Tag: bookses precious

Renee Ahdieh, The Wrath and the Dawn. A vivid and intense 1001 Nights retelling, very distinct from E.K. Johnston’s A Thousand Nights despite both featuring a strong romance and a strong female platonic relationship. The root story is not one that snagged me for possible retelling as a love story, so I’m fascinated to watch very different people make it work, and I’ll be even more interested to see what Ahdieh does branching out into more of her own stories with the sequel.

Thornton Burgess, The Adventures of Old Man Coyote. We all have gaps in how we read the children’s classics as kids, and Burgess was one of mine–when talking to a friend about his childhood reading and Little, Big, it became clear to me that I’d read a character in the latter as a type when he was far more particular than that. Burgess is very much of a different era of children’s literature–gender issues so marked that there was only one (grandmother) female character in the entire animal village, didacticism not only marked but set aside in little poems–and yet it was a breezy little read, and I could see why decades of kids learning to read were proud of getting through the different animals’ adventures.

Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern. Strange combination of highly personal and highly intellectualized/meta poems in a very small volume. While I could see that what he was doing was very good, none of it touched me very particularly, in the strange way that poems either do or do not. However, it was a thing that I read over breakfast instead of articles about Donald Trump, and this is a life choice I cannot help but recommend.

Neil Kent, The Triumph of Light and Nature: Nordic Art, 1740-1940. Lots of pictures, some of them unfamiliar and interesting. I am still puzzling over Willumsen’s Jotunheim. Particularly the decapitation. I was interested in this before planning my trip to Sweden and Finland, but I made it a priority to read in case there was anything I’d want to make a point of seeing.

Hilary McKay, Binny in Secret. This is one of the good McKays, by which I mean that it made me giggle out loud in several spots and it also tackled genuinely dark and difficult topics. And yet it wasn’t one of the best McKays, by which I mean that I don’t think it really held together in the end. The dark and difficult topics were brought up with a “lady or the tiger” sort of ending: unresolved, left to the reader, in a way that I found to be a copout, and also one of the middling-difficult topics (the relationship between the two girls) was really glossed over in a way that was far less sensitive than I usually expect of McKay. Also the characters were more remembered from Binny for Short than completely drawn in. So: I’m glad I read it, I will want my own copy (this was the library’s), but it’s not going to be one of my top recommendations. More on a par with Indigo’s Star than the really good ones.

Jonathan Spence, Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man. A fascinating look at an essayist at the end of an era, his family and how he portrayed them. Spence is really good at this kind of microhistory, the sort of stuff for China that Steven Ozment does for Germany. Always a pleasure.

Brian Staveley, The Last Mortal Bond. Discussed elsewhere.

Susan Stinson, Spider in a Tree. Oh, I loved this. Loved. It’s a novel about Jonathan Edwards–you know, the preacher of “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” that Jonathan Edwards–and his household and neighbors and their world. And Stinson really digs into the fundamental weirdness of colonial Massachusetts, religiously and interpersonally, and yet sticks with their fundamental humanity, in ways that are so compelling. It’s rare and wonderful to get a great historical novel that isn’t focused on either war or a single arc of romance, that gets all the gritty details of householding right and puts them in the context of different characters’ concerns with their larger universes. Preaching from insects, different slaves’ perspective on joining their owners’ church, nephews finding their way in the world their uncle shapes with his preaching but does not control…oh, so many good bits.

Wislawa Szymborska, View With a Grain of Sand. Reread. Perhaps it’s an aspect of reading in translation, but while nothing shot lightning through me, nothing made me go leaping through the house looking for my phone or my computer to write to someone about a particular line, a particular poem, the entire experience of this was satisfying, like being in very good and thoughtful hands, like a satisfying conversation.

Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Fascinating study of how people interact with the ideas of magic and evil and money when the money/wage component is comparatively new to how they deal with work. Lots of really interesting anecdote, lots of really dense and chewy analysis. Good fodder for fantasy writers, probably worthwhile for others as well.

Lavie Tidhar, ed., The Apex Book of World SF Volume 3. Like Volume 2, this was an extremely varied collection in tone, subject, author origin, and more; I expect that Tidhar had to work quite hard to get such a variety of stories. The ones that stood out for me in the most positive ways were Xia Jia’s “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight,” Fadzlishah Johanabas’s “Act of Faith,” and Amal El-Mohtar’s “To Follow the Waves.”

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

If you’re one of the people who still can’t believe that George R. R. Martin had [horrible result] happen to [character], good news! The last book of Brian Staveley’s trilogy is out. If you’re one of the people who got tired of that and wandered off to look at a stand of birch trees, also good news. The world still has birch trees in it.

By the beginning of this book, everything has gone seriously to hell in a handbasket, and continues to do so. The difficulty of having the central problem of the series be “how do we keep everyone in the world from becoming loveless monsters” is that you have to show people not currently all being loveless monsters, or else the basic response is, “eh.”

I really wanted to like this. I really, really did. After this many pages, I was invested. And Staveley does have some cameos of minor characters who care about each other–and he does have, eventually, some major characters realize that life is not all suffering. Five hundred pages into the third book. But for whom is the boilerplate at the end of this review? Who might enjoy this, who might want to read it? People who don’t mind wallowing in the darkedy darkedy dark of the grimdark even when the premise is supposed to be undercutting it and specifically on the side of choosing caring. Because this is a lot of wallowing. This is a lot of muddle and muck–a lot of instances of things going wrong in eye-rollingly predictable fashion–“don’t let thing go wrong, A!” says B, so of course A screws up in exactly that manner–before the end finally comes.

I think the thing that tipped me over the line into NO NOT REALLY, NO: was the disabilityfail. The major, utter, total disabilityfail. Here is your rule of thumb: if your character’s disability literally goes away when it is most convenient for it to go away. If you have your character discussing how this happens. I will not care that you have come up with a magical reason for why this happens. I will start spelling magical with extra a’s at that point: your magical reason is now a maaaaaagical reason.

Because here’s the thing: I always want my disability to go away. It would always be most convenient. I do not need barbarian warriors to be slashing at my head. The day I missed the wedding of one of my best friends in the world was enough. Or the day other people in my house got sick and no one was well enough to get groceries and we had to call for outside help. Or…oh, pick a random Tuesday. Tuesday is a good enough reason to Rully Rully Want to not be disabled. And pretty much every disabled person I know feels this way. (Now, you may have labeled some differences as disabilities that the person who has them does not label that way. That’s a separate conversation. But if the person who has it calls it a disability? They pretty much want it gone.) So the Convenient To The Plot Appearing And Disappearing Disability: don’t do that. Don’t ever, ever do that.

But if you’ve stuck with the previous two volumes and want to see how it all turns out….

Please consider using our link to buy The Last Mortal Bond from Amazon.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

This is the second in a series, and I have not read the first, which is called Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant. Its content is easy to infer, since the titular characters are both in this volume: the Turkish Lieutenant, Mister Selim, narrates to the reader his role in events and his (slightly more sensible) opinions of Delilah’s exploits.

And exploits: they are many.

There is swashing, and also buckling. There are adventures on horseback, on sailboats, in carriages, at fancy balls, in gardens, at teas. There are adventures with multiple different sets of soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars. The swords, the muskets, the barrels of powder, and the written-out sound effects are copious. So there are many of you for whom this is going to be exactly your sort of rollicking adventure. If you have ever thought, “The biffs, bams, and pows of ’60s era Batman: if only they were attached to a young woman in the British Regency!”, then your long nightmare of waiting is over and this is the graphic novel for you.

Those of you for whom it maybe isn’t: the ones who care about the social mores of British society during the Napoleonic Wars. In the author’s note, Tony Cliff says that despite his best efforts there will inevitably be some conflict with the astute reader’s knowledge: boy howdy. And then he invites readers to help him with his research: um. This is a complete cop-out, basically, because when it comes to social mores he pretty clearly does not care. When can you, as an unmarried woman of good family, go introduce yourself to random other people of good family? How does that work in the Regency? Hahaha Tony Cliff patently does not care–I cannot imagine that a reader saying, “That’s not how it worked, actually,” would have gotten anywhere with the plot he had contrived. It looks very much like he wanted to write a rollicking adventure with a very modern heroine who does not care either. And if you, the reader, care–if you cannot un-know the things you know about the social interactions of the time–if you cannot set them aside to go biff, bam, and pow–this is probably not the graphic novel for you, swashing and buckling though it may have.

Please consider using our link to buy Delilah Dirk and the King’s Shilling from Amazon.

Tina Connolly, Seriously Wicked. Connolly’s previous book, Silverblind, was one I felt was a serious level up for her, and so I had high hopes for Seriously Wicked. But it was aimed in a completely different direction from her previous work, and I think it’s important to keep in mind that when we really like something an author has done, sometimes the best thing they can do with their next book is something different. Compared to Silverblind, this is frothy, bubbly fun. I felt like the resolution was somewhat obvious, but its teen target audience very well might not–and writing things that are genuinely fun is harder than it looks and generally underappreciated.

Laura Esquivel, Malinche. The prose of this is beautiful, particularly the places where it’s talking about pre-Columbian Mexico. There are several places where Esquivel skips over some of the most emotionally difficult stuff–where her heroine decides to accompany Cortes and leave her infant son with a nanny, for example, that decision is summarized in a paragraph. She’s allowed to talk about what she wants to talk about, but a book that’s about Cortes’s translator could have been more powerful if she had been less willing to flinch. That wasn’t her interest, though, and the lyricism is gorgeous. Also it’s very quick, so if you start to get annoyed at the places where Esquivel looks away, it’ll soon be over.

Judith Flanders, The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London. Exhaustive detail. Exhaustive. Really. There is an entire chapter about what the roads were made of, advantages and disadvantages of the different materials. If you’re writing a book set in Victorian London or similar city, you really do want this. There are a few missteps–mostly not related to her period but to ours–but in general Flanders is someone to follow if you’re at all interested in her period, and even if you’re not.

Christine Ingebritsen, The Nordic States and European Unity. This says a lot of things about the Nordic states and their relationship with the EU and its predecessor, and it’s one of those books where if you know a reasonable amount about the differences in the economies of those countries, it will all seem a tiny bit obvious. But here it’s laid out with graphs and charts and numbers, so you can quote the things that seem obvious if you need them later, so there’s that, I guess.

Astrid Lindgren, Ronia the Robber’s Daughter. Reread, twenty-five or so years later. This was a favorite when I was little, and revisiting it after a hiatus of my entire adulthood does not make me love it any less. If anything, I love it more now, because I see the things it’s doing clearly from a different angle. Lindgren writes with clear-eyed love about childhood friendships and time in the Swedish wilds. Death, dirt, illness, hunger, and prejudice are all here, but none of them win–none but death, because in a Swedish children’s book you’re allowed to tell children that the people they love will someday die. Which is one of the reasons I love them. The horses, the forests, the snow and the river and the rocks, Ronia and Birk together in the summer, oh how I love this book.

Jan Morris, Hav. This was the perfect book to read while planning a trip. It’s a travel guide to a Mediterranean city that doesn’t exist, and it’s chatty and wonderful. It feels real. It feels like, oh well, we chose to go to the Baltic in May, but if we hadn’t, we could have gone to the Mediterranean instead and gone to Hav. So it was like having a friend talking about her own vacation while I was planning mine. And the bits that loomed, the bits that were plotty around the edges–the bits that smelled like plot in the corners of your brain without coming right out and being plot–those were fascinating.

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient. This is such an encapsulated world book. Onddatje wanted to be telling such a very particular kind of wartime story, and the places where he’s playing with other pieces of English literature keep fascinating me. Kim and A. A. Milne, I keep going back to pick at what he was doing there, I’m still not entirely sure I’ve got it. I do know that if I had charge of him for the week I’d make him read a lot about Gertrude Bell until he apologized for the idea he had about the desert being a men’s world. But never mind that, there was stuff about love and choices and pieces of English literature, and I’m not sorry I took the time. Even if I get stern about Gertrude Bell sometimes.

Diriye Osman, Fairytales for Lost Children. Short stories, queer Somali surrealist immigrant experience, and if that doesn’t make you want them, then you don’t want them. Family relationships around all that. Not like anything else, like itself. I think many of you do want them, though. I think many of you were waiting for queer Somali surrealist immigrant family experience short stories in this kind of illustrated prose and didn’t know you were.

V.E. Schwab, A Gathering of Shadows. Discussed elsewhere.

Wade Shepard, Ghost Cities of China. This felt very much like expanded magazine articles. It did not, at the end, feel like it had enough insights to be a book instead. So: China pre-plans and pre-builds its cities, intending to fill them with people, and they don’t always fill as quickly as the west would expect, since we don’t do things that way. Okay. And the environmental destruction involved in China’s building industry is staggering, but is it more so with the pre-planning than it would be if they were waiting until the people were clamoring to get in? Do we have any indication that the cities in this book will stay ghost cities? Well. Not really. Disappointing, written probably ten years before there’s book to be had, meh.

Lavie Tidhar, ed., The Apex Book of World SF, Volume 2. A varied volume in location, style, theme, etc. In such a volume of course there will be some that appeal far more than others. For me the two standouts were Anabel Enriquez Piñeiro’s “Borrowed Time” and Shweta Narayan’s “Nira and I.” Shweta is a personal friend, and I had never even heard Anabel’s name before. Very divergent topics and styles also. I look forward to finding gems like these in the rest of the volumes in this series.

Charles Watkins, Trees, Woods, and Forests: A Social and Cultural History. In an email to a friend, I compared this to being the more informative, intellectually stimulating version of looking at puppy pictures on the internet. Because it was calming. It was so pleasant. And yet: informative! Not mindless in the least! I think I need more things like this, full of scientific and social facts about a topic of interest and yet not at all likely to make me fume and want to punch things. Forestry may be fertile ground here. So to speak. But this volume in particular is great, many lovely facts about trees, almost as good as trees themselves. You can even combine the two when the weather is a tiny bit nicer.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

This is the sequel to A Darker Shade of Magic. I think that reading the first book adds a lot to the reading experience of this one, and it’s definitely a classic middle book structure–there is plot that is resolved here, but there’s a pretty big cliffhanger at the ending. However, if you want to start here I think it actually would do a pretty good job of giving you the clues you need of who is who and what is what–not quite all the emotional depth/implication that you’d get if you read both, and the previous volume is readily available, but still. Should work.

There are four parallel Londons, with differing types and levels of magic, and a few lucky (har, har) people can cross between them. None of these is happy fun-fun land, but some of them are nastier than others. We spend most of A Gathering of Shadows in the most interesting, Red London, which is the least gratuitously vicious and the most magically endowed. If you’ve been missing formal elemental magic tournament battles since Avatar: Legend of Korra finished its run, wow, is this ever the book for you. There’s a lot of battling with earth, water, air, and fire here in formal tournament duel structure.

In addition to the fighting, there’s also torture, revenge, something that might be true love if you look at it funny, and definitely murdered by pirates. Murdered by pirates is good. There are some messed up nobles/royals–messed up multiple ways in multiple worlds–and a few fancy balls with fancy ball gowns, but not so much of it that I think it’ll bog you down if it’s not your thing. It is not really a kissing book, but there is a little kissing. Betrayal. More betrayal. Perceived betrayal. Serious loyalty. Pain shared that is not, in fact, pain halved. Some of you will be serious suckers for this book and find that it pushes your own personal buttons very, very hard. For the rest–if you’re feeling like a fun fantasy adventure, it can be that, as it was for me, even if the buttons it’s pushing aren’t quite yours. And there’s very clearly a big finish yet to come.

Please consider using our link to buy A Gathering of Shadows from Amazon.

John Bierhorst, The Mythology of South America. This is an anthropology-level overview, talking about common features of myths among different ethnic groups of South Americans. It starts out pretty dubiously, talking as though myth-formation is a thing done by Those Primitives, you see, and not by Us Civilized People, so you have to take it with a grain of salt–it’s mostly interesting as a source of avenues for further exploration–oh, this motif here, let’s explore what that really means in detail with people who know what they’re doing.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. A gentle mid-life romance among the Vorkosigans and the alien fauna of Sergyar. At 76 Cordelia is not yet even a little bit old by Betan standards, and for me this is a shame; I am looking for more books that are about protagonists who actually feel old. But “more time with these characters you like” worked just fine for me in general, even if I want even more time with them later–and it was definitely a book full of grown-ups, and there are not enough of those either.

Mike Carey, Linda Carey, and Louise Carey, The House of War and Witness. Intertemporal ghost stories weaving back to a crisis moment in the 18th century. I was disappointed in this–it was reasonably well done, but compared to their previous collaboration, The Steel Seraglio, it was not at all my thing. The different ghost stories through time were quite well done, as was the 18th century main protagonist whose life was pretty awful. It just was hitting various tropes that are not at all of interest to me fairly hard, and in a narrative featuring an abusive relationship that was sensitively handled but difficult to read.

Edwidge Danticat, Untwine. Heartfelt YA about a young woman learning to live without her twin–her entire family learning to live without, really. The Haitian political references Danticat is known for were around the edges–this is a Haitian-American family, its relatives multilingual and naming their cats after politicians, but the core of this book is where the personal does not much overlap with the political.

Albert Goldbarth, Across the Layers. Reread. Lots of prose poems and borderline-prose poems. Not much snagged me this time through, and I don’t know that I will give it a third go. The interesting things he was doing with his family immigrant voice were not immigrant things that really caught me much with individual moments or lines.

Rachel Hartman, Seraphina. Come for the early modern/premodern musical instruments, stay for the saint culture. What, shapeshifting dragons? Yes, all right, I suppose you can have some of those too. It adds up to familial relationships with alien psychologies in some ways, which I am much more interested in than “fire thing go swoop.” Although there is fire thing go swoop, if that’s what you’re here for.

David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. Wow, what a book. Soil science. Politics of erosion and soil depletion laid out in multiple places worldwide, throughout time, with explicit parallels drawn. Fascinating, lovely, much recommended. It made me want to scream and swear and punch things sometimes, but not without hopeful spots also. And dirt! Dirt is great!

Julia Rios and Alisa Krasnostein, eds., Year’s Best Young Adult Speculative Fiction 2014. I have a policy of not reviewing books I’m in. So much potential to be tacky. So: this exists, I’m in it, I read it. You can read it too.

Bogi Takacs, Changing Body Templates. Kindle. This short was a bonus from a charitable donation I made, and was interesting in its cultural reference points.

Chris West, A History of America in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps. Each year I buy myself a book for my grandpa’s birthday. I pick something I would have wanted to share with him, since I am not actually done sharing things with my grandpa yet despite the utter stupid inconvenience of death. As 300-page histories of the US go, this is not the worst you could do, particularly if you wanted something to hand to someone who is not from the US. It suffers from a few quite glaring flaws. Its sexism, racism, and classism are the benevolent sort, but still present. It has a strong and annoying present-day skew–three hundred pages of all of American history and culture and you can fit in Monica Lewinsky, really? Alice Paul is irrelevant, never mind Grace Hopper, but Monica Lewinsky must appear? And on the other hand I started to wonder whether its author was merely clueless or an extreme Tory in his own country and trying to shore up his own party’s allies, because while the aforementioned Affaire Lewinsky did appear, the election of President Geo. W. Bush came and went without the least hint that it was the tiniest bit controversial in its practicalities. So while he did a good job of explaining some of the American history things that Americans generally take for granted, there were also some tone-deaf notes.

G. Willow Wilson, Ms. Marvel: Generation Why. I enjoy Kamala Khan. I enjoy her even more with a very large teleporting doggie.

Diane Ackerman, Jaguar of Sweet Laughter. Reread. The colonialism fairy has visited the early poems in this volume, and there is more self-directed sexism than I could see when I first read Ackerman nearly twenty years ago. But I could also–easily–find in this volume the poems that are the reason I came to like her, the reason I bought so many of her works in the first place–“When You Take Me From This Good Rich Soil,” of course, and “Nuclear Winter” and “At Belingshausen, the Russian Base, Antarctica.” Poems that stick around doing the things they meant to do after nearly twenty years, so that I’m glad I returned looking for them.

Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades. Sequels are hard. This one feels like a particularly difficult tonal shift, from the shattered mirror dead god experience of City of Stairs to a very human set of consequences. It’s an interesting book, an engrossing book, but not ultimately one that succeeds as well for me as its predecessor. I think it depends on the reader which will be more favored. I think it relies on knowledge of the previous volume for impact, but I can’t swear to it.

John Bowker, ed., Orthogonal SF: The War at Home. Kindle. A quirky and fascinating new entry on the SF magazine scene. I felt that the positive standout stories were “#Anon and the Antlers” by Michael J. DeLuca and “A Citizen’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven” by Josh Pearce, and Alana I. Capria’s “Gelatin Molds” was really really not my thing…but it was not my thing in a way that committed whole-heartedly to what it was doing. It was not trying half-assedly to be something else. None of the stories were mealy-mouthed. Two stories out of five that make me go “oh hell yeah”–and zero stories that I can’t remember, zero stories that make me go “wait, which one was that?”–not at all bad for a start.

Chaz Brenchley, Sister Anthony Comes Down. Kindle. Short piece in the same universe as the Crater School and bearing immediately upon it but not, for the most part, sharing its style. However, it’s the kind of bonus you get with the Patreon, and it is not in serial form, so I took advantage of its self-contained nature to jump in and be able to jump out again.

Marie Brennan, Chains and Memory. Kindle. Discussed elsewhere.

Keigo Higashino, Salvation of a Saint. A murder mystery very much in the puzzle novel style: practically entirely composed of “how will they prove it.” Translated from the Japanese, with cultural assumptions intact. So okay then.

Gwyneth Jones, Midnight Lamp. Reread. There is no point to even trying with this series without starting at the beginning, with Bold As Love. By now they are deep into the weeds, far far into consequences and follow-on effects. Fiorinda is putting herself back together after having saved the world once. So are Ax and Sage. California Adventures! And so on. I like how this book doesn’t escalate directly. Sequels that manage not to do that and still find interesting things to say are better.

L.M. Montgomery, Rainbow Valley. Kindle. Reread. When I was sick in ’15 I read the first six Green Gables books. When faced with a fairly loud setting and a need to read on my Kindle, I reached for this familiar volume, which has a balance of kids’ antics and adults’ love lives as most Montgomery does. It was one of my favorites when I was little, and I still like it reasonably well. Note that there will be moments of unthinking racism against persons not present, as part of the fabric of the culture depicted, and some of the parenting practices from the kinder and more progressive parents are still pretty barbaric.

Emma Newman, Planetfall. A fascinating science fiction psychological study of an individual and a community dealing with colonization and background aliens while completely failing to cope with a mental health issue that is central to the book. I found the ending not at all satisfying. “Wow!” I kept saying to myself. “This is really compassionate and understanding, I wonder how she’s going to stick the landing?” Uh…better luck next time? Seriously, the rest of the reading experience is worth following Newman’s career and trying again, but the ending…did not quite make it, for me, and I will be happy to talk on email with those who either have already read it or find the details important enough that they want spoilers.

George O’Connor, Olympians: Apollo, The Brilliant One. Discussed elsewhere.

Benjamin Parzybok, Sherwood Nation. Drought and crisis and how people come to the end of their rope, what they do when they get there. Particularly interesting to read fairly close to Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, which are very different water/drought books set in the Pacific coast states. Parzybok’s scenes of family life in externally imposed crisis are particularly poignant and believable, and having “Maid Marian” and her crew to cheer for keeps it from getting to be too grindingly much. Also the very last page works in so very many ways that I am kind of fidgety to talk to people who have read the whole thing about what I like about it.

Mary Rickert, The Memory Garden. Beautiful domestic fantasy with lots of old women as protagonists and supporting characters. I have no idea why this book hasn’t come up when we were discussing Lifelode and The Dubious Hills as domestic fantasy, even though the setting is this world instead of secondary world. Full of garden life and ad hoc families and the way that people cope and then shape their lives around their coping.

Ysabeau S. Wilce, Prophecies, Libels, and Dreams: Stories of Califa. These are in the Flora Segunda universe but not nearly as middle-grade-skewed as the Flora books, which is an interesting balance. The prose voice also varies in how much it’s off into the twee land of Flora–for all that it took me a couple of tries to really get into the voice of those books, I found I missed it a bit in the more restrained stories, even though I saw why Wilce made the choices she did for each. Writing adult stories in the world of your children’s books is just the sort of fun interesting totally non-commercial thing I think more people should do, so I want to call this particularly to the attention of Flora’s fans.

Kai Ashante Wilson, The Devil in America. Reread. I remembered liking something by the author, so I picked up this beautiful little bound version from the free table at ConFusion. Turns out that what I remember liking is this. Well, still, now I have a beautiful little bound version, and that’s no bad thing. Racism, bargains, cost.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

The muses hustle you through Apollonian mythology. Seriously, this is a whirlwind tour. Birth! Slaying Python! Daphne! Marsyas! Hyacinth! Asklepios and his centaurs! Fighting, screwing, the lyre, the sun, healing, wheeeee! So much Apollo. Seriously so much. In one very, very short book.

If you’ve been reading Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy, you will notice that this comic brushes past events covered in more depth in The Just City and The Philosopher Kings. Apollo! He’s a thing there! But even if you’re not interested in that series, this is reasonably pretty and a decent introduction or refresher. I would say “for young people,” and it is, but only if you don’t mind the young people not getting a completely prettied up version. Daphne is nearly raped here; Marsyas is flayed. The Greek gods: you don’t want to invite them to your parties. Or pointedly not-invite them to your parties! Lest they show up and turn you into a goat!

I feel like it’s such a fast run-through that it’s not the best of the series, but the series is worth having, and this is a reasonable installment of it.

Please consider using our link to buy Olympians: Apollo, The Brilliant One from Amazon.

Review copy provided by the author, who is also a personal friend. Also I backed the Kickstarter for this book.

While very thoroughly a sequel to Lies and Prophecy, Chains and Memory avoids the trap of doing all the same things. Kim and Julian are not still at college. Their relationship has progressed. Their roommates and best friends, while still emotionally close, are physically distant, and other secondary characters have taken the stage. If you want “more just like that,” this is not more just like that.

If, however, you want a sequel that is trying to take the next step with worldbuilding consequences–that is thinking through implications and pushing them–that is saying “yes, and another” to relationships not only between the main characters but with the other people and in fact institutions in their lives–it is that.

So it really depends on what you want from a sequel.

The roles of the Seelie and Unseelie in the human world have also progressed, and their hand in how humans–varieties of telepaths and non-telepaths–interact with each other, reaching back through history, are thoroughly examined in this book. There are passages about which kinds of telepaths are like theater kids, and then there are passages about Congress. There are action scenes. There is not fencing, but there is fighting, torture, revenge, and true love. Of more than one sort.

There is not actually a mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, though. I suppose one can’t have everything. At least not in a book of this length.

Please consider using our link to buy Chains and Memory from Amazon.

Exclusive of manuscripts, which I don’t talk about publicly.

Octavia Cade, Chemical Letters. This was a joyful, beautiful, nerdy romp through poems and chemistry. The world needs more like this. Hurrah. Hurrah.

Thomas Goetz, The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis. Oh, this book. So first of all: it is gross. It does not stay with the parts of TB where someone dies looking pale and ethereal. It goes into TB and the rest of medicine in the time, in ways that are useful and disgusting. Now, me, I am the sort of person who read this while eating lunch, no problem. You judge for yourself whether you are, though, because Goetz…does not hesitate to go there. And not just with the gross, though. It is tragic: people not accepting procedures that will be lifesaving. People self-deluding that they have cures they do not. Koch, a great medical man in some ways, gradually painting himself into a corner wherein he believes himself to be unjustly persecuted just because he peddled a false TB cure and also opposed pasteurization of dairy products. (OH IS THAT ALL. POOR YOU HOW THEY PERSECUTE YOU THERE THERE.) The other thing this is, though, weirdly, is a piece of biographical criticism, of how Arthur Conan Doyle could become the man who could invent and write Sherlock Holmes in the first place. And John Watson. The influences upon him, the things that touched his life that pushed and pulled and added up to…yes, there he is: the creator of Holmes and Watson. And it’s not even a very long book, to pack in the medical background of the time, serious amounts of Franco-Prussian War politics, and the character of the two men and their families. So if you have the stomach for it, I do recommend this. But if you don’t, I don’t blame you for it.

Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard, The End of the Sentence. A spooky ghost novella, but a kinder one than I feared to begin with, and worth the trouble. I’m glad that Magonia made me seek it out.

Tove Jansson, Sculptor’s Daughter: A Childhood Memoir. I should have guessed from reading the Moomin books that Jansson would have an unerring feel for what it is like to be a child, but you can’t tell in advance that someone is going to write a memoir in that frame of mind, in the frame of mind of what it was like at the time. Remembering that perspective. It was so lovely, because she was sensible in the way that children are sensible, and there were so many important details that adults leave out, things that one would want to know about 1910s-20s Finland.

Fiona MacCarthy, Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy, 1860-1960. Lots of pictures, less text. The jacket copy focuses on radical sexual politics, which is not much in evidence in the minimal text at all–I personally am a better source on that than this book is–and there’s a bit more on radical non-sexual politics, but only a bit. As for influence, yes, there’s some of that, but only darting into it here and there, considering how broad and deep Morris’s influence runs. I’m glad to have this book, but it’s weirdly frustrating. Not even so much shallow as spotty. And that particularly surprised me from MacCarthy, who gave us the giant exhaustive Burne-Jones biography that took up so much of my time in 2015–but this was a volume from curating an exhibit, so. Well, there’s other Morris stuff out there.

Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here. Fascinatingly, the fantasy plot is both completely crucial and entirely relegated to the edges of this book. What a neat needle to thread. This is a YA telling the story of the kids who aren’t in the middle of saving the world from the giant fantasy menace. They’re caught up in their own senior year relationships, and oh, does Ness remember what it’s like to be a high school senior. To be in love with your best friend, to be weirdly awkward with your other best friend for reasons you don’t fully understand, to be trying to figure out how to be good to your family and still have things the way your newly adult self needs them…with magic you can’t control or even quite see, that isn’t much to do with you, all around the edges…yes, Ness has a handle on the end of childhood very, very well.

Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd’s Crown. The last Terry Pratchett novel, and you can see where it’s not quite done, where in some spots it’s an outline–gesturing at Terry Pratchett Discovers Third Wave Feminism, sketching in Pterry’s Last Love Letter To the Old Codger He’ll Never Get To Be. And yet he gave us one more bit of Tiffany Aching, and the death of Granny Weatherwax–the loved ones of Granny Weatherwax mourning her–and you know, that was enough, I think. Not his chart-topper, his greatest masterwork. But enough. Trying for more even to the last, I hope we can all say as much.

Alter Reiss, Sunset Mantle. I must admit that I critiqued this novella in draft form. And now it’s published! Go team! This is fantasy with strong religious worldbuilding (by which I mean in-world religion, not our-world religion) and a military component, with a loving central relationship and practical work, all packed into a plotty action-filled novella. But I’ve admitted my bias.

Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell, eds., Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. In addition to having amazing cover art (seriously, who did that?), this covers a wide range of what Delany has meant to various people, in both fiction and nonfiction. Some people are just doing their own thing, which is influenced by him indirectly. Some are more directly trying to demonstrate his influence. For me the standout stories were Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “The First Gate of Logic” and Nalo Hopkinson and Nisi Shawl’s collaborative “Jamaica Ginger,” but I imagine that this is very much a “something for everyone” anthology, and what that something is will vary considerably.

Gordon Shepherd, Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters. My subtitle: “Why Nonfiction Voice Matters.” This is a book whose author does not know who his audience is. Is it people who are interested in highly technical things? That would have been fine. Is it a lay audience with no technical skill? That would have been okay, too, because I could have skipped it; his voice when writing for the lay audience is really, really patronizing, and his metaphors completely unenlightening if you didn’t understand them from the technical passages. And then there are the chapters where he wanders off outside his own fields of expertise to speculate about things like Why Modern People Are Obese and goes completely off the rails, and if you want someone speculating about that on little to no expertise, why pick someone with a terrible prose voice? The parts that were Shepherd writing technically in his field were a-okay with me, but for that I think looking up his papers in journals on academia.edu or some such is a far better way to go. Also this is what happens when people who are obsessed with visual processing try to do other things; they can’t even see that something that is processed spatially in the brain may not be processed visually, come on, people, this is not hard. ALSO. Let me be the first to tell you that it is possible to write about taste/smell and memory without dwelling on Proust. Do it now. Do it today.

Salla Simukka, As Black As Ebony. The third in the “Snow White” trilogy of Finnish crime YA novels. It felt tacked on, obligatory; Our Heroine…does some stuff…figures out some stuff…has some stuff done to her and triumphs in the end. All very short chapters. If you liked the first two in the series, this one is still skippable, unless you are really really set on learning what happens to Lumikki.

Leslie Valiant, Probably Approximately Correct: Nature’s Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World. This…is an excellent example of what happens when you know your own field (mathematics/computer science) really really well, are interested in someone else’s field (biology/evolution), and…do not perhaps take as much time as you ought to understand what they are saying. About evolution and its mechanisms and why. As a result Valiant is very clear when he’s talking about algorithms, and less insightful than he hopes when he’s talking about evolution.