Year: 2022

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a local/Twitter pal.

Throughout history, women have been able to turn into dragons, but in 1955, there was the Mass Dragoning. Thousands upon thousands of women turned into dragons at the same time: wings, fire-breathing, the whole lot. Some of them ate their husbands. Some of them just flew away, to the mountains, the sea, the great beyond.

This is a metaphor. Also, it isn’t, they really do turn into dragons.

Alex Green has one of the missing dragons-nee-women in her family, and the fallout shapes her entire life. In her proper small Catholic Wisconsin town, no one talks about dragons. No one wants to even acknowledge thinking about them, except for a few brave souls around the edges. Again, this is a metaphor. Also, it isn’t, it’s about dragons. They have talons, they set buildings on fire, they tear down walls, no really, literal walls. And Alex is fascinated, furious, torn, and her little cousin–now her sister–Beatrice–has a host of outsized emotions all her own that Alex has to help her manage. Because Beatrice and Alex are each all the other one has–that and a fierce librarian, some half-trustworthy pamphlets, and their own determination.

One of my favorite things about genre books that embrace their own genre nature is that their metaphors can be multi-layered, because they embrace the concrete. When Women Were Dragons is about women’s intellect, women’s emotions, women’s freedoms, and the ways the America of the 1950s and early 1960s stifled all those things. For sure. But also it’s about dragons with scales and shiny gold eyes, and the way that it manages its genre nature keeps its ground firm, means that it won’t get bogged down in one simple metaphor at the expense of other possibilities. There will be readers who want this book to be about sexuality–homosexuality, bisexuality–and it absolutely is, but not in an easy Dragons = The Gays way. And the same for transgender issues: this is not an easy Dragoning = Transition book. And you can tell that it’s not, because The Gays are right here in the book, and some of them become dragons and some do not. And there are trans women in this book, and some of them become dragons, and also some of them don’t.

So as with Tooth and Claw before it, but using a completely different set of approaches to what segment of history and what kind of dragons we’re talking about, When Women Were Dragons keeps a firm, sure voice in its period. It has beautifully passionate things to say about gender and sexuality and culture. It also wants to talk about, no shit, really, dragons. And I absolutely love that juxtaposition. This is one of the things genre does best.

Emily Bergslien and Kat Weaver, Uncommon Charm. Discussed elsewhere.

Maurice Broaddus, Sweep of Stars. Discussed elsewhere.

Rachel Ferguson, Evenfield. Is it possible to like both this book and LM Montgomery’s Jane of Lantern Hill? I ask because I always felt iffy about Jane, and I enjoyed this. It’s another book about a young woman in love with her childhood house–this one a suburban London affair, ordinary to the rest of the world but beautiful to her in its childhood details, which she tells with charm. And she returns to live in it after the death of her mother, and she lets herself grow past who she was as a kid and move on with her life in various ways, but the charm of this book is in its specifics. Also some of the places that make you wince are very much in the specifics: it was written to be quiet escapism in 1942, and there are some of the bits of racism that are frankly weird from a modern perspective (how are you managing to be racist when you don’t even have anybody of other races in this book?)–they’re not frequent or plot-crucial, but they are present, be warned.

John M. Ford, Aspects. Discussed elsewhere.

Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr, A Different Distance: A Renga. A renga is a particular form of Japanese poetry passed back and forth, and these two friends decided to write this one during the first year of the pandemic. The poems they traded, each springing from the last, range from anguished to mundane. It’s already an interesting snapshot of a year; I think it’ll be fascinating to return to.

Rose Macaulay, Going Abroad. For the vast majority of this book, it had the sort of tension that comes from reading a book where you know more about the characters’ likely fates than the author does: it’s set in Basque Spain in 1934, among vacationers from other countries but with Basque characters as well. So the shadows of Franco and Hitler are omnipresent, how could they not be? Some parts are funny, some make you wince…and then there is the absolute emotional gut-punch of the last chapter when you realize that Rose, oh my darling Rose, had some very conscious things to say after all. I am not at all surprised that this is not one that is widely reprinted and beloved, because it is not a comfortable experience, and yet there are moments of such bravery and intelligence and humor among the moments of “what on earth, this must be something contemporary or maybe just Rose, how weird.”

M. Rickert, The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie. If you, like me, hate watching people being cruel or obtuse to someone with a cognitive or processing difference, you may well hate this book. I hated this book. I kept reading where I normally would have quit because I have liked Rickert’s work before, and I kept hoping that the worldbuilding hints would pay off, and I did not feel they did, not even a little bit, not even close.

dave ring, ed. Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Won’t Die. Kindle. The length and topic of these generally post-apocalyptic stories varied considerably, so if you’re at all the target audience, there will likely be something for you. I am not the specific target audience–that is, I am straight as heck. But endurance is still a thing I enjoy, so here we are.

Patrick Saint-Jean, The Spiritual Work of Racial Justice: A Month of Meditations with Ignatius of Loyola. This was a gift from a family member and is a month of daily devotionals on racial justice themes from a Haitian Jesuit priest. I think it will primarily be of interest to committed Roman Catholics who have not done a lot of reading on social/racial justice topics but are open to starting. If you know anyone of that description in your friend/family circle, or have a book group at your church, etc., this might be good for them. I am not of that description on either front, so for me it was more of intellectual interest to see how someone with a very different perspective than my own would address topics I’ve seen covered in quite different ways elsewhere.

Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution. This does substantially what it says on the tin–it’s a history of the French Revolution through the lens of the life of Maximilien Robespierre. Even for a strange time he was a pretty quirky guy, and reasonably well-documented in a number of ways, so Scurr has a lot to work with.

Lauren Shippen, The Infinite Noise. Kindle. Some stories straddle the border of superhero narratives and the kind of old-school SF that had “mind powers/psy powers,” and this is one of them, in the form of a contemporary YA love story between two boys. I picked it up more or less at random when I was bouncing off a lot of books and was prepared to bounce here too, and instead I found the sweetness of the two teenagers and their relationships extremely engaging and read it almost all in one go. When I say “sweetness,” I don’t mean saccharine–one of the kids’ empathy leads to anger management issues when he’s around people who are angry, and similar issues–but they are fundamentally pretty nice kids trying to figure out, as, hey, we all are really.

Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Philosopher and friend of this blog, Shotwell is looking at the places where taxonomies and labels don’t do the best work of ethical choices for us and nuance and context can do better. There’s an environmental focus here that will be of interest to some of you and was to me.

Review copy provided by the authors, who are also personal friends of mine. Also I read an earlier draft of this novella.

Julia Selwyn-Stirling doesn’t like to think of things she can’t make into a joke, she tells us right out. She would really like to romp her way into her social debut and the pleasant upper class life to follow. There’s no reason the new guest in her home has to interfere with that, even if he is her closest friends’ illegitimate half-brother–and studying magic with her mother.

But as Julia gets to know Simon, the secrets that have been woven into her family life for her entire childhood start to unravel. And as beguiling as it is to drawl jokes and practice fencing, the ghosts that Simon can talk to have concerns that–dare Julia admit it?–might be more important.

This is Mitfordian fantasy, its froth not actually concealing family dysfunction and social discontent–not actually trying. It’s got the interwar jewels and frocks and parties and boxing matches, it’s got all the fun elements you’re looking for in a novella with its prose voice. But it also has an awareness of all the solid, real things that a young woman could use a clever, assured voice to cover for in our world–and how much nastier that could get with working magic. This is so well-grounded and so self-assured as well as so much fun. I’m so glad it’s coming out where the rest of you can enjoy it too.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Dear Mike,

I read the poems in this, and bits of the prose, in your handwriting. You know I’ve read it before. And now here it is, it’s a real book (with glue!), and you’re gone, you’re so far from us I can’t wrap my mind around it. (Neither can Neil, you can tell from the introduction he wrote for you.) And I read the first of the poems that I remembered in your handwriting, and I thought, all right, I can do this, and I got to the first two paragraphs, about the timing and manner of a person’s death, and Mike, I broke down sobbing again.

You always do that.

A lot of stuff I’ve spent the last fifteen years saying I want more of in books is in this book. Trains! Parliaments (and other forms of government that are not monarchies)! Friendships of all shapes and sizes and ages! Disability representation of more than one kind! People who have hobbies and still have intense life work and relationships! And now I will be able to point people at this and say yes, this, this is actually what I meant. I mean, other things too. But this, this is what I was talking about.

This is the thing that you said to us over your shoulder from the doorway as you were leaving, and I’ve been calling down the hall after you since, and now, and now…other people can hear at least some of your part of the conversation.

It’s so clear that you knew here–as in all your other books–that you wouldn’t have much time. There is so much of this book that knows that time is short, so damnably short. And there is also so much of this book that is clear that you thought you’d have more time than this, and it’s so unfair, it’s so unfair, I can see the shape of where you were going, not just with the touchstone sonnets at the end but the worldbuilding, even just small moments like the conversation about which characters learn which second languages in which countries–this is a shape of continental politics that is moving, and I can see the pieces on the game board, I watch their shadows, but the details matter, Mike, the colors matter, and this book has so much color.

Now there isn’t any book of yours I haven’t read at least twice.

Now there isn’t any book of yours I haven’t pressed on people, saying, here, you can read it, you should read it, it’s full of people making things and wrestling with their better selves and asking questions, finding spaces where they can breathe more easily and people who help them do it. There is a moment where one character asks of another, “who is he?” and the answer comes, “Someone who will leave Lescoray a better place, if he can only find the time.”

Time was so short but you did find so much of it for that. I wish you could have given us all of this. But it is so good, so good to have what there is of it, here, in my hands, where I can share it around, where in addition to shouting down the passage after you, I can turn to the person just coming in and say, “whew, that poem that came with Agate’s sculpture, right? RIGHT???” And they can know. They can finally know.

Thanks for this final gift, my friend.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is an internet and convention pal, as he is with basically everybody at this point because he is just so darn nice and friendly.

So what do you want in a space opera? Do you want interplanetary politics? The Muungano empire has you covered, with its distributed system of ships and families, griots and captains. Do you want artificial intelligences who may be having a teeny little problem? Maya’s got your back–and everyone else’s–unless a little glitch is making her artificial life a little difficult. Do you want space soldiers fighting against impossible odds? Fela Buhari and her unit are there for all your space shooty-shoot needs. Do you want the drama of wormholes and alien races and what the heck is going on over there? Look, I don’t want to go too far into it, because spoilers, but it’s there, I promise it’s there. This is basically a perfect kitchen sink space opera with something for every lover of space opera.

Oh, unless you think that every space opera has to be full of white people, in which case it’s not for you, sorry not sorry. But everyone else should find a little something for them, a character to follow, a conflict to latch onto and follow into the next book. Will Amachi and Stacia ever be really good friends again? and AAAAAAH FIX MAYA was mine, but you’re going to find your own and get swept away in it. A lot of us need a fun fast read right now, and whooosh this is definitely it.

Charlie Jane Anders, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak. Discussed elsewhere.

Chaz Brenchley, Rowany Goes to Summer School. Kindle. Chaz continues with his exploration of the Mars-that-wasn’t, and also genres-that-sometimes are, and this one was spy training, and if you love a good training montage, why, here we are, at novella-ish length.

Susan Cooper, The Grey King and Silver on the Tree. Rereads. Okay, so I was going to keep wandering through this series as slowly as I had the previous three volumes, but when I posted about Greenwitch in my last book post, I got to talking to Sonya about it, and then there was a poem that needed writing, but I had to read the other books with Jane in them first, so these two got read much more quickly than I’d planned. I remember The Grey King being more plot-coherent than it is. There’s quite a lot of “and for reasons of their own” and “and for some reason” and “the Light has its ways” and so on in this book, and even apart from that there’s “and then someone happened to tell the eleven-year-old completely age-inappropriate things about how the neighbor tried to rape his friend’s mom and oh there’s the neighbor now.” Yeah. Wow. Huh. And it leans very hard on threat and eventually carrying through with the threat to the dog. There’s still the part where they teach at least one and possibly up to three generations of Anglophone nerds how to pronounce Welsh, but it’s structured extremely weirdly; I have a much harder time understanding why she made the choices she did with Will’s memory loss and abrupt return now that I ask questions like that. Silver on the Tree was a relief after that–it has some of the horrible gender aspects of the rest of the series (Jane is such a blank slate that she is not even allowed to look down at her clothes while time traveling–lest she have an opinion about them?), but it also does some really lovely things with the Wild Magic and the Lost Land, and it hangs together as a mythic book. I also am now old enough to notice that Stanton Drew is the location of a major stone circle, so: heh, all right, Susan. Glad I read them, despite noticing a lot more things that were off about them than I did as a kid.

Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, Vita Nostra. Speaking of training montages, this is not a bit like Chaz’s. It’s one of those books where the universe and the authority figures in it are both hostile and violent and everything around magic is unbearably nasty–both on the macroscale (will kill you and your family!) and on the microscale (everything rather squalid, will mess with your college plans and romances). My tolerance for that kind of approach is usually fairly low, but under these circumstances I can rather see why Ukrainian authors would feel that way about the world sometimes, and the very ending was aiming for something better.

Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain. Hutton is very clear that primary source material about the druids is minimal. What he’s doing is talking about what various eras have wanted to use the druids to mean, and he’s very thorough and interesting about that, for good and for ill.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Worlds of Exile and Illusion. Discussed elsewhere.

Elias Lönnrot, Kalevala. Translated by Keith Bosley. People often ask me what translation of the Kalevala I recommend, and now I’ve read the major English translations and can say definitively: good Lord not this one. Stick with Magoun, Magoun keeps the weird in, Magoun is dated but delightful, Bosley is dated but dreary. Friberg if you can’t find Magoun but ugh, not Bosley. I hate the syllabic unmetered lines he made up for himself, I hate a great many of his translation choices (g–sy is not a good choice for “transient laborer” for so many reasons, sir), cultural quirks do not need smoothing out, they’re what we’re here for, this is the bloody Kalevala, you wind in the back staircase. Which is an insult you will not find in Bosley. Which is part of why you should not read his translation. Where is our modern translation, where. But even Bosley can’t entirely dim my delight in the source material, and anyway now I know.

Rose Macaulay, Staying With Relations. I ordered this more or less at random from mid-period Macaulay. I did not expect it to be set in Guatemala. There is a plot twist that is a plot twist only if you do not trust Macaulay to be better than the average white person of her era about whether Guatemalans are so-called savages, but that’s okay because there is still how it unfolds and all the stuff after it. I don’t know why it annoys me less when Macaulay writes about writers than when other people do, but it’s absolutely true that it does. This is once again a book that does all sorts of things differently than other people, and even knowing that it’s Rose, I don’t know all of where it’s going, and I love that, I love her.

Andri Snær Magnason, The Casket of Time. This disappionted me. It was an environmentalist fable, a combination fairy tale and children’s science fiction novel, with very heavy-handed messaging, and there wasn’t a lot to it except the messaging. There were enough charming bits that I stayed on through the end hoping for more and did not find them. I enjoyed one of his adult books and will try another, but this was not really worth the time, alas.

Thomas J. Misa, Digital State: the Story of Minnesota’s Computing Industry. Wow, this is why people think they don’t like nonfiction. Because it is delivering the data that it has and no more than that. There are not charming stories here, no anecdotes, no side tales–and there are opportunities for some, which I know, because I know some of the individuals involved in this. This is a reference volume. Refer to it if you want the stuff it refers to.

Alexander McCall Smith, What W.H. Auden Can Do For You. This is a slim volume, and good thing, because Alexander McCall Smith is fairly determined not to go into the ways that Auden can exasperate you and make you tear your hair, or even gently say, “Oh Uncle Wystan, oh my darling no,” or the ways that Auden can make you stare at the wall and maybe go for a walk when it’s too cold to go for a walk and you don’t feel good but something has to clear your head after the bit of W.H. Auden you just read and anyway I begin to think that Alexander McCall Smith has only the very edges of an idea of what W.H. Auden can do for you, or possibly a limited concept of who you might be. But if you want someone to say to you in bracing tones, “isn’t he neat? isn’t he just keen?” then by God Sandy’s your man. And you know, I actually did, for a bit; it was nice, it was like having someone I don’t like very much also like my favorite aunt’s paintings, it’s good that he does, I’m glad I’m not the only one, and I’m glad that person has gone home now. He has, right? oh good. Whew.

Anton Van Der Lem, Revolt in the Netherlands: The Eighty Years War, 1568-1648. Did I spend this entire lavishly illustrated volume thinking of it as Panic in the Disco? I’ll never tell. But it is, it is absolutely gorgeously illustrated, full color on most pages. If you want to know lots of things about the Low Countries and how they got their freedom from Spain, here you are. If you just like looking at weird old maps and pictures of people wearing ruffs, this is also a good volume for you.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

What this book is, what it isn’t. Okay, first: I think this is one of the biggest upgrades in edition of any of the Tor Essentials reprints. My previous copy of an omnibus containing these three novellas/short novels bore the title Three Hainish Novels and a garish (though content-accurate) orange cover illustration of sword-wielding people riding flying cats. The previous title effectively appealed only to people who already knew they wanted to read something in this series, and the previous cover image drove away all but the most dedicated readers of Le Guin.

What it isn’t: I don’t actually think this is a great place to start reading Le Guin. She is just starting out here, writing planetary romance, more or less, in the telepathy-obsessed mode of the mid-1960s. Happily for humans, most of us get better as we learn our craft, and even more happily, there has been more room for women to be more than docile and gentle and obsessed with bearing sons to men in recent decades–and particularly in more recent Le Guin work. If you take this starting point as representative of where she wanted to be or where she would end up, you will underestimate Le Guin by a great deal.

What it is, again: it is an interesting representation of mid-1960s short adventure science fiction, and the telepathy focus is a mostly-lost trope that Le Guin pursues, particularly in City of Illusions, the last of these works, farther than most of the people who played with it went. And these are a beginning, and it is worth having them in print, worth seeing where someone whose voyage went the places hers went started. Worth seeing the first of her travelers through snow, the first of her characters pondering how to not harm other life, the first of her people looking around and trying to treat everyone else as people, and failing, and trying again.

That a book–in this case, three of them in one volume–is imperfect is so trite as to barely be worth stating. What is this imperfect book doing. It’s reaching out. It’s looking for what comes next. I think it will be more interesting to you if you’ve seen more of what comes next. But I’m glad that this edition is here once you have.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

It sure is a good thing that galaxies stay saved once you save them, right? Right?

Uh-oh.

The characters from Victories Greater Than Death are back, and they’re pursuing the heck out of their dreams…mostly. Those of them who can. Those of them who are not recovering from the total ass-whupping it was to save the galaxy. Because it turns out that saving the galaxy takes a whole heck of a lot out of you, and sometimes you do not bounce back in exactly the same shape as you were before. Sometimes you are literally larger and more purple. Sometimes figuratively…well. There’s a lot to come back from, is what I’m saying. And that’s before you learn that the villain you vanquished has not been as thoroughly caged and the ground (space?) around him as thoroughly salted as you might have hoped.

Yikes.

So yeah, this is a middle book with the volume turned up to eleven. This is so very middle book of a trilogy. I love middle books. The stakes are set, the complications set in, the characters’ decisions ramify and come back to bite them. In this case, Tina’s story is allowed to spread to give Rachael, Elza, and the others more focal time and perspective, and I am entirely here for it.

And there is a lot of room for more alien species, more cultural stuff–alien video games! alien snacks! alien pop culture jokes!–and generally room to move around in the universe Anders has built and see how it fits. And how it falls apart under pressure, and who it fails. What dreams it offers. What heartbreak. The emotions are all turned up to eleven here, and that’s what YA is best at. That’s one of my favorite things to read YA for. I could immediately think of at least three teens and two adults who would be enthralled with this series. I can’t wait for the stunning conclusion.