Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day, Amishi P. Jha. Discussed here and here.

Sheine Lende, Darcie Little Badger, ill. Rovina Cai. Prequel to Elatsoe (which I really loved), ergo takes place in a world where magical stuff is openly known, though not always talked about — Shane is cautioned to watch out who she lets know that she can raise the spirits of dead animals.

This one gathered momentum as it went. The early part was somewhat focused on a situation I find uncomfortable because it’s all too real — a family living on the brink of poverty, where one thing going wrong can mean absolute disaster — but once it got into the meat of the story, I was much more on board. Several people have vanished because they stepped into mushroom rings created, not by the well-accepted fairy mushrooms being used to build teleportation circles across the U.S., but “mimic” mushrooms that look similar and are far more dangerous. Shane, who has worked with her mother finding missing people, has to figure out where they’ve gone and how to retrieve them . . . and while the first retrieval is very straightforward, the others are anything but.

The Prioress’ Tale, Margaret Frazer. This is the first of the Frevisse novels written by a solo author instead of two under the Frazer pen name, and I think I can see some of the difference: the investigation got a lot more forensic than previously, with the characters working out that the victim must have been struck from behind with a particular weapon by someone of roughly a certain height, etc.

As usual, though, the murder is just one element of the story (and not the largest), with much of it being taken up by the issue of the titular prioress: St. Frideswide’s is under new leadership, and to say it’s not going well is an understatement. I did appreciate, though, Dame Perpetua arguing for a more charitable interpretation of that trainwreck: she’s not wrong that it’s coming from a place of love. It’s just that the love in question is arrogant and apocalyptically stupid, with predictable consequences for the convent that will continue to ripple out into the next book at least.

Living Karma: The Religious Practices of Ouyi Zhixu, Beverley Foulks McGuire. Read as research for the sequel to The Worst Monk in Omnu. Ouyi is a moderately famous historical Buddhist monk, and this is a study of how he thought about and interacted with the concept of karma, including attempts to divine it and change it. Useful for me; probably not terribly relevant to anybody lacking a focused reason to read up on Buddhist theology and history.

The Changeling, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. I picked this one up after it got mentioned in discussions of Snyder’s Green Sky Trilogy — because, yes, Green Sky shows up here! As a narrative game the characters are playing, and it’s fascinating to see the differences: the basic concepts of the world are the same, but the version here embraces the idea of villainous monsters below the Root and builds a melodramatic high fantasy narrative around that. I’m glad that Snyder took a different tack when she decided to write actual books in that setting, even if the execution of that tack felt clunky to me.

And this book does vindicate my suspicion that the awkward prose in the Green Sky Trilogy is due to Snyder trying to High Fantasy it up and failing. I still wouldn’t call her a great prose stylist here, but it flows much less stiffly. Meanwhile, this book echoes the diversity I remember being surprised by when I went back and re-read The Egypt Game: you’re never told the Carsons are Black, but the description of Ivy puts the pieces right in front of you, and all the adult tutting about not wanting their sons and daughters to hang out with those Carson kids takes on an extra, unspoken layer of meaning. (Made awkward by the indication that yes, quite a lot of the Carsons do seem to be petty criminals . . . but there’s room to see that as a product of circumstances, and those who can escape the circumstances are entirely capable of a different life.)

The Door on the Sea, Caskey Russell. Tlingit-inspired fantasy, the first in what I think will be a trilogy. The setting is semi-modern in feeling: everybody’s sailing around in wind-powered boats and fighting with swords and bows, but there are also books, postal services, and in one settlement the characters visit, hot running water. I loved the start, almost bounced out shortly after that, stuck with it, and am left with slightly mixed feelings that might at least partially be ameliorated by later books.

The very start of the book is from the point of view of raven, who may or may not be capital-R Raven, and it was fantastic. Russell knows what many writers forget, which is that tricksters are often crass, and frequently as stupid as they are clever; raven here gets caught and has to make a bargain to get out. The narrative voice is very folkloric, too, which works great. After that, however, the story shifts focus to the boy who caught raven, and for a little while it feels very much like fairly standard MG/YA material, with Elan wanting to be a warrior but assigned to a bookish educational track, upset because his childhood friend won’t talk to him anymore, etc. — the kind of stuff that’s perfectly fine, but much less interesting to me as an adult reader.

Fortunately, that doesn’t last long. Soon Elan is sent on a quest to retrieve a weapon raven knows about, which could help his people in their war against some strange invaders. These invaders are not just Europeans or a thinly coded analogue thereof (which at first I thought they might be); in fact, there is something deeply weird and possibly science fictional in play, which later books will presumably unpack. And I think I will read those books, despite my primary gripe: that folkloric voice, which works so well for raven’s opening bit, winds up feeling rather flat as the novel continues. Oral narratives tend to do very little interiority, so Elan’s emotional arc through the course of this book feels more told rather than shown, even when it gets into events that really ought to be producing a lot of inner conflict. As a result, the story is mostly about the logistics of getting the crew together, sailing to the location of the weapon, dealing with threats along the way, etc.

But I love the unique specificity brought to the setting thanks to the Tlingit underpinnings, and I’m intrigued by what’s going on with the invaders. So, despite feeling a bit like the narrative voice holds the reader at arm’s length, I am likely to read the sequel!

The Maiden’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. Unusually for this series, there’s a murder right at the outset, rather than it occurring halfway through the book. Despite that, investigation of it gets delayed until extremely late in the book, because this time around Frazer is mostly interested in the politicking around the duke of Orleans and whether he’s finally going to be freed (after more than twenty years as a political prisoner). I don’t mind that — I’m happy to read straight historical fiction, no mystery — but Frevisse felt notably incurious this time around, making assumptions about things or actively deciding not to inquire. I would have liked her to be a little more proactive.

(Also, and I don’t know if this was absent from The Prioress’ Tale or I just didn’t notice it, but my god does Frazer write a lot of extremely long sentences here. I’m not a priori against those, but it started to feel extremely same-y in the rhythm, with me mentally inserting breaks here and there to vary things up more.)

Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead, K.J. Parker, narr. Oliver Hembrough. Paul Weimer’s review of this book speculated that it might not work very well for readers new to the “Parkerverse,” the broad setting shared by this and many (all?) of his other novels. Well, I’m that reader, and I was all in for the premise here: a monk and a nun serving the militant arm of a Catholic-analogue Church as assassins at an ecumenical council, where the monk — despite being an atheist at heart — would really rather be listening to the intellectual heavyweights of the Church go at it in a series of theological debates.

Parker has the same touch I mentioned when I was reviewing Margaret Owen’s books, of clearly being somebody who has read actual history. This is very full of the kinds of concrete details that make it feel real, instead of a reheated version of somebody else’s fantasy world. (Not just in the nods to theology and philosophy, though those are definitely there; the specifics of how the protagonist goes about forging documents are equally well-researched.) So I greatly enjoyed the first half or so of this book. When it started to flag for me, it was nothing to with the setting or the characters, and everything to do with the plot feeling like it circled the same beats of its try-fail cycle too many times. The end involved a fairly uninspiring monologue from an antagonist I didn’t like very much, with the result that the moment of the whole thing kind of petered out.

Still, I’ll probably give the sequel a shot. I liked the characters and the setting, and Hembrough was an engaging narrator, too.