Tag: bookses precious

You can tell that I had a cold by the type of reading I’ve mostly been doing. I have a half-read volume of fairly dense political history on my desk, and…we’re just not going to get there until next fortnight. Just: some weeks, no.

Marie Brennan, Voyage of the Basilisk: A Memoir by Lady Trent. Discussed elsewhere.

Hilary McKay, Saffy’s Angel, Indigo’s Star, Permanent Rose, Caddy Ever After, Forever Rose, and Caddy’s World. All rereads. Oh how I love this series. Definitely comfort rereads. I like Sarah best. I don’t know why I might overidentify with the fierce character (with a good hat!) who can’t walk right and whose mother uses her prodigious organization to be kind to people and whose father fixes the water feature. That part will have to remain a mystery. But the bits that reliably make me laugh instead of smiling on the third go-round are almost all Sarah. I think that the prequel nature of Caddy’s World simultaneously saves it (it would be unbearably dark if we didn’t already know that Rose does not die as a newborn–and I really don’t think that counts as a spoiler since her name is in two of the titles) and makes it worse (Caddy’s friends really should have shown up in the earlier published/later chronological books). But it’s still a fun read, and I feel like there’s room for more interstitial additions if McKay is careful.

L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne’s House of Dreams, Anne of Ingleside, and A Tangled Web. All rereads. One of the things that jumped out at me this time was how much there is stillbirth, infant death, and miscarriage in Montgomery–and how differently it’s treated than in a modern book. Anne’s own loss is part of the actual plot, a notable event–but there are places where there’ll be just a brief mention that this is something that happened to another character–and that it affected them strongly, just–this isn’t their story. You’re allowed to know about this sort of loss when it isn’t the main character’s. It reminded me of the people who want a “reason” for a character to be anything but an American white dude: being a person who has suffered that kind of loss is something that modern books seem to think needs a “reason,” in a way that these older books really don’t, they just acknowledge it as part of being human. There was also a moment in AoGG in which Anne reports that her beloved and respected teacher has told her that she should never put anything in her stories that couldn’t happen right there in Avonlea, and…given how much L.M. Montgomery wrote about imaginative girls in mundane settings, and given how the advice was framed, I seriously wonder whether this happened to her. And whether we were robbed of a Maritime Hope Mirrlees by it. (So I have a story to write with that.) Anyway, I still like these books and still find their anecdotal approach entertaining. A Tangled Web, I will note, ends with gratuitous racism on the very last page–product of its time blah blah, but still, it’s totally unnecessary, and if you’re not braced for it, it’s a poison pill in a puff of cotton candy.

Arthur C. Parker, Skunny Wundy: Seneca Indian Tales. This is a pretty old book. Parker was himself Seneca, but it’s an old enough book that it was explicitly addressed to young white male readers. It’s mostly animal tales, mostly the just-so kind of animal tales. Interesting both for the stories it tells and for the assumptions involved in telling them. I’d be interested in contrasting this with some Seneca stories that were aimed at an adult, female, and/or Seneca audience.

Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment and Interesting Times. When I heard the news of Terry Pratchett’s death, I wanted to reread something, but I didn’t feel up for rereading the ones that are most personally meaningful to me yet. (Soon.) So I picked up MR, which I recalled enjoying, and I enjoyed it again. If it was Sir Terry Pratchett’s Grand Statement on Gender, it would leave something to be desired, but it wasn’t, it was a light comic novel that did a few good gender-y things. Then I grabbed IT, which I didn’t remember at all. It’s not one of his best. There are some entertaining bits, but I am generally less enthusiastic about Rincewind than about most Pratchett characters, and also I feel he is much stronger when making his jokes about an “us” rather than about a “them.” (IT has both, but the pseudo-Chinese culture just didn’t really work for me, as a joke or as serious.) Well, with the number of books the man wrote, to have some of them be kind of forgettable is not a horrible thing. And there are so many wonderful rereads ahead of me.

Dana Simpson, Phoebe and Her Unicorn. I really need to learn that when people say, “This is the next Calvin & Hobbes!”, they mean, “I wish this was the next Calvin & Hobbes…oh God, I’m so lonely…COME BACK TO ME, BILL.” This was a moderately entertaining comic about a girl and her snotty unicorn best friend. It was fine but in no way had the range of C&H.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Seal of the Worm. Last in a very long series, and for the love of Pete do not start with this one; it will make no sense and be emotionally unsatisfying if you don’t have the rest of the series. I felt that in some ways Tchaikovsky’s strengths were also his weaknesses here: he kept introducing new antagonists, which is great but didn’t really wrap up some of the potential of the other groups he’d introduced at all. I did like the fate of the Wasp Empire, and for a ten-book series of this size, I suppose any more wrapping up might have felt tied with a bow. I’ll look forward to seeing what he decides to do next.

Review copy provided by Tor. For further disclosure, the author is a friend of mine.

This is the third in the series of fictional memoirs by the dragon naturalist Lady Isabella Trent. In this volume, Lady Trent’s young son Jake is old enough to accompany her on her travels, which adds a note of domestic logistics but neatly avoids the “child as constant source of idiotic trouble” plot that I so hate.

This series is set up to go very readily to new places and see new dragons there, and this volume–as one might expect from the title–is no exception. The main body of the action takes place in a Pacific Island analogue, but there are some other places along the way, and also there is a great deal of Victorian-analogue sea travel.

There is also more arc plot than it may seem to begin with, beyond just “Lady Trent would like to find out more stuff about dragons, and does,” which would in some ways be enough for me, but I do like arc plot as well. I think this would be a quite reasonable starting place for the series; while you’d ideally then go back and read the others, I think it would be perfectly comprehensible to just dive right in (…so to speak) to sea serpents, fire lizards, and other taxonomic goodness.

I do love taxonomy.

Please consider using our link to buy Voyage of the Basilisk from Amazon.

Philip Ball, Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler. This was fairly short and contained entertaining/appalling anecdotes as well as a pretty comprehensive idea of which physicists went which ways under the Nazi regime and why. Ball walked a very fine line very, very well: he didn’t overstate Nazi sympathies based on continued residence in Germany (even talking about why it could be hard for Germans of any religious/ethnic background to find places elsewhere in the world), but at the same time he was not really up for overstated nonsense about who was in danger and why. Good stuff.

Ellen Datlow, ed., The Doll Collection. Discussed elsewhere.

Nina Kiriki Hoffman, A Red Heart of Memories. Structurally weird but doing fantasy things I don’t really see elsewhere. I find Hoffman’s prose very readable but somehow manage to forget to get more of her stuff for large swaths of time and then binge.

Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thousand Years of an Erotic Tradition. Despite the title, this will not be an erotic book for the vast majority of readers. (Some people would find the manual to their crockpot erotic. Never say never; the world is full of differences.) It’s a pictorial history of Chinese women’s foot-binding and the shoes that covered the bound feet. Jackson manages not to exoticize the historical binding of Chinese women’s feet while exoticizing literally everything else about the existence of Chinese people, which was quite, um, the accomplishment. (See what I didn’t do there?) The photos speak for themselves and are fascinating and horrifying. And splendid: the needlework put into these shoes is astonishing.

Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America. What a strange book. It ends with 1920, and I get why: because Prohibition is such a huge topic. Still, in 1920 the Progressive Movement had not really fallen, and Prohibition is a huge relevant topic. Also it barely mentioned the Tafts and skated past the longer-term effects of Roosevelt and Wilson. I was glad to see some more obscure figures covered, but…this is not going to be enough if you’re looking for a history of the Progressive Movement. It has interesting tidbits but huge incomprehensible gaps.

Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization. The ancient Mediterranean is not one of my main things, but this seemed like a reasonably well-done history of a civilization not much covered except as The Opponent, so it was a good gap to fill in.

Andrew C. Nahm, Introduction to Korean History and Culture. It fascinates me how the various people I’ve read trying to write a history of Korea focus so differently. It’s fun to watch. Anyway, this one–like pretty much everything else I’ve read–spends half its time on the twentieth century, which is frustrating for someone whose main interest is three to five centuries earlier. Still good stuff, though; if you’re going to start reading about Korean history, this is as good a place as any and much better than some.

Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Does what it says on the tin…if you assume that only white women worked in turn-of-the-century New York. Which: hahaha no. Or if you assume that non-white women had the same access and interest in leisure activities in that era, which, seriously, come on, can anybody say rise of jazz? But it was really solid on white ethnicity and religious variability, and there’s good detail here for those who want more texture in a heroine of this era (or even a hero). Just…the dimension that was missing was a bit glaring to me.

Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham, Veronica Mars: Mr. Kiss and Tell. So…back in the day my college friends and I discovered Connie Willis books. And we tore through them and raved over them and loved them. And then I picked up the collaborations between her and Cynthia Felice. And fie! no! how horrible they were! And we gnashed our teeth and muttered dire imprecations about Cynthia Felice for ruuuuuining our Connie Willis books. But then! I graduated, and I went to a convention where Connie Willis was the GoH, and she was on panels talking about how the collaboration had worked. And it turned out that every single thing that I liked in those books was Cynthia Felice, and every single thing that I thought was horrible was Connie Willis. So! While I know Jennifer Graham somewhat, I don’t know what balance of ideas in this book was hers and what was Rob Thomas’s. (For those of you who are not Marshmallows, Thomas is the original creator of the series.) But! Given the amount of control a co-writer of tie-in novels has compared to the creator of the series, I strongly suspect that the scenes with Veronica and Logan buying and training a puppy were Jen Graham’s and the…direction…that the overall plot arc regarding long-time beloved characters took…was Rob Thomas. The first of these tie-in novels was good fun, like a middle-of-the-road episode maybe. This one…I only recommend it to Marshmallows who will want to know in detail where the continuity is going. But if you do read it, email me and we can…discuss. Possibly with many ellipses.

Richard von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700. Does what it says on the tin. If you don’t want to read about when they issued what coins and which counterfeiting techniques were prevalent, you will probably not be tempted anyway.

Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple, The Last Changeling. Second in its series, very much a series book, but with new fun elements and clear and significant furtherance of the plot. And not in a way that made me want to punch anybody, either, so go people who are not Rob Thomas. Um. Wait. That was my outside voice. Anyway, this is Faerie fantasy with one of the main characters an apprentice midwife not just in name but in personality/practice, and I really enjoy that.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

You can tell from a quick glance at the cover that this is an anthology that will skew towards dark fantasy/horror. The cover does not mislead. So the first thing to know is that I am not the target audience for this book. While Ellen Datlow says in the introduction that she didn’t want any evil doll stories, I thought that at least one of the stories totally qualified as an evil doll story by my standards.

Still, even for someone who is not the target audience, there’s skillful, interesting writing in this volume. Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Doctor Faustus” drew heavily on Mary’s experience as a puppeteer–if you revel in telling detail and vivid accuracy, this is a standout story. I only wish it had had a longer/more complicated plot–I’d love to see more of this sort of thing from Mary. Pat Cadigan’s “In Case of Zebras” was a perfect example of how not every story has to be paced the same way: it unfolded in a way that was appropriate for both its teen narrator and her ER volunteer setting. The heroine was engaging and well-done. Finally, Seanan McGuire’s “There Is No Place for Sorrow in the Kingdom of the Cold” used the doll premise to do serious secret-world worldbuilding, drawing on multiple sources in a way that I found delightful. For someone who is more horror-inclined, I’m sure there will be more stand-outs. It’s still not my sort of thing, but it was in general a very readable anthology.

Please consider using our link to buy The Doll Collection at Amazon.

Eleanor Arnason, Hidden Folk. Icelandic mythology-inspired short stories. There were a few of these that fell oddly into the 1970s-esque trap of “the Irish are a special maaaaagical people,” but the language was right on in all of them for being saga inspired. Generally good fun.

Helen Bynum, Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis. So very good. Sanatoriums, interactions of TB with leprosy, general degenerative interesting stuff.

Octavia Cade, The Life in Papers of Sofie K. Kindle. A magical realist novella about a nineteenth-century Russian mathematician. If that doesn’t make you want to read it, I can’t help you; if it does, hey, did you know there was this book? There is this book! It is just the sort of thing you like if you like that sort of thing! (I do.)

Mike Carey, Lucifer Book Three. Giant graphic novel omnibus, and I think I am done with the Lucifer series on this one. The stories are not compelling enough to be worth the deliberately ugly art. I understand that it’s deliberately ugly for a reason, is making a statement, etc. But it is still a visual assault that I can opt out of, and will.

Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel, Women in the Material World. A late twentieth century book of photographs and interviews with women in different countries worldwide, touching on their daily material lives in a very practical and specific way. I would have passed this by without a recommendation, because if it had been less concrete it would have been awful. As it was–fascinating.

Benedict Jacka, Chosen. These are short and zippy–this is the fourth in a series–and if you’re looking for Magical London Books, this is one. This one has had enough room to start ramifying interestingly. I don’t recommend starting here because of that, though–there’s no reason not to read the previous ones, and they’ll make the ramifications here work better.

Laurie R. King, Night Work. I may also be done with this series. There was a lot of exoticization of non-white characters, which was particularly bad as both the characters and the exoticization were central to the plot. I had sort of gotten along with the earlier volumes in this series on the theory that they were from an earlier time, but this is getting pretty contemporary and not acting like it. So–sigh. Onwards in the search for another long mystery series I like.

Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. This is a particularly interesting biography because so much of its process geeking is text rather than subtext: Milford will talk about interviewing Millay’s sister and then talk about what she thinks is not being said, what she has doubts about and why, what other sources she’s using. Quite good; I wish Milford had more work out there. (She wrote a bio of Zelda Fitzgerald, but I had enough of Zelda Fitzgerald in Flappers and don’t need an entire book of her, no matter how good the biographer.)

E. C. Myers, The Silence of Six. Myers is quite good at Average Teen Voice, whether or not the teen in question is entirely sympathetic. This is a teen hacker novel in the vein of Little Brother and Homeland. Lots of running around and skullduggery, good fun.

Julie E. Neraas, Apprenticed to Hope: A Sourcebook for Difficult Times. Lent to me by someone with whom I was talking about chronic illness stuff. I’m sure it’s very helpful to some people, but I found a lot of it frustratingly basic.

Greg Rucka, Stumptown Vol. 2. Portland PI graphic novel, with rock musicians. Reasonably fun if you want a one of those, not one of Rucka’s best.

V. E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic. Discussed elsewhere.

Chris West, A History of Britain in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps. Every year I buy myself a book for my grandpa’s birthday. I pick something that I think we could have enjoyed together, because I’m not done sharing things with Grandpa even though he’s gone. This was this year’s purchase, and I’m confident that Grandpa would have found it interesting. A lot of the historical overview was stuff that someone who knows a reasonable amount about GB/the UK would already know, but some of the detail was more middlebrow/person-on-the-street than histories often focus on, and that made it feel more authentic to me: if you asked a bunch of Britons what happened in such-and-such a year, the World Cup is very likely to come up, for example. Also the postal-specific stuff was interesting and explained some institutions we don’t have here, like banking at the post office.

Review copy provided by Tor.

A Darker Shade of Magic is the story of four parallel worlds with very different outcomes. One of the protags is one of the very few people who can move between the worlds, and he has color-coded them to keep track of which one he’s referring to–Grey, Red, White, and Black. The divergence of the worlds is not random but refers to their relationship with magic.

That all sounds a bit technical and inside-baseball; the book is anything but. It was such a fast read that I was 2/3 of the way through before I even noticed I should probably do things like move around and stretch occasionally. I am not one of the genre readers who is a sucker for thief protags, but the thief Lila was brave and useful and entertaining. And the two princes were just what they ought to be (errm, sorry, child of the nineties)–that is, they were sympathetic and comprehensible in their relationship with each other, their parents, and the rest of the world. While not everyone has a fully filled-in backstory, ramification from background is the name of the game–each world shapes its denizens differently, for good or ill.

And there are music boxes and magical artifacts with minds–or at least wills–of their own. And burning ships.

Fun story, hurrah, would read author again.

One note: the city in which all this takes place is London, with the Thames as an important thing. If you pick this up hoping for another immersive London fantasy, it will not deliver. There is not a heck of a lot of our-London historical detail in this book. For me, this was not a disadvantage–I have plenty of Magic London Books and not a lot of good recent parallel worlds magic stories. But best to know what one is getting into in advance: set in London, yes, Magic London Book subgenre, not really, no.

Please consider using our link to buy A Darker Shade of Magic from Amazon.

Review copy provided by First Second.

The Sculptor seems aimed at young artists and wannabes: a sad-sack sculptor makes a deal with Death that he can sculpt whatever he wants, with his bare hands, in exchange for shortening his life to 200 days. Death’s motivations in this are pretty dodgy, and the text spends hundreds of pages crapping all over the main character (David) and then aims for cheap pathos in the ending.

Oh, sorry, do I sound unimpressed?

The thing is, there was enough good stuff about The Sculptor that I did want to keep reading. One of the things that favorably impressed me is that for all the rest of the times he falls for young-artist-narrative cliches, McCloud is clear that having your work turn out exactly as you intended doesn’t solve everything. Or sometimes anything. That’s pretty important–it’s a mistake I see a lot of young writers making, thinking that the only problem is that it’s not like it is in their heads. Stuff is like it is in David’s head, and nobody cares. He sometimes has bad ideas, he sometimes has obscure ideas, he’s terrible at promoting himself…and superpowers don’t change that.

Some of the sculptures are cool to look at on the page, and it’s an idea that’s fun to think about: if you could sculpt any material with your bare hands, including granite, concrete, etc. at very large scale, what would you come up with? How would you present it to the world? But the idea is better than the execution. The rule isn’t actually “do the worst possible thing to your characters,” it’s “do the worst possible thing that’s interesting.”

Ah well. Even at several hundred pages, it’s a quick read. And it’s not terrible. It’s just…well, it’s just like its protagonist: you start to think its lack of success is because it’s ultimately pretty shallow.

Please consider using our link to buy The Sculptor at Amazon.

Ben Aaronovitch, Foxglove Summer. It seems that Aaronovitch is alternating arc plot books with monster of the week books. This is one of the latter, and it’s a fun monster of the week sort of thing, Peter out of his usual setting, but if you were looking for an immediate follow-up to the ending of the last volume, this is not it. There’s just enough to let the reader know that he hasn’t forgotten, isn’t neglecting it, and otherwise this is pretty locally focused. I would still recommend starting at the beginning of the series, but you might be able to make this work as an entry point that’s atypical in some key ways.

Samit Basu, Resistance. This is another “start with the first one” book that’s still a pretty worthy sequel. The suddenly superheroic universe of the last book has evolved by a bit, and this book is fairly strong on following up/piling on consequences. If you wanted a book wherein mechas fight kaiju in a superhero universe, that happens here, but a lot of other stuff happens too.

Elizabeth Bear, Karen Memory. Discussed elsewhere.

Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, Stranger. Post-apocalyptic mutant adventures! I think my favorite part of this book was the variety of imagined fauna and flora. The human parts were well-handled also, but I found myself hoping that the characters would leave their town (as they sometimes did) so that they could find out about more strange plants and critters. I’m looking forward to finding out what else that world contains in the sequel.

Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory. I didn’t mean to have an incredibly morbid nonfiction week, but sometimes that’s what hold requests at the library do to you. This is short, a very easy read, and yet provides a lot of detail about modern cremation and the modern funeral industry in general. Some of this may be difficult for some people to read–I particularly want to flag that Doughty is detailed about how they handle infant corpses as opposed to adult corpses–but it’s very interesting stuff.

Amal El-Mohtar, The Honey Month. A synesthetic exploration inspired by twenty-eight types of honey–some poems and some short fiction, hard to genre-typify. The sort of strange intense project I wish we had more of.

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. This was the second unintentionally morbid book in the week that Mark’s Grandpa Gritter died, and it had a lot more intellectual/emotional depth than the Doughty. Gawande is a doctor who has written extensively about process in some very usefully nerdy ways, and he looks at some process questions here. Much of it is stuff we’ve already handled or are aware of others handling, in my family, but there was still interesting detail that was new to me, and I think it’s a worthwhile book for many/most people. Recommended.

Robert Hughes, Goya. This was physically heavy enough to be a problem to read sometimes, so I’m afraid I had a more fragmented experience than I would otherwise have had. The progression from young artist attempting to make his mark with court to satirist and on to darkly humorous old man pleasing mostly himself was fascinating, though, and I enjoyed having a closer look at a painter I didn’t know much about.

Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter. Most of the Moomins hybernate, so this is a limited-cast Moomin book. Still fun, interesting, so very Finnish, but again probably not my first choice for where to start. (There’s no Thingummy and Bob, so there you have that.)

David Liss, The Day of Atonement. The story of a Portuguese Jewish man in the 18th century returning to Lisbon after having lived safely in England, seeking revenge on those who wronged his family and finding it harder than he expected to determine where and how that revenge should be dealt out. It’s the sort of thing Liss does very well, and I liked this latest volume of it a lot.

Karen Lord, The Galaxy Game. I would have liked more elephants, but it was still another worthy book in the universe of her previous. I also would have liked slightly more perspective balance among the young characters, but that isn’t really very important; it was still a space SF book of the sort that I loved when I was 12 and miss very much right now: different types of human with different abilities, navigating galactic politics and local variations as best they can.

Allan H. Ropper, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease. I do love neurology when the topic of it isn’t a family member. This contains bunches of weird stories of what the brain does and what people do around their own and others’ brain glitches. If you like that aspect of Oliver Sacks, Ropper is not quite as engaging but still a quite reasonable example of the genre. He also handles being Michael J. Fox’s neurologist quite well in the text, walking the line between name-dropping and minimizing with ease.

Janni Lee Simner, Tiernay West, Professional Adventurer. Kindle. Tiernay hunts for very personal treasure. This is a middle-grade novel, but I think it’s almost better suited for adults, because the perspective on Tiernay’s awesomeness and juvenile limitations is very adult. I’m always on the lookout for good adventure fiction for the MG audience, so I was glad to get this one.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them. Every time I read Sylvia Townsend Warner, I say, “What a strange book,” and this was too. It was the story of a bunch of nuns over several decades of the 14th century. For the first half or so, it’s extremely fragmented, with through narratives not always easy to discern, but they do come together eventually.

Review copy provided by Tor. Also, full disclosure, the author is a personal friend.

Remember when I read Emma Bull’s Territory and said I don’t like Westerns, but I like this book?

Yeah. About that.

I also don’t like books set in whorehouses because they are a minefield of bad tropes.

Huh. So. Funny thing.

Karen Memory is a masterpiece of voice. If you read the first chapter and aren’t hooked by the titular character’s voice, I can’t really help you; and it’s achieved almost exclusively by word choice rather than phoneticization. Karen is a logging camp girl, the daughter of a horse trainer, in the process of being educated in the whorehouse in which she works. She is acutely observant but still thinks of some of her vocabulary as belonging to someone else. She is wholeheartedly accepting of her co-workers, except for the places where she doesn’t notice her own biases until they trip her up. There is every reason for this book to be titled with its protagonist’s name, because while there is plenty (plenty upon plenty!) of action plot here, it is really Karen’s story.

(The Memory part…if you are a neurology nerd hoping for a speculative novel whose premise rests strongly on the processing of memories, this is not that book. Her last name is Memery. This is the one with steampunk battle machines made out of the least likely possible domestic implements and a diverse group of people fighting to be treated as people. We can do neurology geeking somewhere else.)

The alternate history-steampunk elements are subtle in some chapters but present from the beginning, and crucial from the beginning. They are not gears glued on after for fashion. There is, for example, a medical machine that is far better with some cures than others, and the machines are sometimes loud and smell funny, and they need people to actually fix them or, better, soup them up. But there’s also a wealth of setting detail grounding the narrative beyond the machines: the smell and behavior of horses, for example, and more kinds of processed carbohydrates than you can shake a stick at. Dear heaven the carbohydrates. If you have celiac and read this book, I sincerely hope you have good substitute recipes, because I defy you to read this book and not long for biscuits and cornbread and flapjacks. There is buttermilk on my grocery list right now because of this book. This is entirely period-appropriate; there are also beans and bacon and molasses and suchlike. But when I finished reading I wanted to a) make a list of people to give this to and b) eat biscuits. Not in that order.

I am finding myself dancing around some of the coolest steampunky/speculative elements because I think the book will be more fun if the reader discovers them at the pace the book reveals them. So “Karen and her friends/co-workers fight a nefarious local would-be politician who has…” um. “Who can…” right. Yes. Well. There is fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, true love. Okay, not so much the fencing. But biscuits and giant crazy machinery are a pretty good substitute.

Please consider using our link to buy Karen Memory from Amazon.