Tag: bookses precious

Review copy provided by Tor. Further, not only is the author a personal friend, but I helped with this book in draft. You can go to the acknowledgments in the back and see where it says so, pretty specifically.

Various individuals and movements in SFF have talked about how they draw inspiration from whomever they please (I remember one China Mieville manifesto in the pages of Locus waxing poetic on this theme in particular), but I don’t recall seeing very many SF novels that were actually inspired by the sort of mid-century British women’s literary fiction that informs My Real Children, authors like AS Byatt and Rumer Godden–or even their cross-ocean counterparts, Gail Godwin and Margaret Atwood. This very much does. My Real Children is the story of a woman’s life and family, bifurcated. Patricia Cowan starts out singular, a seven-year-old on the beach in the UK of the 1930s, and for her early days as Patsy and Patty we see a unified storyline. Then there is the crucial moment, the split, and it is–as is appropriate for the style of book that this is–a marriage proposal.

Up until that point, Patricia’s world could be our world. After that she is both Pat and Trish, and neither of her worlds are ours. The divergence happens slowly and on human scale–there is no sudden alien landing, no moment where one of the versions of our heroine turns out to be a cyborg from the future–but the small changes are real and important, both to the world at large and to Patricia as a person. Some things that seem like her core self remain constant–when she is an old woman, she remembers two lives, so she conceives of herself as one, as herself. Others–everything from faith to food–diverge sharply enough to call core self into question.

Which makes it sound like an intellectual exercise, when it’s not that, or not just that, it’s deeply emotional. Each of the characters gets highly personal joys and sorrows, very sharp emotional relief but also bits of keenly observed mundane life that doesn’t quite line up with the way mundane reality worked out in our own timelines. All sorts of bits of women’s lives that get ignored or swept off to the sidelines in traditional science fiction are front and center here, and it is a richer book for them.

It’s a very strange feeling, trying to write an ordinary review post about a book that I already talked to the author about in this much detail while it was in draft. I’m all ready to talk about how it makes me hungry for gelato, how I thought of this book when people my age were moaning about how it didn’t feel like twenty years since Kurt Cobain died and I blurted out, “Come on, not only had I not had sex then, I hadn’t even had gelato,” and then I thought of My Real Children and whether there was a branched-off universe in which I never had gelato, not even once. I don’t think so. It doesn’t sound like me. But then it wouldn’t have sounded like Pat, either, so there we are, not knowing which column it goes in, the unchanging fundamentals or the large looming things that get oddly swept aside as a result of small perturbations. And now it’s coming out soon and the rest of you can read it and see what I mean about the gelato and how Bee is the best but Bethany is pretty good too, how we make the best lives we can in the worlds we have to deal with and sometimes the best lives and the best worlds are not at all convergent.

I love this book because it’s doing more than one thing I like at once in ways that nobody else is doing, and even if other people start doing more of it, it’s full of concrete specifics, so I will still love this one, the way the children are in passport control and the way one experience in college informs two evolutions of viewpoint in entirely different ways. I love the bits of this book that don’t go the obvious places they might have. It has wrenching horrible pieces and is not always easy to read, but it would not have the impact that it does on me if it didn’t. Most of all, though, the overlap of influences gives it such rich context that I really enjoy, and I will be interested to see how people who come to it from only one part of that context or another find and enjoy it.

Review copy provided by Tor.

This is the fourth in Mary Robinette Kowal’s series of Regency fantasies. Two of the things that I like about it may seem contradictory, but I don’t think that they are. I think that it stands alone better than the previous two volumes–that it is a better jumping-in point than any other volume since the first, basically, and that’s valuable in an ongoing series. And I also think that it follows up on a character/emotional situation from the end of the third volume that I felt ended abruptly. I don’t think these two things are at all contradictory: the particular situation is one that can be introduced very smoothly into the text at the beginning of this volume and ramify throughout, but it had nagged at me since the end of volume three, and I was very glad to see it addressed here.

Jane and Vincent remain the main characters, and in fact one of the things that makes this volume stand alone fairly well is that they are traveling to Venice, leaving their friends and relations behind as they develop ideas for linking their new glamour (magic) skills and the Venetian glass industry. Venice, however, does not welcome them with open arms. Venice, in fact, is full of swindlers and con artists, though there are also some decent people they can trust–the trick, of course, is sorting out who. There are police and noblemen, nuns and puppeteers, glassblowers and glamour pupils, and which of them are out to steal the obscuring glamours–and with what allies and for what purposes.

I love glassblowing, and I love consequences, and this has both. There are even non-metaphorical fires: the cover is not misleading as so many fantasy novels with fiery covers are. If you’ve been keeping up with the series, this is a worthy entry; if you haven’t, go ahead and start here if you like.

Review copy provided by Starscape.

I feel a little conflicted about this book.

On the one hand, it’s a reasonably fun children’s book, with First Nations cultures all over North America, multicultural alliances, clockwork toys that are trained to do amazing things, and all sorts of rushing about in trains and airships.

On the other hand, the prose is pretty jerky in parts, and what the titular League of Seven is protecting the world from, explicitly right there on the page…

…is science.

Every age, seven heroes arise to protect the world from the forces of lektricity, including a leader and a strong man and…yeah. They protect the world from the swarming evils of science, represented by the Hive Queen.

So despite Hachi, who is a pretty cool First Nations girl character who “kicks brass” (sigh, kids’ books) and has these little clockwork toys that help her and is fierce and fun, I…well, I am the swarming evils of science, folks. That’d be me. (Bzzz.) So I read this book all the way through, going, “But he’s going to notice that Fergus the tinkerer is actually a proto-scientist, right? We’re going to undermine this ‘protected from science’ and have Mr. Rivets the clockwork man notice that he runs on science?” Except that we don’t know that he does. He might well run on magic. And while Tesla appears on the good side, sort of, he’s, well, about as sane as you’d expect Tesla to be, and Edison is far less sane than you’d expect Edison to be (even if you’d just read a bio of Edison), cacklingly hand-rubbingly cat-strokingly evil.

And then the revelations about Our Hero’s True Nature and his family…were not what I would call deftly handled. So as much as I want to like Hachi…as much as I want Gratz to overcome a lot of the stuff he’s dipped this book in…kind of ew, honestly. Ew. The swarming evils of science are going to swarm somewhere else now. Bzz. Ew.

Review copy provided by author. Read on my Kindle.

This is an epic fantasy with focus on imperial succession, but the empire in question is more a collection of tribes than something more established and administrative like the US, Victorian Britain, China, or Rome. There are feuds of varying levels of intensity among the peoples under the Iyah’s domain, and of course there are border disputes–aren’t there always? The Iyah-ship is not limited by gender, and at the beginning of the book the old Iyah, the father of several of the major characters has just died, and one of them is about to become Iyah. Beyond that…well, beyond is the land of spoilers.

The unfamiliar terminology is introduced easily. While there are scads of relationship names and tribe names, they flow smoothly and do not break down the epic fantasy pacing here. And by “epic fantasy pacing,” I mean that it’s not a short, machine-gun paced book, but on the other hand, the focus is on fights, action, betrayals and redemption. There are human relationships here, but they are very much on the backdrop of empire–not a lot of time to stop for the budding friendship or see what it would be if it were not tested against loyalty to the Iyah, because that’s the focus of this book.

Sword and Chant is self-published, so the fact that the pacing is smooth and subgenre-appropriate is particularly noteworthy: that’s the thing that has fallen down most often for me not only with self-published but also with small-press works. The production is also good, with one or two typos, which is the same level that I notice from the big name publishing houses that send me review copies. MacGregor is someone I know online, not a close friend but someone with whom I am friendly, so I know that she chose self-publishing for this book as her main option, and she took the time to make it work here.

If I have a complaint about Sword and Chant, it’s that I can’t really attach to any one part of the world and say “ooh shiny, this is the part I loved.” It was very readable all the way through–recommended for those who like their epic fantasy with plenty of fight scenes. For me there was no moment where I started grabbing passersby and saying, “here is the thing you MUST know about this book because it is SO COOL.” Since I just read a Terry Pratchett book that I reacted to the same way, this is no great condemnation–I’ll definitely keep an eye out for Blair’s other stuff.

Light fortnight for books, looking even lighter because of the stuff I’ve been reading in manuscript.

C.J. Cherryh, Foreigner. Reread. I had forgotten how this began, with two vignettes of people we will never seen again. I honestly don’t think those vignettes improve anything about the series. I had also started to forget how directed the early volumes seemed compared to the leisurely stroll that the later volumes have become. Atevi culture is far less developed, but plot, oh, plot. I sigh for you, plot. Even with insufficient Jago.

Andrew Levy, The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves. An interesting read, and not a long one. Levy is particularly on-point and acerbic about the places that the example of Robert Carter blows up modern-day pieties about some of the other founders.

George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, editors, Old Mars. This is a particularly bad example of what happens when you just call up the people you’re usually pals with and ask them for stories without regard to whether the results are well-suited for the anthology at hand. The result is a limp and uninspired collection of stories that would have confused the heck out of me if I had been more naive in the genre and thought that there was any reason to believe them to be the best pre-Voyager-style Mars stories available to Martin and Dozois instead of just editorial laziness. Possibly it’s just coincidence that the two best stories of the collection are by some of the youngest writers, “James S. A. Corey” and Chris Roberson. Possibly the Martin/Dozois usual suspects were really excited about the concept and it just failed to come through in their stories; that can happen. (And then it’s the editor’s job to deal with that honestly….) But in general: what a yawn, what a waste of pages.

Mizuki Shigeru, Showa: A History of Japan 1926-1939. This is a comics representation of Japanese history of this period. (I would say “graphic novel” due to the size, but it’s nonfiction, so…terminology, ack.) It’s a very strange combination of things to do. It’s Japanese history interspersed with personal anecdotes from the same period of the author’s life. The perspective on what a Japanese person of that generation found important and noteworthy (doughnuts; I would never have guessed doughnuts) can be fascinating, but I really didn’t feel like the history was very successfully integrated into the comics format. A lot of it was very heavily reliant upon the text in the footnotes, with flipping back and forth required every few pages, not for “additional information” but to make basic sense of what had just appeared on the page.

Steven Posch and Magenta Griffith, The Prodea Cookbook: Good Food and Traditions from Paganistan’s Oldest Coven. Discussed elsewhere.

Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam. I like trains, and I like Discworld, but this Discworld Book About Trains was kind of…well, it was fine. It was a fine enough book, I guess. It was entertaining while I was reading it, I just don’t expect to want to reread it all that often. It felt a bit formulaic-ly Moist, and it felt a bit like he was trying to Say Some Things. I don’t regret reading it, but I also wasn’t sorry to be done.

William W. Warren, History of the Ojibway People. An interesting case. Warren was a young man in the 19th century who had an Ojibway mother and a white father, and all those influences were extremely clear. He used the word “savage” un-self-consciously, as though he had learned what it meant by watching what the people around him applied it to rather than by reading the dictionary definition, which was a very curious thing in some of his contexts–he very clearly does not use it to mean anything unpleasant or negative, and yet there it is, savage, right there on the page, hard to get around. Warren’s own story was a tragic one: he kept trying to resolve conflicts between the two sides of his own heritage and wore out his health, dying very young. In the meantime, he left us this and other attempts to explain his people to each other. Not at all unbiased; nothing is. Very interesting stuff, though. And the people who put out this volume are immensely valuable, because they footnote it with things like, “So-and-so says that this is not true, he has this family’s clan wrong.” They…went and asked more Ojibway people about stuff on which they were authorities and made notes about what they said. Oh best of book editors, oh very very best. We need more footnotes that basically say, “1. Nope,” when the author cannot be reached to fix things and yet they are questions of fact on which we have better information. (Note: sometimes Ojibway is also spelled Ojibwe or Ojibwa. Putting things into alphabets they were not originally in is hard. I have gone with Ojibway here because that is what William Warren himself preferred.)

Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold, editors, Bordertown. Reread. Slightly disorienting to reread, because I remember buying it and reading it in finals week when I was a freshman in college, and oh, it was so very hot, no air conditioning in the dorms, and I needed everything to be magical, I needed the escape so very much. Now I found the stories a very direct split: I liked “Danceland” and “Mockery,” and the other two left me pretty lukewarm with my now-brain, but it was very easy to just slip into my then-brain and read them on that horrible college mattress again with the barest hope of a breeze in the window.

Elizabeth Bear, Steles of the Sky. Discussed elsewhere.

Tobias S. Buckell, Hurricane Fever. Discussed elsewhere.

Dorothy Canfield (Fisher), Understood Betsy. Kindle. This is a very strange thing: an anti-helicopter parenting manifesto kids’ novel from…1917. It’s astonishing how many of the details of the helicopter parenting map pretty exactly. I think that the sort of modern kid who enjoys “old time novels” might still enjoy it? but my main recommendation of it is to modern adults who should find it to be a quick read and may be greatly interested in the details of how much the more things change…. Canfield/Fisher is very careful not to put country living over city living, for example, and although there are a few places where her priorities make me wince, overall it’s really quite good.

C. J. Cherryh, Peacemaker. The latest atevi novel. She keeps writing ’em, I keep reading ’em. Honestly, do not start here. Whatever you do, do not start here. Not at all the strongest of the series, by no means stands alone–they get less and less stand-alone as time goes by–but I still do care how Cajeiri negotiates the question of the birthday coat and its consequences as well as being impatient for the Spoiler who still do not Spoiler yet in this book. (Maybe in the next fortuitous three. Or maybe not. Sigh.) This book could have done with more Jago. But I still liked it.

Nancy Hale, Mary Cassatt. A quite competent but not transcendent bio of one of the important (American, female) Impressionists. Recommended if you’re looking for a bio of Mary Cassatt, otherwise not really.

Seanan McGuire, Discount Armageddon. Not my usual thing, but I could see how skillfully she was appealing to the audience she was appealing to, and there were some quite amusing moments. I’ll probably go back for the next one when I’m in the mood for humorous (modern-type) urban fantasy with cryptids.

E. C. Myers, Quantum Coin. Definitely in sequel land, and while I could see where this went all sorts of places an author might be eager to go, I was less eager as a reader to follow. I hope that Myers goes somewhere entirely different with his next work.

Michael O’Brien, Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon. Louisa Adams, the wife and First Lady of John Quincy Adams, was with him when he was ambassador to the court of the tsar, and she kept an account of when she had to travel by herself from that court to Paris. (“By herself”: with servants, her sister, and her son. But with no suitable male escort.) These worlds coexisted in my mind but did not really intersect: the philosophical austerity of the early American Republic (largely brought about by the elder John Adams) and the demands of an embassy at a court such as that of the early nineteenth century Russian one. Uff da, not an easy thing to have in collision, and an interesting book thereby.

Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird. I loved this book! This was so beautiful! Such a lovely amazing book! Um. Except the last few chapters. Other than that, great stuff! Ignore the last couple of chapters. I think the thing was, Oyeyemi had all sorts of interesting things to say about passing and the intersection of African-Americans and ethnic whites in the era she’d chosen, and then she tried to take it an analogy too far. There was a light touch with the fairy tale parallels (seriously, fantasy writers, we could learn from the lightness of touch), there was a richness of historical detail, there was all kinds of good stuff here. But the last few chapters…well, just…no call for them really. I will try again with another of her books. Onwards.

Reader’s Digest Editors, Great Biographies: Charles A. Lindbergh, Thomas A. Edison, Hans Christian Andersen, etc.. Grandpa’s. Again, the biographies are chopped to bits and strikingly laudatory and uncontroversial. One would hardly know that Edison ever had a controversial thought or deed. I am impressed that one can even manage such a biography of Edison. Or Lindbergh, although his was an autobiography focused solely on the Spirit of St. Louis trip, which does tend to limit the debate.

Reader’s Digest Editors, Scenic Wonders of America. Grandpa’s. This was large photos of scenic areas, followed by essays about them, then lists of nearby (“one day’s drive,” which is not all that nearby, by my American standards) places to visit. It was from 1973, and it was kind of nice to see that Grandpa had looked through it and picked out some things that looked interesting and gone to see them–often with me–but it would have been unlike him to use it as a checklist, and in fact he had not. Not really the sort of thing one reads so much as looks at, but in the spirit of my project with my grandpa’s books, I did indeed look at it.

Evelyn Sharp, All the Way to Fairyland. Kindle. Somewhat twee late Victorian fairy tales, not too bad but not the best Evelyn Sharp or the best late Victorian fairy tales. Probably mostly for the specialist in one direction or the other.

Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham, Veronica Mars: The Thousand Dollar Tan Line. Had some very fun bits. I was interested to see whether a novel would read more like a season or more like an episode, and for me it was more like a slightly extended episode. Clearly some of the juicier developments are being held back for future movies if it turns out that demand for such things exist, but there were still a few character arc points for the committed fan.

Monique Truong, The Book of Salt. A novel about the Vietnamese chef for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in their time in Paris. One of the key pieces of advice in critiques–which this is not, it’s nattering about books–is that one is to focus on what the author wanted a book to be, not what one wanted of the book oneself. This is one of the cases where it was a perfectly readable book where the author and I kept having drastic mismatches in what we felt was interesting about the situation and where we wanted the book to go. I, for example, found Binh’s communications (successful and otherwise) with his employers and with Parisians–and in flashback scenes, with his countrymen–fascinating, and felt that Truong missed a lot of opportunities in where she ended the scenes she chose to write. She was a lot more interested in elements like his parents’ sexualities, which…kind of bored me, frankly. So I think this is a reasonably good book for which I was very much the wrong audience.

Greg van Eekhout, California Bones. Every time I read a lovingly detailed book set in Southern California, I think, “Maybe this will be the one that makes it clear why people love this place I so very much do not love!” van Eekhout has probably come the closest so far. He also has some cool fun osteomancy worldbuilding, which is nifty and zips along. It isn’t out yet, but I borrowed a copy from someone else who got a review copy. Out this summer. Good fun. Expect to hear more when they’re actually, y’know, available and stuff.

Review copy provided by Tor.

The first of Buckell’s thrillers (Arctic Rising) made me sit up and take notice, because there is a distinct stylistic difference between writing a thriller and writing near-future SF. I think a lot of us SF writers look at the sales numbers for thrillers and think, “But that’s basically the stuff we’re doing!” But the differences are crucial. They start with the shorter sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and often books, and they go on from there. The thriller skims the surface of the near-future technological and social changes, focusing on action and adventure. The emotional connections between characters are clear, not murky, whether they are positive or negative–even when someone is in the “friend or enemy?” category, they are clearly tagged by genre conventions to be in this category. It is sharp and accessible and fast.

Buckell has completely nailed this style, as distinct from the style of his previous books. He deserves the sales numbers that go with it, and I hope he’s getting them, because he has married the thriller style to actual knowledge of the Caribbean as something other than a vacation destination and fun extrapolative bits of SF–shark-based bio-paint, awesome!–so that it is a superior grade of thriller. If you’re an SF reader who dips into thrillers from time to time, or if you have a dedicated thriller reader in the circle of people for whom you buy presents, Hurricane Fever (out in July) should definitely make your shopping list.

Hurricane Fever the story of Prudence “Roo” Jones, who is preparing for the increasingly common storms he and his nephew weather on his boat when he gets a message from an old friend. The consequences for Roo, his neighbors and friends, and his nephew Delroy, span several islands and the entire rest of the book. There are multiple storms of varying severity, other strong effects of climate change, a hemorrhagic plague, tailored genes, spies whose governmental support is also varying, Bond villain monologues, neo-Nazis to thwart…the whole thing races along at an amazing clip, and if you like thrillers, you won’t want to miss it.

Review copy provided by Tor Books. Also the author is a personal friend, which I sometimes completely forget to say, as I forgot to say it about Katherine Addison, which does not mean I like her any less or am any less willing to make her dinner or am trying to put one over on people in order to get them to buy The Goblin Emperor. (Which you should do! But not because Addison is my friend; I have plenty of friends whose books I don’t like half so well as The Goblin Emperor. But this is not a post about one of them. Ahem. Anyway.)

I hate total orderings. Total orderings give me hives. There is no particular reason one has to say that one thing is the very best thing and another is the second best and on down the list when they have diverse good points, and there will be reasons to recommend one book to one person and another to another.

That being said. Now that the Eternal Sky series is finished, I feel that it is a very strong contender for Bear’s best work to date, even over the one that has my heart so transparently that it got dedicated to me before I’d even read it. (That would be By the Mountain Bound, and if you’ve read the Edda of Burdens, you’re probably going, yeah, that’s pretty Mrissable. And yeah, it is. But these books, people. These books.) It’s a very high contender for “thing to recommend if someone says ‘Elizabeth Bear, I’ve never read her, what should I read,'” unless there’s a darn good reason to go another way, such as their passionate love for generation ships or the Norse, and even maybe then. The things she’s doing are strong and interesting and complicated, and Steles of the Sky is very much a book of sticking the landing.

And what a complex landing it is to stick. I feel that what Bear deserves for this–what I would have wanted in order to try to get it right myself–is a tiny set of carven stone pieces in jade and tiger’s eye and all the materials, to be the dragon and the bear men (BEAR MEN SHE GAVE ME BEAR MEN IN A BLIZZARD SHE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TO) and the horses, each of the horses and the herd, and the ghulim and all. I am amazed that she managed to make it all work without an entire layout of them, and I think she deserves them all to play with and pet, just for making it all work.

Here is what you will notice, if you pay attention to the rest of the series so far: you will notice that not everyone gets to win. And that even the people who get to win…you will probably start to think as you think about what there is in play…probably do not get to do so without a price.

There are some pretty high prices in this book. I’m finding it hard to talk about it without spoilers, but…yes. Not without cost, this one.

Some series are books that only incidentally go together–they have the same characters and setting, but the events are only loosely linked. This is not one of them. While there are ample reminders of who is who and what is what if you haven’t reread Range of Ghosts as a refresher before picking up Steles, the weight of everything from the horses’ colors to Hsiung’s choices will be much stronger with the weight of the previous two before it. But the thing is complete now; if you’re a reader who only wants to read stories that are complete, now’s your time. Highly recommended.