Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author has been a dear friend since the mastodons roamed the plains.

It seems like half of the reviews out there claim that the book they’re reviewing is something really different, but this, in fact, is something really different. It’s like Marguerite Yourcenar’s A Coin in Nine Hands, where the story passes from person to person as they encounter each other, showing different facets of life. But it’s also very much not like that, because the story is a fantasy story with crucial worldbuilding, and the quiet nature of its plot makes it easy to miss that it’s about massive social change.

Serenissima is not Venice, though they are connected. Serenissima, city of the mists, is the point that joins nine worlds, each filled with a sentient humanoid species, living and trading and growing and learning across worlds. No matter how long anyone has lived in Serenissima, no one person knows all of its secrets–so they need to work together to cure the blight that has stranded some of them there.

Because yes, this is a Venice Carnival mask book–but it’s also a book that couldn’t have been written in 2019. It is a book with strong awareness of the pandemic we’ve been going through, and all the ways in which it’s only one possible way that we could suffer–and need to help each other. It’s a book with a strong sense of forming community with others, even when those others don’t fit our preconceptions of what a friend, an ally, a lover might look like. I really like the gentleness and the hope in this one. I think you might like it too.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Nothing lastingly bad happens to the dog in this book.

Sorry but not all that sorry to those of you who wanted that suspense, but Brandy is a lovey good big boy and I think most of you will have a much better time if you don’t have serious worries about the mastiff. This is a debut novel, so Serra Swift doesn’t have a lot of trust built up. This is the beginning of building it. Brandy gets a nice chewy in his nice bed. He is fine.

The humans…well. The humans are a bit more messed up. A bit more tangled in grief, a bit more vengeful, a bit more desperate. The Beast has been slaughtering humans since time out of mind, and after Lyssa Carnifex (Cadogan) loses her brother she swears that she will put an end to it no matter what. She manages to dispatch a large and varied number of magical beasts, but The Beast eludes her. But when she meets Alderic Casimir de Laurent, it seems like she’s found someone who’s just as dedicated to helping her slay The Beast as she is to doing it. She just has to put up with Alderic’s annoying fashion sense and weird priorities.

…or so she thinks. Obviously, “or so she thinks,” there’s not a book if there’s not an “or so she thinks.” I don’t feel like the twist is one that will surprise most experienced fantasy readers, but if you’re looking for an engaging and well-written adventure fantasy, this may well suit.

K.J. Charles, All of Us Murderers. In a lot of ways more a Gothic thriller than a murder mystery, I found this gripping and fun. I hope Charles keeps writing in the thriller and mystery genres. The characters are vividly awful except for a few, and that’s just what this sort of thing calls for.

Virginia Feito, Victorian Psycho. And speaking of vividly awful, I’m not sure I would have finished this one if it hadn’t been both extremely short and part of a conversation I was having. There is not a piece of vice or unpleasantness not wallowed in here. It’s certainly affecting, just not in a direction I usually want.

Frances Hardinge, The Forest of a Thousand Eyes. I’m a little disappointed that Hardinge’s work seems to have gone in the direction of illustrated middle grade, more or less, because I find the amount of story not quite as much as I’d like from her previous works, and I’m just not the main audience for lavish illustration. If you are, though, it’s a perfectly cromulent fantasy story. I’m just greedy I guess.

David Hinton, trans., Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China. An interesting subgenre I hadn’t had much exposure to. Translating poetry is hard, and no particular poem was gripping to me in English, but knowing what was being written in that place and time was interesting.

Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen, The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition. Kindle. If you’ve been reading anything about American Black history this will be less new information and more a new lens/synthesis of information you’re likely to already have, but it’s well put together and cogently argued, and sometimes a new lens is useful.

Im Bang and Yi Ryuk, Tales of Korea: 53 Enchanting Stories of Ghosts, Goblins, Princes, Fairies, and More! So this is a new and shiny edition, with a 2022 copyright date, but that applies only to the introduction and similar supplemental materials. It’s actually a 1912 translation, with all the cultural yikes that implies. Even with the rise in interest in Kpop and Kdramas information about Korean history and culture is not as readily available as I’d like, so I’m keeping this edition until a better translation is available.

Emma Knight, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus. This is a novel, and I knew it was a novel going in. It’s a novel I mostly enjoyed reading, except…I kept waiting for the octopus. Even a metaphorical octopus. And when it did come, it was the most clunkily introduced “HERE IS MY METAPHOR” metaphor I recall reading in professionally published fiction. Further, using it as the title highlighted the ways that most threads of this book did not contribute to this thematic metaphor. I feel like with two more revision passes it could have been a book I’d return to and reread over and over, and without them it was…fine while I was reading it, not really giving me enough to chew on afterwards. Sigh. (It was set on a university campus! It would have been trivially easy for someone to be studying octopus! or, alternately, to be studying something else that was actually relevant and a source of a title and central metaphor.)

Naomi Kritzer, Obstetrix. Discussed elsewhere.

Rebecca Lave and Martin Doyle, Streams of Revenue: The Restoration Economy and the Ecosystems It Creates. Does what it says on the tin. The last chapter has a lot of very good graphs about differences in restored vs. natural streams. Do you like stream restoration ecology enough to read a whole book about it? You will know going in, this is not a “surprisingly interesting read for the general audience” sort of book, this is “I sure did want to know this stuff, and here it is.”

Astrid Lindgren, Seacrow Island. Surprisingly not a reread–not everything was available to me when I was a kid back in the Dark Ages. I had hoped it would be Swedish Swallows and Amazons, and it was not, it was a lot more like a Swedish version of something like Noel Streatfeild’s The Magic Summer, but that was all right, it was still delightful and a pleasant read. I will tell you right up front that Bosun the dog is fine, nothing terrible happens to Bosun the dog in the course of this book, there, now you will have an even better reading experience than I did.

Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen. Reread. Probably my least favorite of her collections despite some strong work–least favorite of a bunch of good collections is not actually a terrible place to be, nor is improving over one’s career.

Freya Marske, Cinder House. A reverse Gothic where a nice house triumphs over a terrible human. Short and delightful.

Lio Min, The L.O.V.E. Club. I really hope this gets its actual audience’s attention, because it is not about romantic love or even about people seeking but comically failing to find romantic love. It’s about a teenage friend group trapped in a video game and dealing with their own friend group’s past plus the history that led to their lives. It was about as good as a “trapped in a video game” narration was going to be for me, sweet and melancholy.

Nicholas Morton, The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East. Two hundred years of Mongols, and this is a really good perspective on how Europe is a weird peninsula off the side of Asia. Which we knew, but wow is it clear here. Also it’s nice to read books where people remember the Armenians exist, and related groups as well. My one complaint here is not really a fault in the book so much as a mismatch in it and me: I’m willing to read kings-and-battles kinds of history, and this is a khans-and-horse-troops kind of history, which is basically the same thing. I prefer histories that give a stronger sense of how actual people were actually living and what changed over the period that wasn’t the name of the person receiving tribute. But that’s not a problem with this book, it was clear what kind of book it was going to be going in.

Caskey Russell, The Door on the Sea. This debut fantasy (science fiction? science fantasy?) novel is definitely not generic: it’s a strongly Tlingit story written by a Tlingit person, and it leans hard into that. Raven is one of the major characters; another character is a bear cousin and another straight-up a wolf. It’s a quest fantasy, but with a different shape to harmonize with its setting. I really liked it, but let me warn/promise you: this is not a stand-alone, the ending is not the story’s end.

Vikram Seth, Beastly Tales (From Here and There). Very short, very straightforward animal poems. If you read something like this as a child, here’s more of it.

Fran Wilde, A Philosophy of Thieves. A very class-aware science fiction heist novel that looks at loyalties and opportunities at every turn. Who’s using whom and why–if that’s your kind of heist, come on in, the water’s fine.

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.