Tag: bookses precious

Review copy provided by Tor.

There is a line about 2/3 of the way through this book: “One could glimpse horror in a can of soup.” And I read it, and I thought, well, you could, that’s clear enough.

This is a stand-alone, not going along with the Gun and the Line books, and yet like those it is just about as far out on the edge of dark fantasy with a drumbeat of dark dark gloom despair woe woe gloom despair as I have any patience for. Most of Gilman’s characters do not have very functional relationships with each other. There is a bit of the middle where the really quite sensible option would have been for the people who are romantically involved to break up with each other, and I honestly can’t tell you why they didn’t. (Because it would have messed up the plot. But other than that.)

I kept reading this book. Gilman’s prose is readable, very readable. On the sentence level, I can always go on with him. And I always think, “Well, maybe this time–” And then no. Not this time. Not any time. No no no no. This one is about late nineteenth century Britain and its fantasmagorical notions of the spheres, Mars in particular but all of them really–and I am interested in that. I am interested in the ways that fantasy can take that on, can take that different places than the world did. Secret societies, secret computing machines and their alternate results, this is of interest to me! But then the drumbeat of Felix Gilman ground it into muck, as he always does, because that’s how he thinks books go.

I really need to remember this. Some of you like that sort of thing, and more power to you; he does it quite well, and here is where you can find it.

Review copy provided by author, who is also a personal friend under another name.

The Victorian naturalist’s memoir is in my opinion an untapped gold mine for fabulists, and Marie Brennan does the genre well. I would love to see more of this sort of thing in fantasy: the secondary world, the functioning and creatures not the same as ours, but treated with the same attitudes and approach as in that era of our history. Or an earlier one: a Linnaeus of a fantasy land would be like catnip to me.

Lady Isabella returns here from her adventures in A Natural History of Dragons, which volume I think would be helpful but not necessary to appreciating the events of the current one. In this installment, she has come through early widowhood, pregnancy, and her son’s infancy, is now a published naturalist, and is ready to face new challenges with new companions, all of whom come with challenges of their own (none of which are allowed to overtake the story’s momentum). The set of dragons and near-dragons this particular expedition is investigating is located in a jungle known as the Green Hell, on a continent seemingly inspired by our world’s Africa. Unlike most fantasy scenarios, this inspiration involves awareness that African cultures are far from being monolithic. There are three imagined Erigan cultures in this volume alone, and our heroine, while being far from a modern enlightened thinker at points, has some level of exasperation for her own compatriots for treating the continent as a monolith. It’s a fine line to walk, taking inspiration from a colonialist era, and I think Brennan does it extremely well, especially with a later ceremony that would be a major plot spoiler.

The thoughts on colonialism are mostly a background process. The foreground is adventures with dragons and their investigation, with progress towards a more modern scientific attitude juxtaposed with (literally) high-flying feats. No one becomes a dragon rider here. They don’t have to. There are plenty of life cycles, breeding grounds, and fanged things sinking their teeth in at inopportune moments without anyone having to stick an apostrophe in their name for fun. Highly recommended.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

This is more or less the exact opposite of The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza, as far as graphic novels for young people go, and it’s sort of amusing that the two arrived in one package. This One Summer is a moody coming of age story about a young girl and her family and friends, about the ways that she finds that the people she admires and the people she is mad at sometimes need to switch places for awhile, and that she doesn’t know quite everything she thinks she knows.

Rose and her parents come to the same cabin every year, and she’s friends with a younger girl there, Windy. I think that one of the things I like best about This One Summer is the way that it depicts the tension in Rose and Windy’s friendship, as Rose has gotten a little bit older and more sophisticated than Windy, and yet not quite as much older and more sophisticated as she hopes. Those delicate cusp moments are difficult to get across in a few drawings and lines of dialog, and the Tamakis pull it off perfectly. And Rose and Windy are in turn not quite old enough to be part of the circle of teenagers around the cabins–they’re on the outside looking in, and they don’t understand all of what they’re looking at, and the ways they try to make sense of it all can sometimes be self-serving, and sometimes cruel, but ultimately neither.

The same is true of Rose’s relationship with her parents: she has been dragged into their issues and did not ask to be, and she is not always perfectly understanding of that, as who could expect her to be. She is prickly and frustrated and herself, but ultimately she has a sense of who they are as a family, and who their family is to the world, that shines through.

This is very much a relationship book. The plot is quiet, though the girls are often not. While I frequently complain that there isn’t enough story in graphic novels, there’s as much story here as in many a YA novel with the same number of pages. The expressive faces and body language account for a great deal and carry through mute hurt and joy and much more.

Joseph Barry, Infamous Woman: The Life of George Sand. Lots of scandalous nineteenth century gossip to be had in this, and various artists wandering in and out and having their own way in various aspects of their lives, and being shoved into corners by illness and revolution and financial concerns. Interesting stuff. Recommended.

danah boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. A lot of what’s in here is stuff I already knew, but I strongly suspect that I am not boyd’s main target audience here. I think the main message is not “there’s nothing to be afraid of” so much as “most people seem to be afraid of the wrong stuff.” Also, holy crud do we need more genuine cross-generational public spaces. Also, people seem to believe things that are patently untrue, such as “I wouldn’t let my [sixteen-year-old] kid talk to strangers in person, so I’m just carrying that onto the internet.” Culturally we require kids of that age to talk to strangers all the time; what people who say that seem to mean is that they don’t expect their teenagers to have adult friends of their own with common interests apart from the parents. Because if a 16-year-old refused to speak to classmates they hadn’t been formally introduced to by their parents, or to the clerk at the grocery store? it would be considered rude and weird. And most 18-year-olds are dumped off and expected to live and construct entire social lives with strangers. But “I don’t let my kid talk to strangers” is one of those things that sounds like it’s probably true, so people are allowed to say it without having someone challenge them on what a dumb thing it is to say about a person who is allowed to operate a motor vehicle. Or even a bicycle.

Cathy Marie Buchanan, The Painted Girls. An historical novel about young Paris Opera dancers and their lives, dealing with what the impressions and views of artists such as Zola and Degas and the less savory characters around them would do to the impoverished women who were their object. In spite of that not at all uplifting theme, it has moments of great sweetness and beauty, and the women in question manage to claw out their own realistic happy ending despite their appalling circumstances. If you want the romance of the ballet, this is so not for you. I ended up entranced.

Mike Carey, The Unwritten: Orpheus in the Underworld. The worst Mike Carey thing I have ever read. Tedious, zombieful, wallowing in non-shocking attempts at gross-outs and shock-turns. I have not quit reading the series based on this volume but have started considering whether I will soon.

J. Kathleen Cheney, The Golden City. This is one of those books that as a writer I was glad I read when I did, because it bore extremely superficial similarities to an idea I was playing with, so now I can change a few details so that the deep differences will be clear and not obscured by superficial similarities. Hurrah timing! It was pacey and enjoyable, although I did wish that the historical Portuguese setting had been, well, more Portuguese. There was very little that was individually Portuguese about it, so I hope she can do more with that in future works. Still, even without much historical Portugal, murderous magic, selkies, and merfolk: want that? This is that.

Megan Crewe, The Worlds We Make. A mostly fitting end to this trilogy. It zipped right past, hitting the logistics strengths of the series hard (YAY LOGISTICS), and while the very ending was slightly not…hrmmm…hard-nosed? enough for me, it certainly made gestures in that direction considering that this was in fact YA. I will be eager to see what Crewe does next.

M. J. Engh, Wheel of the Winds. Did you ever say to yourself, “If only I had some Jack Vance to read without the sexism”? Worry not, here is this book. It is a planetary navigation adventure. Also, M. J. Engh thought very thoroughly about what it would take to have this kind of adventure with a mid-sized dog. This book very thoroughly understands not only where that kind of dog can be a useful companion but also where allowances must be made for the dog and where special accommodations must be arranged. The dog is not a prop that can be stuffed in the bag of holding. This seems like a small thing, and yet: dogs. Really.

Judith Flanders, The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. I am so fond of Judith Flanders, when I opened this book as a present from Mark, I blurted out, “Oh! Judith Flanders! She’s my favorite Victorianist who wasn’t in our wedding!” She lived up to that expectation here, going into murder ballads and broadsheets and sets of dolls, how murders were covered and how they were prosecuted, what expectations of evidence were and how people perceived the possibilities of the world around them. Well done, hurrah, more please.

John M. Ford, The Final Reflection. Reread. Interesting to read in proximity to some of Mike’s other stuff. It’s been awhile since I revisited this one, and the other thing it’s interesting to have in proximity to it is late season ST:DS9, which we are slowly rewatching as a household. They decided to go a completely different direction with Klingon culture, which makes me a little sad: this is the best Star Trek novel, and Mike’s Klingons really were much cooler. Ah well.

Ben Hatke, Zita the Spacegirl, Legends of Zita the Spacegirl, and The Return of Zita the Spacegirl. Discussed elsewhere.

Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo. I’ve been wanting to read this for awhile, ever since I read The Best of All Possible Worlds. It’s less polished and less balanced than her excellent later work, a completely different style of book, but still interesting, a fantasy of consequences, with African (specifically Senegalese) roots we don’t see often enough in fantasy. Well done, worth pursuing even if we didn’t know that Lord had gotten even better since (which in my opinion we do).

Mary Renault, The Friendly Young Ladies. I think this is the last Mary Renault I will try. I think me and Mary Renault are just not meant to be. There were five major characters in this book, three of them interesting. The other two got the most page time, and they got almost no character arc whatsoever, just an entire book of flatness. Someone does indeed deserve to get abandoned in this book, and someone does indeed deserve a sock in the jaw, and it is not the characters who received those fates. I understand that there are all sorts of things she could not do because of the censors of the time. But choosing to get around that by using a clueless protag who never does get any kind of clue…is not really a very sympathetic choice for me. And the ending, oh good heavens the ending. And then her notes about the ending later, arrrrgh. So: no more Mary Renault for me, I think, thank you, no; understanding why she did things in context does not translate to enjoying her doing them, even if Leo and Helen and Joe were all lovely and characters I would gladly have spent more time with.

Marie Rutkoski, The Shadow Society. Much more romance balance on this one than I am used to in my fantasy, but handled in a way that was not too visual for my tastes (my usual complaint about romance is not the love but the visual focus). The relationship between very different talented young people from very different parallel Chicagos is the center, but the worldbuilding is crucial to the ups and downs of their relationship–and the rest of the plot. All the good things that people say about blending fantasy and romance apply here. Also the positive foster parent relationship, the good friendships, and other factors made it a fun read.

Hiroshi Sakurazaka, All You Need Is Kill. This book looks like it’s doing two more typical things than what it settles into actually doing. The first is a battlefield military SF novel. The second is a Groundhog’s Day type time loop narrative. And then it goes on to do something more interesting than either one with the time loops. It’s very short, it’s very punchy, and if you don’t mind the violence that comes with a military setting (especially when it’s divorced from the baggage of a lot of American MilSF), it’s a lot of fun.

Janet D. Spector, What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village. This is a classic example of the Book of How Everyone Else Is Wrong. In this case it really does look like everyone else was wrong, and quite badly, too. One of Spector’s advantages seems to be that she worked with the local Dakota instead of ignoring them (this seems basic, and yet); another was cataloging organic material and handmade material, not just metal objects purchased from white settlers (again, obvious, right? and yet), and she did some reinterpretation that was very interesting and quite logical. This is very local to me–as in, I could get to her specific dig sites with very little more direction than what is provided in the book, could picture them easily–but I think it would be interesting to those who are not from this area also.

Jonathan Strahan, ed., Fearsome Journeys. Is there anything better than reading someone you like doing the thing you like them doing? Absolutely, and that’s reading someone you like doing something new. I got two of those in this volume, one from Scott Lynch and one from Ellen Klages. I also got stand-out stories from Elizabeth Bear and Daniel Abraham, whose novels are less unitary and who therefore have less of a “their thing” to deviate from. This is in the upper ranks of fantasy anthologies I’ve read in this decade, possibly the best–I haven’t sat down to do a total ordering, since that’s not my scene. But as fantasy anthologies go, it’s definitely worth the time.

E. P. Thompson, William Morris. Oh, E. P. Thompson, how I love you. Oh, William Morris, also with the love. This is a big thumping biography, and Thompson has the necessary background in poetry and also the necessary background in English socialists (Marxist and non-) to give context to the whole messy thing. And Morris was the Pre-Raphaelite who would get in there and dye stuff himself, and Morris was the one who would get in there and do the lead lines for the stained glass and figure out the exact colors when Rosetti had just tossed him a pencil sketch of roughly how something should look–oh, I did not come out of this a greater fan of Rosetti at all–and really, he was such a tinkery nerd. So fond, so fond. And I was even more fond because Thompson would make no bones about the parts of Morris’s work that were complete crap–he was a biographer who was clearly fond of his subject, but not at all reverent, he would just dive right in and say, “Despite Rosetti’s enthusiasm for Morris’s latest work at the time, this poem had no visible virtues,” or something like that, and you’d go and find it online and read it and go, oh, ugh, Uncle Will, what a thing to write, go and dye something, you’ll feel better after. It was so lovely. Towards the end it got to be a really diffuse accounting of English socialism of the period more than a biography of William Morris per se, but you can sympathize with that, given that Thompson was who he was and Morris was who he was. It was an awfully tempting rabbit to go running after. Anyway I highly recommend this if you are even remotely interested. And if you are not, then I will do the interpretive dance of Janey Morris and George Bernard Shaw and the blackberry pudding for you, and that’s almost as good.

Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and Shirleen Smith, People of the Lakes: Stories of Our Van Tat Gwitch’in Elders. The two different spellings of the group name are there on the cover, so I have replicated them faithfully, knowing well the problems of transliteration. These are people of the far north who are not Inuit, telling some of their own stories, with photos illustrating the lands where they live. Quite useful for filling in gaps in perception about the peoples of the far north.

Stanley Weintraub, Beardsley. Biography of Aubrey Beardsley. Does what it says on the tin, does not do a great deal more than that, except that the accompanying illustrations gave me a much more solid reminder of what stuff is Beardsley-influenced. (A lot. Really a lot.)

Review copies provided by First Second Books.

First Second was really smart here. The most recent of the Zita books, The Return of Zita the Spacegirl, just came out, so instead of sending me just that one, they also sent me Zita the Spacegirl and Legends of Zita the Spacegirl so I could read the whole thing. Which I could do in a total of less than an hour, because they’re graphic novels for kids, or more to the point for all/most ages. I would say that the main restraint on the Zita books will not be age but temperament. There are going to be a few people who find their cartoon levels of threat frightening or bothersome, but that’s probably going to be as true at age 2 as at age 82.

Zita is extremely charming. She has adventures, she is extremely stubborn, and she makes a very wide variety of friends, including robots and a giant mouse and aliens of all sorts. (I am very much attached to Strong-Strong in particular.) Zita and her friend Joseph are thrown into their adventures, but she is very active and very much attached to virtues like justice, loyalty, friendship, and stubbornness, without being too didactic about them. She has a cool costume and all sorts of aspects one could easily attach to as “favorite,” and while the first story is pretty straightforward and sweet, the second and third ramify from there and have consequences that are not quite so obvious.

It’s rare that I can recommend something without regard to age, but I really can here. The question is whether you like mild, sweet, cartoony space adventure comic books. If you do, Zita will probably make you smile.

Michelle-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden, eds., Rocket Dragons Ignite: Daily Science Fiction Year Two. I make a policy of not reviewing books I’m in, and I’m in this, so, hey: this exists, I’m in it, I read it.

Alan Bradley, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches. A mystery series that has a definitive ending other than the death of its author or its main detective is like a dancing bear, and this is no exception. Compared to the delights of the early series, this is not nearly so good, but goodness, look at that! it ends at all! The long-term plot threads are wrapped up, Flavia is more or less launched in the direction we have long suspected she would go…but while I sat down and read it in one big gulp in an hour, there was a lot about it that felt a bit perfunctory the minute I thought about it. I still recommend the series, and I expect that if you get going and like it, I’m not going to be able to talk you out of getting the last tidbits you can about who Dogger is and what happened to Flavia’s mother and that. But the exuberance of the first few was just not there for me in this series ending.

Susan Chitty, Gwen John, 1876-1939. All sorts of interesting tidbits in this bio, but uff da, what a mess these people made of their lives. It was like they were all 22 from age 15 until their deaths, and they forgot to pick someone to be The Sensible One in their group of 22-year-olds. Also I will never look at Rodin statues quite the same way again. My main complaint of Susan Chitty is that she never found a way to refer to her subject other than by both names, even though there is no indication that John went by “Gwen John” compulsively (and in fact every indication that she did not). And 200+ pages of “Gwen John, Gwen John, Gwen John” started to get to be a bit much. I understand that John is a common male name and so might feel funny for a female subject, and that on the other hand one might not feel chummy enough to be constantly calling one’s subject Gwen. Get over either one problem or the other.

Kate Elliott, Cold Steel. Very much dependent on the earlier volumes, so if you want to read this, you probably already know it. I was mostly interested in the worldbuilding, which did not get developed much more in this volume, but the momentum was enough to carry me through happily enough.

Isabel Greenberg, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth. The stories in this were mostly too similar and not twisted enough–“here is almost a Cain and Abel story but not quite, but not doing anything very interesting with the differences.” So mostly I would read them and want to say, “okay, and?” The “and” was the art. (It was a graphic novel.) Unfortunately I am the wrong audience for “weak story, nifty art.”

Anne Higonnet, Berthe Morisot. Quite well-done bio that managed to explain, without going into long digressions, the social and economic forces that led to women artists (particularly Morisot but also others) being a force in Impressionism in ways that were less possible earlier. Discussion of who could afford to paint and what would previously have kept people from it, as well as lots of personal and interpersonal stuff. Very pleased.

Bennett Madison, September Girls. This was the other thing I read in a gulp from the library yesterday while not feeling good. It’s very YA, male protagonist with some chapters of female perspective. I enjoyed it well enough, but I kept noticing how white it was, because I kept expecting it to be a plot point. Because “here is a town in North Carolina that is filled entirely with white people and all the crap jobs are done by teenage blonde girls” did not occur to me until most of the way through as potentially not signaling something interesting about plot, until…there was nothing political it was signaling about the plot. It’s just that everything else I’ve read about that regional setting…anyway, I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to say: nope. So there was that then.

Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety. A very long novel about the personal lives of French Revolutionaries. Screamingly funny in parts; I am still giggling about where the women started imitating Desmoulins. Having come to Mantel from her later work, though, I was a bit startled that she wanted to do something so conventional as these very well-known and central figures’ lives. Further, I felt that the explanation for the final rift was…I’m actually going to hope that “beneath her” is not inappropriate here. Certainly the very ending left a bad taste in my mouth. Not enough to ruin me on Mantel in general. I just felt that she was seeking for an interpersonal complication for something that politics entirely well explain, and also that the interpersonal complication she came up with was, in context, not great.

Jaime Lee Moyer, A Barricade in Hell. Discussed elsewhere.

Marie Rutkoski, The Celestial Globe. Sequel to her previous MG novel. I was a little disappointed because this one was set in Elizabethan London, whereas the one before it was set in Bohemia of the same era. Bohemia: little-used setting, very interesting. London with Queen Elizabeth, John Dee, Shakespeare, Marlowe: not at all little-used, been done quite well by quite a few people. I’m hoping that the third in the trilogy returns to a solidly Central European setting, because I found that a lot more unique and interesting.

Howard M. Sachar, Farewell Espana: the World of the Sephardim Remembered. This book was interesting in parts but not very well-organized. It was not entirely clear that it was going to start with Spain and then go on to the different regions and treat each mostly-temporally-sort-of, so when I got to twentieth century Jewish-Turkish-Armenian complicated relationships rather abruptly halfway through the book, I was pretty startled. Some gaps filled in, but this should definitely not be your first or even your third volume of Judaica/Jewish history/Sephardic history.

Mark Siegel, Sailor Twain, or The Mermaid in the Hudson. Discussed elsewhere.

Johanna Sinisalo, It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction. Kindle. Interesting stuff I couldn’t get elsewhere, although I don’t really like having excerpts of longer works in an anthology. I know tastes vary on that, but that’s mine. It contained the single most disgusting short story I’ve ever read, Carita Forsgren’s “Hairball,” which was good enough that I kept reading despite being more grossed out with every page, but uff da, what a thing. I was much more fond of Maria Saario’s “The Horseshoe Nail” and her time traveling blacksmithing and consideration of what suits which people, and also of Tiina Raevaara’s “Ospreys.”

S. E. Smith, The United States Marine Corps in World War II: Vol. II: Battering the Empire. Grandpa’s. This is all first-person accounts from much closer to WWII, from Marines and journalists who were with Marines. As such, it’s fascinating and valuable, and I’m looking forward to Vol. III. It does bear some caveats; there is a certain amount of racism of the sort that tends to be encouraged in war, and it has not been filtered or softened by time (or any other force) in these accounts. It’s particularly fascinating to watch some of the more virulent racists and how their racism was shaped entirely by propaganda cartoons, because I only know what they’re talking about because I’ve seen those cartoons. I’m referring to the idea that the Japanese, as a people, have buck teeth. At the time this was apparently considered a thing. From the perspective of someone who has seen a great many Japanese and Japanese-Americans while not at war with them, it is as though someone decided that all Germans have either gigantic chins or weak receding chins. I can think of Germans and German-Americans with either trait, but it’s just not a generalized ethnic trait at all. And the buck teeth thing is like that: you think, “What were they talking about?” You can picture the cartoons and think, okay, that’s what they were talking about. But when you try to picture actual Japanese people, you can’t make the propaganda link up with any statistical trait. It makes you wonder what we’re thinking now is just “how [group] is” that our grandchildren will look at and go, “Uh…what are you talking about? No, seriously, what are you actually talking about?” The other thing in this book that was just heart-rending, that I wished for more of, was the account of the surgeon. He was talking about the casualties, and his attitude towards the psychiatric cases was particularly interesting, because he treated them as real but beyond his expertise. This particular surgeon–maybe typical? hard to tell?–would basically say, “Sure, yep, stomach pains,” about the shell-shock cases who claimed they had stomach pains but didn’t check out with any injuries/illnesses, and give them water and leave them alone, saying he tried to talk to the first one and made him cry, so he figured psychiatric work was beyond him. And…I think that’s so much more interesting than the movie version we have, where either you have the gruff military doctor barking at soldiers to get back to the front, or else you have the understanding healer who can talk it all out, the Hawkeye Pierce if you will. This guy talked about how he was a lung specialist back home, how this was all beyond him, and he just didn’t want to make some poor shell-shocked kid worse. Really glad somebody bothered to write it down.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, War Master’s Gate. I am really torn about this book. Philosophically I completely approve of what Tchaikovsky is doing here. He is making the plot arc bend towards an ending! He is not just wandering around endlessly complicating things further and having his characters do ever more stuff and find ever more interesting bug species! This is good! This is what we like! Shaped plot arc, determined action, hurrah, this is artistically satisfying. But in my heart of hearts, I can’t help it, all I really want this series to do is wander around meeting interesting bug kinden and finding out what their different powers are and how they live and what they look like and what their habitats look like. Basically I want Lonely Planet: Bug People. I am not proud of this urge, and it is not one that Tchaikovsky should indulge in me. I will dutifully go and buy him doing the artistically better thing. But bug people. That is what I am reading this set of gigantic fantasy bricks for.

Michael Wolf, Chinese Propaganda Posters. This is what it says on the tin: it’s reproductions of lots and lots of Chinese propaganda posters. They’re sorted by category and translated into English, French, and German. There are some very ordinary ones and also some completely alarming ones like “how a gas mask is supposed to fit properly on Comrade Horse and Comrade Mule” and “we need a whole mess of children to haul this gigantic peach of immortality to Chairman Mao, that is just how much immortality the Chairman needs,” and of course the ever-popular “send your propaganda artist out in the street to look at babies, because I have seen Chinese babies and they do not look like spherical pinkish kewpie demons.” Fascinating stuff.

Review copy provided by Tor. Additionally, Jaime is a personal friend, and we share an agent.

As I read A Barricade in Hell, I kept thinking, “Why can’t I have a TV series like this?” Jaime does the research into her visual cues meticulously, from the flowers to the furriers to the Chinatown streets. They’re touchstones, jumping-off points for the narrative, grounding the fantastical in the historical. And the two main characters fit together so well: Delia’s work with ghosts and poltergeists meshes so well with her husband Gabe’s police work, each complementing and balancing the other, that I keep thinking, “This is such a good place for a scene break in a book…and it would also be a good place for a scene break in a TV show…if I could have a TV show in which a married couple had work strengths that complimented each other like this!” But honestly, it’s not that common in the written side of things either.

And 1917 in the US is such a volatile setting, such a fascinating time, with “modern” technologies just introduced but not ubiquitous (cars, telephones–present but not to be relied upon), and also of course with the US poised on entry into the First World War. A Barricade in Hell uses that and all its attendant tensions without being directly about the politicians in Washington, and without forgetting that even a country that’s been isolationist can’t be isolated. I was so pleased with this, so very pleased. Highly recommended. It doesn’t come out for awhile, which makes now your perfect time to catch up on Delia’s Shadow if you haven’t already.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

This is a graphic novel with a very distinctive style. The art is all charcoal drawings, not at all period (the setting is 1887) but evocative of period, and when I saw the stag rising up from the Hudson River, I went, “Oooooh,” and wanted to fall in love.

I wish the stag in the Hudson had been, y’know, a great deal more important. Or that the references to Twain and Lafayette had gone somewhere interesting. Or that the two little boys had, or the black boiler workers or…or…something. This was a book of loose ends and missed opportunities. If you’re the sort of person who finds that graphic novels usually have entirely enough story to be satisfying, possibly you won’t feel that way, but if you often feel that there isn’t quite enough there in the best of times, then maybe give this one a miss.

Also…I have been trying to think how to say this tactfully. Some people are in a place personally where “protag is a jerk to disabled spouse” is a perfectly fine narrative component for them and doesn’t really interfere with story. “Oh, jerk to disabled spouse, okay, cool,” they might say, I guess? I don’t really know. I am not those people. I am not in that place. And this is a book with that narrative device, and it is not handled in a self-aware enough way that makes me think, “Well, at least there was the part where….” There is not that part. No. It’s just kind of jerkish. And I wonder if I’m supposed to be using the potential spaces in the narrative to make excuses for the protag? But the other narrative devices (the “cure” for mermaid “affliction” is…what, really? really?) did not really incline me to be in an excuse-making mood.

The acknowledgments thank Pete Seeger and the Clearwater gang, so that’s kind of awesome.

Things are really quite bad here. Lots of time on the couch with a book. Hoping for it to ease up…any time now, really. Any time now would be good. In the meantime, here’s what I’ve been reading:

Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us. I cannot think of any reason you might want to read this book. Bering has a breezy, jokey tone, but he’s very patchy on documentation vs. blathering on with his opinions. There are several interesting books to get written on how we know what we know about sexual response and hard-wiring vs. experiential wiring and how knowledge of taboos and accepted practices gets passed along culturally. This is none of them. Also, Bering starts early on with the assumption that harm should be a gold standard for what is and is not tolerated by a wider society, though individuals and groups may have additional standards for what they personally cannot or will not do or stand for; sounds reasonable enough to me, but he never makes the argument for why–and then halfway through the book says that he hopes he has demonstrated why. Well…no. He didn’t even try to demonstrate why. (Seriously, it was: “I hope I demonstrated the thing I asserted.” “No, you just asserted it.”) And that kind of shaky logic underpins all sorts of discussion here, on a set of topics where it is least helpful and most fraught. NOT recommended, and this is the second book in as many months I’ve gotten on New Scientist’s recommendation only to find it shallow and disappointing.

Gillian Bradshaw, London in Chains (Kindle) and A Corruptible Crown. A pair of English Civil War novels about a young woman who comes to London and becomes a printer and a Leveler. They’re pretty melodramatic–the villains twirl their mustachios with great glee–and there is an element of sexual violence for our heroine to get past. But how often do I get English Civil War novels, much less novels whose plot is “our heroine becomes a printer and a Leveler”? I mean, feel free to go write me more without the sexual violence if you like; until then, beggars, choosers, you know.

James L. Cambias, A Darkling Sea. Discussed elsewhere.

Betty Boyd Caroli, The Roosevelt Women. Mothers and wives and daughters and aunts and cousins of the two Roosevelt presidents, very different personalities and politics. In some places this volume went more in-depth than I’d seen, and in others it glossed over, so it was a good companion volume for others, I think, rather than a place to start. Caroli pointed out that when she’s written about First Ladies in the past, she’s discovered that it’s less that they’re interesting for the men they’re married to and more that we get better documentation of these independently interesting people because of who they married. That’s certainly the case here. I think her decision to deal with Eleanor entirely in the context of her relationships with the rest of the Roosevelt family was a good one, since there is so much available Eleanor material elsewhere, and that’s not the case for the others.

Lyndsay Faye, Seven for a Secret. This has happened twice in a row now: I have mistaken a Lyndsay Faye title and cover on my library list for a random urban fantasy thing. “Oh, I’ll try whatever this urban fantasy thing is,” I have thought. “Maybe it’ll be good.” Lyndsay Faye does not write urban fantasy, brain! (Lyndsay Faye does not write urban fantasy, cover designers!) She writes historical mystery. No fantasy elements. Try to remember this, brain! Also, you already know you like her series, brain! Seriously, brain, keep up! (I remembered the book, just not the author/title. Oh, brains.) This is the series that’s set immediately after the founding of the New York police. This volume deals with blackbirders and the evil they did, entangled with the politics of the early New York City police being funded almost entirely by the Democratic Party, which was not at all sympathetic with abolitionists. I enjoyed it. It would probably be okay to start with this volume, but there is some arc plot that will have more emotional impact if you have the first one under your belt.

Zoe Ferraris, City of Veils and Kingdom of Strangers. Second and third in the series of mysteries set in Saudi Arabia, written by an American woman who married into a Saudi family and lived there for awhile. I think the third one is really the best, so I hope she keeps writing more, if that’s an indicator of how she’s learned to do it. The way that she explores what women manage to do within the Saudi strictures, and how the Saudi strictures change how a murder mystery can be solved, both make for fascinating twists on mystery fiction.

Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600. A pretty good first text if you need a first text on this period. Does what it says on the tin. Also had a screamingly funny section on an extant phrase book for Korean businessmen traveling to China at the end of the period described. Every conversation included phrases like, “You’re joking! Tell me the real price!” and, “Please stop shouting!” I feel that more early language lessons should include, “Please stop shouting!” Especially language lessons for Minnesotans. Teaching us to say, “Can you please say that louder?” in Japanese but not, “Please stop shouting!” looks like a grave oversight in retrospect.

Rawn James Jr., Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation. I hope Rawn James Jr. goes and writes more books, because I liked this one pretty well, and the one he wrote on the desegregation of the US military was excellent. While it just says “segregation” in the title, the main focus was on educational segregation, with a little bit of union segregation thrown in where it was relevant. James’s legal experience came in very clearly with the relevant court cases. Good stuff, interesting stuff.

Snorri Kristjansson, Swords of Good Men. Grimdark Vikings. Such grimdark Vikings. There were a few quite good moments, but I…don’t actually like grimdark. Even when it’s done really quite well. I don’t enjoy the levels of bodily fluids and sexual violence. So if you want one of these, yep, here’s one of these. I don’t want one of these. You go ahead.

Peter H. Lee and Wm. Theodore de Bary, Sources of Korean Tradition Volume One: from Early Times Through the Sixteenth Century. What they mean here is Korean Religious tradition, which is why I ended up muttering, “too much Buddhism, not enough roller derby” at this book repeatedly, and at one point wailed, “there is no Dana, only Buddhism!” Don’t get me wrong: I recognize that Buddhism is immensely important to Korea’s history. It’s just that every time I would come upon a reference to something else–anything else–that might in the broader sense be considered part of Korean tradition, I would seize upon it eagerly. “So-and-so got on the ship to China.” Yes, ships? Tell me about the ships. Merchant fleets separate from the fishing boats in this period? How big? Made of what? What kind of sailing technology? “Here is what Buddhist texts they studied when they got to China.” Aughhhh. Or else something about mulberries and silk, and I would perk up, yes, tell me about the silk, tell me about the weaving industry, the dyeing industry, the silk trade, the mulberries. “Here is how they are a metaphor for Buddhism.” AUGHHHH. So I now have an extensive reference about how Buddhist and Confucian thought affected Korea in this period, which is good to know, it really is. It’s just…Korean history. A continuing quest.

Nancy Mitford, Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie. Two comic novels, not really upbeat but not tragic either, one in the 1930s and the other in the 1940s. The spy novel ending of Pigeon Pie had me just howling, so if you’ve read ten million non-comic spy novels, by all means go to. They’re quite short, and while there’s not a lot there, there are worse things for a day on the couch.

Chris Moriarty, The Watcher in the Shadows. I have been waiting for this sequel to The Inquisitor’s Apprentice, and then it slipped out without my noticing somehow. Definitely recommend that you start with the first one for full effect, but: magical early twentieth century New York with all sorts of class warfare and ethnic variety thought through. Very much my cup of tea.

Kenneth Oppel, Such Wicked Intent. Another of his prequels to Frankenstein. Gothy, angsty YA. Meh. Not sorry I read it, glad there aren’t more so I wouldn’t have to decide whether to keep going.

Guy Rickards, Jean Sibelius. Tolstoy was so wrong. Dozens, thousands of Finnish families of this era were unhappy in precisely this way: father drinks and everyone is miserable; father stops drinking awhile and everyone is miserable; father starts drinking again and everyone is miserable. Death of one of the children. Additionally, typhus. Seriously, the biographer was of that suboptimal kind who went around armchair-diagnosing with all sorts of things, but even so it really looks like the only interesting thing Janne Sibelius ever did was write music. If you ever think that being brilliant is enough to save you from being a crashing bore and kind of a jerk, go read a Sibelius biography. Also: I have read a great deal about a great many Finns, and Sibelius appears to be the first one who hasn’t had anything whatsoever strange and amusing happen to him. Really. Anything. Unless it’s the fault of the biographer, who didn’t seem that bad, you just would not want this man to dinner, because he would be devoid of anecdote and drink up all your booze. Go listen to the music instead and save yourself the trouble.

Marie Rutkoski, The Cabinet of Wonders. First in a middle-grade Middle-European fantasy series. Clockwork, magic globes, alchemy, plenty to like. I look forward to the rest, but the afterword made me howl with laughter, because apparently Rutkoski’s Czech relatives are my Swedish relatives in disguise.

Anya von Bremzen, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing. Oh, I loved this. So glad that Zalena recommended it, because I probably wouldn’t have gone and found it on my own. von Bremzen goes through the decades of the Soviet Union from a culinary perspective but with digressions into other points of interest–the fate of the 1927 Uzbek Women’s Day festivities made me cry and go put various books on Uzbekistan on my wishlist, for example, and apparently I’m going to have to make Stalin’s favorite dish this summer when the little eggplants are good at the farmer’s market. Fascinating book. Vivid, funny, sad, fascinating.

Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great. Discussed elsewhere.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Scenes of Childhood. Perfect for curling up on the couch while not feeling good, especially if you have an Edwardian sense of humor, which is one of the kinds of sense of humor I have. This book features The Poodle, and I kept reading bits of it out to the long-suffering Mark; it’s that kind of book. The only down side is that the rest of Sylvia Townsend Warner is not easy to get, and now I want it more.

Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. This is an extremely important book to have out there, and an extremely difficult book to read. For example, the things that the “father of gynecology” actually did with black women to figure out how to treat fistula…the details are harrowing to think of. Even if you think you’re thinking of them now, unless you actually have the details, they will be more harrowing than you think. Washington was apparently quizzed by more than one person while writing this book about whether the book would make black people distrust medicine, and I think she’s correct that the practices in it would, but the book would not. I think it’s extremely important to have this information available for people who need it for specific purposes, and also I think it’s important for some people who don’t specifically need it to know it. That said, you’ll want to consider carefully whether you want to be one of those people, because…as I said, harrowing. Carefully researched, carefully considered, really intelligent and thorough. But oh, those poor people. I told a family member that I am okay with being the one in our family who holds this knowledge. It needs knowing, but…not everyone has to make themselves deal with it. We can spread that out a bit.