Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a rerelease (coming this fall!) of the author’s preferred edition of this 2000 fantasy novel.

Maskelle is supposed to be the Voice of her god, but they’ve had a falling out. She misinterpreted a vision in a way that angered the powers that be, and she’s been a cursed outcast ever since. Her journeys with a band of players are taking her back where her god wants her, back in the city that is the center of his worship.

And the god wants her there for a reason. The ritual that renews the world every year–with particular emphasis on this year’s centenary observation–is going awry no matter how they try to fix it. Maskelle has been out in the world, her connection with the god at least used to be the most powerful–surely she’s the right choice to set the world right.

This is about as big a job as you might expect. Add in a cursed puppet for the traveling players and all sorts of personal complications for the swordsman they meet along the way, and there’s a recipe for a giant shitstorm at the end. Which happens, which definitely happens, and the climax comes together as only Martha Wells books can.

Clara Benson, A Case of Blackmail in Belgravia and The Murder at Sissingham Hall. Kindle. These are each the first in a longer series of historical mysteries. Benson made them available for free on the Kindle, which was very smart of her because I will now be giving her money for the rest of each series. The two detectives are distinct without one of them being deeply obnoxious, and the early 20th century setting is a favorite of mine.

Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School, Prelude through Chapter 9. Kindle. I’m still enjoying this series of boarding school books from Chaz, but I notice as it goes on that there isn’t one single person who doesn’t end up settling in and loving boarding school. That’s the genre. But it’s a genre I start to have more quibbles with the more I read of it, because I don’t actually believe that any institution is for everyone, and boarding schools of this type certainly not, and the longer it goes the more I start to get antsy about it, even though each book is no less fun than the last.

Elise Bryant, It’s Elementary. A bubbly fun mystery where the detective is a mom investigating suspicious goings-on at her kid’s school. She’s a single Black mom whose interactions with her ex are cordial and plot-crucial (getting the kiddo on her calls with her dad is one of the most important things in the protag’s world) and for whom race is also key to her experience at a “gentrifying” school. I found the ending a bit disappointing but enjoyed the narrative voice throughout.

Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, eds., Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells. Reread. Still enjoyed stories by stalwarts like Elizabeth Bear, Veronica Schanoes, and the writing team of Ellen Datlow and Caroline Stevermer. Worth keeping on my shelf.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton. Kindle. Her first novel, and Charlotte Bronte has not yet yelled at her about beloved people who transgress social standards getting to live out the book. So you can pretty much guess who is going to get a noble tragic death and who is going to still be around. On the other hand, the prostitute aunt and opium-addict father get a great deal more compassion than would have been standard for the era, and it’s set entirely in the working classes and firmly takes their side. Explicitly, in fact; this is a book that came out in 1848, and its author’s attentions were firmly on the revolutions of 1848 though the scope of her book is much smaller.

Marianne Gordon, The Gilded Crown. Do you want necromancy? Because this has necromancy. This has so much necromancy, in fact, that I’m not sure you could fit more in with a shoehorn. Court politics and so, so much necromancy, including of a very nice bird.

Helen Hardacre, Shinto: A History. This very correctly labels itself a history: it is the sort of book that is much more concerned with when movements related to Buddhism affected Shinto and how than it is with the experience any person might have of Shinto. It’s briskly written, very fast for its size, and interesting as long as you go in knowing that it will not be about the subjective experience of being(/doing?) Shinto even a little bit.

Selma Lagerlöf, The Outcast. Kindle. Early 20th century moral melodrama about a person who is reputed to have engaged in cannibalism (that part is chapter 1, I’m not spoilering anything) and all the good he does attempting to redeem himself in the eyes of his community. Not her best, I think.

Tiya Miles, Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation. Quite short, focused on 19th century women’s relationships with the out-of-doors, explicitly takes the time to look at Black, White, and Native American women in this context–but very American, not particularly concerned with a compare-and-contrast with other countries.

Ng Yi-Sheng, Lion City. Kindle. Queer Singaporean surrealist short stories. Weird and fun and, yes, weird. And weird.

Meredith K. Ray, Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. This is about the era when scientific culture itself was only barely emerging, and there’s a lot of stuff that’s right on that line where practical plant knowledge becomes botany or distilling expertise starts contributing to chemistry. Interesting stuff.

Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time. Basically this is “time: how does it $##@&% work?” There’s some elementary thermodynamics and some elementary quantum mechanics, nothing that will be troublesome if you’re shaky on math. There are also startling numbers of Smurfs employed in the time-related diagrams, apparently on the theory that Papa Smurf is the aged version of a default Smurf? Huh.

Naben Ruthnum, Helpmeet. Creepy Victorian body horror novella. I feel like this comes closer than anything else I’ve read that was written in the 21st century to actually feeling like how the Victorians would have done it, rather than being about Victorians (although it is that too).

Catherine Shaw, The Three-Body Problem. Kindle. A 19th century murder mystery about solving the N-body problem, fun even if you’re not interested in that. Will pursue more of this series. (This is good. I’ve been in the mood to find more mystery series.)

Vandana Singh, Distances. Another very readable genre-central SF novella from Vandana Singh, the second one I got for this year’s birthday.

Bogi Takács, Power to Yield and Other Stories. I really like it when collections provide durable locations for stories I’ve liked in their original printing plus other stories I haven’t gotten to yet. This delivered admirably on that combination.

Kat Tang, Five-Star Stranger. This is one of those literary novels that might have been science fiction and isn’t. The society in it has Rental Strangers who can be hired to perform roles in people’s lives–really basically any role from parent to job candidate. The protagonist has this profession and gets emotionally involved with some of his clients, which is a no-no. The ending was very flat, which is what happens when you want to have a premise like this and not examine any of the broader social stuff, it’s just: yep, that’s how that very specific personal thing plays out, okay.

P. G. Wodehouse, The Coming of Bill. Kindle. What a weird book. The problem with the eugenicist is that she…doesn’t let the titular little white boy play enough? Uh. Huh. So on the one hand, the eugenicist is vanquished in the end and the people she was trying to control are free of her, but on the other hand a lot of things about her go completely unchallenged and unremarked. Also this is one where strong men are supposed to wear the pants, seeeee, which: oh buddy no.

Patricia C. Wrede, Caught in Crystal. Kindle. One of the things that has come up several times on convention panels is the desire for more stories where parents and kids have adventures together. This is definitely one. Kayl is a retired swordswoman with two middle-sized kids who bicker like kids and get excited about new stuff like kids and generally act like kids, but also are plot-crucial to the fantasy adventure here.

Kelly Yang, Front Desk. A sweet, earnest MG book about a young Chinese immigrant girl who works at the front desk of the motel her parents manage. Her struggles are, as Yang notes in the afterword, entirely based in Yang’s experience, and they feel real throughout.

Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940. By “women of the Left Bank,” Benstock specifically means literary women: writers, editors, bookstore owners. This is not the tour de force that some more recent group biographies have been, but it’s still an interesting compare-and-contrast if you’re interested in the period.

Stephanie Burgis, A Marriage of Undead Inconvenience. Kindle. Light, fun novella about a scholar who is hustled into marriage with a vampire and has to belatedly learn the ways in which they can work together to their own benefit (but not necessarily their relatives’…).

Zig Zag Claybourne, Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe. Second in the Jetstream Brothers series, the focus of this volume is not on the eponymous brothers but on some of the women in their general circle. Similar gonzo full-on every-genre-in-a-blender tone, when you’re looking for something that just won’t quit.

Michael Cronin, Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene. Kindle. A brief work looking at various shapes of environmental impact of travel, direct and indirect.

Ellen Datlow, ed., Mad Hatters and March Hares. I picked this up on a whim, not because I have a particular Lewis Carroll interest, but there were a few quite good things in here–Jane Yolen’s, for example, what a surprise, and CSE Cooney’s, again not shocking but still satisfying. The bent of this volume is a bit darker than my tastes tend to be, but well done for that.

Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, eds., Black Thorn, White Rose. Reread. I can’t say “every one of these is a banger,” but pretty close, most of them are. There are some formative stories for me in here that I didn’t realize I first encountered here–I haven’t reread this since I was a teenager. I won’t say something foolish like “timeless” because all art is made in particular times, and the framings and concerns of these stories are of their time as much as anything else is. Shakespeare is, Middlemarch is, there’s no shame that these stories are. I should have gotten back to this sooner.

Michael J. DeLuca, The Jaguar Mask. Discussed elsewhere.

Harriet I. Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture. Through no fault of the author, I got a copy of this book that had every fourth page printed slightly blurry, which made it more of a slog than the text would otherwise be. The chapters that were most interesting to me were about disgrace during the Roman Republic and about empresses and other highly ranked women’s disgrace.

Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss. Short and vividly written, this is an interesting view of a kind of person who doesn’t often get the spotlight. Fox is particularly clear about the different shape of crime bosses in the 19th century, particularly in this case the focus on property crime rather than “vice” or violence as a central factor.

Margaret Frazer, The Prioress’ Tale and The Maiden’s Tale. Kindle. The next two Sister Frevisse mysteries. The Prioress’ Tale is in the sort of emotionally low part of the series thus far, and The Maiden’s Tale pulls the mood up a bit, to my relief. It also gets more political and changes up the structure of the book to have one of the murders very early rather than the first murder halfway through as this series has liked to do.

Maggie Graber, Swan Hammer: An Instructor’s Guide to Mirrors. Beautiful poetry, vivid, referential, grounded. I was surprised at the breadth of geography in Graber’s groundedness, much of the North American continent really, well done her.

Juliana Hu Pegues, Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements. Accounts of the relationships of both Alaskan Indigenous and immigrant Asian-Alaskan groups with each other and with white cultures. I wanted more here, but I’m glad to have even this much, it’s a pretty specialized topic.

Premee Mohamed, We Speak Through the Mountain. A sequel novella to The Annual Migration of Clouds, and you should probably read that first to enjoy this fully. Its protagonist has now arrived at the Promised Land that is college. Prepare to be disillusioned. I don’t think this is Dark Academia as I understand the genre, but it sure isn’t “academia is pure and lovely and will cherish its acolytes as humans,” and I like that it isn’t. Further SF ramifications since the first volume. Loved it.

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. It’s inevitable that some people will have to form theories right before major change, and this is one of those cases: Piven and Cloward were writing this leading up to the point where all the graphs of trends in American life in the 20th century hit a sharp turn. That’s not their fault. But it makes their assessment of movements and tendencies less useful than it otherwise might be.

Cameron Reed, The Fortunate Fall. Discussed elsewhere.

Zoe Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. Mostly about plant behavior. Schlanger occasionally seems more confused than I think is warranted about why the botanists she’s talking to are so intent on avoiding entangling themselves with debates about the nature of intelligence and instead try to focus on behaviors they can observe and document, but even with that caveat there’s a lot of interesting plant behavior in here.

Vivian Shaw, Bitter Waters. Kindle. The latest Dr. Greta Helsing story, this one in novella form. All the vampires you could possibly want in here. There’s never a moment where you could fairly say, “Good stuff but I wish you’d put in more vampires.” I don’t like vampires, this novella is wall-to-wall vampires, and I still like this novella, because I like Viv’s careful and humane exploration of the tropes.

Kathleen Sheppard, Women in the Valley of Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age. This title can’t quite be Lesbians in the Valley of Kings, but it’s close. There are a lot of wlw in this particular bit of history, and Sheppard is not shy about letting you know who they are–or which people might not have identified in ways that we do today. She also does a great job of making clear when the subjects of her work were on both ends of crushing prejudice, because some of them had to battle really terrible sexism and then perpetrated really terrible racism on their own hook, and Sheppard doesn’t shy away from that.

Dana Simpson, Unicorn Crush. This is the latest Phoebe & Her Unicorn volume, and it is not particularly outstanding as a stand-alone thing, but if you’re continuing to enjoy Phoebe and Marigold Heavenly Nostrils, as I am, it’s fun. And it sure won’t take you long.

Vandana Singh, Of Love and Other Monsters. This novella (it was a very novella birthday for me) is clearly in conversation with Octavia Butler about mental connection and the alien, which I find interesting as a subgenre categorization.

C. Spike Trotman, Kate Ashwin, Kel McDonald, and Taneka Stotts, eds., The Girl Who Married a Skull and Other African Stories. This is an anthology of short comics retelling African fables of the sort where there’s a clear moral to the story. The art styles vary considerably, so if you don’t like one, another will be along in 1-10 pages. Don’t go in expecting depth or substance, though, there’s only so much that can be done with three comic book pages at a go.

Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. What it says on the tin. Goes briskly and has lots of interesting details. If you like this kind of cultural history, I’m glad to be able to recommend you another of its genre.

Boyce Upholt, The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi. A mostly-cultural somewhat-natural history of the Mississippi River and what humans have done to try to manage it, and the ways in which that has and has not gone well. Interesting stuff, some stuff even I didn’t know, and I am a northern waters nerd.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a good friend and I read an early draft of this book.

Cristina Ramos is not making the art she meant to make–it didn’t sell. Her paintings now are safe, predictable–things she can sell to tourists. Things that keep her buying more art supplies, things that keep her helping her large and beloved family in the way she wants to, not in her mother’s restaurant the way she feels everyone expects from the oldest daughter. Her nephews need her, her mother needs her, everyone needs her. But she still has visions of another way–sometimes literally. And when her mother is gunned down as an afterthought to a political murder, she can’t hold those visions back any more.

That’s when she meets Felipe K’icab. He’s a jaguar shapeshifter who’s been driving an unlicensed cab, trying to use his collection of masks to get by in a world that’s tumultuous enough for plain humans. Felipe’s roommates have been trying to draw him into their activism, but he gets pulled into the wrong end of dealing with his country’s corruption when he picks up a fare who’s a corrupt cop who recognizes him for what he is. Coopted into an investigation that gets in the way of his own loyalties, he has to scramble to keep his own secrets–and save his closest friends.

Lushly written and beautifully imagined, The Jaguar Mask reaches for the truth of artist’s visions and the needs of family and friends. Their road to unmasked truth is fraught and so, so very human–even when it comes on velvet paws. One of my favorite books of the year, full of tension and hope.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I was just recently at a picnic with the author, so that’s nice.

Some of you may have read this book when its author was writing under her previous name. This is a Tor Essentials rerelease with a new introduction written by Jo Walton saying why she liked it so much the first time around.

One of the things that’s astonishing to me about The Fortunate Fall is how clearly it thinks about the internet compared to a lot of cyberpunk preceding it. The political and social mores of having some people telling stories, others filtering those stories, and still others receiving without knowing what’s gone into either part of the process–that’s something that’s so well-done in The Fortunate Fall, something that’s less the mirrorshades cool of early cyberpunk and more the scarred and lumpy reality we actually got.

Maya Andreyeva’s life as a “camera” is not a glamorous one. Like everyone else who has been wired to record, she’s hustling to convey the most compelling sensations and impressions of whatever it is she’s covering, in hopes that it be safe and yet daring enough to broadcast. She got the job she got at the beginning of the book–covering a forgotten genocide–by sheer trickery, and that’s more or less status quo. Her new “screener” Keishi seems familiar and inexperienced at the same time, and Maya has constant difficulty trusting her.

That’s before they get to the whale, or the technological pan-African empire, or the swapping of hardware to get around different kinds of repression…there’s a lot going on in this book, and it’s fascinating, and one of the things that’s really fascinating is that the stuff that was then-unusual and is now-usual is still written well. I’m thinking in particular of the same-sex relationship that’s the center of the book. Cameron wrote toward a world where no one would have to pat your hand and tell you not to be scared of the lesbians, and partly as a result of that we got to that world. And because it’s not hand-patting about it, the core of the relationship holds up beautifully. It’s a wonder to behold. And now you can behold it! Because it’s available again.

Olivia Chadha, Fall of the Iron Gods. A sequel, very much a sequel, with mechas and an environmentally devastated world. Betrayal and reunion, fun stuff.

Vajra Chandrasekera, Rakesfall. Generation-spanning weird experimental book with echoes of the Sri Lankan Civil War throughout spacetime including onto a dying planet. Even in the weirdest parts, very well-written.

K.A. Cobell, Looking for Smoke. A mystery about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, centering around Blackfeet teenagers. It’s really well done and really emotionally wrenching, particularly if you have a personal connection to this issue. I clutched the pages so hard I had to be careful not to tear them.

Emily J. Edwards, Viviana Valentine Goes Up the River and Viviana Valentine and the Ticking Clock. The second and third volumes of an historical murder mystery series, set in 1950-1951 so far. Fun but not impeccable, so if you’re picky about historicals, this may not be the one for you.

Erin M. Evans, Relics of Ruin. Another very sequel-ish sequel, returning to interesting characters and setting. No reason not to read the first one first in this fun secondary world fantasy setting.

Rebecca Fraimow, Lady Eve’s Last Con. To continue the fun reads theme of this fortnight–which was not wholly deliberate on my part, it’s partly just what the library happened to get in–this is a frothy delightful space opera romance with a con artist main character. I particularly liked the artificial beach scene for being a very science fictional intervention in this type.

Sara B. Franklin, The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America. Brief and delightful biography of a person who was influential across multiple kinds of writing. Not everything that happened to her was delightful, but that’s the nature of the 20th century….

Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire. This is a bug-crusher of a book, and it’s just what I wanted, recounting the revolutionaries and revolutionary movements of South and Southeast Asia in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It successfully centers the perspectives of people in those regions, touching on the rest of the global political scene only as appropriate rather than centering US/European white perspectives. If you’ve ever felt like you’d like to sort out a bit more of who knew whom and who was doing what when, in the anticolonialist movements of Asia, this is a very useful book.

Allan Kaster, ed., The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 8. I make a policy of not reviewing books that I’m in, and I’m in this one.

L.M. Montgomery, The Blythes Are Quoted. Kindle. Oh, what a disappointment this was. The premise is that Anne Shirley Blythe is reading her poetry to her family and we get their reactions in stage dialog form, interspersed with short stories in which other people star but are obsessed with the Blythe family. This is lampshaded by various characters saying that they’re sick of hearing about the Blythes…only to be completely undercut by them all feeling great about the Blythe obsession once their own lives are sorted out. She died before this got published, and perhaps if she hadn’t an editor would have asked her to fill out the poetry scenes with, well, scenes. And it would be better if I liked her poetry, which I definitely do not. This is the last bit of Anne of Green Gables fiction I had unread, and I wish I’d left it there.

Jay Owens, Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles. About literally what it says on the tin, and a lot more interesting than you might expect dust to be. Science! with dust! Good times, also not terribly long.

Noel Streatfeild, Myra Carrol. Kindle. A novel about the life of a woman who falls into decadence and climbs back out again through the love of her children. She uses the word “decadent” a lot, which is not particularly comfortable for me in a book from the World War II era–especially when the proper thing the character is returning to is very kinder, küche, kirche. She’s explicitly anti-Nazi, but she’s not always advocating positions as far from them as I’d think.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, House of Open Wounds. Look, it’s got it right in the title. If you feel like you’re going too read a book called House of Open Wounds and expect it not to be gory and gross, that’s on you. This is a fantasy about battlefield medicine, which is something you don’t see nearly enough of, and I thought it was really well done, but it is what it is. Go in forewarned. (Also it’s a sequel, but I think it’s a pretty stand-alone sequel.)

Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck, eds., We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage. I picked this up from the library’s new book display, and it contains poems by a lot of poets I have liked before. Unfortunately I re-learned that love poetry is not very central to my preferences, that I enjoy it more when it’s a handful of love poems in among other kinds of poems. Ah well.

Alan Bradley, What Time the Sexton’s Blade Doth Rust. Discussed elsewhere.

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time. This was a fun time travel book, though it had one of the plot twists I find tedious in time travel fiction. The relationships are strong, and the central time traveler characters are vividly of their times. The focus on the government program running the time travel situation is very well done and compelling–the title is not metaphorical, it actually is a government department–and I was happy to just dive into this.

Colin G. Calloway, The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America. This is intended to be a primary sources compendium with minimal commentary from the editor. It’s all regionally grouped along the Atlantic coast. If you read this period and focus of history, you’ll have read several of these documents, but here they are all in one place.

Miriam Darlington, Otter Country: An Unexpected Adventure in the Natural World. A charming volume of natural history about observing and spending time with wild otters in the UK and how that’s been handled previously in literature etc. Not particularly long, very smoothly done.

Justine Firnhaber-Baker, House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France. Ah, the Capetians. So many jerks, so many centuries. This is an interesting account of this dynasty, if you’re interested in the transition from the Frankish to the French, if you’re interested in dynastic politics at all, if you like the kind of history where the historian is very clear that the past only looks inevitable to us because we can see it from this distance and in the lived reality it wasn’t inevitable at all.

Margaret Frazer, The Murderer’s Tale. Kindle. This is one of the less pleasant reads in this series simply because of the time in the point of view of the titular character. He’s not merely a murderer but an arrogant jackass, and you get to spend a lot of time in his head. Also Dame Frevisse is having a cranky book, and one can’t entirely blame her with the amount of death that’s been surrounding her. But it’s just a very prickly entry in this ongoing series.

Jodi Meadows, Bye Forever I Guess. Discussed elsewhere.

Premee Mohamed, The Siege of Burning Grass. A weird fantasy meditation on pacifism, war, and how we justify ourselves, lots of beautiful tiny details of magic/tech that are not genre standard, very much fun to read, recommended.

Gennarose Nethercott, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories. Kelly Link blurbed this book, and you can see why: a lot of its themes and stylistic concerns overlap with Link’s favorite types of short story work. I found it generally quite charming, though the illustrated title story was not really my jam.

Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski, The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family, and Kingdom. It was entirely coincidence that I read this and the book about the Capetians in the same fortnight, but it was a lovely coincidence, because it detailed how two very different polities had evolved toward similar(…ish) governance from very different places. Raffensperger and Ostrowski are very careful not to frame their work as giving credence to contemporary Russian nationalist ideas about the proper boundaries of Russia, using Rus and other relevant terms so as to be clear which entities were when. An interesting resource for this era and region.

Tabitha Stanmore, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic. This is very centered on England with a little bit of France and the rest of Europe. It’s got a lot of interesting detail about practical magic, how it was used, how it was regarded, how it was not regarded though modern people assume it was. It’s short and interesting, so if you have any inclination towards this topic, it’s not going to be a big commitment.

Boel Westin, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words. This is more or less a work biography of Jansson. If you want more about her interiority, you’ll need her own work. There’s not a lot of depth of emotion, but there sure is a lot of information about what she did when, and that’s interesting and useful in itself.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Well, I don’t know if this is the last Flavia de Luce mystery Alan Bradley is writing, but it’s the last one I’m reading.

The trick of young protagonists is that they grow up if you give them enough story time to do so. Adults ideally grow as well, but I think we find more tolerance for an adult character, especially an adult detective in a series, who doesn’t change much. A kid, though…there’s a precedent for Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden to stay the same age forever, but those are not series for adults. The teenage-ness of those detectives is the magical “big kid” nature of looking up in age at teens, not looking down at them. Flavia de Luce has to progress in self-awareness to be satisfying.

Entire Cousin Undine, who allows Bradley to keep writing about a precocious, bratty little girl and also give Flavia a taste of her own medicine. I see why he’s brought Cousin Undine into the series and also I don’t really enjoy the result. “What if this was entirely about a more mature teenager” is not the series he wants to write. Okay. But as for what I want to read…well.

And one of the things that forced Flavia to grow up recently was dealing with death as real and immediate, dealing with dead people as people and not merely mysteries. This book has the kind of plot twist that I find unconscionable: it leans on a character’s emotional reaction for pathos and growth and then pulls the rug out with “surprise, that person faked their own death.” To avoid spoilers, sort of, I’m not saying which character it was who died and then turned out not to have died, but it was basically the worst possible choice for my enjoyment of the series. I was beyond annoyed and into angry and disgusted. If you don’t hate that particular plot twist the same way as I do, you might still be entertained by this series despite Cousin Undine, or even because of her if your tastes run that way. Me, I’m done.

The other thing is that the reasoning for the faked death is related to the way that Bradley keeps leaning into secret super-spy networks as this series evolves, and frankly I find his secret super-spy networks super-tedious, so if anything could have made this plot twist worse, it’s that it’s done for very boring reasons. The more I learn about this super-spy network, the less impressed I am. So this is my stop, actually, this is where I throw Gladys the bicycle in the grass and wander away. The early books in the series are good, they’re still there, you can read them. This one is a stinker, and not just because of the prevalence of fart jokes with Cousin Undine.