Tag: bookses precious

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.

Please consider using our link to buy Ghost Talkers from Amazon.

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.

Please consider using our link to buy Spellbreaker from Amazon.

Liz Duffy Adams, Delia Sherman, Mary Robinette Kowal, Madeleine Robins, Barbara Samuels, and Sarah Smith, Whitehall. Discussed elsewhere.

Max Gladstone, Four Roads Cross. Discussed elsewhere.

Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. This one I discussed in several places throughout the week I was reading it: here, here, here, here, and here. After the first introductory post, those are by decade of poems in the book, with the 1950s and ’60s lumped together.

Carrie Jones, Flying. Discussed elsewhere.

Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters. This is the last Kelly Link collection I had to catch up on. It had some overlap with Magic for Beginners, but the overlap was in some of my favorite stories, so I suppose I’m glad they’re available to more people. Still definitely glad that I decided to pick up reading Link after years of not, and from here I’ll probably stay caught up.

Pat Schmatz, Lizard Radio. I think one thing that adults reading middle grade and YA need to remember is that everything is somebody’s first time encountering a concept. For people in my immediate social circles, Lizard Radio‘s protagonist not being transgender but not fitting the expectations her culture has of girls either will not be revolutionary. The handful of portmanteau words used by the characters in this future setting will not be shocking. But if you go over to GoodReads, you’ll find people–many of them quite young–who are struggling through these ideas for the first time. And many of them don’t care that the ending is a little loosely formed–they’re just caught up in Kivali’s story. Sometimes it’s good to remember that people who have been utterly steeped in inside-baseball genre politics for more than a decade are not the only or even the main audience for most books, and let it be what it is: a coming of age story against a dystopian backdrop, with gender politics that shouldn’t be notable but I guess we all know still are, at least for a lot of people.

Paul Schneider, Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History. This is like sitting in the bar at a convention with some guy who likes all the same books as you like, even though his own book is kind of a mess. Schneider rambles wherever he wants to–instead of writing about the Mississippi proper, which would have been enough for a book, he wanders throughout the entire Mississippi watershed and beyond. I suspect that he included the Ohio River section of the watershed in this book just so he could talk about Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War, which puts me in great sympathy with him, because I talk about Crucible of War at the drop of a hat, I terrified someone at a birthday party once talking on and on about Crucible of War. (That poor woman. She seemed nice.) And John McPhee, he loves John McPhee, I love John McPhee, hurray. So this was reasonably good fun to read, but I resent it a little, because it will fill the space where a history of the Mississippi goes, and there’s quite a lot to be said there. And also if you hadn’t read McPhee going in, I am not at all sure that Schneider is coherent about the perils of the Lower Mississippi. So really go read Anderson and McPhee and try to find me and this Paul Schneider in the bar at a convention sometime, that’s my actual recommendation. (Note: I have no indication that he would even consider attending a convention.)

Leonie Swann, Three Bags Full. This is a murder mystery from the perspective of a flock of sheep trying to figure out who killed their shepherd. To some extent it succeeds for me based on how much primate stuff the sheep never really do understand. But then again, its general lightness and sly jokes are not really entirely in keeping with how things turn out, so…it’s a mixed bag full, this book.

Review copy provided by Serial Box

Each episode of this serial has its specific authors listed, but there are thirteen episodes, and I don’t think you care who wrote episode one and who wrote episode seven, so the six contributing hands are Liz Duffy Adams, Mary Robinette Kowal, Madeleine Robins, Barbara Samuel, Delia Sherman, and Sarah Smith.

For those unfamiliar with Serial Box, their very conscious model is a TV season, only with written fiction. You can subscribe to get the serial every week when the new episode comes out, catching up with a “season pass” if you find a serial you like that’s already out. You can also buy on an episode by episode basis, and all the serials have their “pilots” available to read for free.

For many people, the serialization is part of the fun, and reading a sample will help you decide what you like. For people like me…not so much. Right up front: I fundamentally dislike serialization. I am a really fast reader, and I never got into watching TV on a weekly basis before DVDs and Netflix were widely available, so I’m not at all accustomed to the idea of having to wait for the end of the story. For me, this is not a feature. But! There is a solution to all this, and I’m doing it with Chaz Brenchley’s Crater School serial, which is subscribe to support the project and let it pile up in my Kindle until there’s enough to make a satisfying amount of story. So when the publicist for this project asked if I wanted to review it and told me the pitch and who was writing for it, I said absolutely…if I could have the whole thing. If it had a definite ending. It does and I could! So here we are.

Whitehall is the story of the early days of Catherine of Braganza’s marriage to Charles II of England. I basically always want another historical novel that’s reasonably well-researched and grounded in its period, and the Restoration is a period I know enough about to be annoying, so I was on board in an “I will catch the two nits that got through your meticulous editing process” way. (But the fact that this book did not make me run screaming in the first episode is a very good sign, because I am easily to send screaming about this period.) Catherine herself is a major point of view character, but so is the king’s acknowledged mistress, one of the queen’s serving girls, the king himself, and a few others as the story demands. Whitehall traces Catherine from her earliest alienation from the English court as a new, foreign, Catholic princess to finding her place as a beloved and acclaimed queen.

Unlike some collaborative works, each writer writes all the characters–you can’t break it down and say, “Oh, Jenny is written by Delia” or “Barbara writes the stuff with Rochester,” even if you could recognize writing style. Instead there is continuity of characters for each episode. Further, I felt that there was some effort to create a consistency of voice throughout the project, as one would see in a TV show. This has its good and its bad points. The good: Whitehall read a lot more like a novel in parts than like a series of short stories written by various people around a common topic, each with a slightly different idea of what James II would have been like in the time before his reign, etc. The bad: if you are craving a Delia Sherman novelette, a Mary Robinette Kowal novelette, etc., this will probably not scratch that itch, as the voice is a lot more averaged-out, with a lot of the quirky individuality of prose and characterization lost. This happens at least a little bit in any collaboration process, the more so with each additional collaborator, but when you have collaborators who have vivid voices you love to read, having a smoothly written group voice can be a bit more of a letdown if you’re not expecting it.

I found that there was not a lot of the kind of reminder you would find if the writers did not trust the readers–at least not the obtrusive kind. So if you’re like me and want to read your serials all piled up into one longish novel, this will not be a repetitive novel that cycles back to “remember who Lady Buckingham is? she’s the one who…” over and over again. I think that the presence of a “who’s who in Whitehall” webpage link and other links to keep you grounded will help those who are reading on a more weekly basis if they get lost in the English court. I felt that there was also enough incluing of why these people are important to the plot and why they should have some of the political/emotional triggers they have so that if you don’t have a solid grounding in Restoration history, it should not be confusing to you–while still not going into pages of backstory that would bore the fetchingly fitted trousers off those of us who already know that Catherine of Braganza wore them.

So if you’re interested in historical drama, especially in serial format, Whitehall scratches that itch, and you can give the pilot a try without committing to more. If you’re like me and a pilot will frustrate you, I can promise that there’s a whole story coming in all the pieces if you’re just a tiny bit patient.

Review copy provided by Tor Books. Also Max is one of my Fourth Street people, so yay for people who show up and talk theory with me.

The Craft Sequence is pretty carefully designed so that you can start it at any point, but the titles tell you what the chronology is: the number is right there in the name. This is the fifth one published but the fourth in chronology, hence the number FOUR right there conveniently in the name of the book. But you can read it first, no problem. All will be explained. Well, all will be inclued, hinted at, etc., which is better anyway.

So. Four Roads Cross. You’ve got a city with a resurgent moon goddess and a bunch of gargoyles, and how the population will take it depends on how it’s handled by…a lot of people. The news reporters and their choirs. The official law. Some people in personally difficult transitions, because hey, who do the gods use? Who have they always used, any gods, anywhere?

This is a book with stone poems and nightmare matrices and gods in very–very–unexpected places. It has mining consortiums and implicit and explicit contracts fighting it out in courts. And fallen empires echoing down through history to produce characters in the current world who are who they are because of who they were aeons ago–not just gods, but…other things.

If you’ve been missing Tara Abernathy, or Alt Coulumb itself, or watching pieces of the Craft universe unfold–if you’ve been waiting for this book–then yes. This is the book you’ve been waiting for. With all the shiny bits that implies, worldbuilding-wise, interpersonally, all of them. Go and get it.

Please consider using our link to buy Four Roads Cross from Amazon.