Novel Gazing Redux

Sara C. Bronin, Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World. If you haven’t thought much about zoning, this is a good introductory book. I was hoping that it would be a little deeper than it was; ah well.

Agatha Christie, Third Girl and Towards Zero. Gosh, Christie did not much enjoy the Sixties! But other than the usual caveats about that crankiness and some attitudes I’d call “dated” if some people didn’t still have them alas, these were fine enough, fast reads, not outstanding, there’s a reason they’re not the famous ones.

Davinia Evans, Rebel Blade. Regular readers know how I love to say “the triumphant conclusion,” and here we are! The triumphant conclusion to this trilogy, with the magic of the mundane plane making its mess all over everyone’s life and getting mopped up as best they can! Don’t start here, you want to start with the first one, but gosh I enjoyed this series.

Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide. Discussed elsewhere.

Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. This was also not a deep analysis but a fun wander through the history of everyone’s favorite kind of shop.

Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe. I have read a lot of books about the Carolingians, and this was the absolute best of any of them at keeping straight which Charles, which Pepin, etc. we were talking about at any given moment. The analysis is clear and cogent and it never devolves into “and then a series of events, God knows why we’re telling you this except that it appears to have happened,” which is frankly a Carolingian pitfall. This is my jam, and I think it will be the jam of many of you here as well.

Ariel Kaplan, The Republic of Salt. A sequel to The Pomegranate Gate, and you really don’t want to start with the second one, you really need the character and plot context of the first one. Very much a middle book, looking forward to where it’s going, lots of mythological ramifications here.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. Lavishly illustrated, extremely short, more life philosophy and less botany but still interesting.

Julie Leong, The Teller of Small Fortunes. A sweet and cozy adventure fantasy, featuring a cat and a baker as well as some more traditional adventuring party members.

L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle. Reread. It had been longer than I thought since I reread this, but it remains as funny and sharp and loving as always.

Garth Nix, Frogkisser!. A MG fairy tale-inspired quest fantasy that sometimes goes hard in the silly direction, but really who hasn’t had a day when we need a bit of that.

Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow and The Reckoning. Rereads. Wars and alliances and kingdoms oh my! I had basically forgotten all of these last two books and remembered the trilogy as the first book alone, so this was a lovely rediscovery of “oh right, THIS guy again.” Everybody boo for Edward Longshanks.

Lev A. C. Rosen, Rough Pages. The third in its series of mid-century queer San Francisco mysteries, and this is a perfectly reasonable place to start (although the second one is still my favorite). Its detective has to deal with the murder of the owner of a bookstore that mails queer literature not entirely legally–and has a mailing list that would name names of a lot of his community. This is not a feel-good mystery, this is a very tense mystery, which is also sometimes just what you need, but not the same times.

Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination. Kindle. A collection of Roy’s political essays from the early 90s to the mid ’00s. This is a period in which I was definitely already politically engaged–for part of it I was reading three to four major news magazines every week as part of handling the “extemp box” for my high school speech team–and a lot of the elements of what was going on in Indian politics were completely new to me. Thanks, US media! The stuff that I already knew about was interesting to see from a different angle–and unfortunately there’s a lot of ominous foreshadowing in this collection.

Iona Datt Sharma, You Are Here: Nine More Stories. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the author, who is an online pal and has the same agent as me.

This collection has all the stuff I like about Iona’s stories, and you should read it.

Oh, did you want more? Hmm, okay: the thing I love most about Iona’s stories is that heart and head are both fully engaged and connected to each other. This collection has fantasy and science fiction, comedy and pathos, it has different kinds and moods of each sub-genre all in nine stories. There is range here. The consistent thread is how human the concerns are and how well they are rooted in their speculative elements. Nobody is having a romance in a spaceship where the spaceship is incidental–it’s absolutely crucial to the romantic obstacle. Nobody’s relationship with their family is using portal fantasy as a backdrop, portal fantasy is illuminating the relationship with family and time. This is what short speculative fiction does best, and whether you’ve already read some of these or whether it’s all new to you, you have treats in store here. Highly recommended.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Today I was on the periphery of a conversation of books “about” queerness and books that “just happen to feature” queerness, and I need to say: this one is about queerness, it sure is, it is as about it as anything ever has been. What it is not, however, is a 101-level work about queerness. In science fiction this division often points at science fiction novels where knowledge of, for example, trans people is assumed and the trans people are allowed to have space adventures (undersea exploration, dimensions of the human heart, whatever) just like cis people, vs. novels where the author is going to do a science fiction about What If Gender: Weird Stuff, Huh.

Not in Notes from a Regicide. This is a book where it matters deeply to the main characters’ experiences that they are all trans people. It matters to the action plot, and it matters dreadfully, intensely to the main plot arc that is “young man attempts to understand the outside world forces that have shaped his parents.” It matters that their trans experiences are not all the same, both in terms of what’s available/expected from the outside world and in terms of what they want/need internally. This is very much a book that knows that there is no unitary trans experience any more than there is a unitary artist experience or a unitary revolutionary experience, and it’s a much stronger book for that.

Because yeah, some of the people who manage the most revolutionary acts do not burn with a political fervor here. Some of the things that change the world were meant to change it in other ways, or in unknown ways. The breadth and depth of human variety is stunning here, as the pieces come together, as we find out who did what and how it has mattered, small scale and large.

Clara Benson, A Case of Robbery on the Riviera, The Imbroglio at the Villa Pozzi, and The Problem at Two Tithes. Kindle. So I’m still finding these light historical mysteries diverting in the way that I need right now. My only complaint is that there’s no clear indication of the timeline on which the two series interleave, so A Case of Robbery on the Riviera contains spoilers for several more of the Angela Marchmont books than I’ve gotten to. There’s a warning at the front that says you should have read both to get the full enjoyment, but how far in both is not made clear. Ah well. (Also I find Freddy Pilkington-Soames much more annoying from Angela Marchmont’s POV than from his own.)

Brenda J. Child, My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation. This book includes a lot of things under the category of labor that challenged my cultural preconceptions about what she would be talking about. Interesting personal-ethnographic study.

Agatha Christie, At Bertram’s Hotel. Who is where when and who was meant to be killed and who will take the blame for it, pretty classic Christie.

August Clarke, Metal From Heaven. Labor movement fantasy. Labor movement fantasy! Labor movement fantasy. Yes. Amaze. It has other facets–some people may be interested in the lesbians or the violence or all sorts of things, but you had me at labor movement fantasy, that’s all I needed, thank you and good night.

Eric H. Cline, After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations. This is a follow-up to his book about collapse of civilizations around the Mediterranean around 1177, and it did not do what I wanted, but it did a fine job of what it did. What it did: a survey of who was left in the aftermath of that massive collapse, who ruled what and how much they rallied. What it did not do: talk in any detail about the lives of actual people in this period or very many social trends and traits that might help us understand why some cultures did better than others (and on which axes).

Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red. The title refers to the Red River, and this is about soil and relationships and feeling trapped and finding choices in a small town in its area. The people are…oh God, I know these people. They’re so real. It’s just so vividly real about the people and the land.

Margaret Frazer, A Play of Lords and The Apostate’s Tale. Kindle. Oh look, more historical mystery series that are diverting in the way that I need right now.

Vigdis Hjorth, Will and Testament. Speaking of vividly real people: this is dysfunctional Nordic family drama, and gosh are the rhythms of it familiar even if the details of it are not my family details. I would be interested to hear from people who didn’t grow up being told stories of family dysfunction by Nordic people, whether it was hard to follow at any point with the names given without relationships and relationships without names and…all this was in my idiom even though it’s in translation, and I don’t know who else’s idiom it’s in. Not a nice book, the dysfunction is horrible and deep, do not read this for a light diversion.

Noah Jodice, Beyond Courts: Community Justice Exchange, Interrupting Criminalization, and Critical Resistance. Kindle. This is another book that did well at what it was doing but was not doing what I wanted. It is a very 101-level primer or possibly sub-101-level about why the criminal justice system is not very just and why alternatives are called for. What I wanted was more detail on the alternatives, a lot more detail. Different book completely, ah well.

Dan Jones, Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King. Jones is pretty upset about people taking Shakespeare as a reliable source about Henry V’s early character, as there is no historical evidence whatsoever for the Prince-Hal-to-King-Henry transition. But that’s not most of the book, most of the book is just talking about his life and times, and it’s interesting and well-done. Just. Not a lot of Falstaff to be had here.

Anna-Marie McLemore, Flawless Girls. McLemore can write sisters. GOSH YES. This is about two sisters who are trying to use a fancy finishing school to make their way in society, only to find that it is not doing exactly what it promises–INSERT SINISTER MAGIC HERE. Fun times.

Sy Montgomery, Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell By Shattered Shell, The Hummingbirds’ Gift: Wonder, Beauty, and Renewal on Wings, and What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World’s Most Familiar Bird. These were my other random comfort read thing this month, besides the historical murder mysteries: they’re all quite short, and the first two are about rehabbing the animals in question back into the wild. There are occasionally random moments in the structure of these books, but it’s mostly okay, and in any case they’re worth it for the solid accounts of people taking concrete steps to make things better in the natural world. (The chicken one was just interesting despite not being in that same category.)

Jim Morris, The Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers. This is a case study of some factories and their misdeeds, with clarity about how they stand for a much, much larger class of factories and companies doing the same thing. It is not a fun time, but also it’s better to know what tricks they’re pulling.

Rebecca Nagle, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land. Very similar category of book to the above but a different topic: this is about the legal fight for jurisdiction and about who prosecutes crimes on Native lands (and which crimes go unprosecuted and why). Harrowing but solid.

H. G. Parry, The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door. An alternate-1920s fantasy, but in the “oh my God WW1 and influenza just happened” way more than the “whee parties” way. (Guess which one I like better, just guess.) Class and magic and friendship and academia, yes please.

Iona Datt Sharma, Blood Sweat Glitter. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a friend I met through being represented by the same agent.

Back in the day, one of my friends grumpily reviewed a book by saying, “too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby.” They would never have to have that reaction to Blood Sweat Glitter, which is absolutely full of roller derby, and also the romantic connection builds between two women, zero boyfriends involved.

Eleanor is a charge nurse who pours her heart and soul into her roller derby team. The stress of the job comes out in the rink. Her team isn’t one of the big ones–their league is pretty small-time–but she loves the game for itself, and she keeps hoping to build a team that will love it with her. When new girl Robin shows up–and shows off–Eleanor finds her abrasive and annoying. She’s constantly acting silly and ditzy, and why is she even in roller derby? She’s a good skater, though, Eleanor has to admit that….

As the team’s season progresses, Eleanor realizes that Robin is not the airhead she appears–and her candy-pink bubbly presentation is covering over some trauma. Nor is Eleanor entirely free of it herself. If she can get past some of her prickly habits, they might make a pretty good team, on the rink and off. Lovely fun read but–like the character of Robin–not an insubstantial piece of cotton candy after all.