Tag: bookses precious

Stephanie Burgis, Masks and Shadows. This is a fun fantasy about Habsburgs and opera singers and alchemy. There are masked balls and banquets and all sorts of court intrigue of the sorts that I think a lot of my friends find fun to read about, and yet I don’t remember hearing this book talked about when it came out–I only saw that there was another in the world with Congress of Secrets when I looked at Stephanie’s webpage to see when a couple of other things were coming out. And I’m glad I did.

Agatha Christie, Murder on the Links. Kindle. This is an early Poirot mystery, and when I was sick it was a fine light read. I think she was still realizing how much it was going to be a series at that point, with the second volume, but it was fun, and some of the things that bother me about the TV series were completely the opposite in this book (though it would be a spoiler to say what, so if you want to talk about what, email me).

Aliette de Bodard, The House of Binding Thorns. This is the second in its series, and it’s full of ramification and implication, so I recommend reading the first one first. Angels and dragons and Paris! Illness and childbirth and addiction and trickery! So much skillfully interwoven here.

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss. Kindle. Knowing what I do about George Eliot (Maryann Evans) and her actual life, this was a beautiful and heartbreaking book and I wanted to travel back in time and kick her brother in the shins and hug her and invite her and her partner and stepsons to Christmas dinner. This is a passionate story of a nerdy, unconventional young woman and how much she loves her rules-driven brother and craves his approval, and how she basically can never, ever have it. And the ending made me cry, and yet also I think that trying to give it to high school students who don’t have a really strong basis in Victorian cultural mores and this author in specific is futile and likely to make them hate her. But when it’s on your own hook, with the right background…oh, I loved reading this.

Elizabeth Hand, Errantry: Strange Stories. These are, indeed, strange stories; they are slightly off to the side of the main thrust of genre structure and expectation, often with less of a linear plot focus than a lot of genre-central manuscripts and more focus on mood evocation.

Laurence M. Hauptmann, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State. I was a bit disappointed on how much this focused on the white people who dispossessed the Iroquois, but on the whole it was an interesting additional set of data about the Erie Canal, the power elite of New York State, and the various ways that the Iroquoian people found to remain a force for their own culture and self-determination in the face of overwhelming odds.

Rose Macaulay, Potterism. Kindle. This is a novel about how easy it is to fall into the ruts of the conventional even when your life is dedicated to opposing them. It does not, itself, generally fall into those ruts as often as one might fear; there were several points in its short length at which I blinked and said, “Well, I didn’t see that coming.” Some of it is frothy and witty, some of it portrays staggering amounts of anti-Semitism directed at one of its most wholly positive characters, and while it is not approving of that anti-Semitism, you can’t really brace and say, okay, we’re done with that bit now, no more anti-Semitic slurs will pop up here. Similarly sexism: Macaulay is quietly, bitterly, wittily furious at some of the sexism she has encountered and uses it as fuel for this novel, but there it is, if you don’t want to read about it today, don’t read this book today. Aside from that, though: she doesn’t turn conventional pieties in a mirror by insisting that the conventionally pious will get their comeuppances instead of the conventionally impious–she understands the world differently than that, and that was…good but also frustrating but generally quite good.

Eduardo Jimenez Mayo and Chris N. Brown, eds., Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic. These were mostly quite short and, like the Hand above but in a completely different direction, very focused on evocative mood and language. I’m glad these stories were translated and compiled, as I found them very much worth reading and will probably return to this anthology for a reread.

Lindsay Smith, Max Gladstone, Cassandra Rose Clarke, Ian Tregillis, and Michael Swanwick, The Witch Who Came In From the Cold (Season 1). This is a compilation of a serial, so it has the pacing of a serial, which is to say, sometimes rather slow. The thing it’s doing where Soviet vs. US and the two kinds of magic don’t map to each other made me very happy, though, and if you’re also a sucker for spy stories, you won’t want to miss it.

I spent late September having influenza! Boy was that…about as much fun as you’ve heard influenza is! And much of what I could do in that time was read. So read I did! Yay reading! Note: this is a particularly bad time to make comments about how you wish you had that much time for reading, as I had to cancel several other things I was excited about in order to lie in bed, feel terrible, and read. Still yay reading! But…not really to be envied. Even though some of these books are great.

Roma Agrawal, Built: The Hidden Structures Behind Our Structures. This is definitely a “pop structural engineering” level book; for all Agrawal outs herself as a nerd, she’s aiming at the general audience. But if you’re looking for little nuggets of trivia and interest about materials and building, from the most basic structures up to the most modern skyscrapers, this is your jam.

Gavin Chappell, translator, Sagas of Ancient Kings; Sorli’s Yarn: The Saga of Hedin and Hogni; The Saga of Asmund, Bane of Champions; The Saga of Fridthjof the Bold; The Saga of Hervor and Heidrek; The Saga of Hrolf Kraki and His Champions; The Saga of Hromund Gripsson; The Saga of Thorstein Vikingsson; The Sagas of Ketil Trout and Grim Hairy-cheek. Kindle. Oh so many legendary sagas. Oh so many. So many people turning into wolves, swans, and who knows what else. They’re actually pretty perfect to read in bulk with a fever because fever logic and saga logic live next door to each other: and then he ate live coals and turned into a troll, sure, yes, why not.

Nicky Drayden, Escaping Exodus. Discussed elsewhere.

Jennifer Giesbrecht, The Monster of Elendhaven. This novella is darker than my usual fare, but sure-handed and beautifully done. The classes and regions of the worldbuilding, the individual relationships in the magic, the decay and the illness and the murder murder murder….

Ben Hatke, Mighty Jack and Zita the Space Girl. This is a team-up capstone to these two series, and I think it works best if you’ve read the books in both, because a lot of it involves revisiting characters and places from previous episodes in a dash to the finish.

Kat Howard, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone. There are some truly beautiful stories in here, including a college Arthurian that is just exactly my jam. Highly, highly recommended.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Peculiar Ground. This book was mis-shelved by a used bookstore that thought it was fantasy; its speculative content is extremely minimal. Mostly it is a literary novel about walls and boundaries, ranging from the Restoration to the fall of the Berlin Wall. I enjoyed the experience of reading it but once I’ve had a chance to think it over, some of the thematic implications are kind of gross, but not gross enough to ruin the entire thing–especially not gross enough to ruin the rare chance at Restoration garden design fiction.

Kelly Jones, Sauerkraut. This is a really fun kids’ book about a haunted fermenting crock and a kid who likes to make stuff! and his family and their various interests! it is great! it is by the chicken book person! I am basically made of exclamation marks when I talk about this book!

Margaret Killjoy, The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion. Kindle. A novella that does not outstay its welcome: it gets in, tells its story of magic in a small town commune of squatters and punks, and gets out again. This is what the pacing of novellas is supposed to do. Its characterization is precise and clear, its plotting doesn’t linger purposelessly, and its details are very well drawn.

Karen Lord, Unraveling. Karen Lord is always doing something different from anybody else, and this is no exception. It’s a labyrinthine fantasy of solving a serial murder related to immortals and their influence on humans, and it pays attention to that influence in ways that don’t fall apart when you keep thinking.

Rose Macaulay, Mystery at Geneva: An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings. Kindle. Alas, I was bound to come upon one of Macaulay’s works that didn’t hold up for me, and this was it: this is a satire of the Leage of Nations in ways that just feel off and nasty now, some of them racist, some of them merely crass. The central plot feels cheap and shabby, with the resolution an unsatisfying echo of some of the things she manages in better works. Not recommended unless you, like me, have become passionately dedicated to Macaulay and want to be able to talk knowledgeably about what she wrote in all its available details.

Donald McCaig, Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men: Searching Through Scotland for a Border Collie. I cannot fathom the reviewer on the cover of this who thinks it will make you want a border collie. I love border collies, but it is very clear about them as working dogs, and you almost certainly do not want one. But if you want to read about nice dogs and the very weird people who have them, doing trials and things, this is a good book about that, it doesn’t last too long, the dog the writer has at the beginning is still around getting pettins at the end and also there is a new dog, so it is not one of those And Then My Dog Died horrors. Dogs! Sometimes one wants a book, and this is one.

Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. This was a fast, fun read that described a lot of things that you have probably experienced, or else will be interested to learn about and catch up on, if you like language and its fluidity. I DMed Gretchen excitedly about a particular example in the middle. If you don’t know Gretchen even in the internet way that I do, you probably shouldn’t do that, but you may well have the urge, because it’s that kind of book.

Naomi Mitchison, The Blood of the Martyrs. This is a lovely and loving book about attempting to establish a group based on love and trust in the face of a totalitarian regime. In this case it happens to be an early Christian group in Rome in the reign of Nero, and they fare about as well as you’d expect, but Mitchison wrote it in the late ’30s and was thinking rather more historically broadly than just Nero.

Rebecca Roanhorse, Storm of Locusts. Roanhorse continues to be some of the most thriller-paced fantasy I have ever encountered. Her worldbuilding is unlike any other going on right now in the genre, a radically altered future with drastically changed magic. The new characters in this volume made it fun and a fast read for me, and I enjoyed zipping right through.

Karl Schroeder, Stealing Worlds. It took me a little bit to get into the characters on this one, but I’m very sympathetic to what Karl was doing with the ending, and it’s worth getting there, I think, even if you’re a hard-sell on blockchain fiction, which I am.

Vivian Shaw, Grave Importance. Now okay, yes, I did read this with influenza, so that might have made me more likely to cry, but the ending made me cry in such a good way. It is taking urban fantasy and monster tropes and making them into such a work of hope and love. All the times when people say that genre gives you structure to make your art work within: this is what they mean. This. This capped the series so beautifully and so movingly, and it works best with the full weight of the series behind it, so go, go read, I loved this.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, For Love of Distant Shores. I am so pleased that this is what Tchaikovsky has decided to do with his vast and sweeping fantasy setting. So not only did he write a ten-book series that had a beginning, a middle, and–get this–an ending–when he was done, he did not go do another just like it again to try to get the same result. No! Instead he is using this canvas he’s made to tell different kinds of stories! My analogy for this book is that if the big giant fantasy series is like the description of WWII, this set of novelette-ish length things is like the Indiana Jones stories, if Short Round got to be the protagonist. They’re fun, they’re a completely different tone, they’re exploring corners of the world in ways that Tchaikovsky is good at. Do approve.

Lynne Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 6 and Uncanny Magazine Issue 30. At least that’s how my Kindle metadata lists it! But! We know that Uncanny Magazine Issue 30 was actually Disabled People Destroy Fantasy and that it was actually edited by Nicolette Barischoff, Katharine Duckett, and Lisa M. Bradley, according to the cover. It was a varied and lovely issue, with my favorite part coming with A. T. Greenblatt’s essay about disabled protagonists, but I also found solidarity with Karlo Yeager Rodríguez’s “This Is Not My Adventure,” a story of grief that went some places I needed to go. I realized, looking at my Kindle, that for some reason Issue 6 was the only issue I’d missed in the past, though I’d read a lot of the individual stories, and while it’s not that long ago in real terms, in short fiction terms it feels like the magazine and the field has built a lot on what was going on then, on this issue and others around it, so it was interesting to look back as things grow and build so quickly.

Valerie Valdes, Chilling Effect. Discussed elsewhere.

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. What a difficult and compassionate book. I knew I would be in good hands when van der Kolk related learning from a mentor whom he asked, would you call this patient schizophrenic or schizoaffective? and got told gently: I would call this patient [name]. While he’s willing to talk about diagnoses and use them where appropriate, his focus is always on human experience, and it’s a stronger book thereby.

Greg van Eekhout, Cog. Discussed elsewhere.

Jane Yolen, Dragonfield, and Other Stories. Kindle. The first of these stories is the same story as the graphic novel of Jane’s I read at the beginning of September, so that was disorienting. And then there were a couple of stories that were among the best short fiction I’ve ever read of hers, so…yeah, worth the price of admission, I should say, even with the different angle/same narrative at the beginning.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Nicky Drayden is one of the most creative writers working in speculative fiction at this time. One of the ones with the most pleasant, happiest work…I can’t say that, really. But creative, oh Lord yes, and this is no exception. Escaping Exodus takes a generation ship saga and moves those ships inside massive gigantic space beasts. Y’know, just another one of those.

So if you are thinking, human parasitism inside the organs of a truly epic-sized space herd, wow, cool, yes, you are correct, and if you are thinking, that has the potential to have some really gross bits with sphincters and bodily fluids, you are also very correct. Drayden does not wimp out on including pus and goo here. Our characters carve bone, but also they deal with organs galore.

It’s all in the service of real, flawed human relationships and science fictional conceit that goes beyond “ooh lookit,” though: the lives of the giant beasts are tied intimately to the lives of our protagonists in ways that go beyond the understanding their culture has evolved. They have to come up with new and better ways to manage their own lives–which they can barely do under the current cultural norms–and the beast’s life and life in space, if anyone is to survive. If you’re thinking about the interdependence of life and fragile ecosystems–which, ahem, please do–or if you’re thinking about the way people who love each other manage to hurt each other anyway, you probably want this book. Pus and all.

Review copy provided by the author.

I am writing this review several months ahead of posting it for its release, and honestly it is going to KILL ME to spend the entire late spring, summer, and early fall without people to talk to about this book. But hey! Thanks to the miracle of [checks notes] saving things and posting them later, you now exist in a world where you can go get Cog for yourself.

Much better world.

This is the story of a young robot boy who doesn’t want to be a human, he wants to be his own best robotty self. He is full of curiosity and loyalty and conviction and also a determination to learn from his mistakes. Possibly by making as many of them as possible.

He also has a weaponized sister, a robot dog, and a couple of other companions I will leave as the glorious surprises they are. And also maybe some unexpected special powers.

He is great.

He has a very satisfying plot arc, but truly I would just be happy to hang out with Cog while he shops for cheese and figures out the world. His voice is lovable and satisfying and fun. The themes of the story are the sorts of things that you probably already know–even if you’re part of its child audience–but never fully internalize. This book is a delight. Self-actualizing robots forever.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a Twitter buddy.

Eva Innocente and her crew may not be rich, but at least they’re honest–mostly honest–welllll, more honest than Eva’s family. So when Eva’s even-more-honest sister is kidnapped and threatened by a galactic crime syndicate called The Fridge, Eva has to save her–even if some of the decisions she makes along the way are not technically what would be known as wise or sensible or OH MY GOD EVA WHAT ARE YOU DOING. There are spaceship maneuvers, low-gravity cats, brain parasites, human-alien relations…in more senses of the word than one…fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, true love…actually I’m not remembering the fencing very well. But this is in fact a kissing book, and also there are true friends who stick with the heroine.

Also she expresses herself in emphatic Spanish from time to time, so if that’s a thing you need–and for some of you it definitely is a personal positive, I know–and the rest of you can pick up what you need to from context, trust me. No, you can. Suck it up, buttercups, you can do Klingon, the Spanish is great.

Here’s my caveat, though, having read it but also seen the marketing and some other reviews: there is a purple upbeat Julie Dillon cover, and the first chapter features the cats, and the word “fun” is getting used a lot for this book in discussions I’ve heard. How much you parse it as a pure fun adventure is likely to depend on how you read a book where one of the main engines of plot is (and this happens very early, so I don’t feel like it’s a major spoiler) the threat of sexual violence against the heroine. Because there is a very persistent sexual violence threat against the heroine. It is, in fact, one of two or three central things that drives the plot. If you don’t find that fun or relaxing–and I don’t–you might still find this book interesting and well done for the things it is doing–and I did–but your “fluffy fun yay!” quotient is going to vary considerably. One of the things it is not doing is providing a place where people who find the threat of sexual violence stressful can relax and read about space battles and cats and aliens and spaceships. Not every book has to do that, but be forewarned that this one is not. Well-written, yes; fluffy, no.

(I’ve also seen some assumptions that this must be YA based on the cover and–let’s be real here–the fact that the author is a woman of color. Don’t do that. This is adult space opera, go read it as adult space opera. Or not, if you were looking for YA! But be clear that Valerie never once claimed this was YA, not even a little. Know what you’re getting.)

Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate. This is a charming novella of extrasolar planetary exploration. The crew works well together while having clear and distinct personalities, the planets are very different and spark different human psychological reactions, it’s all very classic SF while at the same time being very contemporary…there is hardly anything that is for everybody, but among SF fans I should think this will come pretty close.

Gavin Chappell, trans., The Saga of Half and Half’s Champions and The Saga of Ragnar Shaggy-Breeches and the Yarn of Ragnar’s Sons. Kindle. Two more legendary sagas, full of random mythical beasts and great weirdness. I live-tweeted one of them, because the depths of weirdness were inspiring. Hypothetically I am reading legendary sagas as preparation for a project I might be doing (read: will be doing, but when, who knows), but in reality let’s all admit that I just love them a lot. Also, as I clarified on Twitter, the first one is the saga of Half’s champions, and also of Half himself, not the saga of the champions of a thing you can put in your coffee. Oh, phrasing and punctuation.

Chen Qiufan, Waste Tide. There are certain kinds of books that get translated first, I am noticing, because I tend to read a lot in translation. Maybe this is unfair of me. I enjoyed Waste Tide for what it is, but…I also notice that in the wave of Chinese SF that is getting translated first, the stuff that is fairly traditionally structured and extremely male-focused to the point of being somewhat sexist is getting translated first. So this is interesting in its ideas about waste disposal and intercultural assumptions both inside and outside China, and also there is fridging and minimal use of women’s perspectives, and it is basically exactly what you’d expect would get translated early. Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have interesting points, just…I’ll be glad when there’s more variety of what’s written in Chinese SF available in English.

Amanda Downum, Still So Strange. This is a collection of Amanda’s short mostly-urban dark fantasy, and I had been missing her work, and now here’s a bunch of it all at once. Yessss.

Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten, A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World’s Extinct Animals. This is a beautiful compendium of extinct animals, each with a description and a painting. Some of them are heartbreaking, and it’s hard to predict which.

Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars. If you’ve been missing books that center a non-romantic relationship, this one is all about, all about sisters. There is noir detective work around a magic school, and either of those things may push some of your buttons, but for me it was the sister relationship that centered the book’s appeal.

Theodora Goss, Snow White Learns Witchcraft. This is substantially fairy tale retellings, but for me the poems were the best part, crystallizations in a few pages of fairy tale extensions and extenuations.

Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January. Discussed elsewhere.

Jaime Lee Moyer, Brightfall. Discussed elsewhere.

Malka Older, State Tectonics. The conclusion to a science fiction series about microdemocracies in a high-information society. Basically I would not recommend reading it without the first two, but as a series conclusion I found it thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Sarah Pinsker, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea. This is a beautiful and varied collection. Highly recommended. Spans length, genre, theme, mood. Yay.

Sherwood Smith, Inda. Reread. I think what stuck out to me on this reread was how much this book was a study in leadership in its different modalities, how to inculcate leadership in people who didn’t have it naturally, how to use it for your own ends, all sorts of themes and variations around education toward leadership. I should probably restrain myself from just plowing through the rest of the series.

Pauline Stafford, Unification and Conquest: A Political and Social History of England in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries. This is a fascinating look at England over the period of the Norman Conquest with an eye to the commonality of culture more than its disruption. Extremely useful if you’re doing a thing.

Jane Yolen, A Plague of Unicorns. This is one of those children’s books where the adults will have seen the twist a million times, but the crucial difference is in how it’s handled–in this case not just deftly but kindly, deeply kindly. And also with lots of apples and cider.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

For a long time you couldn’t get a portal fantasy for love nor money, most particularly not for money, as I’m pretty sure the fanfic ones were out there for love. But for several years, portal fantasies were out of fashion for adults. They seem to have come back in the last few years, but in a self-aware, self-examining iteration.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is one instantiation of that. It is full of portals–the title is no exaggeration–but almost all the action takes place in this world, or a version of it. January Scaller has spent her entire childhood puzzling over various mysteries of her existence–when her father will make one of his brief returns from his assorted travels, for example, or what happened with the mysterious and magical door she found in Tennessee as a child, what the coin she picked up beyond it meant. The other people she meets are her guardian’s house are varied in age, race, expertise, but none of them seems ready to answer her questions.

And then as January comes closer to coming of age, everything seems to happen all at once. Her guardian tells her that her father is dead, that she must adjust to a new role in the world–and all of the things that she has hoped and known about her guardian shift out from under her. The world opens up new possibilities, many of them terrifying–many of them worlds themselves. And her own power and control are simultaneously beyond what she dreamed and woefully inadequate for the task at hand.

So it’s a good thing she’s made some loyal friends along the way.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a long-time friend.

I was obsessed with Arthurian legends in my early adolescence, as I think a lot of kids that age are and especially a lot of kids that age in that period were. I also read Robin McKinley’s Outlaws of Sherwood, and somewhere along the line it occurred to me to wonder why there weren’t more Robin Hood novels. On the surface there was a strong similarity with Arthurian stories: both British, both featuring nearly infinitely expandable bands of buddies and sidekicks and character actors, both romantic and action-packed. But the shelves were packed with the one, nearly empty of the other. Why?

One of the theories I formulated was that the Arthur story has a narrative arc, whereas the Robin Hood story’s arc, when it has one, is a deus ex machina: King Richard returns and all is well through no particular action on the characters’ part. It’s not even ripe to be a picaresque because nobody really goes anywhere. It’s full of episode without direction. In order to have an actual novel, I speculated, you’d have to add a lot to the basic Robin Hood story.

Brightfall is basically exhibit A for this theory. This is a Robin Hood novel, no mistake, but Jaime brought so much to the table. Witchcraft! The Fair Folk! A dragon! Entirely new characters completely separate from the extensive original cast! Plot that extends in time–that, in fact, starts–far after the glory days of the Merry Men, that gives Maid Marian her own home and priorities and life–a life that can be disrupted by nefarious plots from another realm.

Also Robin Hood is a complete butt in this book.

Seriously, though. A. Complete. Butt. But it’s not one of those books where the author doesn’t recognize it; a good third of the dialog is approximately:  Someone: Why are you such a butt, Robin Hood? RH: …I dunwanna talk about it. Is he not a butt in the end? Well, that’s for you to find out for yourself. Marian gets an earned happy ending, I’ll promise you that, but with whom and how and when is for you to find out.

Wilfrid Blunt, Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist. I hate Wilfrid Blunt and wish he was still alive to give the cut direct to. He doesn’t really care about Linnaeus’s students and under-researchers, which…neglects a major component in his success. But he also just had a major hate on for Sara-Lisa Linnaeus and took random swipes at her for completely unjust reasons. Oh gosh, sorry you didn’t find Sara-Lisa to be as cultured as you’d like, Wilfrid, too bad she was literally not allowed to study anything. So tedious. So many places where he wasted time sneering at Sara-Lisa when he could have been talking about failed attempts to grow tea in Sweden. Only get this book if you are a truly dedicated Linnaeus completist.

Gwenda Bond and Christopher Rowe, The Supernormal Sleuthing Service: The Sphinx’s Secret. The second in its series, featuring kids with varied skills and magical backgrounds solving problems and mysteries. If friendship and teamwork are elements of MG fantasy you like, this series delivers those along with sphinxes and time travel and monkeys going berserk and sentient elevators. Just plain fun.

Alan Bradley, The Golden Tresses of the Dead. The latest Flavia de Luce mystery. Do not start here, there is a lot of assumption that you know the characters and care about them, but really, 12-year-old girl chemist in post-War Britain, great fun for a cozyish mystery read, very fast to zip through.

Chaz Brenchley, Dust-Up at the Crater School Chapter 22. Kindle. I really need to learn to let the installments of a serial pile up, but whenever I’m traveling I read what’s come around since last I was traveling, and this was only one chapter, and…more! More adventures! More!

Greg Brick, Minnesota Caves: History and Lore. This is exactly what it says on the tin. All the Minnesota caves, including some fictional ones, and what they’ve been used for, so far as Brick has been able to figure out. There is history of cheesemaking, the mushroom industry, brewing. There is tourism, there are structural uncertainties. It’s a slim volume, but it covers a lot. The prose is not necessarily sparkling, but if you want this for the contents, it sure does what it does thoroughly. (I do want this for the contents, in case that wasn’t clear.)

Gavin Chappell, trans. The Saga of Arrow-Odd. Kindle. This is the first listed of several legendary sagas I’m going to be reading. And I mean “legendary saga” here as a technical term, as distinct from family sagas and king sagas, and buckle in, because these are a trip and a half. I am researching a thing, and if that means that I have to read about abrasive Vikings who suddenly run into mythical beasts who were nowhere foreshadowed in the text, so be it. That will be my fate. (Dang, legendary sagas feel random.)

C.S.E. Cooney, Desdemona and the Deep. This is a delightful romp through mining labor relations, faerieland, self-knowledge, and friendship. It packs a lot into every single page. There is also couture. I think you know from that if you want this. You probably do.

Candas Jane Dorsey, Ice and Other Stories. This is a very large range of stories and types of story, with a lot of fairly icy science fiction as its core. There’s a high prairie range to it that made me glad I read it when I had just been to Alberta. It’s the sort of collection that pulls a career into focus.

Sarah Glassford and Amy Shaw, eds., A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland During the First World War. This is totally a tell that I’ve been in a Canadian museum shop in the last month, because really, you can’t get things like this in the US–I mean, probably you can special-order them, this is the future we live in, but how would you know it was out there to do. Anyway: Glassford and Shaw and the authors they’ve assembled are careful and thoughtful about what range of girls and women they manage to cover and what range they do not and why, where more study is needed, and it’s very interesting and exactly the sort of thing I’ve been wanting to know for thirty years and more now, thanks, L.M. Montgomery. (Why “and Newfoundland,” say the non-Canadians? Newfoundland was a separate entity from the rest of what we now consider Canada until 1949, the more you know!)

Tessa Gratton, Strange Grace. This is a horror-fantasy or dark-fantasy with a village that sacrifices one of its boys, and how you feel about it may depend on how much you’re willing to sit through some gender essentialism and social toxicity to get to the utter deconstruction of the gender essentialism and social toxicity. For me, having enjoyed other books of Gratton’s, there was a level of trust there–I knew she was not going to go somewhere dreadful at the end. It may still be too much for you, you may still crawl out of your skin before she gets there, because it’s borderline in spots, lots of people accepting a pretty bad status quo and having to be shaken out of it. That may be just what you need right now, that may be the last thing you need right now, depending on whether you find it cathartic or too close to the bone.

Melissa Harrison, Rain: Four Walks in English Weather. Very short, very much what it says on the tin. Four different locations throughout England, lyrical, lovely.

Rokuro Inui, Automatic Eve. Discussed elsewhere.

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs. Kindle. This is a chatty short novel of small town Maine life early in the twentieth century. Some of the interactions between women characters particularly ring true to my experience of family life even though their details are not the specific details of either setting or time frame–the dialog and characterization are note-perfect. One of the major characters is an herbalist, and I find the entire thing charming.

Barbara Krasnoff, The History of Soul 2065. This is a mosaic novel of two intertwined Jewish families, their ghosts, and their loved ones of various ethnicities/religions. Barbara has a particularly sharp ear for dialog, which is such a pleasure to read, making the ghosts warm and human and in places all too poignant.

Adam Morris, American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation. This is a history of people claiming to be God or the voice of God in America. It gets more depressing to read the closer to the present it gets, the less it can be an academic exercise and the more it’s immediate. It’s worth knowing about, and I feel that Morris is very careful about being skeptical yet respectful–that is, respecting the humanity of everyone in the book. If you’re going to read about this topic, this seems like a good choice to me. But oof.

Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud. I really don’t like John Ruskin, like, not quite on the level of Wilfrid Blunt (still mad about you, Wilfrid Blunt!), but I would be very chilly about the process of not giving him the cut direct. However, and unlike Wilfrid Blunt, he did lead to a great many lovely things, and one of them is this book-length poem in several parts, about the universe, the natural world, and, er…everything. It’s Mary Oliver having a good wander, a bit like it was reading a new Madeleine L’Engle book as a child but all poetry. It’s lovely.

Hermann Palsson and Paul Edwards, translators, Gautrek’s Saga and Other Medieval Tales. This is more weird legendary saga stuff. Fewer sea monsters than Arrow-Odd but continuing in the randomness vein.

Robert William Sandford, Cold Matters: The State and Fate of Canada’s Fresh Water. This reads like an extended conference talk, which is fine by me. The gallery owner who sold it to me said, “Oh, he’s very smart,” and now that I’ve read it I realize this was meant as a warning, but it’s a topic that’s worth being smart on. Lots of stuff that we simply do not know yet about drainage and erosion in regions where that water was formerly frozen in glaciers. Lots to investigate and, uh, worry about. But it’s worth the worry. I was thinking this was going to be mostly limnology, but really not, mostly it’s frozen or recently-frozen water which is a different study completely.

Iona Datt Sharma, Not For Use in Navigation. Kindle. Iona is an agentsib of mine, and their work feels…neighborly. To me. If you like my short fiction, I think you might well like Iona’s. It just feels companionable. Of course they are coming from somewhere completely different from me, so what you want in my work and what you find in theirs may be quite different. I just was startled at how much I could notice the fellow-feeling across the miles and years and gender and…everything. So that was awesome.

Lilah Sturges and Polterink, Lumberjanes: The Infernal Compass. Brief and friend-focused and fun and basically everything I am looking for in Lumberjanes. I am not the target audience for this particular message, but hoo boy do I know people who are.

Sara Teasdale, Helen of Troy and Other Poems. Kindle. The persona poems in this volume fascinate me, the particular empathies Teasdale finds with historical and legendary women and the way she chooses which women to shape empathies with. The rest is more typical Teasdale, but those felt very worthwhile as a separate category.

Ngozi Ukazu, Check, Please! Book 1: #Hockey. I’d read this as an online comic, but I really like physical books better (really) (really really), and I didn’t even mean to sit down and read this, I just…got lured. It is a college hockey and baking comic. At the end of this volume there is some romance. It is so much fun. It is so hockey, but I think in a way that draws non-hockey people in rather than shuts them out. I will be so glad to have volume 2.

Adriaan Verhulst, The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe. This, it turns out, means Belgium. It is always startling to me to be exposed to regions that had the Romans and thus Christianity but particularly the regions that were not at all central to that, that had bishops but not, like, consistent secular governance. Like Belgium. And it was interesting to watch cities not entirely map to Roman settlements or bishoprics or…well. Go Belgium, do your thing.

Jane Yolen, The Emerald Circus. This is a collection of Jane’s stories, mostly the newer ones. If you’ve read a lot of her short work, there will be some old familiar favorites in here, but also probably some new ones even the avid followers haven’t run into before unless you’ve been getting every anthology she’s got one in–which, with Jane, takes quite some doing; it’s difficult enough to keep up on the books she’s authored by herself.

Review copy provided by Broken Eye Books. Also the author has become a convention buddy of mine.

This novella is an incredibly fast read for something this creepy and dark. I started reading it in the waiting room for a doctor’s appointment, and…it’s not the pulse-pounding raise-your-blood-pressure kind of dark fantasy. It’s the creeping-chill kind of dark fantasy, the kind that won’t show up on any monitors but will stick with you.

So. This is very Southern Gothic kind of dark fantasy, which the title is not trying to keep from you in the slightest. The title is very, very accurate in that regard. As with a lot of the best in Southern lit, there’s a lot of time and generations, there’s complicated history that people only know parts of at any given time, and there’s…dark and swampy stuff going on. Literally this time. Literal dark and swampy creepy stuff that the protagonist has to unravel if the people he cares about have any chance of making it through in one piece.

Gotta tell you the odds do not look great at several points in this, and it’s dark fantasy, so I’m not going to tell you what the survival rate is. Just…lots of bayou stuff and lots of family history, and some people who make their own families caring about each other and sticking by each other through some unimaginably dark times. Good stuff, though very far outside my usual.