of Esteben’s raiders come to Osto, intent on stripping the town of all that makes it an oasis and leaving desolation in their wake. Vasha, an old woman who has led Osto for years, tries to strike a bargain: if their leader can lead the town for a day and win its people’s support in a fair election, she’ll give him power freely. That day…hour by hour, second by second…determines the future of Osto.

There’s not a lot that’s earthshaking in the science fiction concepts here, but that’s not what Newton is aiming for. She’s focusing instead on character relationships–how understanding human relationships can be exactly the science that can save a way of life, a little at a time. How giving people their free choice is better than forcing them–no matter what the people holding the guns at your village keep would like you to think. This is a novella full of ideals (though not of sweetness and light), and this is a time when you might very well need some of that.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I know the author on this here internet a bit.

Sometimes you read the first page of a book and you think, yes, I am in good hands, I am going to have a good time now. That absolutely happened here for me. A Strange and Stubborn Endurance introduces itself with the perfect balance of trope and utter trope rejection: Our Hero is not fighting for his father’s lands! could not care less for them! has a servant paid to put up with his bullshit and is not going to bother that servant with this observation HOORAY I AM HERE FOR IT. Look, I picked this book up after a book that started whining about how corsets were universally bad, so I really needed this.

Okay, so what is it really, beyond the first page? It’s an arranged marriage book, with absolute lashings of fantasy politics, riding through the mountains, fighting bandits and/or discovering someone has been a bandit, chase scenes, discovering secrets, fancy parties, more fancy parties, knife throwing, figuring out the customs of a new land, using people’s ableism against them, lots of descriptions of food. And it is gay as a bright summer morning. Velasin and Caethari may not be the husbands each other dreamed of, but if they’re given a chance they might grow into being the husbands they need.

This book is also pretty clear about what content warnings you might want: sexual assault and both internal and external fallout thereby, homophobia (SO MUCH HOMOPHOBIA), suicidality (resolved happily but still portrayed). This is an ultimately positive and fun book, but not because everything is happy on every page. There’s a lot of emotional range here–chiaroscuro, so to speak, some very low lows for some young people starting out in their lives but also some very high highs. Some deep friendships as well as some startling betrayals. Magic seems, at first, to be a thing that is peripheral, but its presence grows as the story unfolds–from the tiniest charm around the edges to something more, something integral to this world and its people.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Someday I will learn my lesson.

Some subgenres of book that I don’t like are far more upsetting when they’re written by somebody highly skilled and good at their job, as Gailey is, because they are more effective at the things I don’t like. Like highly psychological horror where people do loads of terrible things and treat each other badly. Like this book. It is an extremely, extremely well-done version of what it is. Also aaaaaah and I’m glad I finished it well before bedtime so I can try to think about something else now.

For the first time in years, Vera Crowder has been summoned back to the house where she grew up. It’s not for funsies–her mother is dying. And as little as anybody likes facing that reality, Vera has not only her mother’s frankly rather disgusting physical decay to deal with–not only the detritus of her parents’ life–but also the reality of the horrible things that happened in the house. (Oh, and a fame-seeking artist living in the shed, who thinks he’s all that and doesn’t respect her personal space, literally or emotionally, in this difficult time. Charming.) Gailey skillfully unfolds each twist of what happened and exactly how much this is supernatural and how much psychological horror–it’s both, it’s very both–so that things that look one way are illuminated with a very different–uh–flashlight when the next chapter rolls around.

If you like creepy houses and the kind of books where you have a very long list of answers to “who’s the real monster here?”, this is one for you. I don’t. But I read it cover to cover without putting it down to do more than eat my supper anyway. It’s a very well-done thing that is not my sort of thing.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Vivian Kelly is a seamstress by day, an Irish orphan in the New York City of the mid-1920s. By night she dances her cares away at the Nightingale, a speakeasy that serves a mixed clientele in race, class, and sexuality. Her sister wishes she’d stay on the right side of the law, but the Nightingale is Viv’s haven from a world that doesn’t much care what happens to women like her…until she and her best friend Bea find a dead body in the alley.

The corpse looks only vaguely familiar, but the Nightingale’s owner wants Viv to help find out what’s going on–especially after the club gets raided. She’s not exactly happy to help, but she wants the Nightingale–and her friends who work there–to be safe, and her work gives her an excuse to fit clothes for the primary bereaved. And the interesting new man hanging around the club might have something to do with it all, but is it on the side of angels? Viv is highly motivated to find out. The dead man’s associates are providing a little…extra motivation of their own, and it is not always on the positive side, so Viv had better figure things out, fast.

This was a fun, easy reading mystery with lots of dancing to jazz, lots of cocktails, lots of flirting and friendship and sisterhood. Schellman’s notes after the book point out that she researched when the title Ms. was used (earlier than one might think!), whether there were Black and Irish girls living two blocks away from each other in NYC at the time (yes!), whether all the races and ethnicities she portrayed would be mixing at some types of speakeasy (absolutely!), and so on–I suspect that the fact that this is written as a fast-paced mystery rather than a footnoted treatise may be what trips up those readers who want to argue those points. (Certainly we can agree that the past was diverse, we just can’t enjoy it that way?) This one isn’t for them. It may well be for you, though.

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

Thera Celehar, the hero of The Witness for the Dead, returns for a sequel with enough plot in it for four books by another author. Seriously, there is so much plot here. Celehar has a trainee! There’s a murder! That leads to corruption and evil and a foundling school that is doing what now? Oh no. Oh no. And then the dead just keep giving a little more of their secrets, and a little more, and soon Celehar and a brand new Witness have problems they thought were mythical. Or didn’t imagine at all.

Celehar remains his conscientious, worried, and slightly badly-dressed self. If you found the first volume charming–as I did–this is definitely more of the same. A lot more. I am extremely impressed at how much there is packed into this without making it feel crowded, it just keeps–turning. And turning again. And leaves Celehar in a new place that allows him to find out who he is, who he will be, going forward, while staying true to the core of himself.

Also there is more opera, so that’s a relief.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a local/Twitter pal.

Throughout history, women have been able to turn into dragons, but in 1955, there was the Mass Dragoning. Thousands upon thousands of women turned into dragons at the same time: wings, fire-breathing, the whole lot. Some of them ate their husbands. Some of them just flew away, to the mountains, the sea, the great beyond.

This is a metaphor. Also, it isn’t, they really do turn into dragons.

Alex Green has one of the missing dragons-nee-women in her family, and the fallout shapes her entire life. In her proper small Catholic Wisconsin town, no one talks about dragons. No one wants to even acknowledge thinking about them, except for a few brave souls around the edges. Again, this is a metaphor. Also, it isn’t, it’s about dragons. They have talons, they set buildings on fire, they tear down walls, no really, literal walls. And Alex is fascinated, furious, torn, and her little cousin–now her sister–Beatrice–has a host of outsized emotions all her own that Alex has to help her manage. Because Beatrice and Alex are each all the other one has–that and a fierce librarian, some half-trustworthy pamphlets, and their own determination.

One of my favorite things about genre books that embrace their own genre nature is that their metaphors can be multi-layered, because they embrace the concrete. When Women Were Dragons is about women’s intellect, women’s emotions, women’s freedoms, and the ways the America of the 1950s and early 1960s stifled all those things. For sure. But also it’s about dragons with scales and shiny gold eyes, and the way that it manages its genre nature keeps its ground firm, means that it won’t get bogged down in one simple metaphor at the expense of other possibilities. There will be readers who want this book to be about sexuality–homosexuality, bisexuality–and it absolutely is, but not in an easy Dragons = The Gays way. And the same for transgender issues: this is not an easy Dragoning = Transition book. And you can tell that it’s not, because The Gays are right here in the book, and some of them become dragons and some do not. And there are trans women in this book, and some of them become dragons, and also some of them don’t.

So as with Tooth and Claw before it, but using a completely different set of approaches to what segment of history and what kind of dragons we’re talking about, When Women Were Dragons keeps a firm, sure voice in its period. It has beautifully passionate things to say about gender and sexuality and culture. It also wants to talk about, no shit, really, dragons. And I absolutely love that juxtaposition. This is one of the things genre does best.

Emily Bergslien and Kat Weaver, Uncommon Charm. Discussed elsewhere.

Maurice Broaddus, Sweep of Stars. Discussed elsewhere.

Rachel Ferguson, Evenfield. Is it possible to like both this book and LM Montgomery’s Jane of Lantern Hill? I ask because I always felt iffy about Jane, and I enjoyed this. It’s another book about a young woman in love with her childhood house–this one a suburban London affair, ordinary to the rest of the world but beautiful to her in its childhood details, which she tells with charm. And she returns to live in it after the death of her mother, and she lets herself grow past who she was as a kid and move on with her life in various ways, but the charm of this book is in its specifics. Also some of the places that make you wince are very much in the specifics: it was written to be quiet escapism in 1942, and there are some of the bits of racism that are frankly weird from a modern perspective (how are you managing to be racist when you don’t even have anybody of other races in this book?)–they’re not frequent or plot-crucial, but they are present, be warned.

John M. Ford, Aspects. Discussed elsewhere.

Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr, A Different Distance: A Renga. A renga is a particular form of Japanese poetry passed back and forth, and these two friends decided to write this one during the first year of the pandemic. The poems they traded, each springing from the last, range from anguished to mundane. It’s already an interesting snapshot of a year; I think it’ll be fascinating to return to.

Rose Macaulay, Going Abroad. For the vast majority of this book, it had the sort of tension that comes from reading a book where you know more about the characters’ likely fates than the author does: it’s set in Basque Spain in 1934, among vacationers from other countries but with Basque characters as well. So the shadows of Franco and Hitler are omnipresent, how could they not be? Some parts are funny, some make you wince…and then there is the absolute emotional gut-punch of the last chapter when you realize that Rose, oh my darling Rose, had some very conscious things to say after all. I am not at all surprised that this is not one that is widely reprinted and beloved, because it is not a comfortable experience, and yet there are moments of such bravery and intelligence and humor among the moments of “what on earth, this must be something contemporary or maybe just Rose, how weird.”

M. Rickert, The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie. If you, like me, hate watching people being cruel or obtuse to someone with a cognitive or processing difference, you may well hate this book. I hated this book. I kept reading where I normally would have quit because I have liked Rickert’s work before, and I kept hoping that the worldbuilding hints would pay off, and I did not feel they did, not even a little bit, not even close.

dave ring, ed. Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Won’t Die. Kindle. The length and topic of these generally post-apocalyptic stories varied considerably, so if you’re at all the target audience, there will likely be something for you. I am not the specific target audience–that is, I am straight as heck. But endurance is still a thing I enjoy, so here we are.

Patrick Saint-Jean, The Spiritual Work of Racial Justice: A Month of Meditations with Ignatius of Loyola. This was a gift from a family member and is a month of daily devotionals on racial justice themes from a Haitian Jesuit priest. I think it will primarily be of interest to committed Roman Catholics who have not done a lot of reading on social/racial justice topics but are open to starting. If you know anyone of that description in your friend/family circle, or have a book group at your church, etc., this might be good for them. I am not of that description on either front, so for me it was more of intellectual interest to see how someone with a very different perspective than my own would address topics I’ve seen covered in quite different ways elsewhere.

Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution. This does substantially what it says on the tin–it’s a history of the French Revolution through the lens of the life of Maximilien Robespierre. Even for a strange time he was a pretty quirky guy, and reasonably well-documented in a number of ways, so Scurr has a lot to work with.

Lauren Shippen, The Infinite Noise. Kindle. Some stories straddle the border of superhero narratives and the kind of old-school SF that had “mind powers/psy powers,” and this is one of them, in the form of a contemporary YA love story between two boys. I picked it up more or less at random when I was bouncing off a lot of books and was prepared to bounce here too, and instead I found the sweetness of the two teenagers and their relationships extremely engaging and read it almost all in one go. When I say “sweetness,” I don’t mean saccharine–one of the kids’ empathy leads to anger management issues when he’s around people who are angry, and similar issues–but they are fundamentally pretty nice kids trying to figure out, as, hey, we all are really.

Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Philosopher and friend of this blog, Shotwell is looking at the places where taxonomies and labels don’t do the best work of ethical choices for us and nuance and context can do better. There’s an environmental focus here that will be of interest to some of you and was to me.

Review copy provided by the authors, who are also personal friends of mine. Also I read an earlier draft of this novella.

Julia Selwyn-Stirling doesn’t like to think of things she can’t make into a joke, she tells us right out. She would really like to romp her way into her social debut and the pleasant upper class life to follow. There’s no reason the new guest in her home has to interfere with that, even if he is her closest friends’ illegitimate half-brother–and studying magic with her mother.

But as Julia gets to know Simon, the secrets that have been woven into her family life for her entire childhood start to unravel. And as beguiling as it is to drawl jokes and practice fencing, the ghosts that Simon can talk to have concerns that–dare Julia admit it?–might be more important.

This is Mitfordian fantasy, its froth not actually concealing family dysfunction and social discontent–not actually trying. It’s got the interwar jewels and frocks and parties and boxing matches, it’s got all the fun elements you’re looking for in a novella with its prose voice. But it also has an awareness of all the solid, real things that a young woman could use a clever, assured voice to cover for in our world–and how much nastier that could get with working magic. This is so well-grounded and so self-assured as well as so much fun. I’m so glad it’s coming out where the rest of you can enjoy it too.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Dear Mike,

I read the poems in this, and bits of the prose, in your handwriting. You know I’ve read it before. And now here it is, it’s a real book (with glue!), and you’re gone, you’re so far from us I can’t wrap my mind around it. (Neither can Neil, you can tell from the introduction he wrote for you.) And I read the first of the poems that I remembered in your handwriting, and I thought, all right, I can do this, and I got to the first two paragraphs, about the timing and manner of a person’s death, and Mike, I broke down sobbing again.

You always do that.

A lot of stuff I’ve spent the last fifteen years saying I want more of in books is in this book. Trains! Parliaments (and other forms of government that are not monarchies)! Friendships of all shapes and sizes and ages! Disability representation of more than one kind! People who have hobbies and still have intense life work and relationships! And now I will be able to point people at this and say yes, this, this is actually what I meant. I mean, other things too. But this, this is what I was talking about.

This is the thing that you said to us over your shoulder from the doorway as you were leaving, and I’ve been calling down the hall after you since, and now, and now…other people can hear at least some of your part of the conversation.

It’s so clear that you knew here–as in all your other books–that you wouldn’t have much time. There is so much of this book that knows that time is short, so damnably short. And there is also so much of this book that is clear that you thought you’d have more time than this, and it’s so unfair, it’s so unfair, I can see the shape of where you were going, not just with the touchstone sonnets at the end but the worldbuilding, even just small moments like the conversation about which characters learn which second languages in which countries–this is a shape of continental politics that is moving, and I can see the pieces on the game board, I watch their shadows, but the details matter, Mike, the colors matter, and this book has so much color.

Now there isn’t any book of yours I haven’t read at least twice.

Now there isn’t any book of yours I haven’t pressed on people, saying, here, you can read it, you should read it, it’s full of people making things and wrestling with their better selves and asking questions, finding spaces where they can breathe more easily and people who help them do it. There is a moment where one character asks of another, “who is he?” and the answer comes, “Someone who will leave Lescoray a better place, if he can only find the time.”

Time was so short but you did find so much of it for that. I wish you could have given us all of this. But it is so good, so good to have what there is of it, here, in my hands, where I can share it around, where in addition to shouting down the passage after you, I can turn to the person just coming in and say, “whew, that poem that came with Agate’s sculpture, right? RIGHT???” And they can know. They can finally know.

Thanks for this final gift, my friend.