Tag: bookses precious

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

I don’t think a single one of Cherie Priest’s books is My Sort Of Thing, and yet I’ve read almost all of them. Cherie knows paragraph-level pacing like nobody’s business, the sort of thing that makes it easy to read just a little more and just a little more until another hour has gone past and you haven’t started making supper yet.

This one is a haunted house story. In some ways it’s a very classic haunted house story, and in others it’s very modern. Everyone uses their cell phones sensibly, and most of the characters are engaged in a very modern business: salvaging wood, fixtures, and other parts from old houses before they get torn down, to sell them for elevated antique prices. Dahlia Dutton is a recent divorcee, still working through her issues with losing both husband and house in the divorce. She’s working with her cousins and another employee on a job that could make or break the family business. And that job turns out–of course–to be haunted.

Cherie Priest clearly knows a lot about old houses and their bits, and there’s an affection for them that shines on almost every page. She doesn’t shy away from admitting the places where they can be unpleasant, even downright nasty, but the feeling that they’re worth attention comes out and makes the house feel more special than the genre-standard haunted house.

Please consider using our link to buy The Family Plot from Amazon.

Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha, eds., Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. I was a little confused at first about why these stories tended to be heavy on exposition. Then I realized that when you’re trying to do things that are not very well aligned with what has gone before–when you’re trying to break new ground, examine new territory–sometimes that ends up heavily weighted towards having to tell people what you’re doing. Go figure.

Ben Hatke, Mighty Jack. Discussed elsewhere.

Christopher Hibbert, Garibaldi: Hero of Italian Unification. Nineteenth century Italy is deeply, truly weird. I mean, totally bizarre. This is an older book–from the 1960s–so you’ll still find people referred to with racial terminology that, while not deliberately offensive, is not what we would use in my lifetime. Also, there is not a great deal on Garibaldi’s early life. With those caveats, it’s a fascinating book about a strange, strange place/time.

Luis Martin, Daughters of the Conquistadores: Women of the Viceroyalty of Peru. This author had very firm ideas about what convents are Supposed To Be Doing and how nuns are Supposed To Act. If you can get past him telling colonial Peruvian nuns, rather frantically, that they were Doin It Rong, this is a fascinating study about women of many walks of life. The other caveat is that the author was focused on Spanish-descended women and plaintively called for someone else to write a study of the roles of native and African-descended women. Amen, brother. I am with you on that. But Peruvian women had some really interesting cultural quirks that you would not guess from first principles, and this was very much worth my time.

Nisi Shawl, Everfair. Discussed elsewhere.

Gerald Vizenor, Chair of Tears. This is the third of Vizenor’s short novels I’ve read, and it occupies a conceptual place between the other two as well as a temporal one. The satire explores both university culture and Native families, it draws on the trickster stories so clearly dear to Vizenor’s heart, and it divides the book into stylistically and tonally different sections. It’s interesting to watch Vizenor change and stay the same with time, and I will probably read more of his stuff.

Drew Weing, The Creepy Case Files of Margo Maloo. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

If you have watched Gravity Falls, you may have wondered where Thompson came from. The earnest butt of his teenage friends’ jokes, the one who is always stuck with the dare, fond, ambling, amiable Thompson. I don’t think that Drew Weing meant for the protagonist of his kids’ comic to be an origin story for that Thompson. But here we are: Charles Thompson, preteen, moving to a new city where he would have preferred his old small town. This Thompson is precise, cranky, nosey, nervous. This Thompson is physically quite similar, but he has not learned to go with the flow. He would not know the flow if he saw it. Young Charles Thompson is the anti-flow.

And then he meets Margo Maloo.

Charles–Thompson, as Margo Maloo immediately decides to call him–has a troll problem. Not with the internet, with his closet. His new friend and neighbor Kevin gives him her business card, says that Margo is the person to call. Sharp and impatient, Margo swings through his window to take care of things. Her methods, though, are not as Thompson expects, and he ends up pursuing her through her next few cases–different kinds of monsters, different parts of the city–trying to figure out what is going on and what Margo Maloo knows about it.

There is room for nearly infinite variation in this if it’s going to be a series, which it feels like it is: different monsters, different kids in addition to Charles Thompson and Margo Maloo. Different interactions with the outside world. In a kids’ comic, you have to make the choice how scary your scary things are going to be. The trolls, ogres, goblins, ghosts, and vampires in this volume, at least, threaten but do not carry through on their threats, and while they are unfamiliar shapes and colors, they seem to be at least as threatened by humans as threatening to them. Some kids are going to be scared by anything with monsters in it. But ruling out that category, it’s hard to imagine anyone else finding this book genuinely frightening. If anything, it pulls too many punches/fangs. It’s aiming for a pretty heavy message of “we shouldn’t be xenophobic, we should talk out our differences with people who look different from us, and everybody should get along.” I like that message! But I kind of feel like that message gets undermined when the person you are shaking hands and agreeing to be pals with is *literally considering eating you* rather than shaking your hand. So…Weing walks a really fine line here. Because if the monsters are basically not at all scary–which is the side I came down on, I had a very hard time reading them as scary–then people who are treating them as scary are being xenophobes, bigots, pretty much inexplicably so. And if the monsters actually might eat you…”Oh, be nice, it’ll probably be fine, let’s leave everyone else in ignorance of the danger” seems like it’s maybe not the best complete response, even if “kill it with fire” is also going too far.

So…odd little book, fun to read, fast read if you’re not new to this reading thing. Balanced a little strangely, but entertaining enough.

Please consider using our link to buy The Creepy Case Files of Margo Maloo from Amazon.

Blake Charlton’s Spellbreaker came out last month, but the life of a doctor-and-writer is a busy one, so we just caught up with each other now! Here’s a Q&A with Blake.

1) Most classic fantasy is centered on an external conflict. Many of the best authors add an internal conflict. For triple backflip, you’ve added autoimmune to the other two layers of conflict in Spellbreaker. Is there any farther down the rabbit hole you can go? Can you talk about some of the difficulties of dramatizing conflict that isn’t just character vs. themself but character vs. their own body?

It’s intensely gratifying when a reader picks up on a personally important theme as you just did. So thank you kindly for this question.

Although the charters of Spellbreaker wouldn’t recognize the term ‘autoimmunity,’ they would recognize the disease that the protagonist, Leandra, contends with as one of the parts of her heritage at war with each other. They would also recognize the themes of self-hatred and self-attack as important to their lives and the story unfolding around them. Casual perusal of the internet suggests one of the more popular scenes in the book is Francesca’s emphatic, hopefully humorous declamation on why there is no hatred worse than self-hatred–which you can read here <http://darkfaerietales.com/review-spellbreaker-blake-charlton.html>.

My interest in these themes comes from my own struggle with my disability. I was often frustrated by my limitations, would often disparage the part of me that made me different. When I was younger, this lead to flares of hating and attacking myself or hating and attacking ‘normal’ people and the insensitive society they created. Escaping these flares was central to my struggle to become an adult. Anecdotally, I have noticed other friends and patients with disability get caught within or escape such flares. So you see, the conflict between a person and their own body or brain and the resultant secondary conflict with a society built by convenience around the fiction of ‘normalcy’ has been dramatized throughout my life.

For those interested in such things, the different characters in this series explore different aspects of this theme. In the first two books, Nicodemus was struggling with his doubt and self-hatred. The danger he faces is that of becoming the bitter and angry disabled person, who lashed out at the world. His nemesis in those books, James Berr, represents a shadowy reflection of who Nicodemus has the potential to become. Francesca, on the other hand, is a character who in the second and third books contends with regret. She has had to make difficult decisions–many of them the right ones, some of them wrong. She is haunted by her past, though she is not completely aware of her past. In the third book, her relationship with her daughter, Leandra, is fraught with regret; mother and daughter find themselves in cyclic flares of blaming themselves and then blaming each other. Trying to find a way out of that cycle, if there is one, is the central issue of their development in the book. Finally, Leandra has the most immediate and visceral relationship with the theme since she has a chronic disease that induces periodic, unpredictable, and agonizing flares. She has grown up with the sense that her own body has betrayed her, expecting that she will die young. There is a strong anti-heroic streak in Leandra, and the capriciousness and injustice of the world weighs heavily on her, makes her ruthless. Her overarching passion is to effect justice in a chaotic and prejudiced world. It gets her into trouble. Big trouble.
2) Many doctors get accused of having a God complex. You have several. Were there any divine complexes that got left out in the editing stages? Any fun combos of gods you’d have loved to include?

Wow. This question is amazing. I should get my answers out of the way of your questions. Yes, several god complexes. No, no developed complex was left on the cutting room floor. But I did toy with the idea of showing the creation of a new divinity complex. Perhaps, I thought, it would be fun to show the southern war gods–who show up as reinforcements toward the end of the book–on ‘shore leave’ as it were in Chandralu. Deities from different cultures intermingling.  I had some vague idea of dramatizing a kinda paper-rock-scissors love-triangle between deities of incompatible elements and ideologies: Something like an angel of light falls for, but would erase, a goddess of shadow who’s obsessed with, but useless to, a demon of prisms, glass, and illusion, who would of course perforce be enamored with the angel of light. But that was going to be too involved, and the book was already too long. So I put it in my back pocket, where it will likely stay.
3) Lupus, teratomas, and instant cancer curses: there’s a lot of medicine in this book compared to most fantasy. How much does your own practice inspire your work? How hard is it to keep the lines in the right places?

Medicine is the lens though which I see the world. As a physician in training, I don’t think I can escape it. When riding the muni around San Francisco, I can’t help but try to diagnose fellow passengers. When listening to the news, my mind jumps automatically to the implications on global or national health. And when I think about adventure, fantasy, magic that same lens stays with me. It may seem like a stretch to some. It certainly isn’t similar to the typical fantasy lens, which focuses on chainmail and horses and catapults and Feudal politics. I don’t know anything about chainmail. But maybe that’s okay. I think much of the innate human conception of health and sickness is connected to the spiritual and the magical. I would guess that many, if not most, of human prayers and rituals center around health and healing. So if magic were real and tied to manifestations of divinity, then maybe it isn’t so far a stretch to say that the world that created would be as much or more obsessed with medicine as with chainmail. I have wonderful beta-readers and editors who are good at slapping my hand when my medical speculations or technical language gets too far afield.

4) The islands involved in this book mean that sailing, kayaking, and other water transport take a major role in thisbook. What’s your favorite form of water transport, and do you get to take part in it, or is this all theory for you? What’s your personal favorite? (I have an ongoing love affair with Lake Superior and a recent fling with the Kemijoki in northern Finland, so I probably get more emotionally involved with water than most.)

Maybe it’s a little silly but each of the books in the Spellwright series are associated with an element, a phase of life, and a direction. Spellwright is a book rooted in the earth. It’s about digging down into one’s past, discovering all the things about one’s family and what lies underneath. The ghostly chthonic people are the best example of this. My hope was to convey a sense of mystery and exploration, something like discovering a magical cave. Its physical inspiration was all the pseudo-gothic buildings and libraries of Yale University, where I was a student when I first conceived of the idea for the series.

Spellbound is a book that’s oriented upwards, into the sky and air. The theme is romance and fluidity. This was, hopefully, manifested in all the airships and the mercurial evolution of Francesca’s understanding of herself and her feelings toward Nicodemus. It was a book that was supposed to capture a feeling of weightlessness, flight, possibility. Its physical inspiration were the windy mountains of savannahs of my native California with a splash of the majestic ridges and jewel-like cities of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains–where I was fortunate enough to travel as a young man.

Spellbreaker’s element is water; its direction neither up or down, but all the innumerable points of the compass that the horizon represents to the sailor. The physical inspiration for Ixos is the leaward side of Kaui and my current home of San Francisco Bay. During my intern year, the America’s Cup came to San Francisco and during some of the rare days off, I would go down to watch the catamarans sailing out on the bay; the way the sail caught the wind, jumped up on to their hydrofoils, seems so magical to me I couldn’t help writing it in to Spellbreaker. I’m sure I made many, many nautical mistakes when writing the books, and I’d like to beg for forgiveness from any sailors who read the books.

To answer your question, I would have to say I’m partial to the traditional American ‘holiday on a lake’ activities of swimming, fishing, waterskiing. My grandparents had a humble cabin on Lake Nacimiento in the Central Coast region of California, and I group up splashing around in its green waters and then reading 1990s classic fantasy in the cabin at night. I am, however, very jealous of your access to Lake Superior, and after googling “Kemijoki” I might have to add “float down a Finish river” to my wanderlust bucket list.
5) It says that Spellbreaker is the final installment in this trilogy. Can we expect more in this world that’s separate from this trilogy, or will your future work be something completely different?

The next book will be something wholly different, something placed in this world but still a fantasy, heavily influenced by my medical training. The elevator pitch so far is “Neil Gaiman’s American Gods goes to Medical School.” But it’s a work in progress so we’ll see. There may well be a return to the world of Spellwright. I tried to plan a few seeds at the end of Spellbreaker; I’ll have to wait to see if they grow into anything.

Thanks for joining us, Blake!

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

This is the first in a new Hatke series. For those who have enjoyed Zita the Spacegirl and stand-alone works like Little Robot and (my personal favorite) Julia’s House for Lost Creatures, a new Hatke book is reason to sit up and take notice–a new series perhaps doubly so.

Jack has a single mom struggling to make it all work and a sister–Maddy–who is substantially non-verbal. He wants to help more than he’s allowed to, and it’s all very frustrating. Until a bad trade at the flea market leaves him and Maddy with packets of fascinating alien seeds. Their new garden draws the attention of their sword-fighting neighbor, Lilly, who has ideas of her own about what to do with the creatures who come out of the ground.

Mighty Jack ends on a cliffhanger, and a lot of how I feel about the series will depend on how it’s resolved. So far everybody is doing their best, and everybody has sensible motivations that don’t always work well together. But it’s Jack’s story. How will Hatke keep that balance going? The cliffhanger has me in genuine suspense–how will he resolve it and how soon? It’s pretty rare that I’m not sure. But this time I really don’t know. I’m eager for the next volume, to find out.

Please consider using our link to buy Mighty Jack from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

The cover to this novel screams steampunk. The image, the articulated mechanical hand, the human hand, the globe: if you go into Nisi Shawl’s debut not expecting steampunk, you are just not paying attention. And yet it’s quite unexpected steampunk. It’s steampunk that has thought about where rubber comes from, who builds the steam-powered devices, who has access to them and who doesn’t. Who makes things work, who runs things, the dissatisfactions that arise when the two are not the same. This is steampunk with not just a thorough understanding of colonialism but a deep desire to engage with that colonialism.

Its African setting is perfect for that. If you’ve read things about Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries–about World War I in Africa, for example–you’ll be able to see the places where Shawl’s worldbuilding research really shines. The vast variability of Shawl’s characters’ backgrounds and beliefs is completely natural. It would–should–be utterly unremarkable–but instead, it’s ground-breaking. This book is fiercely tender with its history, unflinching and understanding with its characters’ contexts. The parts of the premise that are not literally true are emotionally true–of course utopianists of the late 19th century would behave exactly like that, look at how they did elsewhere and how fascinating to watch it play out in fiction in a different setting.

Does that mean it’s written like a treatise? Nope. It’s written like a thriller novel: short chapters, lots of action, lots of POV switching to cover the most perspective. With a plot that covers thirty years and people from four different continents, it takes a breakneck pace to get through everything that happens. There is no time to stop and lecture. Everything has to be folded into actual story or there will not be enough room for all the story there is here.

Everfair has all sorts of tags you can put on it that will sound like other things, but it is fundamentally not a heck of a lot like the other things with those tags. Steampunk, fantasy, sure, yes, yes it is. But even more its own thing on its own terms.

Please consider using our link to buy Everfair from Amazon.

Renee Ahdieh, The Rose and the Dagger. This is the sequel to a 1001 Nights retelling, and while the first book (The Wrath and the Dawn) was vivid and fun to read, I like this better because it’s a more interesting question to me: what next? What did they do when the known story reaches its borders? The writing is just as vivid, and favorite characters return to develop complexity. You could maybe just start with this one, but I think getting the emotional backstory from the first volume is better. This is a definitive ending, in case you’re worried about series that go on indefinitely. (There’s also a free-on-Kindle bonus story, The Crown and the Arrow. -ed This is not a good way to find out if you like this series, it’s only good if you already know you like it and want bonus content. -M)

C.J. Cherryh, Visitor. Annnnd speaking of series that go on indefinitely. This is volume 17, and she’s showing no signs of stopping. The plot threads that started 10+  books ago are being picked up. You already know if you like this series, and look! here’s another! that’s about more than Bren’s apartment! My main complaint in this book was too many hoomans. I do not read this series for the hoomans. Too many hoomans, not enough Jago-ji, but I have hopes for future volumes. And the hoomans were surprisingly interesting for hoomans, it’s just that I can read about them anywhere.

Eric H. Cline, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Now that I know more nonfiction writers, I’m aware that they don’t often get to choose their title. This one is hideously ill-suited for the book, which should actually be called something like What Do We Know About the Sea People Anyway: Several Centuries of the Southeast Mediterranean. But it was aces at doing that.

Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History. This, on the other hand, does what it says on the tin. If you’re really interested in the Acadians, I wouldn’t recommend starting here, but it does talk extensively about the diaspora and is worth including in a larger-than-one-volume Acadian history collection for that reason. (What would I recommend starting with? Probably Farrager’s A Great and Noble Scheme.)

Jed Horne, Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City. This is a fascinating book, and I’ve had several stories that are not about Hurricane Katrina directly (that’s not mine to tell, I don’t think) leap out at me since reading it. Very little will be surprising if you’ve paid attention to the news (and possibly watched Treme), but having it all marshaled into one place is very useful. Seeing it all laid out like that, what happened, who did what, what do we know. A really diverse set of viewpoints went into Horne’s research for this book. Recommended if your blood pressure can stand it.

Guy Gavriel Kay, Children of Earth and Sky. Kay tends to mostly write books that are set in thinly veiled versions of our own history, in various locations. This one is in the same universe as The Lions of Al-Rassan (one of my favorites of his books) and the Sarantium duology, much later in time. It’s basically the Balkan coast and Venice, in fantasy form. The fantasy conceit is somewhat more present than in some other works of this type that he’s done. I don’t think this is his masterwork, but if you enjoy this sort of thing from Kay–and I do–it’s definitely worth the time.

Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. I came into this volume having read the title story and one other story in it. Those two were my least favorite out of the whole volume–and I wanted the collection on the strength of them. “State Change” was an utterly fresh premise, for example, and there were many stories that had depth of research that’s often either not attempted or not visible in short fiction. I read every story. Very much recommended.

Michael A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America. This book performs the kind of recentering that resets your brain, akin to being taught when Rome fell and then having the epiphany that the Byzantines considered themselves Romans for centuries thereafter. If your point of view on Native American/First Nations/Indian people is centered on the east coast of the US and Canada, then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries look like a steady decline, caused by invasion and disease. McDonnell centers his thinking on Michilimackinac, what is now Mackinaw City, the center of a powerful meta-kin network and series of alliances that was in some ways highly successful in this period. Fascinating stuff.

Thomas Michael Power, The Economic Role of Metal Mining in Minnesota: Past, Present, and Future. Really really what it says on the tin. I was hoping there was more “past” involved. Nope. This is an environmental and economic assessment of these industries in Minnesota’s north–interesting, though not useful for the story I was hoping it would be useful for.

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. A solid biography of an important and little-sung figure in the Civil Rights Movement and adjacent social movements. If you’ve ever wondered who did the caregiving in that era of fighting for racial justice, read this book–it gets quite specific in spots about what unheralded labor was necessary for the famous events to go off as well as they did. Baker was a firebrand. Awesome stuff.

Tsuruta Kenji, Wandering Island Volume 1. This is a manga whose main appeal is its setting: not any of Japan’s cities, but the outer small islands. The speculative conceit is moderately interesting. If you’re thoroughly habituated to ubiquitous bikini pictures, bath pictures, panty shots, etc. in this genre/set of genres, the fact that it’s utterly idiotic to have a pilot flying around in a bikini top (IT GETS COLD UP THERE) may not bother you (nor is that the only stupid excuse for scantily clad heroine). The plot did not advance very quickly, and I’m going to stop at just this one volume.

Django Wexler, The Mad Apprentice and The Palace of Glass. Second two books in a middle-grade series. (The first of which is The Forbidden Library. -ed) Much darker than books for that age often are, with cruelty and death foregrounded in the fantasy–foregrounded but not triumphant. I found both of these fast and smoothly written, and I think you could start with either if you were doing the fairly typical grade school kid thing of grabbing whatever was in front of you that looked cool regardless of series placement.

Dorothy Dora Whipple, Chi-mewinzha: Ojibwe Stories from Leech Lake. This book is laid out with the Ojibwe text on one page and the English translation on the facing page. It’s thoroughly illustrated, so between those two factors it ends up being quite a quick read (unless you’re an expert in Ojibwe or other Algonquian family languages and are doing complicated comparisons with the translation. Some are “traditional” stories, a lot are family stories, personal stories. It’s well-done and interesting, and if you’re trying to do research on another culture you shouldn’t stop at one book anyway, so it doesn’t matter that this can’t be the one. And if this is your culture, you can tell me, but it looks from here like Whipple did a really great job of providing this as a resource for both insiders and outsiders.

A ton of books, many of them not book-length but on my Kindle so I keep track all the same…so you can tell that I was traveling in this fortnight, and indeed I was.

Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters. The friend who recommended this collection said it was dark, and it is. It may be the darkest thing I’ve finished. I have no idea why Maureen McHugh’s blurb describes it as Lovecraftian, because there’s very little unfathomable horror here: most of the horror is entirely fathomable. It is substantially characterization horror–while there are elements of supernatural, the tone is consistent throughout the stories, never a moment where you’re surprised that the supernatural thing is not a sparkly friendly unicorn for these nice happy people. It’s also a very blue collar set of stories, and I am having feelings about how easy it appears to be to find a horror writer who wants to write about blue collar people as opposed to an optimistic science fiction writer. I think it’s probably easier to write about a broad spectrum of people than to change fundamentally what metaphysics your stories have, so I am not upset with Ballingrud about this, but…still. Many feelings in other directions.

Chaz Brenchley, The Crater Girls in Camp. Kindle. While I wait for enough of the serial to stack up that I can read it, this is a stand-alone from the same project. It has the “school story/camp story” nature, but set on Mars, so if you read that kind of thing as a kid, it’s quick and fun and full of spunky girls.

Marie Brennan, The Bottle Tree. Kindle. A motivating prequel story, a “how they got there” for her Chains and Memory/Lies and Prophecy universe. I think it works better for having read the books than it would on its own, but since the books are available, that’s entirely possible.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Penric and the Shaman. Kindle. This is another in the Chalion universe, a sequel to the earlier novella Penric’s Demon. This features ghosts and hedge shamans and trying to figure out which gods will want which souls. It doesn’t have the personal/interpersonal depth of Paladin of Souls, but it’s a fun read all the same, and that’s a pretty high bar to expect to clear. If you liked that universe and want more, here’s some.

A.S. Byatt, Possession. Reread. This was one of the first things I read of Byatt’s. Looking back having read pretty nearly everything of hers, I find the passionate fight for one’s own proper work to thread through it, and it’s definitely here, both in the flashbacks and in the contemporary chapters. I’m also fascinated with how this book was written, in what order, because of all the pieces of Victorian-esque poetry and prose she had to do for it. I’m a non-linear writer myself, and I’m looking at the construction of it, trying to turn up the hems to see how they’re sewn.

Blake Charlton, Spellbreaker. Discussed elsewhere.

Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson, eds., Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. This was a series of essays that was purportedly about ecology and SF. And…I think how you feel about this book is going to depend on how you feel SF, as a genre, is doing at dealing with the environment, climate change, ecologies, etc. Do you feel that it’s doing a bang-up job and nothing more could really be asked? If so, the self-congratulation of this collection (“yay! someone is dealing with any kind of ecology at all ever!”) will probably not grate on you. And the stretches the critics in it require to make connections with ecology will not, and the moments where they let gigantic social movements outside the field go completely unmentioned when relevant. Yeah. All that will be fine, if you think that environmental SF is in a state that’s just peachy keen and doing all that could ever be asked of it. So.

Jan Golinski, The Experimental Self: Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science. This is not a traditional biography so much as a character study. It goes through different personae Davy may have been considered to have adopted or had thrust upon him, in the context of what his era made available–“scientist,” for example, was not something young Humphry knew about to aspire to or shun. Remarkably, it goes into quite a lot of gender identity and sexuality for its era, and does so without imposing on Davy any modern identities that his writings don’t support him taking on personally. So go team on interesting and useful context that doesn’t push farther than the documentation.

Bill B. Hayes, Five Quarts: A Natural and Personal History of Blood. I found this book unexpectedly touching. There were interesting facts about the way that blood has been studied and known and considered–I expected that. I didn’t entirely expect how much there would be personal stories from Hayes about his family and his partner, and they were sweet without being treacly. It’s a quick read, and, well, heart-warming.

Kat Howard, Roses and Rot. A modern Tam Lin story with sisters, both artists, daughters of an abusive mother. One is a dancer and the other, the protag, is a writer. The main weak spot for me was that Kat Howard is a better writer than her protagonist, so whenever we saw flashes of Imogen’s work, I didn’t really buy that it was supposed to be wonderful. The other art, described but not shown, was far more interesting, as were the discussions of people’s varying attitudes toward their art, its inspiration, and its influences.

Ayize Jama-Everett, The Liminal People. An American superhero in Africa and London, in a not-at-all-typical situation but possibly a much more realistic one…until the last third, where the structure becomes a lot more formulaic/predictable. I was interested in this very very non-Justice League superhero and not so disappointed with the ending that I wouldn’t recommend it, but it gets dark, considering that the main character works for a warlord. Heads up. Still worth the time if you’re in the mood for it.

Eeva Kilpi, A Landscape Blossoms Within Me. Kindle. A wry, witty, earthy Finnish poet. This volume gave the poems in Finnish and English, first the one and then the other. Some of the shortest poems were the best. I could have read dozens more if there had been more here. Runs a large emotional range.

Robin Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Does what it says on the tin. Kimmerer, while a trained scientist who is talking a lot about moss science, is not shy about acknowledging that she has emotional and personal reactions to moss as well, which is refreshing considering that most scientists do. Lots of variety, lots of interest here, ends if anything too soon.

Mary Robinette Kowal, Ghost Talkers. Discussed elsewhere.

Leena Krohn, Tainaron: Mail from Another City. Kindle. This is a series of letters describing life in a city of bugs. It’s weird and fanciful and probably would get tedious if it was longer, but it isn’t longer, so it’s just the right length of stay in Tainaron.

Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, eds., Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet Issue 34. Kindle. I liked the poetry in this. I liked the first Hazel Crowley poem, the one about the patron saint of sunken ships. I liked Molly Gloss’s “Superman, Sleepless,” and I liked Holly Day’s “People in Boxes.” I don’t know if the proportion of poetry is typical of LCRW. But it was time well spent.

Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond. Read this book and get mad at Aaron Burr all over again, for screwing over the New York water system for half a century and several cholera epidemics. There’s also a bunch of other stuff, most of which I already knew and you might too or maybe not. I don’t know, it’s really hard for me to gauge what the general cholera knowledge is. For a cholera book it’s only middle of the pack. But the stuff about Aaron Burr will make you steam.

Vandana Singh, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet. Beautiful science fiction stories rooted both in place and in genre. This is in some ways the opposite of what I was talking about Gerald Vizenor doing in Treaty Shirts earlier: this is the concerns of traditional science fiction, all the genre furniture, but in a context and culture that traditional science fiction ignored. I want both things. I want more of both things. I want this, though, definitely this.

Noelle Stevenson, Shannon Watters, Carolyn Nowak, and Maarta Laiho (et al), Lumberjanes: A Terrible Plan. This rambled, and I did not care. I love the Lumberjanes and their failure to earn cake decorating badges and their run-ins with the bear woman and everything. I hope it doesn’t keep rambling indefinitely. But a little ramble? Yes please gimme. Usually I don’t need an identification character. Everyone in this series is my identification character. Everyone. Even the bear woman.

Anthony Trollope, Miss Mackenzie. Kindle. I started reading this in Sweden, back in May, and it’s taken me this long to finish it partly because I don’t preferentially read on my Kindle (at all) and partly because Trollope makes me exceptionally nervous. Oh so nervous. And this book is no exception. He keeps talking about money right out loud. This is terrifying. What if the title character ends up poor and/or with a mother-in-law she hates? This happens to my friends all the time, and it’s scary stuff. My friends are pretty low-risk on the bitten by werewolves front, but poor and fighting with their mothers-in-law? Terrifying. So I basically read Trollope through the cracks in my fingers. I think the ending of this book–and in fact the structure of several key events–was far more surprising to me than it ought to have been because I share so few values with Trollope. But I liked the central character a lot.

Genevieve Valentine, Icon. This is a sequel that very much needs the book before it: you want Persona first. But if you’ve read Persona, this is just as fast-paced, just as hard-driving. Maybe more so. It takes on the aftermath of the events of that book and brings them to a logical conclusion that is not in any way formulaic. Politics, media, interpersonal questions…it’s all here, all systems go.

Gerald Vizenor, Griever: An American Monkey King in China. This is semi-autobiographical: Vizenor really is a Native American professor who went to live in China very early in the time when Americans were able to do so. That he then recast himself in a Chinese epic role…well. It’s a very, very different book from Treaty Shirts. Sometimes the intersection of American imperialism and Chinese imperialism, American exceptionalism and Chinese exceptionalism, is staggering. Vizenor’s Griever is (and sees himself as even more of) an outsider to American culture, and yet even more of an outsider to Chinese culture. Weird, weird book. Having read two of his, I have no idea what to expect of a third. Trickster myths? maybe, sure. Maybe not. Who knows.

Jo Walton, The King’s Peace. Reread. Years and years later, now that I am friends with Jo and she has written and published all sorts of things (none of which was true the first time I read this)…this still feels like a very natural book. It has a flow, a comfort level with the material. It’s been years since I voluntarily reached for an Arthurian retelling, and I think having Arthur at the remove of Urdo instead, having everyone with different names, is important to my enjoyment here, because Jo can do slightly different things–I can think, “Oh, right, that’s who Fishface is,” but I can feel that she will have her own shape of story around him, her own outcomes, where using the familiar names would close off those possibilities. Some possibilities, of course, are outside the light cone completely.

Kai Ashante Wilson, Sorcerer of the Wildeeps. This is like a Silver Age military science fantasy, if one of those had been built without the prejudices they’re generally steeped in. If you really love that sort of story and hate being slapped in the face with racism, sexism, homophobia, here’s Wilson doing it without internalizing those things–his characters are not perfect but are called on their flaws, concisely and to the point.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

Ginger Stuyvesant is an American medium serving the British army in WWI. In secret, she takes reports from recent casualties about the circumstances of their deaths and dispatches the information back to the front so that the survivors can adjust to where the Germans have moved their guns and troops, where danger is coming from where it has just been.

She and her fiance, Ben, discover evidence that the Germans have found out the Spirit Corps’ existence, a closely held secret–and what’s worse, it looks like a traitor within their own ranks is the source of the information. Ginger can talk to the dead and read auras, but knowing that the people around her feel angry, sad, guilty, or confused doesn’t tell her why they feel that way–so she and her allies have to embark on a great deal of painful and dangerous detective work for the sake of the war effort–and their own needs. Because it swiftly gets very personal–of course it does.

This was a fast read, very smoothly written. Ginger’s encounters with the misogyny of her time don’t make it a happy romp through an early twentieth century that never was, but anyone who writes a happy romp of the Great War is probably not paying attention. Ghost Talkers is doing things with Spiritualism and the Great War that I haven’t seen done elsewhere, and it’s a major interest of mine. Worth the time.

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Review copy provided by Tor Books.

I know that there are readers who don’t like series to be indefinite, and this one is not. This is, technically, the third in its trilogy: series over! For those who want to wait and be sure that a trilogy is not five books, eight, twelve: it is not. Go ahead. But I also feel that Spellbreaker stands on its own quite well. You may want to go read Spellwright and Spellbound after having read it, but “after” is a perfectly good time to do so.

So what have we got here? We’ve got a world in which text is really, really crucial to magic–and in which learning disabilities as both advantage and disadvantage in that system have been clearly thought through. We’ve got an author with medical training who is using it in the books a lot. We’ve got gods that can aggregate, so you can stick humans together with more than one god at once, with each god having demands to make on the system. We’ve got an archipelago system–ships and kayaks galore, hardly a horse to be seen. Traders and shark gods, yes. Tough Guide to Fantasyland travelers making stew, hardly.

This is an adventure fantasy on multiple levels. Empire, interpersonal, intrapersonal, autoimmune. On some levels it’s “if you want a one of those, it’s a one of those.” On others–I can’t really think of another one of those that works quite like this one. People who are made partly of texts, partly of gods, partly of dragons…there’s a lot of stuff going on here, and it goes by pretty fast. There’s not something for everyone. But there’s something for quite a few people.

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