Tag: bookses precious

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I know the author online.

Hope cannot be given away to you, or to anyone. Hope is the song which arises from silence where all our voices had been; all those locked away against their will one day will surge again, come forth with great exuberance, sweep the world in a reverberation of rainbow….

Do you need a book that has the concept of hope seriously woven through every thread of it right now? I bet you do. I bet you did even in January.

And here it is, The Four Profound Weaves, centering on transformation, expectation, and hope. This is a story in Lemberg’s Birdverse, a place we’ve started to learn from short stories–and characters we’ve seen in those stories as well. All the things that I have loved about the stories, the magic of weaving air and sand and more, are developed, pondered, iterated here. The desert and the city beyond it, the people who don’t quite fit in one culture or another and have to find their own path, they are all here with space to breathe, to learn to breathe, to care for each other in imperfect human ways and to find their own paths out of the human difficulties before–and behind–them.

I picked up The Four Profound Weaves after reading a long book about horrible people, and it was incredibly restorative. It was fun and gripping and a very fast read, and the book design was beautiful. But along with all those things it was refreshing at a time when my heart needed to be refreshed. Highly recommended.

Katherine Addison, The Angel of the Crows. Discussed elsewhere.

Lawrence Block, The Burglar in Short Order. A little bit ago I read the Collected Janet Kagan and found some of the pieces in it to be really pointless trifles, and someone (Beth I think?) said that they were glad that everything had been included so that they could be sure that there was nothing else lurking out there that was worthwhile. Well, this is another volume where you can be absolutely sure that you have all the Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery short works, all of them, no matter how trifling. If you don’t know whether you like the Bernie Rhodenbarr stories, this is definitely, truly not where to find out; if you’re lukewarm, steer clear. This is only for people who want to be absolutely sure they have not missed any Bernie Rhodenbarr fiction of any length. (I turn out not to be in that set after all. Ah well.)

Chaz Brenchley, Mary Ellen–Craterean! Chapters 1-2. Kindle. This is the beginning of a bouncy fun new Crater School serial. I have in my Kindle the beginning of something in the same world with a different tone, so the contrast should be interesting.

Stephanie Burgis, Good Neighbors. Kindle. This is the first in a short fiction series: light, fun, mad scientist stories with I think a romance coming if the main characters can dodge the torch-wielding mob for long enough….

E. L. Chen, The Good Brother. This is a ghost story about Hungry Ghost Month and a young Chinese-Canadian bookstore clerk whose brother died. It is also about depression and suicide. I found the characterization really well done, but I was concerned with how the mental health issues were handled in this fantasy context. Specifically…I have serious issues with books where the entire fantasy content can be read as a metaphor for mental health issues, and the more so when that seems to carry the possibility for multiplying rather than assisting with real mental health issues. I’d recommend this one only with extreme caution.

Hannah Abigail Clarke, The Scapegracers. Discussed elsewhere.

Eleanor Shipley Ducket, Carolingian Portraits: A Study in the Ninth Century. This was a treasure I was startled to find, a chatty mid-century volume about kings and monks and scholars. I always want more about the ninth century–really, always–so I was delighted to find the prose lucid and readable, because I would totally have been willing to put up with a slog for what it says on the tin. Gender issues are almost completely absent, but I’ll take what I can get of the ninth century sometimes.

Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan, An Embarrassment of Witches. I am not the target audience for this comic–it’s very new-adult, very focused on finding your path in life through relationship confusion and weird magic–but I enjoyed it anyway.

Julian Jarboe, Everyone On the Moon Is Essential Personnel. This is such a prickly gem. The title story in particular grabbed and held me, but the shining anger and love in the other stories, ranging all over the genre world, was worth the price of admission.

Jenny Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society. Very much what it says on the tin. Some extremely useful stuff in here, and some gaps that I would expound on for hours, but in general recommended if you’re interested in this topic.

S. A. Jones, The Fortress. Discussed elsewhere.

Kapka Kassabova, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe. This is about Thrace, more or less; it’s about Bulgaria-Greece-Turkey, particularly Bulgaria but the borderland of all three of them, and how people live along that border. It is full of anecdote. It won’t be a particular favorite to reread, but it held my attention well enough.

Jane Kenyon, Collected Poems. I got interested in Kenyon’s work because of the poems her husband wrote grieving for her–I had no particular interest in reading more of his work, but the person he was mourning sounded worth mourning. And indeed this is so. Her poems are keenly observed, specific, often very daily/familial or very nature-focused, and I liked watching them unfold.

William Bryant Logan, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees. I need to remember just not to read Logan’s books any more. He’s one of those people you read and find that he’s untrustworthy in the small details you already know, and then how can you trust him in the ones you don’t know? This book is about coppicing, about which he is an extreme evangelist. Along the way he makes such unacknowledged and unforced errors as attributing a slogan from disability rights activism to the Crips street gang. Not recommended in the least.

Lydia Millet, The Bodies of the Ancients. The third in her middle grade fantasy series. This follows the pattern of Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quartet (…I know, don’t @ me) less closely than the previous two. There is no jump forward in the characters’ lives, and the plot is very differently balanced as to which characters get to be active–so in that sense I feel like Millet is coming more into her own as a children’s author. For me it didn’t quite work–it leaned into a trope that I find annoying at best–but it was a near miss, and I’m sorry she doesn’t seem to be doing a lot more with different children’s books using her own patterns.

Premee Mohamed, Beneath the Rising. This is 100% not my usual sort of thing, being cosmic horror. Premee is a friend, though, and she’s done cosmic horror really, really well–and the central relationship in this book is just impeccably done. It’s entirely a relationship-focused piece of fiction, and that relationship is funny and sweet and mean and loving and horrible and human at every turn. If you’re up for horrible creatures from outside our universe trying to remake it and us to their liking–if you’re even a little bit up for that–this is such a good one of those.

Suzanne Palmer, Driving the Deep. Discussed elsewhere.

Caroline Stevermer, The Glass Magician. Discussed elsewhere.

Breanna Teintze, Lady of Shadows. Discussed elsewhere.

Emily Tesh, Drowned Country. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a friend of mine after these years of sharing our awesome agent.

This is the direct sequel to Silver in the Wood, and I strongly recommend reading that before this one, because Henry Silver and Tobias Finch and all the complications of their relationship with each other and with uncanny creatures and the land start there.

The course of true love, we know, never did run smooth…especially when one of you is the Wild Man of Greenhollow. Henry and Tobias are, at the moment, more intrigued with monster hunting and saving a lost girl than they are with each other, or so they’d like to pretend. But the lost Maud Lindhurst is not what either of them expected–and neither is the shabby seaside town where they have to go to find her. Its connections with Fairyland are not any nicer than you’d expect from the previous volume’s encounters with Faerie, and Henry and Tobias have to marshal their resources together–together, dammit–to get themselves and Maud back to the woods safely.

The beach is a very stressful place. Take a friend. And definitely take this non-traditional beach read–or read it at home under a good blanket. Delightful.

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

This is an object lesson in the value of filing off serial numbers. Really, I mean that wholeheartedly and so very enthusiastically. Because this both is and is not a Sherlock Holmes story. It is clearly, plainly, not trying to hide it, inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. And yet it is not a Sherlock Holmes story, it is clearly and firmly not, and the distance between Crow and Holmes, between Watson and Doyle, is enough to pour worlds into. It is not a technicality, it is an opening that lets in an entirely different kind of story.

This story would not be possible if I was comparing, at every turn, to my previously held view of Watson, saying, wait, what? Watson’s secrets are what? How does that square with what I previously know of Watson? Which things are alternate and which am I to keep? I am not to keep things, I am to trust what is built, not about Watson about this new character Dr. J. H. Doyle, whose experience in Afghanistan is not the same, because Doyle has been wounded by one of the Fallen, in a world where angels, vampires, werewolves, and hellhounds are part of the daily landscape.

And they are woven deeply into the fabric of this story. Addison knows the Jack the Ripper facts in our world incredibly well, so she knows how to use them deftly in a story that’s about so many more things. The fantasy elements go deeply into everything here, with thought and care, and the characters are layered and wonderful. I’m just so glad of this book.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a personal friend and shares an agent with me.

Lady of Shadows catches up with Gray and Brix not long after the events of Breanna’s first book, Lord of Secrets. They have settled into a peaceful life, everything is fine, and this book is basically them having fancy iced cakes with friends while they contemplate which traveling musicians should play for them.

Wait, no. It’s not. Actually it’s not at all. Because magical plague and also Brix’s relatives.

(I should note here that the magical plague is not at all like the real plague we are dealing with right now, and I don’t think it will be the least bit triggering. It is very magical and very, very different. There’s no way around the fact that there is a plague in this book, but it is not stressful, honestly.)

I also wanted to get Alan Rickman in this book to do the bit from Galaxy Quest where he yells at Tim Allen’s character for always managing to get his shirt off. Because Gray? Is always. Managing to get his shirt off. And sometimes the rest of his clothes with it. So many magical tattoo moments! So much naked magician!

The thing about Breanna’s books is that they have heart, they have plot, but they also have just a ridiculous amount of fun packed in. This came at just the right time for me, but I suspect that any time would have been the right time, and I suspect it will be for you too.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a personal friend.

I was so excited to get this from Caroline, because I’d been hearing bits and pieces of it as it was in progress but didn’t read the manuscript–perfect amounts of information to be optimally excited. And I was not disappointed.

Thalia Cutler is a stage magician, struggling to get by on skill and wit in an alternate twentieth century where the wealthiest families have not only the power of their money but also magical shapechanging powers. As an orphan, she’s worked with her guardian dad’s friend, Nutall, doing the only kinds of magic she knows: sleights of hand, cunning tricks. Then one night a jammed mechanism threatens her life and forces her into a kind of magic she didn’t know she could do.

And then there are the monsters after her.

The rich magicians have resources. The rich magicians have safety. The rich magicians have training. Thalia has what she’s always had, except now angry people trying to figure out what’s going on with her, and also monsters. So that’s fun.

No, really, it’s a lot of fun. For the reader. Not for Thalia so much.

I raced through this book with barely a glance at the outside world. I can’t wait for more.

Review copy provided by the publisher, and also the author is an online friend.

This is the sequel to last year’s Finder, with the same protagonist: Fergus Ferguson, interplanetary repo man. Fergus has been…changed…by his adventures in the previous volume, giving him some additional, uh…problem-solving options that I don’t want to spoil for you here, and he takes full advantage of them here.

Because he really, really needs to.

Fergus’s strength is his friends, but they’re also his weakness. Particularly when nefarious parties have done their best to kill them all. But where his friends are concerned, Fergus isn’t going down without a fight. Even if that means going way, way down…

Under the frozen waters of Enceladus.

Yeah, the ice moon of Saturn is host to a lot of angry people and their angry secrets, and that’s where Fergus has to do if he wants to save his friends, adopt a cat, and pick apart an additional mystery he didn’t even know he was in on. Spacefaring adventure that crackles with electricity. If you liked Finder, definitely pick up Driving the Deep.

There is a beautiful passage toward the beginning of The Scapegracers where the character talks about the ways and reasons in which people direct anger and frustration toward girls and young women, why and how they get underestimated. Hannah Abigail Clarke doesn’t make those mistakes.

This is a contemporary fantasy about teenage witches and their friendship, about trying to figure out who you are and what the hell you’re doing in a world with a lot more to it than you expected. So: the teen experience. With cool new friends who sometimes scare you, when you’re scaring yourself, and also horrible enemies, and also a crush, and what even is this fancy restaurant. So: the teen. experience. In so very very many ways.

Sideways and her friends are so well drawn, so very skillfully and respectfully done, and by respectfully I don’t mean that Clarke mistakes them for superheroes or even adults, but that they are allowed to be themselves. They are allowed to be grumpy, bristly, snarky, loving, guilty, full of rage; they are allowed to like eyeliner and worry that they’re screwing up various things; they rush in where wiser heads might advise caution and try things that just might work (but also might not). They are so human and so great, and I’m delighted that this is only their first book.

Karen Babine, All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer. This is about cooking for her mother, who had cancer. Spoiler alert: her mother did not die of cancer in the course of this book! I know that for some of you I just ruined this slim volume of nonfiction, and I’m very sorry, but for others I have made it possible to read the thing. She’s obsessed with secondhand shop Le Creuset, she’s a vegetarian who’s cooking meat for a sick carnivore, and the sick carnivore does not die at this time. You’re welcome. Come on, some stresses we just don’t need right now.

Claire Eliza Bartlett, The Winter Duke. Discussed elsewhere.

Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom. I picked this up because of my interest in Malaysia, even under its British colonial name, Malaya. It turns out that Malaya is also the name of Cinelle Barnes’s daughter! Who, if she has anything to do with Malaysia, does not reveal it in the course of these essays! That’s okay, though, because they turned out to be interesting in themselves. Barnes was an undocumented immigrant to the US from the Philippines who managed to regularize her legal status in the US and has very interesting thoughts on that process; she is fierce and detailed and fascinating.

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Orphans of Raspay. Kindle. The latest Penric and Desdemona novella, in which Pen and his demon companion–and various others–are kidnapped by pirates and must effect their escape. Fun for fans of the series but probably not a good beginning place, go back to where Pen starts this whole thing.

Roshani Chokshi, The Gilded Wolves. I have enjoyed Chokshi’s middle grade books, but YA is a whole different ballgame, so I was wondering how this would go. Quite well, it turns out! Gilded Age Paris with a whole bunch of magic and some interesting people like a mathematician, a baker, and a spider enthusiast. There are important friendships as well as romances, there are lovely clothes, there is a lot of swirling color and bright lights in the more general scene-setting sense, and I had fun with this and will be glad to find the sequel.

Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America. This is a history of the Lakota in specific and of the Native world around them in general, how they migrated and were pushed. Hämäläinen includes thought and analysis about where and how he uses terms like Lakota, Dakota, Sioux, and so on, and the maps are some of the most sensible maps I have ever seen in books because they are centered on water at all times, so even though north is not always up, you can find Lake Superior or Lake of the Woods or the Missouri River or whatever it is and know just where you are immediately, they’re so intuitive, it’s great. Fascinating, recommended.

Diana Henry, Pure Simple Cooking. I am the wrong audience for this, because mostly I looked at them and thought, well yes, of course. But not everyone is used to thinking in these terms, and if you want to start, this is probably a pretty good place. A few ingredients used quite well, per recipe, probably a good cookbook for that.

Kathy Iandoli, God Save the Queens: the Essential History of Women in Hip-Hop. What a lovely corrective to the hip-hop documentaries that don’t seem to notice women exist at all. (Argh. Argh.) I am not a big hip-hop fan, so for me this is more educating myself than grooving with my faves–although I’m surprised to notice how many faves I already do have–so someone who is better versed in the genre than I am can evaluate it more from that perspective. As a non-expert, I learned a lot, and you might too.

Rosemary Kirstein, The Steerswoman’s Road. Reread. These are such lovely books of inquisitiveness, care, and discovery. I intended to just stop with this volume (which is a two-book omnibus), but I may well just go on and reread all of what’s there, because really…they’re so good. The characters are so focused on learning each other and their world.

Janet Malcolm, Nobody’s Looking at You. I like the personal essay as a form, but it was so nice to pick up a volume of essays that wasn’t focused on how the essayist felt in her early twenties, that instead was external, thinking about how people do things in the world, profiles of others and what Janet Malcolm has thought of them. A few of the essays were more than twenty years old and felt oddly dated to include–I see why she felt they were some really good work at the time, they just sat strangely with the more recent work. But the effect was to make me wish that she’d had more than one collection like this, not to make me wish I hadn’t read them.

Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby. This is a really strong and affecting novella that starts with a very young girl just before the Rodney King verdict and goes into her adult life and her brother’s adult life as Black people trying to work around a corrupt system as best they can. Magic provides a frame, a solace, insight, sometimes relief, but not a fix for that system–which is in some ways more satisfying, acknowledging that we will all have to keep grappling with it from our own angles, that we are not released from the work by having clearer sight of it.

C.M. Waggoner, Unnatural Magic. For me this book demonstrated one of the risks of having multiple points of view–Margaret Atwood has also had this problem–which is that sometimes I like one point of view vastly, vastly more than another. It was only toward the end, as they began to converge, that I was not impatient with one thread of this book and constantly wanting to get back to the other, but as with other competent multi-POV authors (see also Atwood) it would not have made much sense if I’d just skipped half the prose. Still: there is a stubborn and mathetmatically minded magical protagonist here, and she was worth my time.

Lawrence Wechsler, And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? Wechsler was going to be Oliver Sacks’s biographer. Became his friend. Then Sacks realized that he really, truly did not want a biographer while he was alive, largely because of attitudes about his sexuality during his upbringing. Wechsler, as his friend, acquiesced to his wishes and went on to write other things and hang out more with Sacks. For the rest of his life. And this is a very strange book as a consequence. It’s not the comprehensive biography someone should write–Wechsler knows what material there is to go through for that, knows that this is not it. It’s more of a memoir of a friendship, with the notes for what could have been more of a biography of who Oliver Sacks was in his younger years, except he kept going. Worth reading, interesting, funny, sad, sure, but weirdly shaped, and not just in the ways that anything about Oliver Sacks was going to come out nonstandard.

Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone. This is fundamentally a family story. It’s novella length, multiple viewpoints, long timeline, just different views of how a family views their family life. It has major events in it–the birth of an unexpected child is central, but so is 9/11, and yet…I think this is the first book I read that treated 9/11 sensitively but historically. The people who are directly affected are very clearly hurt, but not in a way that is automatically the only thing the book is about, the way it would have been in 2003 or even I think 2010. Just as now we can have stories where World War II changed people forever–it changed my grandmother, and so many people we know–but know something of the shape of how the survivors’ stories go on. Perhaps now is a good time for a story where an event most people who are old enough to enjoy reading this book can be devastating, can be recognized as devastating, but still have an “after”…but perhaps not if you’re a direct survivor yourself, so I wanted to flag that.

Review copy provided by Erewhon Books.

This is the first book I’ve gotten to review from Erewhon, I believe the first book they’re putting out at all. It’s an interesting choice to set the tone for their new imprint–very much a book both of the current moment and of science fiction’s past.

Jonathon Bridge is a man at odds with himself. He’s not even sure he understands everything that has upset his wife–the details unfold over the course of the book–but one of the conditions for staying in their marriage and co-parenting their child is that he spend a year in The Fortress. The Fortress is a woman-run city-state which men only enter under certain extremely narrow conditions–basically a gender serfdom.

This feels like a book from the ’70s. It has all the “and then it’s a fortress OF WOMEN” and “let’s learn about gender in a very encounter-y sort of way” elements that…there were LOADS of those, some of you read fourteen of them the year you were fourteen, I know I did. And I feel like S.A. Jones was maybe one of us and wanted to read one of them and realized how INCREDIBLY PROBLEMATIC all of those ’70s gender encounter books are in retrospect and said, huh, let’s do one in the present moment that people can read right now without screaming. There is a lot more emphasis on consent, on structural problems, on being part of structural problems even if you are not the worst of them. On empathy and understanding other people’s viewpoints. So if you grew up with those ’70s gender encounter books and feel like you’d like another that’s more up-to-date, this is definitely for you–and if you have no idea what I’m talking about, this might also be for you.

I do wonder whether this will age any better than the previous iterations did. I wonder whether the things that it is saying about learning what it feels like to be helpless, to consent and then feel uncertain about the free value of that consent, the context of that consent, all of those things…will feel retrograde and gross. But that’s how we get there. We don’t get there by never talking about it, by never going off and thinking about what someone else said. We get there by doing another round of them and then saying, okay, but, but this thing, it doesn’t take into account this other thing, and then this, and also that. That’s how conversation works, that’s how discourse works.

There’s a lot about sex and gender and consent in here, and I feel like Erewhon’s opening statement was: we know what this field is, and we want to move the discourse forward, even if it’s sometimes uncomfortable.

Well, okay. Thanks. I’ll look forward to that.