Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a good friend.

Thrillers and near-future SF are not the same beast. Naomi has written tons of the latter, but as far as I know this is her first foray into the former. And she nails it–the differences in pacing and focus are all spot-on for a thriller. The general plotline of this particular thriller is: an obstetrician under fire for having provided an abortion to a high-risk patient is kidnapped by a cult to handle their obstetrics (and general medical) needs. If you just went, “Ohhhhhh,” this is the novella for you.

Some points of clarity: the cult is not a sensationalized one. It’s a very straightforward right-wing Christian compound, not wild-eyed goat-chompers but the sort of people who firmly believe that they’re doing the right thing while they treat each other horribly, the sort you can find in some remote corner of every state of the US. Without violating someone’s privacy, I know someone who joined a cult like this, and Naomi gets the very drab homely terror of it quite right.

One of the things I love about Naomi’s writing is that she never relies on Idiot Plot. You never have to say, “but why doesn’t Liz just blah blah blah,” because Liz does just blah blah blah–that is, she does try the things a sensible person might try, and there are reasons they don’t work, or don’t work instantly, or are considered but actually can’t be tried for lack of some particular element of the plan. But Naomi’s characters not only try things, they keep trying things. I love the doggedness of Liz and of several others who aren’t even sure what they’re reaching for, who have been in a terrible place to find it, but keep striving all the same.

Kobby Ben Ben, No One Dies Yet. This is one of the most overtly gay books I have ever read. Gosh is there plot-essential homosexuality going on here. It’s largely about the relationships between Ghanaians and the Americans who are visiting for Ghana’s Year of Return, and we don’t get many books like this in the US and I’m glad that’s shifting, but also it means that some books will be quite a lot of “interesting in ways for which I am not the target audience.”

Sylvie Cathrall, A Letter from the Lonesome Shore. Second and so far as I know last in its series. Not as strong as the first one. When I say that I like books with established pairings and not just watching people form new relationships all the time, this is not what I mean. It felt to me like the central couple’s excitement and nervousness in dealing with each other was the main source of tension/anticipation in the first book in retrospect, because here it was a lot of cooing at/about each other in ways that…if these people were my real life friends, I would be happy for them but I would also want to get back to the subject at hand. Same with this. Ah well, still worth reading and I’ll keep an eye out for what she does next.

Zen Cho, Spirits Abroad. Reread. Oh gosh I love this collection. It’s one of my favorites, and with each story I reread, I thought, “oh, this one! I love this one!” Yay. Yay.

Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith, Who Killed Nessie?. I like cryptics, and I like Paul Cornell’s work, but I probably wouldn’t have sought this graphic novel out on my own. But since someone else brought it into the house I was perfectly happy to read it; it was fun.

Ben Davis, Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy. Kindle. Davis uses the art movements of 20th century crisis eras to discuss different responses possible and how well they work. Interesting stuff, useful for the current moment.

Margaret Frazer, Strange Gods, Strange Men. Kindle. Another of her short pieces, a little farther afield but not particularly substantive. I expected this; I’ve already read the substantive ones.

Carolyn Ives Gilman, Arkfall. Kindle. This was an airplane double-feature with the Cathrall above; I had no idea that the theme of that flight was going to be “undersea science fiction and getting along with our neighbors,” but it was and that was just fine with me. The setting was particularly vivid here.

Matthew Goodwin, Latinx Rising: An Anthology of Latinx Science Fiction and Fantasy. Read for book club. Most of the stories I liked were by authors I already liked, and the amount of sexism was startling considering how old a book it isn’t. Not a favorite, I’m afraid, despite having some favorite authors in it.

Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland and Finn Family Moomintroll. Rereads. For a mysterious upcoming project. Is it ever a bad choice to revisit Moomins: of course it is not. Unless you have not visited them in the first place, in which case what joy you have ahead.

Selma Lagerlöf, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. Reread. So mysterious. The least of the rereads of this fortnight for me, because its didacticism suits me less well than the other books (and in fact less well than this author’s adult works; I’m glad I went on to read them, because they’re a different beast). On the other hand: idyllic romantic Swedish landscape writing, am I the target audience for that, sure, absolutely.

Suzanne Levine, Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir. This is an example of a person who lived an interesting life but did not necessarily write an interesting memoir about it. I would have loved more about her translation work, more nitty gritty, what it was like to work with the notable authors she worked with. Instead it was a not particularly deep, not particularly vivid memoir without most of what made the subject of the memoir interesting to me. I suppose we’re allowed to be interesting to ourselves in different ways than the obvious ones.

Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking, Pippi Goes on Board, and Pippi in the South Seas. Rereads. What could this mysterious project pertain to, it is a mystery that is very mysterious. Anyway it had been quite some time since I reread Pippi, and it was interesting which places I had the text so memorized that I could think to myself, “ah, they translated that differently than in the edition I had, they said barley soup in mine.” I was actually surprised, given the element of making Ephraim Longstocking “king” of “South Sea Island” that there wasn’t more horrifying racism than there was. Granted Pippi lies about people from other countries all the time. But she does lie; it’s presented as lies, and it’s generally not the shape of lie that reinforces ethnic stereotypes. So okay then, glad to find fewer razor blades than I feared in that lot of Halloween candy.

Linda Pastan, Almost an Elegy: New & Later Selected Poems. These are very straightforward, in places headlong, poems, and they deal with late-life issues for oneself and loved ones, but generally with a fairly light hand. I wanted to connect more than I did, but I’m not sorry to have read them.

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front. Kindle. And speaking of not sorry to have read: oh gosh. Well, I see why this was shocking at the time and redefined a whole direction of literature. It was a harrowing reading experience. Glad I read it, glad I’m done reading it.

Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner, The Fall of the Kings. Reread. One of my very favorites. I reread this for my panel on monarchy and non-monarchical forms of government in fantasy, and it was so good about that, and I loved the shape of ending, I loved how it finally completed a social arc that began before Swordspoint, gosh I love this book.

Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism. This is very short and full of photos. I think it’s mainly for Solnit completists and people with a strong interest in turn of the millennium San Francisco. I lived in the Bay Area at the time and not before or after, so in some ways my snapshot was Solnit’s turning point, which is a very weird place to stand.

Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister. Kindle. My least favorite Trollope that I’ve actually finished. The politics stuff is fun and interesting and I like the arc of it over the novel. The other plot, though, oh HELL NO. The Antisemitism! The general, quite intense, narratively supported xenophobia! The convenience of both an infant death and a suicide! I cannot recommend this, and I don’t.

Katy Watson, A Deadly Night at the Theatre. When I was reading this, I said to some friends that I felt I’d wished on the monkey’s paw for more books that are centered on friendship, only to get this one where the friends can have just as many stupid misunderstandings based on poor communication as any couple in a romance. Sigh. The mystery plot was fine, but I don’t actually read mysteries for the mystery plot, so…I hope she figures out other shapes of friend plot to do.

Amy Wilson, Owl and the Lost Boy. Second in its series, and the titular characters are fighting off what seems like an endless summer–in magical form. I like it when people recognize that summer is not infinitely good, and that endless hot weather is in fact quite terrifying in 2025. Also it was a beautiful MG with friend plots that I liked much better than the adult mystery above.

Ovidia Yu, The Rose Apple Tree Mystery. Well, they can’t all be bangers. I’ve really enjoyed this series of murder mysteries set in mid-twentieth century Singapore, and I intend to continue reading it, but the characterization in this was very flat, and the twist was so obvious that I was writhing and yelling at the book for at least half its page count, someone just figure out the thing already.

Karen Babine, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo. Babine’s take on both camping and more generally living as a single woman is particularly interesting because she is very much not solo most of the time in this book–this is a book that is grappling with her roots, her family, and engaging with her current family. It paints a picture of a life that can be satisfying without fitting prior molds–and our demographics are such that there are a lot of tiny details that really resonated with me.

Angeline Boulley, Sisters in the Wind. This is the third YA thriller about Native issues in the US, centering around the same families and clusters of characters. Boulley is writing them to try to be stand-alone but interwoven, and I’d like to see how someone who hadn’t read the earlier volumes felt about how well this succeeded. I did read the earlier volumes, and I felt like there was quite a lot of “here’s an update on someone you already know” going on here, and like the balance of that with the narrative at hand was a bit off. I also think she’s set herself a very hard task, because when the real life issues you’re writing about genuinely produce people who behave like cartoon villains, you don’t want to sanitize them into something more understandable, and yet then you’re stuck with the people who behave like cartoon villains. It’s a tough problem. So I still found this worth reading, but I felt like the earlier volumes were stronger in some ways.

A’Lelia Bundles, Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance. I picked this up from the “new books” shelf in the library, and I fear it’s one of those books where the author had a reasonably good bio of a famous ancestor in her, and she wrote that already (a bio of Madam C.J. Walker) and has gone on to what is clearly a labor of love writing about her famous ancestors but doesn’t rise to be nearly as interesting to me as the events and subjects on the periphery of the book. Probably mostly recommended for people with a special interest in this era/location.

Martin Cahill, Audition for the Fox. My copy of this arrived early, but it’s out now, I think? Interesting take on gods and their relationship with humanity, a fun fantasy novella.

Emilie A. Caspar, Just Following Orders: Atrocities and the Brain Science of Obedience. This is a fascinating book by a neuropsychologist who has not only done the more standard kind of campus studies into obedience and the variables that affect (or, apparently, in many cases do not affect) it but has also done a lot of interviews and various kinds of brain imaging (fMRI and EEG primarily) on groups of people who could reasonably be described as the foot soldiers of genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda. Caspar’s willingness to admit which things she does not know is only one of the things I find refreshing about her work. She’s also willing and able to engage with these interviewees on the subject of stopping either themselves or others from committing similar acts, what factors might be important there. This is not a book with all the answers but I’m really glad she’s out there asking the questions.

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Reread. The curious thing about this reread is that it’s so smoothly written, it’s such a pleasant and easy read, that it was startling to notice how little momentum this book has. Each chapter is a lovely reading experience if you like that sort of thing! (You’ve seen the number of 19th century novels I read. Of course I like that sort of thing.) But also each chapter is a conscious decision to have more of it, because there’s very little of either plot or character pushing forward in any way.

Brandon Crilly, Castoff. Discussed elsewhere.

Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Joy Is My Middle Name. Only a handful of these poems really resonated with me, but the ones that did really resonated with me, which is an interesting experience to have of a poetry collection.

Georges Duby, France in the Middle Ages: 987-1460. This is largely about the evolutions of the concepts and theoretical bases of power in French society in this era, and was really interesting for the things it bothered to examine in that way–where and when and how the Roman Catholic church got involved in various life milestones, for example, generally later than one might think while living in a world so shaped by those processes that they may seem obvious. Worth having. Did not hate Philip Augustus enough but is that even possible.

Xochitl Gonzalez, Anita de Monte Laughs Last. I found this harrowing in places, because I am auntie age, so the story of young women making themselves smaller and less interesting for men has my auntie heart wailing “OH BABY NO DON’T DO IT” without, of course, being able to do one darn thing about it. Do they come through the other side from that behavior: well, what is the title, really, it’s not a spoiler to say yes. More concretely: this is about a murdered (fictional) Latina artist in the 1980s and an art history student in the late 1990s putting the pieces together. Most of it is not about the putting the pieces together in any kind of thriller/mystery sense. If you’re used to that pacing, this pacing will strike you as very weird. Mostly it’s about the shapes of their lives. I liked it even when I was reading it between the cracks between my fingers.

Guy Gavriel Kay, Written on the Dark. I feel like the smaller scale of this bit of fantasized history doesn’t serve his type of writing well–there’s not the grand sweep, and he’s not going to turn into a painter of miniatures at this stage of his career. I also–look, I know he’s writing these things as fantasy, so he’s allowed to change stuff, I just feel like if a character is still obviously Joan of Arc I’m allowed to disagree with his take on Joan of Arc, which I do, on basically every level. Ah well. If you like Kay books, this sure is one all the same.

T. Kingfisher, Hemlock and Silver. I was mildly disappointed in this one. The mirror magic was creepy, but the romance plot felt pro forma to me, some of the plot beats more obvious than a reinterpreted fairy tale novel would strictly require. Of course she can still write sentences, and this was still an incredibly quick read, it just won’t make my Favorite T. Kingfisher Books Top Three.

Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners. Reread. This title could also have matched up with The Book of Love but definitely not, not, not vice versa. This is not a book of love. It’s a book of disorientation and weirdness. Which I knew going in, but having been here before doesn’t make it less like that.

Alec Nevala-Lee, Collisions: A Physicist’s Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs. Look, I can’t explain to you why Alec, who seems like a nice guy, has chosen a career path that could be described as “writing biographies of nerds Marissa would not want to have lunch with.” But he does a good job of it, they’re interesting books and manage to learn a lot about–even understand–their subjects without falling the least bit in love with their subjects. This one is Luis Alvarez. Did a lot of interesting things! Also I went into this book with the feeling that even an hour in his company would be more than I really wanted, and I did not come out of it with any particle of that opinion altered.

Lyndal Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War. An account of a really interesting time, illuminating of things that came after, somewhat repetitive.

Vandana Singh, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories. Reread. Yes, the stories here were also satisfyingly where I left them, science fictiony and vivid.

Travis Tomchuk, Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the US, 1915-1940. This is actually a book about Italian anarchists in Canada that recognizes that there was a lot of cross-border traffic, so it also looked at those parts of the US that directly affect Canada–Detroit-Windsor, for example. Lots of analysis on Italian immigrants’ immigration experiences either as caused by or as causing their radicalism. Interesting stuff but probably not a good choice My First History of Early Twentieth Century Radicalism.

Natalie Wee, Beast at Every Threshold. It is not Wee’s fault that I wanted more beasts. Poets are allowed to be metaphorical like that. I did want more beasts, but what is here instead is good being itself anyway.

Fran Wilde, A Catalog of Storms. This was my first reading of this collection but not my first reading of the vast majority of stories within it. This is the relief of a collection by someone whose work I enjoy, knowing that each of the stories will be reliably good and now I have them in one spot, hurrah, glad this is here.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend, as you will find out if you read to the end and see that I am in the acknowledgments for the honestly light and easy work of being Brandon’s pal.

Good news for those of you who wait until a series is complete to read it: this is the second book in a duology! So you can just pick up Catalyst and Castoff and read them together, if you haven’t yet. I’m going to try not to spoiler the first book too much, which is going to leave me vague, because this is definitely my favorite kind of sequel: the kind where the consequences follow on hard and fast from the first book. Happily for those with shaky memories, there’s a quick summary at the beginning of this one.

So there are airships! There are strange vast somewhat personified forces! There are people working out their relationships in the face of personal and social change! It’s that lovely kind of fantasy novel that almost might be a science fiction novel in its concern with human interactions with truly alien intelligences. I love that kind. I want more of that basically always. And if it can come with airship adventures alongside the ponderings of the nature of intelligence and caring about others, even better. Very glad this is about to make it out into the world so I can talk to more people about these books.