Tag: bookses precious

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is the last in a trilogy, and it is all about consequences. Regular readers know what a sucker I am for consequences.

Years have passed since the events of Amberlough and Armistice. The world is not perfect–there are still war zones–but people have started to get through the very basics of rationing and rebuilding and into questions of who should be honored and who demonized in their recent turbulent history. For teenagers like Lillian and Jinadh’s son Stephen, the war and occupation are increasingly dim and distant memories, an obsession of adults. For the adults, it’s still all too close and all too real–especially when parts of the past don’t stay hidden in the jungle where they previously were.

Frankly, most of these characters are exhausted. Their old coping mechanisms are imperfectly adjusted to their new circumstances, which keep shifting anyway. None of them seem to have had even five minutes to put their feet up, breathe, and look at some nice trees or a sunset or something. Their world is relentless. That makes Amnesty a completely appropriate book for right now–and also sometimes a difficult one. There’s solace here, but it’s circumscribed, constrained; there are ways forward, but none of them without cost. There is hope, but not for the things the characters used to hope for. And there are people trying to do better. Always, always, amidst rubble and chaos and machination, there are people trying to do better.

Claire Eliza Bartlett, We Rule the Night. Discussed elsewhere.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Paladin of Souls. Reread. It was interesting to revisit this middle-aged coming-of-age tale after it’s had more than a decade to influence the rest of the field. I still love the worldbuilding and the characters, but it was important to keep in mind how much of an influence it’s been–that it looks a little less groundbreaking in retrospect than it actually is because other people have used that soil. Such a fun book, such a good book–and I’m so glad we’ve been thinking and writing about it since.

Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills. Reread. One of my favorite books ever, and basically I will use any excuse to reread it. The way the worldbuilding and the characterization intertwine always makes me think…and then I always get pulled into the story. Go read this book. Go read this book again.

Emilie Demant Hatt, By the Fire: Sami Folktales and Legends. Discussed elsewhere.

Nicola Griffith, Hild. Reread. This is so immersive for me and so lovely and all the details and…it’s just so easy to slide into this cultural mindset. I hope that Griffith meant it that she’s writing more of St. Hilda’s story because I want that so much.

Barbara Hambly, Cold Bayou. The latest Benjamin January mystery. This is a perfectly serviceable entry in the series but not one of the standouts, and it’s a terrible place to start because it relies so much on you already knowing and caring about the characters. There’s not even a murder until halfway through the book, so if you don’t already want to spend time with these characters, go a bit further back in the series and try there. If you do–it further elaborates on some key relationships, particularly with January’s mother.

Larry Hammer, trans., Ice Melts in the Wind: The Seasonal Poems of the Kokinshu. Discussed elsewhere.

Beth Hilgartner, A Murder for Her Majesty. Reread. After so many years. My friend Ginger happened to mention this in passing, and I almost certainly lit up visibly, because I loved it as a child and did not remember the title. (My booklog only goes back to age 23 or 24 reliably. This is a source of sorrow sometimes.) There is a girl who disguises herself as a boy to run from murderers and does not do the sword fighting! No! She sings in a cathedral choir! There is Elizabethan roughhousing! There are Latin mottos iced onto cookies! There is music theory! I loved this book so much, and now I know which one it is, hurrah. Also…it is pretty anachronistic, now that I have somewhat more extensive knowledge of the Elizabethan era than I did when I was 8. So one must be braced. Still. Eeeee.

Ann Leckie, The Raven Tower. Extensive thoughts about what it’s like to be a god in a rock! Cholera or dysentery or similar disease! Despite being based on a very famous story whose parallels become very obvious as you read, this is not like anything else. I’m thrilled to see Ann doing something completely different and can’t wait to see what she does next, but in the meantime I sure enjoyed this.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems. This is very much a late-life collection, with thoughts about aging and death coming to the fore. I found it touching and valuable.

James E. Montgomery, Loss Sings. A slim chapbook about grief and translation. I would have liked for him to connect a few dots about different kinds of translation–to have some thoughts about translating for people who have or have not had a personal experience, or between those two groups–but what he had was interesting and did not outstay its welcome.

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems Volume One. I wish there was a Collected Works out, but right now I’m approximating as best I can with this. I just keep having the urge to immerse myself. I know I’m going to return to several of these poems at important life moments, and also at random, just because.

Suzanne Palmer, Finder. Discussed elsewhere.

Kate Quinn, The Alice Network. This is a female-centered spy novel that spans two world wars and an important bit thereafter. The things it’s doing and saying about spying illuminate other works in the genre by contrast. I found it interesting, exciting, worthwhile. Will definitely look for more of Quinn’s work.

Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, and Michi Trota, eds., Uncanny Issue 27. Kindle. I had an essay in this, and I don’t review work I’m in.

Jo Walton, Lifelode. Reread. This is still one of my favorite domestic fantasies, and I love the worldbuilding that is interwoven with everything and yet not…centered in a traditionally questy fantasy novel way. I love that the shape of this book is a character shape and yet the worldbuilding is not neglected.

Fran Wilde, Riverland. Oh good heavens this book. I picked it up one Sunday afternoon and basically did not put it down until it’s gone. It has so many things I love, glass and rivers and family relationships, and it is breathtaking in its handling of incredibly difficult things happening to its young protagonists. The way that the heroine both internalizes and fights the bad things that are happening in her life is so human and so real and cuts like broken glass. Highly recommended, but with care to pick your day so that you can handle the intensity of this book.

Translated by Barbara Sjoholm. Review copy obtained through a long chain too strange to get into.

This is the translation of a 1922 work by a Danish woman who traveled extensively in the Norden collecting stories. She also made some woodcuts related to the stories, which are reproduced here–one of the places where black-and-white reproduction absolutely does a great job for the material.

It matters that Demant Hatt was a woman in this field. It matters a lot. Because the people she had access to hear stories from, the stories she got to hear, were much more evenly balanced between men and women both as tellers and as characters. Compared to other compilations of Saami [both spellings are used, this is the one I favor, both are fine though] tales, this is a far more accurate representation of range.

And it’s got so many great things. It’s got girls with agency to spare; it’s got feisty old ladies; it’s got reindeer and murder and weird northern birds. It’s got origin stories. It’s got “we don’t know anyone from OUR band who would do this but we HEARD of a girl who did this” stories. I was so excited when I heard this book existed, and it did not in any way disappoint. If you’re interested in Arctic peoples, or even if you just like folklore, this is a must-have.

Review copy provided by the author, who has been a friend on this here internet for many years.

This is the longest of the three volumes of translation I’ve read from Larry lately, but it follows roughly the same format: each poem has its translation and its original provided, with notes on context and any translation difficulties below. I find this format extremely congenial–and I had to laugh at one poem, where I was thinking, hmm, kinda clunky, and then Larry’s note was about the awkwardness of the original. The joys of translation!

This is, again, the kind of book of poetry that both uses and is the source of heavily used tropes and even cliches in its genre. Cherry blossoms abound, but also particular birds, wisteria, chrysanthemums, falling leaves. The signifiers of the seasons are clearly determined–the question is what each individual poet does with them, and I really enjoyed having the examples that failed to distinguish themselves as well as the ones that succeeded, just on the grounds of context.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is an online friend.

This is a debut novel of a kind of science fiction loads of my friends are constantly (no, CONSTANTLY) telling me they do not see enough. It’s planets-and-aliens science fiction! It’s got space stations and settlements and lots of divergence/diversity of human culture and a very big universe and spaceships that think and people disagreeing about who counts as people! Adventure! Excitement! We may know that a Jedi craves not these things, but that doesn’t seem to stop the majority of my social circle.

Well, here you go, friends, here’s a one of these, and it is fun and satisfying and has an ending that leaves a lot of room without being maddeningly open. This is a book, not a chunk of story approximately book-shaped. Fergus Ferguson (under various aliases) and his allies (maybe friends? They’re working on that?) unravel mysteries, fight bad guys, and come up with plans so zany they just might work.

Or not, but then something else needs to, and that’s okay too.

I don’t want to spoil too many elements of Finder, because turning a corner and finding I was not quite where I expected to be was part of the fun of this book. I will say that there are a lot of elements that I’m used to having set up for two, three, five books later, and while there is plenty of room in this universe for interesting stories, Palmer is not hoarding her ideas. She’s giving us a fireworks-filled book. Or sometimes a tennis-ball-filled book. Um. Just go read it, okay? You’ll find out.

Full disclosure: we are friends who are represented by the same agent, and I got this review copy from passing it around among our agentsibs.

However.

I am entirely sure that I would love this book anyway, even if I’d never heard of Claire Eliza Bartlett before, because it is so full of things I love. The setting is a fantasy world version of WWII-era Russia, which is something I don’t see nearly enough of–and then to make things even better, Claire draws on the real history of the Night Witches to create a group of girl witches–pilots, navigators, and engineers using this setting’s magic to fly missions against the enemy.

Revna is the daughter of a supposed traitor to the Union, a man whose main crime is stealing waste scraps of “living metal” to fashion prosthetic legs for Revna herself. Linné is the general’s daughter, spending years hiding in a regular regiment as a boy until she gets caught, dedicated to the Union. They find themselves in very different precarious situations within their very different worldviews, that lead to the same flight training, the same missions, the same perils.

It’s as good as it sounds. It’s better. It’s full of varied and complicated relationships with a morally compromised homeland under siege. Friendships form in all permutations in a war zone: the shallow ones, the easy ones that find their own depth, the treacherous ones, the difficult ones that almost don’t happen at all. Trust, friendship, and making your way through a situation with no clear answers are the heart of this book, and I love it.

Mary Alexandra Agner, The -Ologists. This is a beautiful chapbook of poems focused on women who do science. Favorites included “Dark Matter” and “Song of Steel,” but really I’m glad to have this entire thing. It’s a tiny treasure.

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion. Reread. My records show that I haven’t returned to this since it was new, and I find it holds up pretty darn well. There is some reliance on coincidence in the plot, and there are some places where favorite themes are quite transparent, but I still really enjoyed the world and the worldbuilding, and of course the characters. I am a sucker for setting inspired by medieval Spain in general, actually.

K.A. Doore, The Perfect Assassin. Discussed elsewhere.

Larry Hammer, trans., One Hundred People, One Poem Each. Discussed elsewhere.

Sam Hawke, City of Lies. This was a freebie in my WFC bag, and I didn’t really know anything about it or its author. It’s about poison and siege and trust and families, and I really thought it was fun. You might too.

Justina Ireland and Troy L. Wiggins, eds., Fiyah Issue 9. Kindle. Another very solid issue from the Fiyah team. I felt that Jonathan Kincaid’s “The Ishologu” and Nicky Drayden’s “The Rat King of Spanish Harlem” both really stood out.

Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle. Reread. Another book that holds up charmingly–I’m doing a project, and it’s great, basically. Sophie’s level-headed adventures delight me.

Kelly Jones, Murder, Magic, and What We Wore. This is a YA Regency fantasy featuring a heroine on the verge of penury, saving herself with her undiscovered dressmaking skill. It’s a particularly interesting thing to read in close conjunction with Howl’s Moving Castle, although Mary Robinette Kowal’s glamourist series is a closer comparison point.

Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks. A glossary of regional terms for landscape features. Delightful, probably most useful if you own a copy to refer back to or are using it for a specific project. Still delightful, though.

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire. Discussed elsewhere.

Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings and Bandwidth. These little dips into Oliver’s work are great, but I find I’m wanting to immerse more, to treat it like a cold spring lake and get my head soaked with the shock of her poetry. We’ll see if I can manage that; in the meantime this is what came in at the library.

James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape. I loved this. Loved. Rebanks is quite thoughtful about herding sheep and also about how our systems are sometimes inadequate for rural kids in ways that are different from the ways in which they’re inadequate in general. But also lots of just plain vivid experience of herding. Very useful if a person happened to want to write a novella in a sheep farming village. You know, just. Hypothetically.

Mary Rickert, The Memory Garden. Reread. While this is still a beautiful book (mostly about women’s relationships and flowers) on the second read, I find that it relied a bit more heavily on its revelations than I’d realized. Still not sorry I reread it.

Vandana Singh, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories. Some of these stories are searingly great, others merely interesting–“merely”–but a Vandana Singh collection is basically always a good life choice.

Caroline Stevermer, Magic Below Stairs. Reread. I still feel like the ending privileges the nobles too much at the expense of the main characters, but I enjoyed the details of how the young servant’s work fed into the magic plot and setting quite a lot, if anything more than the first time.

G. Willow Wilson et al, Ms. Marvel: Damage Per Second and Ms. Marvel: Mecca. These are not good graphic novels to read if you want a break from the horrors of modern politics–there is, for example, an image of a hate-filled attack on a mosque–but I still absolutely love Kamala Khan and am so glad to have these, knowing that they are going to take on issues of the current day, knowing that they will do a darn good job of that.

Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing With Dragons. Reread. And for the moment this is the last of “rereads that really held up.” I had a moment quite early on when I didn’t remember whether it was one of those books, that sneers at people for having blonde hair or liking domestic things, and then of course it wasn’t, of course that’s not what Pat was doing at all. It blew the Bechdel test out of the water before the said test was even formulated, and I think that all fantasy novel heroines should have best friends willing to try fireproofing spells with them. Yay.

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

Arkady Martine has a lot to say about empires. Luckily for the reader, she’s very clear on the difference between an academic monograph–that’s her alter ego’s job–and a space opera. A Memory Called Empire is full of bombs, spaceships, intrigue, poisons, and neurological devices. It is also full of thoughts about empire and its periphery, of how systems eat people and how those people can resist–before death, and beyond it with their influence.

It’s fun. It’s thoughtful and action-packed and well-balanced, and there are friendships (with more than one outcome and more than one focus!) as well as a flirtation. The main character, Mahit Dzmare, is poised at exactly the line between knowledgeable and lost that’s so much fun to read as she navigates a tense and dangerous diplomatic situation that’s fascinating not only to her but to me. I easily tuned out hours of airport with this book. I love its barbarians and am fascinated by its empire.

And it’s doing the thing that science fiction claims to do but often does not: examining fundamental questions from new angles. More than one person, more than one culture, has a particular answer to the idea of where the self begins and ends, and they’re all vital to this book, with its explosions and catastrophes. I can’t wait to see what the next one brings. Highly recommended.

Review copy provided by the translator, who is a friend on this here internet for many years.

This is a famous and formative collection of Japanese poetry, first compiled in the 13th century and referenced often in the centuries since. There are names in this volume that have remained famous in the time since–there’s a Sei Shonagon poem in here, and one by Murasaki Shikibu, and several emperors–but also there are names that are less famous even to someone who’s studied Japanese literature. Looking at how that kind of compilation can end up assorted is fascinating.

The themes here are the expected ones because this volume did a great deal to set those expectations–so when there are lots of lovers crying into their sleeves, seasonal references, meeting in dreams, it’s interesting to watch them develop. The layout is similar to the previous translation volume I read from Larry, where the original and the translation are both given, and also contextual translation notes that point out where something is wordplay in the original, what significance a location had, the sort of thing that’s sometimes crucial and always set apart so it doesn’t nag at the poem itself. The poems are all five line formal ones, all very brief, so this is not a long read but a very rewarding one all the same.

Review copy provided by our mutual agent. Also we’re friends.

Every system, every society, every government, has its drawbacks. People differ on what those are and how to address them–in the real world. In too much fantasy, this disagreement gets flattened out into pure antagonism: this is the obvious problem, and if you’re not at least sort of aligned with me on the solution, you are The Baddie.

The Perfect Assassin doesn’t do that. Even in a system that features, well, secret assassins. And I enjoy that a lot.

Amastan is an historian by day, assassin by night. He and the others of his age group have been training for years, learning the rules that keep them in check as well as the skills that will be the difference between life and death for them and others. But someone else isn’t following those rules. Amastan and his friends discover not only a corpse, but one whose jaani (spirit, more or less, sort of) has not been properly laid to rest. This unexpected danger spurs him to find out more about the people around him, and about the past he is supposed to be studying.

Amastan is a beautifully cautious protagonist. He thinks things through, he tries his best–and he still gets himself into heaps of trouble. You will never have the “UGH THINK THINGS THROUGH” problem here, because ‘Stan does think things through–and the results are beautifully, humanly messy anyway. I was nearly late for a lunch meeting when I picked up this book, and it remained fun, exciting, and especially compelling throughout–for me, substantially because its protagonist is so well-drawn. Definitely recommended.