Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

The cover of this graphic novel says only the two names listed above, but the title page has, in smaller letters, “colors by Hilary Sycamore.” Comics are almost always a group endeavor, but this is the first time I have specifically wanted to mention the color work as making the book. The nature of the story is such that having psychedelic, violently variable colors strongly reinforces it, to the point where I’m not sure this story could exist in black and white. Well done, Hilary Sycamore.

This is clearly the first volume of a series. The story ends on a cliffhanger and doesn’t do all that much besides setting up the characters and scenario. Regular readers of comics/graphic novels may be used to that; it’s not something I really like. I also found that the tropes it leans on (non-verbal child character, creepy doll, “haunted” hospital) had not, as of the end of this volume, been revitalized into feeling like something new and special here.

I did think that the idea of Addison attempting to use her camera to document the horrors her family had endured was a cool one. She seemed to approach it far more in that vein than as an artist, but the spectrum of documentary photography to art photography is an interesting one anyway. I’m interested in a heroine who wants to shoot monsters in a non-fatal way–I just wish we’d gotten more of the story to see more of that.

Please consider using our link to buy Spill Zone from Amazon.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

This is a memoir of Hale’s grade school struggles with friendship and group dynamics, and also her relationship with her oldest sister. It’s trying to be aimed at kids–it’s trying to give kids the message that they deserve friends who treat them well–and I really like that message.

But truthfully I feel like this is really more of an adult-appeal book. I can easily imagine adults giving it to kids in their lives who are struggling with friendship and group dynamics, and maybe some of those kids will find it useful or comforting. But for the most part the ’80s references don’t feel intricate enough to be fascinating to kids for whom they’re historical, just touchstones for people who lived through it. And the semi-nostalgic, semi-rueful adult perspective feels very present–it’s definitely “here is an adult telling you, kiddo, a story.”

Part of my problem here, I think, is with the graphic novel format. This is a very short graphic novel, and there are sections where LeUyen Pham’s art is given a chance to shine, notably the imagination games little Shannon plays with her friends. But none of the things that make Shannon Hale a unique individual have enough *time* to feel very developed here. It’s short even for a kids’ graphic novel. It’s not offensive. I’m definitely behind the message. I’m just not sure about the target audience really connecting with it.

Please consider using our link to buy Real Friends from Amazon.

Gary Clayton Anderson and Alan R. Woolworth, eds., Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862. One of the really great things about having an entirely Dakota account of this conflict, from a variety of sources, is that it makes clear what diversity of opinion and experience there was among the Dakota people, between different ages and sexes and bands and obvious demographics of that sort but also between individuals. Which is a very good thing indeed, always. It also made it clear what a terrible time mixed-race people had in this place and time, facing distrust and worse from both ethnic groups. I actually expected this book to be more depressing than it was–I think because many of the worst stories would have belonged to people who died in one way or another. Not that there wasn’t plenty that was sad here, and the measles epidemic at the end was pretty bad to be reading about right now in particular.

Marie Brennan, Within the Sanctuary of Wings. Discussed elsewhere.

Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit. One of the nicest science fiction books I have read in quite some time. It’s a semi-direct sequel to The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, in that the events follow on immediately and feature some of the characters, but only some of them, and there are two parallel storylines that inform each other directly as two people learn how to person in full-on science fiction style. This is a good book to read when you feel terrible.

Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. …and this is not a book to read when you feel terrible, especially when you have a deeply committed, lifelong, highly emotional relationship with one of the said Great Lakes. (If you are new here: Lake Superior. OBVIOUSLY.) I now know more about lampreys, alewives, quogga mussels, and a great many more things than I did before. I am glad to know it. I am not sorry I read this book. But oh lordy this book. Up side: there is a reason why life comes second in the title. It is trying to end on a hopeful note. Down side: I am aware of several of the topics he could have delved into and didn’t aaughhhhh. (But seriously, if you are from a lake state/province, read this book. If you are not from a lake state/province, probably read this book anyway. In conclusion: lakes.)

Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide. I critiqued this book in draft, and now it is a real live book. I am excited. I have been talking about this one for awhile, and now other people can too. Among other things I love about this book: it is so much easier not to let fantasy races stand in for human racial/ethnic/religious groups when the human racial/ethnic/religious groups are standing right there having their own perspective and history and opinions. Ruthanna’s cast is large for a reason: she is doing things with everyone, and they are not the things ol’ HP would have liked. Good. He’s not here, and we all are.

Masha Gessen, Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region. This is short and a bit rambly and does not do entirely enough of what it says on the tin, about Jewish populations and migration and assimilation vs. not, but it’s interesting anyway.

Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Lots of cool tidbits about the brains of other animals, particularly but not limited to octopus and their cousins. I like this sort of thing so much, but even if you don’t like it in general you might like this one; it is a pretty good example of its type.

Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. Hint: only surprising if you were not paying that much attention. Sorry, there are lots of surprises available, it’s just that this is a generalist history; it is not where the surprises are to be found. It’s a good generalist history from what I, a non-Byzantinist, can tell–it feels like it hits the highlights of all the topics you would cover in detail if you were doing several courses on Byzantium. Like these are the bits you would have a vague memory of decades later if you didn’t tend to retain your courses all that well. Which is a decent way to start. If you’re hoping for more depth, go with something else she wrote, which is quite a lot really. There’s a lot of fun stuff here, just not quite enough of any of it.

Shirley Jackson, Let Me Tell You. Short stories of various kinds, personal essays, general stuff by Shirley Jackson. I really enjoyed this quite a lot. Some of it had not been published for decades, some not ever. The thing that kind of threw me was that it was her mimetic fiction and her thrillers and her fantastic fiction all jumbled together, so I was sometimes drastically misreading cues, and I would get to the end of a mimetic story and think, “And…they had an unhappy marriage? that was it? nobody killed anybody or was cast into the outer darkness or anything? oh.” Which does not make them bad mimetic stories, it was just that my reading protocols were wandering around quite a lot from story to story.

Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin, eds., The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories. Sometimes I read a book like this and think, what did I used to read? who was there? because so many of the best authors, the ones whose names I see and look forward to, are people I had not heard of twenty years ago, or even ten, or sometimes even five. This makes me happy and excited about the future. Lots and lots of stories that were positive stand-outs here: JY Yang’s “Glass Lights,” Helene Wecker’s “Majnun,” Maria Dahvana Headley’s “Black Powder,” Amal El-Mohtar’s “A Tale in Seven Birds,” Catherine Faris King’s “Queen of Sheba,” and Usman T. Malik’s “Emperors of Jinn.” See, and of those people, two of them I don’t think I have read before, and the other four I am saying, oh, and I loved their this, their that–and it is less than ten years old. Excited. If I had one complaint, it’s that the opening of the volume felt more uniform than it would later be. But not in a direction of badness, so…not even really a complaint, that.

Sofia Samatar, Tender. This is a book filled with stories that would be my favorites if they were published in other things. I know because many of them were my favorites when they were published in other things, so I don’t have to guess. But not everything here is something I’ve read before, and some of the new things remind me of the old things I liked but different and are paired with them, a new thing late in the volume reminding me of the one from LCRW…oh. Oh, I just like this, I’m so glad to have it.

Emily Skrutskie, The Abyss Surrounds Us. YA about genetically engineered battle sea monsters and the (violent, not happy fun fakey type) pirates involved with them. I wanted to love this, but there was too much girlfriend, not enough sea turtle for me, and also there should be at least one sea turtle book where the sea turtles are not drastically injured. It may just be me and Tim and our godson Rob who feel that way, but we feel that way very strongly. It is not Emily Skrutskie’s fault that we feel that way, and if you are wanting rising sea levels and battle turtles and teen love-angst, this has that. I just would like to have been able to say that no turtles were harmed in the plotting of this book, and welp.

Dava Sobel, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. This is a very straightforward book, first this thing, then that thing, then the other thing. And it is full of women doing astronomy, and I like that. It is not one of the tales of past science that comes with compelling narrative through-arc, so if you do not have at least a little of the same thoroughness that animated these ladies in your soul, it is perhaps not your book. But: first this variable star, and then another, and then a glass plate that might not have any at all, but look, it does. Yes. There. Good.

Bruce Sterling, Crystal Express. This is the sort of short story collection from my past that doesn’t make me baffled or sad at my past self, because I never adored it, it was sort of workmanlike, and it is now too, but…it is not enough really. It sits there with ideas that tried very hard and characters that did not quite get there, and if you are on an airplane or in a hotel somewhere you could do a lot worse than these stories but also generally better. They are not laughably bad, not shameful, not…anything that strong, really. They’re all right I guess. I think you can do better than all right I guess.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a personal friend.

In the last decade or so I have met more people who are reluctant to begin a series that isn’t published in its entirety, with the objection that the author may drag it on forever or may die without finishing it. Marie Brennan’s Lady Trent series has, with its fifth volume, reached its conclusion, so if you’re one of those people, please know that there is not just a stopping point but an ending here.

The series has followed–with lavish illustrations–the career of a lady naturalist specializing in dragons in a world that is not ours but has some very clear analogs. Her own country is not-Victorian-England, and in this book she travels to not-Tibet, following the trail of very rare and unusual dragon specimens. What results calls on all the skills she has spent the previous four books acquiring–in her own science but also in linguistics, archaeology, diplomacy.

If historical approaches to science are your jam–and they are mine–you will want this series. If you like adventure fantasy, there are plenty of death-defying feats and hairs-breadth escapes too. And it’s all told in the chatty tone of an elderly lady looking back on a life well-lived. Recommended.

Please consider using our link to buy Within the Sanctuary of Wings from Amazon. (Or if you’re just starting, A Natural History of Dragons.)

Mary Alexandra Agner, ed., A Bouts-Rimes for Hope. A bouts-rimes, I was reminded by this project, is when you give people the end rhymes for a sonnet and they have to fill in the sonnet. This one, a free project, was specifically aimed at post-election optimism. The poems came out extremely different despite their common rhyme scheme. An interesting thing to do.

Nadia Aguiar, The Lost Island of Tamarind. Near-shipwreck, hidden magical island, and other buttons that you might have had factory installed to push as well. This is a children’s book that doesn’t have astonishingly beautiful prose, but it does have a cranky adolescent protagonist trying very hard for her family. Entertaining, but I was not really very drawn in–there were some quite awkward points.

Danielle Mages Amato, The Hidden Memory of Objects. The speculative premise in this one starts subtly–I was not even sure it would be speculative rather than mimetic YA. It’s about a teenager who is grieving the loss of her beloved older brother, and all the emotional beats are there for relationships being central. However! The speculative premise is also very well thought-through–better, in fact, than in some projects where it is more front and center. This is a book I found through asking what had gotten released since the election and might be falling between the cracks, and I’m really glad I did.

Mishell Baker, Phantom Pains. A sequel to Borderline, and a worthy one, too; this is a novel not just about the interplay between Los Angeles and the world of Faery, not just about disability and accommodation, but about consequences.

Maurice Broaddus, The Voices of Martyrs. This short story collection is divided into past, present, and future tales, and I liked the third category best, but there were interesting pieces in all of them.

Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia. What it says on the tin, written in the ’70s. There is a weird obsession with Dacron, and he pretty much comes right out and says that the denizens of Ecotopia are like hippies but less distasteful. There are lots of points of unintentional hilarity–the more so if you happen to be named Marissa. There’s a certain extent to which he has the ecological utopia being, “Nobody wears Dacron! and people recycle voluntarily!” and I’m like, honey, I have good news and bad news. I think this is most interesting to people who are particularly wanting to have breadth of field on either utopias or ecological speculative fiction; it is very, very dated for the casual reader.

Charles de Lint, Tapping the Dream Tree. Reread. This is a Newford collection. I really imprinted on an early Newford collection when I was a teenager, and for awhile I read everything de Lint wrote. This is not a terrible collection. It’s also not a collection that felt like it was doing anything in particular that he hadn’t done a dozen times with slightly different costuming. Don’t start here, and unless you’re a de Lint die-hard, I don’t see any good reason to continue to this point either.

Taiyo Fujii, Orbital Cloud. Discussed elsewhere.

Robert Graves, Poems 1968-1970. On the one hand, the things that he labels “songs” sing on the page a great deal more than 99% of poems I have read that are labeled songs/lyrics. So that part was a great success. On the other hand, he is weirdly obsessed with female virginity and other gender dynamic issues that do not hold up well. I picked up some Graves because A.S. Byatt contended that he was one of the great love poets, treating the beloved as an equal, and this is one of the times when you realize what low standards people of previous generations had to have for such things and feel very, very sad.

Paul Gruchow, The Necessity of Empty Places. Reading ’80s nature writing is not entirely dissimilar to reading ’80s speculative fiction. Some of the points of florid inspiration are completely disproven at this time, some of the worries are mitigated and others completely underestimated. And there are moments when race and gender pop up suddenly in order to be handled badly. On the other hand, there are some lovely and personal observations of the natural world. I’m glad this isn’t the first Gruchow I read, because I know he learns better, and I’ll keep reading for the gems.

Bernd Heinrich, Summer World: A Season of Bounty. Heinrich writes about the Maine woods and birds a lot. I like that sort of thing. I bet some of you like that sort of thing too.

Grady Hendrix, My Best Friend’s Exorcism. I am really not sure what I think about this book. It’s about a teen friendship, and there is a coda that makes it clear that it’s meant in some ways to be an ode to teen girl friendships. At the same time…the friendship turns really toxic, and everybody in the book has a horrible time, and once I was clear that it was actually going to be about teens in the ’80s who did drugs and one of them got demonically possessed, it felt kind of gross. The way that it was very vivid about the emotions and the experience was particularly unappealing knowing that that gets used as What Really Happened. Really well done, I’m just not sure I want what it’s doing.

Faith Erin Hicks, The Stone Heart. Discussed elsewhere.

Claire Humphrey, Spells of Blood and Kin. This is a great companion volume to Sarah Porter’s Vassa in the Night, which also came out last year. They’re dealing with the same chunks of Russian mythology in completely different ways, so they’re more enjoyable together rather than detracting from each other. This is an urban fantasy with egg magic. Egg. Magic. I know of one friend who definitely does not want that but other than my friend who is secretly the Nome King I totally recommend this book. (There are no Oz jokes in this book. I like it a lot otherwise though.)

Justina Ireland and Troy L. Wiggins, eds., Fiyah Issue 2. If anything, an even stronger issue than the first. I particularly liked Maurice Broaddus’s “Vade Retro Satana,” Christopher Caldwell’s “The Beekeeper’s Garden,” and Eden Royce’s “Graverobbing Negress Seeks Employment.” There was a lot of variety of voice and theme in this issue. Keep going, Fiyah.

Elaine Khosrova, Butter: A Rich History. Long-term, this may be the most expensive book I will ever read. I got it from the library and returned it on time…but it has motivated me to get The Great Butter at the store, and I will want to try The Really Good Butters after that, and yeah. Yeah, butter, there’s a lot to butter. The recipes in the back of this were pretty pointless, but butter technique, butter industrial detail, butter butter butter. I like microhistories, and also dairy. Major complaint: Khosrova only talked about the Iowa State Fair butter sculptures, which are done on wire forms come on people, not about our butter sculptures, which are done out of solid blocks of butter like Princess Kay intended. I’m just saying. There’s a reason they sing that their state fair is the best state fair in their state, and it’s because you cross the border and the people in Albert Lea will immediately tell you that there’s a better one just one state over. (I did not read anything about seed art this fortnight but trust me, you’ll hear it when I do.)

Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit. This is not what people mostly mean by military SF at the moment, but it is entirely military and entirely SF. It’s just a little more off-kilter–Lee is doing the SF part, he is not doing Hornblower In Space Take 257. Major lesson learned by putting this book at the culmination of a lifetime of SF reading: not being a tactical genius is the road to a happy life in a science fictional universe, and maybe you should try not being a tactical genius just in case ours becomes a science fictional universe.

Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery. I wanted to punch Marsh at several spots in this book. On the other hand, I think it’s very well worth reading, not just for the tactile experiences of different kinds of brain surgery (although–!!!) but also for the way that he is very clear about his own mistakes. He not only knows that he has not lived up to the title, he is willing to let us know too. I think we need more of that.

Adrienne Rich, Fox: Poems 1998-2000. None of these jumped out as crucial to share, but I enjoyed the experience. I think I would have enjoyed these poems more in a Collected Works sort of volume. They felt like they were in conversation with things I wasn’t quite catching, and I could easily believe that a fairly large number of those things were Rich’s past poems. I’m glad my library buys poetry at all, but it has a habit of buying one slim collection from 2-3 years of a poet’s life and then saying, oh, we already have some of their stuff and stopping there. Ah well.

Sonia Shah, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years. This is a good introduction to malaria (far more fun than, for example, contracting it). I didn’t really need another introductory-level book, but if you haven’t read about the effects of malaria on human cultures, this is a quite reasonable place to start.

Bill Streever, And Soon I Heard a Roaring Wind: A Natural History of Moving Air. This was a very weird book. It was far too short for what it claimed to do, and then it did even less of that than the space would have allowed, because a lot of it was “Streever and someone else sail around the Caribbean.” I might have read a memoir of sailing around the Caribbean in a small craft. I really was a lot more interested in the history of storms and meteorology here. This was basically half a history of meteorologists and half a travel memoir. So…I mean…fine, but ignore the title.

Christie Wilcox, Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry. Kind of great about hemotoxins and neurotoxins and how they evolve and how they get used and what kinds of animals use them and why. Yay venoms. Fun and reasonably short. (Fun. Um. Okay, mileage varies, but if you can’t have fun with a book about venoms….)

Maryrose Wood, The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place. The titular characters were raised by wolves. This is a kids’ book that has some features that will be slightly more eye-rolling to adults–the way the Incorrigibles’ speech is affected by their wolf upbringing is a lot more aimed at kid sense of humor–but there’s other stuff too, the ongoing horse book series their governess is obsessed with. I liked this enough to get it for my goddaughter.

Review copy provided by Haikasoru Books.

This is very, very near future hard science fiction. The vast majority of the action takes place in 2020, which in some ways is bravely near and in some ways safely near: I know that various things will change between now and then, but I was able to buy the world the characters live in being basically the same as ours in ways that would have bugged me if it had been set in 2040 or 2117. There is a lot of “basically right now” stuff in this book, including using brand names for things like the Raspberry Pi. (So many Raspberry Pis. So many. Wow. On the other hand, yay for a science fiction writer noticing they exist and can have stuff done with them.)

This is a very speculation-heavy book. It’s set on and near Earth, and the focus is entirely on the in-orbit technologies. The characters largely exist to fulfill their speculative plot functions; they are sketched in, not delved into deeply. Emotional and personal growth is not the engine of this plot. And that’s okay.

It’s particularly okay if you want a hard SF angle on another culture. Orbital Cloud is a bit like The Three-Body Problem that way, but only that way–it’s about a million times more cheerful. A billion times. Look, I would need to go into scientific notation to express how much more cheerful this book is than The Three-Body Problem in any kind of compact form. But my point is: same tropes plus different authorial cultural background gives a cool new angle. Fujii is also young/enlightened enough that the sexism here is minimal compared to some of the old hard SF I’ve been revisiting of late, which is refreshing. There are still a few moments where something is a little obnoxious, but it’s definitely a book with more modern standards in that regard. It’s also the good kind of mentally dislocating to watch a Japanese author talk about group dynamics among Americans with Japanese cultural assumptions about what people want or will perceive–gives me, as an American, some perspective about what it looks like when Americans do that about people from other cultures in their hard SF.

There were a couple of hilarious moments when translation was an important plot point–I found them funny not just because of the meta, but because this book does have a flavor of “translated from the Japanese,” obvious points where the translator was trying to figure out how to render “so desu ne?” and other things that are completely natural in Japanese but look weird if you repeat them literally in other languages, less obvious points where it was just a different feel. But translation plot points aside, I think it’s generally easier to translate hard SF decently because the technical terms are more obvious and the prose is not haring off after a lyric in the bushes.

I keep saying the genre over and over again: hard SF, hard SF, hard SF. I really think that this is one of the times where it matters a lot to whether you’ll want to read it. If you hate people doing calculations about orbital dynamics, you will straight-up hate this book, because that is the kind of book it is. It is all that flavor of nerd, all the time. But that flavor of nerd is a fine thing to be, and this is a fine example of it.

Please consider using our link to buy Orbital Cloud from Amazon.