Siren Queen, Nghi Vo. This one is likely of interest to several people I know: Chinese-American history, pre-Code Hollywood, queerness, and fae. Luli Wei is determined to make a career for herself in film, and to do it without falling into certain stereotypical roles — but this is an openly magical version of history where the studio system genuinely does have a supernatural hold on its performers, actors can take long-term damage from the cameras, and “becoming a star” means literally acquiring your very own gleaming spot in the sky, which will persist for as long as people remember and watch your movies.

The supernatural element here, though out in the open, it also largely oblique: at no point does Vo stop and explain it all to you. It actually took me a while to be certain “fae” was even the right word to attach to it, and it’s probably not the whole story anyway (there are references to people making deals with devils at crossroads), but there are enough mentions of the role iron plays, plus a truncated “Tam Lin” in the middle for a secondary character, that it feels more appropriate than any alternative. I mostly liked that obliqueness; it was nice not to have the studio system fall into some kind of clear-cut Seelie/Unseelie structure, not to have the standard parade of familiar types (I think the only creatures that get named directly are “fox girls” in China and a skogsrå from Sweden), etc. There were a few places where I did crave a little more clarity, just so I could properly understand all the dangers of Luli’s world, but those weren’t terribly load-bearing. The ending did not play out in any of the ways I expected, but it played out very well.

On Spec #123 Selling a story to On Spec means you get a one-year subscription! This isn’t the issue I’m in, so I feel free to comment on it. Per my decision last month about anthologies, I didn’t finish reading absolutely everything in here, but I very much liked Kajetan Kwiatkowski’s “Immaculate Deception,” about a jumping spider sent to infiltrate a colony of weaver ants, who finds something very unexpected there — the worldbuilding and the evocation of insect life was very striking. Also enjoyed Lindsey Duncan’s “Not With a Whimper,” a flash piece with a lovely ending — hard to say much without just recounting the whole thing.

Advent, James Treadwell. This was an interesting study in me enjoying things I’m normally less interested in, while being uninterested in things I normally enjoy.

The Publishers Weekly review quoted on the back compares this to Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, and I see where it’s coming from, even if it ended up not working that way for me. Through roughly the first half of the book, this managed to get me really invested in the narrative of Gavin — who has seen odd things his whole life, and has learned not to tell anyone about them, especially not his emotionally abusive father — going out to Cornwall and encountering some people he can actually talk to about those things, just nice, quiet, bonding conversations I found surprisingly engaging. At the same time, the book walks backwards through a series of flashbacks set in the sixteenth century, and despite my love for historical fiction, I honestly found those to be less than welcome interruptions to the rest of the story.

The latter half . . . well, if I’d known this is the start of a series before I hit the last thirty pages, I would have at least had a different frame of reference in which to react to the fact that the secondary characters I enjoyed the most fell out of the story more or less completely, while ones I found less interesting moved to the forefront. (Horace does not deserve what he goes through here, but not gonna lie, it’s hard for me to look forward to more scenes from the kid whose primary emotional flavor is “resentment.”) It was telling to me that my reading pace slowed significantly as I went along, after devouring the first half in fairly short order. I’m guessing that most of the people I liked will return more in the second book, but I probably won’t find out for sure; my interest waned enough by the conclusion that, despite finding the stinger with Jen and Ma’chinu’ch interesting, I don’t think I care enough to pick up the sequel.

(I did like Corbo, though. Yes yes.)

Mummy, Caroline B. Cooney. Caroline B. Cooney is one of those names I recognize from back in my childhood or teenaged years. I don’t actually know if I ever read any of her work back then, though; she might just be one I saw on the shelf often enough that the name stuck in my memory.

So why did I pick this book up now, well after the point at which I’m its target audience? Because Rachel Manija Brown posted about it a little while ago, and basically had me at “heist with questions about the ethical treatment of ancient human remains.” The protagonist here is a smart, well-behaved girl who has dreamed basically all her life of Doing Crime, and gets the chance when the plan for a senior prank leads a few of her fellow students to suggest they steal the mummy from a local museum. But Emlyn has a number of reservations about the whole plan, starting with her feeling that her fellow thieves are not planning the heist nearly well enough, and taking a sharp turn when Emlyn gets her hands on the mummy and immediately starts to think about what it means for her to be hauling around the fragile remains of, y’know, an actual human being.

The book is a short one, and ambiguously fantastical: Emlyn has visions of the Egyptian past that might just be her imagination, but are presented vividly enough that they carry a whiff of magic.. In places it feels ever so slightly peculiar — the references to technology make me wonder if Cooney originally drafted this earlier than its publication date of 2000, because they come across as slightly off for the time. That doesn’t really damage the book itself, though, which winds up hinging on that question of what’s the ethical thing to do with this mummy. I blew through this in less than a day while on vacation, and have no regrets about my reading choices.

Flower and Thorn, Rati Mehotra. Disclosure: I know the author through the Codex Writers’ Group, and uh may have emailed her out of nowhere to bat my eyelashes and ask for an ARC of this book.

This is an alternate history where a certain region of India, the Rann, is renowned for producing several types of magical flower. The protagonist, Irinya, is a flower-hunter, and largely happy making her excursions into the salt desert after the precious blooms there, but when an incredibly rare flower is found — one with the potential to turn the tide of the colonial war against the Portuguese — she gets hauled out of that life to wrestle with much larger-scale politics.

As alternate histories goes, this one struck me as different from most. Although at least one historical character is mentioned in passing here (the Portuguese adventurer Francisco de Almeida) — possibly more, but my knowledge of Indian history is too thin to say for sure — it’s much less concerned with specific people or specific events than a specific *place*. The Rann is a real place, with (as far as I can tell) more or less the ecology and resulting human culture that existed in the real world at that time, and it gets evoked quite vividly here, in ways I really enjoyed. (Minus, of course, the magical flower part.) I also liked the handling of the different villains, who have a welcome degree of depth and evoked sympathy from me at different points in time. Even for the guy whose priorities are in the wrong place, I can at least see why he’s taking that approach, even if it’s short-sighted.

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. A couple of the books I read recently (How Fiction Works and Maps of the Imagination) mentioned Borges, which reminded me that I’ve never actually ready any of his fiction. Since we have had a collection of his work on our shelf for years, this was easily remedied . . . though I’m not sure if the approach I took was a great idea, a terrible idea, or both at once. For Reasons, there was a day when I needed to stay up until about 5 a.m. — bear in mind that I normally go to bed at 3 a.m., so this isn’t as heinous as it sounds — and so, having finished the book I was reading at the time (not Flower and Thorn; I started reading the Borges back in June and just didn’t finish until July), I picked this one up and started reading. At about 2 a.m.

It took me a while to get through the whole collection because this definitely isn’t the kind of fiction one binges — at least not for values of “one” that are “me,” though the experience of some of you may differ. I’d classify most of it as interesting rather than moving; Borges’ self-admitted tendency to kind of write the Cliff Notes of his ideas rather than fleshing them out in full meant they often felt quite distancing. (One of the few exceptions was “The Secret Miracle,” which is bleak as hell but really got me in a good way.) And, well, it was round about “The Library of Babel” where I consciously noticed just how thoroughly absent women are from most of his fiction: the narrator mentions having been born in the library, but speaks only of men living there, so apparently in the world of Borges’ imagination, women aren’t even needed for reproduction. (There is one story here with a female protagonist, “Emma Zunz,” but that’s it for not just this collection but his work as a whole, according to Wikipedia.) Still and all: the ideas are often interesting, and heck yeah I can see how he’s influenced certain fantasy writers. I mean, he’s managed to influence me, in that I realized after reading this that I could take the concept for a novel trilogy I will almost certainly never write and condense its key elements down to a short story in the form of a character’s testimony. So if nothing else, I got that out of this experiment!

The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, Craig Childs. Nonfiction about the writer’s personal experiences with encountering different animals — one chapter per animal. He says in the introduction that his ideal is for people to pick the book up and read a chapter at random here and there, but that if you must read straight through, then he hopes you’ll at least take breaks along the way, sipping rather than gulping. Sir, I wound up reading your book in small chunks because I had to calm my heart rate; the Carnivora section in particular (but also some later chapters) had me wondering how the hell you survived to write this book. Like, oh, the chapter where you were playing your usual trick on your friend by stalking him through the brush and you were about three seconds away from charging forward to leap on him in a surprise attack when you heard him calling from somewhere else and realized that for the last several minutes you’d been stalking a jaguar instead. O_O

Childs writes very vividly, though. He’s excellent at evoking not just the animals, but the physical experience of being in the wild environments where they’re found and the psychological experience of coming into close contact with them. There’s some very poetic writing in here, which I valued because this book is part of my ongoing quest to improve my ability to write about nature. (My real goal is less “make good sentences” than “get to a point where acquiring the content for said sentences doesn’t involve half an hour of research first,” but that may be a pipe dream.) I highly recommend it to anybody for whom nature writing and animals and so forth appeals.

Oh, and I ended up writing a poem based on a detail Chlids mentions in here, so this is another fruitful piece of reading for this month!

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose. YA fantasy from a Seaconke Wampanoag author, set in an alternate nineteenth-century North America. The alternate history here fascinated me, because of the linguistic game Blackgoose plays: early references to things like “anglereckoning” and “erelore” made me realize this seems to be, essentially, a world where the Roman Empire never became dominant in Europe, and so the colonization of the eastern seaboard was heavily Germanic in nature, and possibly stemmed from the Norse excursions acquiring more of a permanent foothold than they did in our history. Ergo, instead of geometry you have anglereckoning, and instead of history you have erelore. (Though there are a few places where Latinate names remain, e.g. “Saturday” and “January.” As much as I would have loved to see those changed, too, I’m sympathetic to the fact that the more you change basic details out from under the reader, the harder it will be for them to find their way in the story.)

As for the story itself, it concerns a Masquisit girl who winds up bonding with a newly-hatched Nampeshiwe, an indigenous type of dragon that hasn’t been seen in colonized territory for a very long time. Since the laws of the colonizers require all such dragons and their riders to be trained at official dragon academies, Anequs has to go off to boarding school — despite the fact that many people don’t want any “nacky” (indigenous) dragon-riders at all.

I liked this book, but I wanted it to dig in deeper on some of the emotional beats. Anequs’ culture shock, for example, mostly registered on me as being an intellectual thing: she doesn’t understand or disagrees with many aspects of Anglish life, but I never really got that visceral feeling of being in an alien place, where all your familiar touchstones are gone and people are all too ready to sneer at you for anything you do that doesn’t fit the accepted mold. Some of the peak bits here flew by very fast — as in, the climax was about two pages? So it didn’t get its claws as deeply into me as I would have hoped, but I’m still interested in reading the rest of the series.

Maria, Maria: & Other Stories, Marytza K. Rubio. Short story collection that I grabbed in ebook from the library when the other novel I’d brought with me on vacation turned out to be not quite to my taste. I’m not entirely sure this collection was quite to my taste, either, but short stories turned out to be the right speed for that stretch of time, where I could dip in and out more easily than with a novel.

These stories skew distinctly literary and in some places experimental. Some of the latter worked surprisingly well for me; in this camp I’d count “Art Show,” a story which is presented basically as the plaques accompanying an exhibit of artwork — complete with actual images (several of the stories in here have some form of illustration). I was less enthused by “Paint by Numbers,” which gives you a numbered diagram and then a sentence or so for each region of the image, emphasizing a color word in the text. They do overall add up to a narrative, but because the text is so terse, it didn’t win me over. The tone is often pretty bleak, too; several bits have a whiff of post-climate-apocalypse to them — or more than a whiff — which is not a mode I’m a great audience for.

Still and all: I may not have loved this, but I enjoyed it enough that I was always willing to try the next story, even if I hadn’t enjoyed the previous. Those with a better fondness than I have for literary-toned short stories and experimental formats might really like it.

How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing, K.C. Davis. I didn’t actually read this in its entirety — there were quite a few sections I skimmed — but I’m reporting on it anyway because others might find it of use. Davis is writing particularly for those who, for reasons of disability, executive dysfunction, or other factors, have a particularly hard time keeping their house tidy. The core message is to decouple your thinking about domestic labor and self-care from morality: you’re not lazy or lacking in virtue if your house is a mess, and if you stop beating yourself up with that mentality, you open up the door to approaches that you might find vastly more sustainable. For example, after spending way too long in a cycle where her clean laundry would sit in a pile in the laundry room waiting to be folded, she realized that it actually didn’t matter if most of the items in the pile got wrinkled — so why not hang up the few where it matters, and just sort the rest into baskets? Less guilt, more actual progress (the laundry at least got sorted), and more energy for dealing with other things. She also advocates thinking of some tasks in terms of them being a kindness to your future self . . . and recognizing that sometimes, being kind to your present self will need to take priority instead. I’m not in the core audience for her message, but I found parts of it very eye-opening all the same.

The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez, Ann Swinfen. I enjoyed Swinfen’s Oxford Medieval Mystery series enough to pick up this, the first book of an Elizabethan spy series. It’s less cozy than the other; for starters, the central conflict of the one is the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth and put Mary Stuart on the throne, which is not a bit of history in which anybody comes off well. The protagonist is working for Walsingham, and the narrative doesn’t shy away from the fact that he blatantly entrapped Mary, to the point of having a post-script forged onto one of her letters to the conspirators.

Having said that, this still has the general vibe of being interested in the time period and what life was like during it. I think Christoval’s/Kit’s life meshes a little less well with the plot than Nicholas’ in the medieval series; where Nicholas comes across as an ordinary guy living an ordinary life with the mystery plots happening around the edges, Kit’s time is more overtly bifurcated between work as a physician at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and recruitment as a code-breaker in Walsingham’s service. But Kit is also — and here I’m not spoiling anything that doesn’t come out in the first two chapters or so — a Portuguese Marrano, i.e. a Jew forcibly converted to Christianity but keeping faith in secret, and furthermore is actually Caterina Alvarez. So that whole “secret world” thing contains many layers, referring to the espionage, the religious persecution, and the cross-dressing. I’ll be interested to see how those latter parts develop over time, as there’s an antagonist who knows her secrets, plus (of course) a love interest who doesn’t know. Me, I’m sitting over here remembering that Walsingham historically said it was infamous to use women agents, and wondering if he’ll ever find out; learning the answer to that might be enough to keep me reading all on its own.

The conclusion of this volume is a bit loose, since honestly the resolution of the Babington Plot involved a lot of people running around after different targets, and Swinfen doesn’t go the route of engineering a pivotal role at a vital moment for Kit. But I don’t particularly mind; I’m here for the details of Elizabethan cryptography and medicine.

City of Miracles, Robert Jackson Bennett. I have not been doing myself any favors by letting years elapse between me reading the various installments of the Divine Cities trilogy, but at least it’s one that can survive such gaps; while each book references earlier events as backstory, it’s not attempting to do a narrative so temporally close-knit that you have real problems if you don’t remember what’s happened.

Apart from that . . . I was reminded very powerfully of the difference it makes, whether you’ve read an author’s work before or not. See, the back cover copy on this one starts out by saying, “Revenge. It’s something Sigrud je Harkvaldsson is very, very good at. Maybe the only thing.” And that, my friends, is not a character I felt terribly compelled to read about. But I liked the earlier volumes in this series, so I gave Bennett the benefit of the doubt. And I kept giving him that even as I read the first few chapters and yep, here is Sigrud being exactly the kind of person the cover copy suggested he would be: grim, scarred, not at all reluctant to kill people and blow shit up (repeatedly), dragging the weight of his past around with him, etc.

That benefit of the doubt meant I got far enough into the book to hit the the point where the story said, Yeah. Those things you don’t much like about Sigrud? We’re gonna talk about those. In fact, talking about those is what I am here to do.

With another author — one whose books I hadn’t read and enjoyed before — I might not have continued, because I would not have had the built-up trust that this road was going to lead me somewhere good in the end. And the thing is, you generally can’t do an effective job of telling the type of story City of Miracles does without spending a solid chunk of time developing the thing it’s going to critique. But of course the problem with that is, the reader has to spend that solid chunk of time hanging out with the thing they want critiqued, waiting for that moment to arrive. Which requires trust in the author, or else trust that whoever recommended the book to you knows that the payoff is one you’ll like. (And sometimes, even with that, the investment is too large or long-term to make the payoff worth it.)

Fortunately, though, this book did have other aspects I was enjoying. Like an antagonist who is both terrifying and kind of sympathetic, and metaphysics I find interesting. So I kept reading, and I’m glad I did.

Inkheart, Cornelia Funke, trans. Anthea Bell. I’ve seen the film of this several times and really enjoyed it, so I decided to read the book, with an eye toward continuing on to the rest of the series once I knew the differences. Turns out that until the very end, the differences are pretty minimal! I think the screenwriter did a good job of streamlining the book plot without losing its general substance, e.g. having everyone taken to Capricorn’s stronghold together rather than Mo being taken and later followed by Meggie, Elinor, and Dustfinger. I’m not certain if I’ll continue on as planned, though; while I’m very much on board with the basic premise here (a profound love for books and storytelling, and then magic based around being able to pull things from books into reality), I’m not sure I’m quite in love enough with the characters to read onward.

The Black God’s Drums, P. Djèlí Clark. Novella that tragically seems to be a stand-alone, at least thus far. It takes place in an alternate history where the U.S. Civil War dragged on for eight years before ending in a stalemate treaty that left the city of New Orleans independent of either Union or Confederacy, and furthermore Haiti’s independence was won in part through the deployment of the titular weapon, a cannon that summoned devastating storms (whose aftermath still threatens to drown New Orleans on the regular).

The novella stands on its own just fine, but it also feels a bit like the setup for something. The main character, who prefers to go by the name of Creeper, bears the orisha Oya within her; she has to team up with an airship captain who bears Oya’s sister-wife Oshun, in order to stop a disaster. I would happily read more about what happens afterward, especially since I loved Clark’s attention to detail in the dialects of the different characters.

The Great Gods, Daniel Keys Moran. He’s moving forward with his series at last! In fact, glancing at the previews I can see on his Patreon, there are quite a few things coming down the pipeline.

This is still a Continuing Time book, but it doesn’t (heh) continue with the narrative we’ve had so far; instead it steps about a thousand years into the future to focus on a character who . . . okay, this gets into the weird structure of the series as a whole, the almost frame story where Emerald Eyes starts off with the Name Storyteller being chased by Camber Tremodian through time etc. Well, it’s time to talk about Camber! Honestly, the biggest effect for me here was a desire to go back and re-read earlier books in the series to see what’s been said before about various things popping up here: most notably, Camber, the Name Storyteller, and the Great Gods of the Zaradin Church. This is clearly a massive tapestry of narrative Moran has had in his head for probably most of his life, and while I have no doubt that new ideas have come in or existing ideas have been tweaked (this book has a lot more acknowledgement of genderqueerness than I remember from earlier volumes), I also fully believe that some sizable percentage of what I just read is building out concepts Moran had in mind back when Emerald Eyes got published decades ago.

As for the book itself? Well, Camber’s no Trent, which is to say this book has less a sense of humor than The Long Run or The A.I. War. There’s much more a feeling of weighty pieces of history moving into place; I’d put it more into a bucket with books like Dune or maybe Foundation (I’ve only seen the TV series of the latter). It still has the same overall style, though, which is to say you’re either on board with the infodumps or you’re not, and if you’ve been following the Continuing Time since the original books, you already know you are. If not . . . I wouldn’t recommend this as a starting point, I don’t think. But I will definitely read more.

The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie, Śivadāsa, trans. Chandra Rajan. More classic Sanskrit literature! Though I really ought to prioritize reading a better version of the Ramayana over less well-known works like this. (I’m open to suggestions; the only one I’ve read is William Buck’s heavily abridged rendition.)

This one, sometimes called the Vetala Tales — Rajan chose to analogize the vetala to a genie in his translation — comes with a stonking 68 pages of introduction for a 181-page text (plus another fifty pages or so for some selections from the Jambhaladatta version). It’s less an introduction than a whole academic article. But I didn’t mind, because it honestly helps to draw out tones and elements that get glossed over in the actual text, like just what picture is being painted by the frame story, and the creepy mood that’s easy to forget as you read along.

The structure here is that King Vikramaditya agrees, for Reasons, to go fetch a corpse that’s hanging in a tree and bring it to a spot in the burning grounds where an ascetic (who is Not a Good Man) is going to conduct a ritual with it. The ascetic tells him not to speak or the corpse will return to the tree, but the vetala that’s possessing the corpse keeps telling Vikramaditya stories and then posing moral questions at the end. So the five-and-twenty tales of the title are the king’s trips back and forth to the tree, until at last he has no answer to one of the questions and remains silent, at which point the vetala — impressed by the moral wisdom Vikramaditya has shown — instructs him in how to defeat the evil ascetic.

It’s a very cool structure, and some of the tales are pretty enjoyable in their own right, though (as per usual for a lot of ancient literature, not just Sanskrit) there is some hair-tearing misogyny tossed in: Vikramaditya makes the jaw-dropping claim not just that women are worse than men, but that “men are rarely guilty of serious wrongdoing.” Does make it a little tough to imagine him as the exemplar of moral wisdom and righteousness he’s supposed to be . . . (This is the same king who features in the Thirty-Two Tales of the Throne.)

Clockwork Cairo: Steampunk Tales of Egypt, ed. Matthew Bright. I found myself reflecting recently that I put down a lot of books which fail to hook me in a reasonable time, and I also stop reading short stories for the same reason. So why, exactly, do I feel compelled to read anthologies cover-to-cover, regardless of what I think of any given story? Because I can’t count it as a “book read” if I’ve skipped anything? Yet I’ve reported on nonfiction where I didn’t read the whole book — see the first item in this month’s post. So why not anthologies?

Yes, that’s a long lead-in to say I didn’t read every story in this anthology, though I did read the majority of them. (My hope is that taking this approach will encourage me to pick up more anthologies.) This one is as it says on the tin, steampunk + Egypt — specifically things related to ancient Egypt, though many of the stories here are set much later in history, and also not all of them take place in Egypt. Several are related to existing series by the author in question; unsurprisingly, some of those work better for readers who don’t know the existing series than others.

I have to admit I reflexively side-eye any piece in an anthology that’s written by the editor, but in this case, Matthew Bright’s “Antonia and Cleopatra” was one of my favorite stories. I also really enjoyed Chaz Brenchley’s “Thermodynamics; and/or The Remittance Men” (full disclosure: Chaz is a friend), Rob Duncan’s “The Museum of Unlikely Survivors,” and K. Tempest Bradford’s “The Copper Scarab.” The theme here leads to a certain amount of motif repetition across the stories — e.g. a whole swarm of clockwork scarabs — but all four of those stories managed to give a very different mood, and all delighted me in different ways.

Also, a special shout-out to whoever at Inkspiral Design did the splash-page “cover” illustrations for each story. I’m sure that made the anthology more expensive to produce, but it added a ton of flavor to the overall effect.

Poems, Diana Wynne Jones, ed. Isobel Armstrong. In my defense, when I spent a year on my Diana Wynne Jones project, re-reading all of her work (and catching the few bits I hadn’t read before) in memorial for her passing, this collection of her poetry hadn’t yet been published.

As her sister Isobel (who served as editor) notes in the introduction, the poetry is for the most part not much like her novels. It seems to have arisen from a different impulse; she apparently wrote most of it in the periods of depression that inevitably followed on finishing a book. None of it has rocketed to the top of my short list of poems that deeply move me, but I did enjoy reading it — for one thing, she and I seem to have shared a love of form, despite it being somewhat out of fashion these days. I think I was most struck by the paired villanelle and sestina that were clearly her taking two runs at “The Song of Amergin,” and specifically Robert Graves’ rendition thereof. As someone shopping around my own poem based on the same inspiration, it was profoundly interesting to see what she did with it, especially with the two versions to compare.

The Art of Prophecy, Wesley Chu. Over and over again it happens: I’ll go through a period where I bounce off a lot of books and start wondering if I’m just not giving them enough of a chance, and then I pick up something where I don’t have to give it a chance, because it hooks me right from the get-go. Oh, right, books can do that, can’t they?

This is the start of a wuxia take on the “prophecied hero” subgenre of epic fantasy, which wastes very little time in turning that trope on its head. Ling Taishi, semi-retired war artist and grumpy old lady, gets sent to see how things are coming along with the Prophecied Hero and his training to fulfill his destiny and kill the Eternal Khan, and finds the answer is . . . not good. Things get worse from there. But they get worse with enough humor laced through to entertain me; I’m finding more and more that I actively crave that in the books I read. Not that they need to be snarky throughout — in fact, authors who lean too hard on snark often lose me — but jeez, let your characters crack a joke occasionally, or recognize the ridiculousness of the situation they’ve ended up in.

Chu does something structural here that I really appreciated, too. Lots of epic fantasies learned the wrong lesson from Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin; they give you one chapter of Character A, then one chapter of Character B somewhere else and dealing with some other plot, then one chapter of Character C . . . by the time you get back to A, you’ve forgotten what they’re doing and why you ever cared. Chu instead gives you two chapters of Taishi and Jian, then cuts away for one chapter of obviously relevant action elsewhere, then two more chapters of Taishi and Jian, then a chapter of the other significant protagonist following up on what happened in the previous break, etc. It did a lot to keep my interest strong, rather than fragmenting the narrative every which way right out of the gate. Eventually it cuts back and forth more frequently, and in places I wish it hadn’t; it would have been stronger for me if e.g. I got two chapters of stuff with Jian before shifting focus, especially when the timing of the different chapters isn’t closely pegged.

I also did have the problem later on that I just didn’t find one of the viewpoint characters terribly interesting. Villain pov rarely works for me, and while I see why it was necessary here to keep certain things from coming inexplicably out of left field, I just didn’t care as much about Qisami. Which became a problem when, toward the end of the novel, her chapters got more frequent, and the narrative executed a maneuver that makes me think I’ll be expected to care about her as the series goes forward. This went hand-in-hand with the back third of the novel feeling overstuffed: certain things (e.g. the exodus from Jiayi) were way too large for the extent to which they got shoved into the backdrop, and there were so many competing agendas, changes of plan, and betrayals as everybody started gunning for the same target that I wound up losing my feeling of momentum. Not fatally — I’ll still be happy to read onward — but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the more focused beginning.

As a side note, the map in my copy is very pretty and borderline useless. Locations that feature critically in the story, like Jiayi or Caobiu or the Grass Sea, don’t get labeled, while locations that are mentioned in passing maybe once are prominently marked for your convenience. But there’s some very cool worldbuilding, including of the landscape: the Grass Sea isn’t a poetic term for a steppe, but rather a wholly fantastical environment of towering grasses (bamboo? something else?) that form a traversable but not entirely solid mat above actual water. I’ll be interested to see whether that gets explored more in future books!

Aboriginal Tales of Australia, A.W. Reed. My family members know that I like collections of folklore from around the world, so when my parents went on a big trip to Australia and New Zealand, they brought back several books, of which this is the first. It was originally published in the ’80s, so the introduction is not quite up to current standards in terms of how it discusses Aboriginal Australian culture, but the stories themselves are fine and often entertaining. In particular, several of them are nice antidotes to any assumption that all traditional folklore features women only as passive objects or manipulative villains.

Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Peter Turchi. This book went onto my wishlist when I was on a cartography-related binge, but it turns out to only partly be about maps. It is also, or rather more, about writing, with cartography as its central metaphor. I found the analogy between them more strained at certain times than others, or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say I found it more shallow at certain times than others: “maps have blank spaces and details they leave out, and so do stories! There are conventions to how we create and read maps, and the same goes for fiction!” Etc. Like How Fiction Works from last month’s reading (and it’s worth noting that James Wood gets quoted in here), this book is far more interested in high modern and postmodern fiction than any other sort, and makes a drive-by shooting at video games along the way. But if you want a more philosophically-oriented “book about writing,” you could do worse than this one — and since it gave me a really interesting idea for how to handle the map in a possible future novel project, I can’t really complain about the time I spent reading it.

Crowned: Magical Folk and Fairy Tales From the Diaspora, Kahran and Regis Bethencourt. This is as much an art book as it is a story collection. Each tale is illustrated with photo shoots of Black children dressed up in some amazingly rococo costumes, mixing elements of modern, fantastical, and traditional African styles. I covet some of the jewelry, and the face and body painting is excellent!

The stories themselves are divided into three categories. The first includes the usual Disney suspects, heavily modified; many of the characters have new names drawn from African and African-American sources, and the plots are freely rewritten to suit modern sensibilities. I was less interested in those, though I can understand why parents might want versions they can read to their kids that don’t close said kids out of the narrative. The second category is why I acquired the book; I have relatively little in the way of African- or African-American-derived folklore in my library, so that plus the art was very tempting. (No idea if those tales are as heavily modded, since I’m less familiar with the sources — though I did notice all of John Henry’s fellow railroad workers stepping up to assist him, turning it into a parable about community and worker solidarity.) The third category, which I didn’t realize would be in here, consists of modern tales with something of a folkloric sensibility.

The stories are all brief — I read this whole book in maybe an hour or two — i.e. suited to being read out loud to small children. Even reading silently, I noticed that there’s a lot of internal rhyme and such worked into the prose, which I appreciated; I feel like many fairy tale collections, even those intended for bedtime reading, forget that there’s a special art to oral narration, one that gains from leaning on the sonic aesthetics of the language.

The authors have a previous book, Glory, which appears to be similar on the photography front, with the content focused more explicitly on Black beauty and self-image. I’m genuinely tempted to get that one just for the art!