The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal. Been meaning to read this for an age, but I’m in a mood for SF much more rarely than for fantasy. (Disclaimer: the author is a friend.)

It starts off with a hell of a bang: a meteorite strike that not only causes unthinkably massive destruction across the eastern seaboard of the U.S. (and ancillary damage elsewhere, from tsunamis and the like), but in the longer term — fifty years, give or take — is likely to cause an extinction event, due to the effect it has on the global climate. As a result, the race is on to colonize other parts of the solar system before Earth can no longer support human life . . . but since that meteorite strike happens in the 1950s, the hurdles in the path of that goal include not only technological limitations, but howling levels of racism and sexism, plus a reluctance to believe it will really be that bad and are we sure it isn’t all some secret commie plot?

So yeah, it shares a lot in common with the T.V. show For All Mankind. There are differences, though: much more of a ticking clock (this isn’t just about beating the Soviets; it’s about saving the species), less focus on queerness and more on mental health (the narrator, Elma, suffers from anxiety), etc. By dint of being a book instead of a show, it can also drop you much more deeply into the science and the technical skills involved in things like piloting, which is great if you’re me and devour that kind of verisimilitude even when you don’t know what the words mean. The narrative significance always comes through, and that’s the important part.

The Lost Steersman, Rosemary Kirstein. Whoof, we’re reaching the part of the series where it gets hard for me to talk about things without spoilers. Which I personally tend not to mind — I always say that if ruining the surprise ruins the story, then it never had much going for it in the first place — but 1) that doesn’t mean I want to impose spoilers on other people and 2) given that part of the pleasure here is piecing together the information you’re given, steerswoman-style, to figure out what’s going on, it would be a shame to wreck that unnecessarily.

But I can say that I was delighted to have a previous theory of mine confirmed (I correctly explained why a certain thing happened), and I was asking some relevant questions before the answers were provided, though I didn’t twig to everything right away — ironically, in part because I had an existing theory in my head that took me too long to let go of. Bad steerswoman-reader, no biscuit. Parts of this dragged a little for me, because it’s harder to interest me in a stretch of narrative where the protagonist is completely alone, but after that it picked up again. The real problem here is that I’ve got only one book left before I join the ranks of fans desperately hoping Kirstein will manage to finish the series one of these days . . .

Dark Woods, Deep Water, Jelena Dunato. Standalone fantasy inspired by Slavic mythology, though very loosely so.

This book is rather badly served by its cover copy, I fear. I went into it expecting the bulk of the narrative would take place at the creepy castle where guests are sacrificed to an ominous goddess; instead you don’t get there until maybe halfway through, and one of the three characters billed as being among those guests doesn’t arrive until more like the three-quarter mark. What surrounds the folkloric bit is a good deal more mundanely political — which I don’t means as a pejorative, though ultimately I wanted that stuff to be interwoven a bit more completely with the folkloric parts (especially since there was at least one bit of apparent connection that got dropped).

I did still enjoy it, mind you! And the creepy castle is very suitably creepy. I just thought I’d get more of that than I did, and I might have enjoyed the whole more had I been more appropriately cued as to what to expect.

A Lily Among Thorns, Rose Lerner. I’ve enjoyed Regency-era spy romances before, and this one’s been on my wishlist for . . . I don’t even know how long. Probably a decade or more. Compared to some of the others I’ve read, it tilts more heavily toward the “romance” side than the “spy” side; it tended to be three or four scenes of emotional bonding to one scene of intrigue, which brings us back around to why I read very little genre romance: I would care more about the emotional bonding if there were more non-romantic plot interspersed.

The plot, however, is enjoyable, even if thinner than I would prefer. It’s got more sympathy for its villains than I expected, and a very clear-eyed awareness of just how badly a woman back then could be screwed over by the law and patriarchy, no matter how secure she has tried to make herself. The hero also has an unconventional profession, being a high-end tailor whose knowledge of chemistry makes him excellent at matching dyes; he is very clothing-focused in some entertaining ways. (One of my favorite moments in here comes when he sees the heroine disguised as a man: she thinks for a moment that he’s horrified by her cross-dressing, only to realize he’s offended that whoever made the clothing for her didn’t tailor it better to help with the disguise.) I’m not sure I was wowed enough to seek out more of Lerner’s books, but this one made for a pleasant evening or two.

Nightborn: A Coldfire Prequel, C.S. Friedman. As the subtitle suggests, this is a precursor to Friedman’s Coldfire Trilogy, which I read and really enjoyed many years ago. I’ve forgotten quite a lot about those books, but that’s fine; this takes place centuries before the series, when the colonists first arrived on Erna.

With a book like this, of course, some of its key events are going to be a foregone conclusion. Therefore, at least for a reader like me — someone who knows what that conclusion is — it lives or dies by its ability to make the journey there interesting in its own right. (Yes, Star Wars prequels, I am looking at you.) I know why the seedship’s computer spent ninety years analyzing Erna before deciding to wake the colonists up from stasis; I know what they’re ultimately going to have to do about it. So the real question is: will the book make me care?

Yes, mostly. Not everything here worked for me; specifically, I didn’t care much for the extended italicized flashbacks. I imagine they’re mean to flesh out the colonists, showing their reasons for getting on a ship in the full knowledge that they’ll never see Earth again, but it felt a little awkward. (If I’m being honest, it also felt like they were meant to flesh out the book: even with them included, this is quite a short novel, and the last section turned out to be a separate novelette? short story? that Friedman wrote some years ago, which takes place six hundred years later and has to do with Tarrant, from the trilogy.) But when the characters burble about how hey, in a few days time there will be four minutes when the sun and the Core and all three moons have set and they’re going to have their first bit of actualfax true night won’t it be neat, I’m over here looking like that Edvard Munch painting — which is exactly the effect I want from something like this. And I also had a good moment of waitasec, why does your name look faintly familiar . . . OH.

The one thing I wonder about — and if anybody has read both Nightborn and the trilogy and remembers the latter better than I do, please chime in — is whether there are discrepancies between what happens here and what the trilogy says happened back then, or whether my recall has simply slipped. I actually hope the discrepancies are real! Enough time passes between colonization and Damien’s day that it would be entirely realistic for the historical record to have drifted a bit away from the truth. And that, if it indeed happened, opens up space for Friedman to not simply follow the sheet music, but to riff in ways that allow for a bit of surprise here.

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, Vol. 2, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. Second of five volumes in the not-a-series that was adapted to TV as The Untamed — I say not-a-series because the webnovel really was written as one continuous thing, not narratively divided up into five volumes, and boy howdy does that show even more here than it does with The Lord of the Rings.

Because I watched the show before reading this, I’m having a lot of thoughts about adaptation. In particular, there are two major sections in here that I think feel much more integrated to me because of how the novel approaches them; the combination of the interiority prose can bring to the table (you’re witnessing these events through the eyes of the protagonist) and where they fall in the sequence of the story makes both sections much more successful for me than they were on the screen. Which is going to have knock-on benefits for how I feel at the end, I suspect, since a thing that felt to me kind of like it came out of left field and didn’t have much to do with anything else has now been seeded much more firmly, much earlier on.

(I think. It’s been years since I watched the show, so I can’t 100% swear to how everything was sequenced there; I just remember that it was very different.)

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance, Foz Meadows. Queer political fantasy, where one of the protagonists gets shipped off into an arranged political marriage — but not with the woman he was intended to marry, because the foreign envoy, having realized he’s gay, swaps in that woman’s brother instead. Intrigue ensues.

I do like much of the worldbuilding here, which attends to differences of language, gender, and law. If I have a quibble, it’s that Tithena gets to enjoy a fairly uncomplicated status as The Good Country: unlike Ralia, it’s not sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or appalled by the notion of more than two genders. It has an aristocracy, but they don’t reserve the use of magic to themselves the way the nobles of Ralia do, and there doesn’t seem to be much class oppression in general. There’s a small amount of ableism, but heck, even Tithenai food is better. It’s not a pure paradise by any means, but its issues seem to be individual rather than systemic, rooted in specific personalities making bad or selfish choices . . . at least so far. I’ll be interested to see whether the sequel complicates that picture, since my preference tends to be for settings where there isn’t clearly one place that has made all the right cultural choices.

That’s a quibble, though, rather than a dealbreaker for me. I liked the character work in here a lot, and the way this handles trauma — which, fair warning, is very much front-loaded in the plot, so that time can be spent on the recovery process. (The book itself warns you of this, in a prefatory note.) There is recovery, though, because this is ultimately romantic fantasy, not a grimdark slog, and I am very much here for that.

Elfquest: Shards
Elfquest: Legacy
Elfquest: Huntress
Elfquest: The Wild Hunt Rereads all, picked up as canon review for my Yuletide fic. I’m not attempting to list authors/artists/etc. because this is well into the part of the series where Wendy Pini was no longer doing everything herself, and so who’s involved depends on which issue you’re looking at (and isn’t always apparent in the first place, because of how the collections are put together).

I remember not being as engaged with this later stuff, and going back through it now, that opinion stands. I generally don’t like the art as well, nor do I think it’s as high quality as it was earlier in the series; in particular, many of the artists don’t share Pini’s knack for making characters recognizable even when they’re tiny silhouettes in the background, and also there are time where I feel like the flow of the dialogue bubbles (or even their placement) is much less clear than it could be. If I am noticing those things, as someone who rarely reads comics and has never attempted to write or draw one of her own, then I suspect the flaws are non-trivial.

Story-wise, it reminds me of certain TV series after the original showrunner stepped back from close involvement: the plot concept is mostly fine, but the execution doesn’t hit as hard as I think it could have. And I get a little weary of how from here on out, practically every problem in the World of Two Moons ends up being the work of Winnowill, the Djuns, or both. I’m more interested in the smaller-scale stuff, the interpersonal conflicts where there’s not so much of an obvious villain. The issue where Cutter and Rayek work out their problems remains a favorite for me, even if the art style there plays less well in my collection’s greyscale rendition; the narrative logic behind it is strong enough on its own.

The Jasmine Throne, Tasha Suri. I love this kind of worldbuilding, where it’s less Fantasy India and more that India is the clay from which the secondary world is constructed. Not that I don’t enjoy the former as well (y’all know me), but this frees up an author to imagine whole new concepts of religion and government and so on: the temple children of the Hirana, the names given to the followers of the nameless god, the mothers of flame, and so forth. There’s some really interesting ideas in here, including some that remain intriguingly ambiguous as of the end of the first book — I’m thinking particularly of the relationship of the yaksa to the rest of the world.

If I have a complaint, it’s that here and there I felt this could have been a little tighter. Not in the way I think that comment is often meant, when said by readers who want “extraneous” (usually character-building) material to be pared away until it’s nothing but the plot, ma’am; rather that the most minor stratum of viewpoint characters wound up feeling to me like they didn’t deliver enough meat to be worth the diversion from the protagonists of more central significance. This definitely needed its major perspectives, though, to adequately show the forces at play here — it would have been much weaker if it had gone the semi-conventional route of limiting itself to the two main heroines.

Definitely interested in the second, though I probably won’t read it right away. (These days I’ve found I enjoy series better if I space their installments out a bit, rather than binging it all in one go.)

The Portuguese Affair, Ann Swinfen. Criminy, was this the wrong book to take with me to read over Christmas.

Like the previous book in the series, it felt in places like this was too much Your Tour of Sixteenth-Century History, with the protagonist there simply to observe stuff happening. This time, however, the tour covered the counter-armada England sent after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, which was supposed to destroy what remained of the Spanish fleet, put a claimant back on the Spanish-usurped throne of Portugal, and for a stretch goal, take over the Spanish control of the Azores. It failed at all three, and something like three-quarters of the pathetically terrible army assembled for these tasks died (often of dysentery, cholera, or starvation) before the survivors managed to limp back home. So for much of this book, you’re watching the English commanders botch every job they were given, while the protagonist has no ability to influence their decisions.

Nor do her own activities go much better! She also has three goals, and of those, she succeeds at one, has the second fail in basically the worst way possible, and never even gets a chance to try at the third. Then, as icing on the cake, the book ends on the cliffhanger of something else clearly having gone wrong, but you don’t get to find out what until book four. Which I have ordered, and will read . . . but I’m definitely not enjoying this as much as I did Swinfen’s Oxford Medieval Mysteries, and given that this series is nine books long, it’s possible I will nope out before the end.

All Systems Red, Martha Wells. Yes, I have finally hopped aboard the Murderbot train. And yes, it feels ironic that a series titled “The Murderbot Diaries” should operate as a pick-me-up after the previous title, but, well, here we are. Murderbot is indeed as charming as I’ve been told, and while the resolution to the mystery here felt a little unsatisfying (hinging as it does on setting details that the constrained space of a novella gave no room to provide before the reveal), that was never the selling point anyway. I have bought the next two and await their arrival.

Firekeeper’s Daughter, Angeline Boulley. Non-fantastical Anishinaabe mystery; YA, but with little of the “YA feel” that I’ve started to get burned out on — in part because of how it leans into its cultural milieu, creating different social dynamics than the ones I see in so many other YA novels. (By “cultural milieu” I’m pretty sure I mean hockey as much as I mean Anishinaabe traditions.)

It takes a while for the mystery to get rolling, though — longer than I expected, and because I’m a philistine who kinda needs some sort of genre content, fantastical or otherwise, to hook my interest, I was a little iffy on this until that finally kicked into gear. I stayed in part because I very much appreciated one particular male character being really good at respect and compassion and basically just being the poster-boy for non-toxic masculinity, plus I liked the view into Anishinaabe society.

Both of those things continue to be selling points even after the mystery gets started, and the other thing that gives this novel an unusual shape is that the protagonist, Daunis, has very culturally-rooted reasons to be leery of trusting law enforcement of any stripe. She’s not rabidly against those institutions, but she’s very aware that their priorities are not the same as hers, and she spends much of the novel trying to navigate that tension — as well as maintaining her involvement with personal aspects of her life, rather than ditching them the moment the plot shows up. This fits very well with the novel’s overall emphasis on community, and paid off in two very different, but equally fabulous, scenes involving her tribal Elders. (The one with the affidavits and the one on the ferry, for anybody who’s read this.)

There’s a sequel of sorts, but in this case I’m glad to see that instead of being the further adventures of Daunis, instead it centers on her twin nieces who have a side role in this book. Since this one is set retrospectively in 2004 — sorry, but I can’t make myself call it historical fiction; my brain throws a rod when I try — the next can leap forward ten years or so to when the nieces are teenagers. The sample chapter at the back makes it clear that Daunis will be appearing in it as their cool twenty-something auntie, and I’m hoping it might throw me a bone re: something that was left appropriately unresolved here but dammit I want some later closure for it.

The Hacienda, Isabel Cañas. Gothic fantasy set in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence. Beatriz marries Don Rodolfo and moves to his hacienda hoping that this will provide security for herself and her mother after the death of her father, but the house turns out to be . . . if I say “haunted” that implies there’s a ghost in it, when the problem is in fact far more pervasive than that. (Cañas explicitly cites The Haunting of Hill House as an inspiration.)

I was drawn to this far more for the historical context than the Gothic-ness of it, which I’m personally less interested in; the result is that I can’t say for sure if the pacing in the middle was boggy or if it was just me not being quite the right audience for the material. I do wish Andrés’ thread of the narrative had felt a little more integrated with Beatriz’s — it jumps around in time a lot, and doesn’t have quite the “puzzle pieces falling into place” feeling I want when it’s showing us material from years ago — and that Juana hadn’t basically left the stage for so long a span, as I didn’t feel as engaged with either of those characters as I wanted to. Ultimately I don’t regret reading this, but I’m not sure if I’m inspired to seek out more — at least, not if future novels are also Gothic.

In November of last year, seeing how many novels by Native American authors had piled up on my wish lists, I decided to spend the entire month reading only those. It was an interesting experience, giving me the chance to see patterns that might otherwise have slipped past me, but I said at the end that I was unlikely to repeat the experiment — in part because it meant saving up those authors for a concentrated binge, rather than just reading them whenever.

And indeed, since then I’ve been reading them whenever. But as November drew close this year, I realized my wish lists also contained quite a lot of nonfiction about Native American subjects. Given that I’ve been craving nonfiction a bit, I decided it was reasonable to binge that instead.

It’s wound up a smaller binge than I originally envisioned, because I maaaaay have also been lured in by Baldur’s Gate 3 this month. >_> But still, it’s given me the impetus to read some things that have been languishing for a while, and that’s good. Let’s get to it!

Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles, Beth Pickens. Rather obviously not part of this month’s theme; it’s just that the audiobook hold came in right at the start of the month. It also comes with an asterisk, in that I skimmed parts of this — yes, even though it was an audiobook. I skipped ahead in sections where what she was saying was either very familiar or not really applicable to me, and I bypassed a good portion of one chapter entirely. Still, I’m reporting on it because it may be of use to others.

This is not, as I’d hoped, a book about “creative hurdles” in the sense of things like burnout. Instead Pickens, who is a job counselor working specifically artists, is addressing people — especially people with some variety of marginalized identity — who are facing difficulties of other varieties. She talks about how to make time for your art, how to approach the question of money, imposter syndrome, arting about personally traumatic subjects, engaging with your artistic community, and so forth. Being Jewish, she speaks approvingly of having some kind of Sabbath day where you don’t do work (even if it’s hard to get time for your art in the first place), and I also liked her suggestion of choosing one day each month that is allocated for personal administration, i.e. this is when you do things like schedule doctor’s appointments. The most valuable bit in here for me was probably the part where she talks about why artists have trouble being as productive as they want during retreats and residencies, and what techniques you can use to ease yourself more effectively into those situations.

So, yeah: ultimately not what I thought it would be, and not as much use to me as I’d hoped, but possibly exactly what others may need!

Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World, Miguel León-Portilla. There’s not a ton of actual poetry in here because we don’t have a ton of surviving indigenous documents from the pre-contact and peri-contact periods. But this is still a reasonably substantial book because León-Portilla is interested in giving you more than just the bare bones: after an introduction in which he talks about things like what our documentary sources are and how sure we can be that the poems attributed to specific individuals are actually their work, each subsequent chapter gives you as detailed a biographical sketch as possible about the poet and an analysis of their work, before delivering the poem(s), first in Nahuatl, then in English. The poets are grouped regionally, too, e.g. those from Texcoco and its environs, then Tenochtitlan, etc. There’s only one female poet because of the vagaries of what’s survived that has specific attribution (as opposed to “by a woman from Tlaxcala”), but León-Portilla is clear that there are plenty of references to women as poets, even if their work doesn’t survive.

The poems themselves . . . well. I won’t say I find most of them amazing, but there are a lot of obstacles in the way of that. Poetry of any kind is hard to translate in ways that preserve its effect; it gets harder when the surviving manuscripts don’t actually give you line breaks or any discussion of Nahuatl poetic aesthetics, such that the translator also has to guess at how to approach them even in the original. Lots of stuff in here feels like a non sequitur from the previous line, though León-Portilla’s prefatory notes do what they can to smooth out the context, e.g. glossing who a particular named individual is or the fact that people from a certain town were reputed to be drunkards. But the main effect you get from this, whether you like the poetry or not, is a sense that the Mexica and their neighbors were not simply All About War (let alone All About Human Sacrifice): they valued poetry, they had melancholy things to say about how transitory everything in this world is, their rulers (many of the poems are attributable to rulers) sometimes wished they could just be left to enjoy the aesthetic life instead.

Central American Mythology: Captivating Myths of Gods, Goddesses and Legendary Creatures of Ancient Mexico and Central America, Matt Clayton. I almost decided not to buy this book when I saw how short it was: only forty-three pages, and it turns out to be forty-three pages of not very small font and margins, either. But I went ahead and got it anyway because crucially, “Central American mythology” here does not mean “Aztec and Mayan mythology.” He has separate books for those groups — one per; they’re not even lumped together — while this is about other Central American peoples, ones in Panama and Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and a few from Mexico that are not the usual Triple Alliance-adjacent suspects. I would still love something meatier than forty-three pages, but as with the Peruvian book I read last month, however slight this is, it’s more than I had before.

Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache, Keith H. Basso. We read the titular article (of four) from this book back when I was in graduate school, and the most succinct praise I can give it is to say I still remembered it nigh on twenty years later, with enough warmth that I sought the book itself out. (In fact, this title was Reason Number One I decided to focus on non-fiction regarding Native American topics this month.)

It’s a little tough to be concise in summarizing what Basso is getting at here, because it’s something very different from what many of us are used to. The Western Apache of Cibecue and its environs have a very high density of place-names, some of which are descriptive of the landscape itself, others of which commemorate specific events (my favorite of the latter is, and I’m not making this up, “Shades of Shit”). Furthermore, these place-names all have one or more associated narratives, which do things to record tribal history and cultural values. And this all feeds into how the Western Apache think about history and the landscape around them, and how they leverage those things for use in daily life, offering oblique reproof to someone who’s behaving badly by telling a particular (place-associated) story or congratulating them on having finally returned from a place that evokes their errors. Furthermore, because all of these things are linked with specific locations, any time the individual passes by there they’ll be reminded of the lesson, or they can visualize it and the story in their mind’s eye, and all of this leads to the Apache talking about places as spots from which you can “drink” wisdom like water, or saying things about a particular mountain “stalking” them, i.e. serving as a constant prod to behave well.

Me, I find this fascinating, especially since one of the things Basso discusses in passing is how disconnected from place the modern world tends to make many of us. I’m curious what things are like in Cibecue now, since this book is several decades old — though Basso mentions at the end that the fieldwork behind it was conducted decades before the book was finished, and he notes the evolution of this tradition over time, e.g. the coining of new place-names and the adaptation of usage to things like newer housing developments. It’s a welcome reminder that culture doesn’t have to stay fossilized in past forms for the heart of it to survive. Parts of this book get moderately academic in tone, but if you can digest those or are willing to skim past them, I think the parts that document how this practice is conducted (and how Basso came to understand it) are very readable for a non-anthropological audience.

Cahokia and the North American Worlds, Sarah E. Baires. Another extremely short book, but unlike the mythology one above, this one is densely academic: its sixty-two pages are followed by a full twenty-five pages of bibliography. It is, in fact, just a longish academic article published under separate cover — and when I realized what I had picked up, I honestly probably should have bailed. It’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t have even read in graduate school unless I were writing a paper on the subject, especially since I wouldn’t call this particularly well-written on the level of prose and aesthetics. (It fared quite poorly on the heels of reading Basso’s book.)

But, well, I’m bloody-minded, and I persevered. So it was kind of a blast from my own archaeology-studying past, coupled with “huh, so that’s where academic jargon has gone in the last fifteen years.” Despite not liking it very much, I may hang onto it on the vague notion that it would be useful for the alternate history I will probably never write. At less than a hundred pages even with the bibliography, it isn’t like it takes up much real estate on the bookshelf.

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, William Cronon. This is, at its heart, the ecological study the title implies: a look at how the flora and fauna and natural phenomena like flooding changed during the period of colonization in New England. But (in part because precise documentation is thin), in order to get at those aspects, Cronon has to look far more broadly, at things ranging from the political effects of disease on Native American communities to the concepts of property used by the different societies — I particularly liked his note on the latter that to say the Indians had no concept of private property as the English did is to misrepresent English notions of property almost as badly as Indian ones.

It does make for something of a bleak read, though. Because even if you took the racism out of the picture, the Christian assumption that humans were meant to “improve” and master the land and if you didn’t do that in ways the English recognized it then you clearly had no ownership, even the greed that drove them to despoil the region at a truly astonishing rate . . . it would be really, really tough to make even the benevolent establishment of an English colony be non-destructive to what was there before. Not only the diseases they brought, but the invasive species that rode along in the fodder for their livestock and emerged in their dung, the lack of defenses by local plants to the kind of intensive grazing brought on by cattle instead of deer, the ways in which trying to make the landscape support the English agricultural/pastoral lifestyle meant transforming said landscape in ways that had knock-on effects: all of these and more were inevitably going to change things, and thereby change the lives of the indigenous people whose lives were built around what had been before.

But also the racism and the religious ethnocentrism and the greed. I’m never going to look at clapboard architecture again without remembering that style of architecture is born out of the flagrantly wasteful use of New England forests, as if they would never run out.

The Warden, Daniel M. Ford. Took a break from the nonfiction for this one, because it was sent to me for blurbing and the deadline was December 1st.

This is a very D&D-ish fantasy without quite feeling like an RPG. There are elves and dwarves and gnomes and orcs; there are wizards trained in sub-schools like Abjuration and Evocation and Necromancy. There are not spell slots (thank god; the one Forgotten Realms novel I read that had a wizard protagonist had to lurch painfully around how to discuss that in an in-world fashion), but spells do exist in numerical rders, the higher the order the harder the spell, and casting too many orders of spells in one day is very tiring. So: a distinct D&D flavor.

But it’s livened up by a good sense of humor and more attempt than I see in most novels of this type to pay attention to realism and logistics. The heroine, Aelis, despite being from a wealthy noble family, upon graduation from her wizard school to a godforsaken rural village on the edge of the lands the central kingdoms are attempting to reclaim after losing them to an orcish invasion a generation ago. I like the way the history behind that is doled out here — no infodumps; just bits and pieces of information coming up when the characters would naturally think about or discuss them — and I wonder if the series will eventually give information on why the orcs invaded, since that kind of thing is usually driven by disaster or other invaders back wherever used to be home. Given that orcs are conspicuously treated as not being the bestial savages of traditional D&D fiction and Ford is clearly interested in asking those kinds of questions, I suspect the answer is yes.

We’ll probably also find out whether (as I expect) the deeper underlayer behind the problems Aelis encounters is tied with a certain enemy closer to home . . . but that absolutely does not get answered in this book, which ends with far more of an honest-to-god cliffhanger than I’m used to seeing nowadays. I’m not going to say “don’t buy this until the next one is out” because I know that’s a good way to kill a series and sometimes a career, but do be aware you will close the covers on the exact opposite of a note of resolution.

Dream Drawings: Configurations of a Timeless Kind, N. Scott Momaday. At this point I was traveling, which put a dent in my ability to read the non-fiction I’d gathered for this month (most of which seems not to be available in ebook from my library, and I’d already paid for print copies). But my library system has a lot of Momaday’s works, and I liked the one I’d read last year (The Way to Rainy Mountain), so I used this to partially fill the gap.

It’s officially a poetry collection, though the lineated poems in here are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the prose poems, quite a few of which dance around in the fuzzy zone between that genre and flash fiction. All are very short — no more than a page, even in ebook being read on my phone — and often quite meditative. They also range all over in terms of content, with Momaday being just as apt to write about Billy the Kid or Beowulf or Bucephalus as, say, the last Sun Dance performed by his people, the Kiowa. I didn’t love all of them, but I’m seriously considering buying a copy of this for my shelf.

Laǩhóta: An Indigenous History, Rani-Henrik Andersson and David C. Posthumus. My knowledge of Native American communities is like 95% ethnographic and 5% historical, and that might be a generous estimate. So a book like this, which takes a particular group and focuses on significant people, events, and movements over a span of time, is very helpful.

Mind you, the first section of this is still pretty ethnographic, as it spends three chapters on describing traditional Laǩhóta life prior to forced settlement on the reservations. The next six chapters, though, which make up the bulk of the book, cover the history from initial contacts with white men through to the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. The final four chapters then shift back to a more theme-organized focus to talk about twentieth- and twenty-first-century history, covering topics like relations with the federal government, language, spirituality, and more.

As you might expect, this does not always make for a cheery experience in reading. While I very much appreciate the authors’ attention to the concerns, desires, and agency of Laǩhóta individuals, rather than solely depicting them as the passive victims of white aggression — which includes acknowledging the extent to which the Laǩhóta themselves acted as expansionist aggressors against their neighbors such as the Crow and the Arikara — still, the trajectory here is distinctly downward for a good long while, before picking up again circa the 1960s with a re-embrace of tribal identity and traditions. I am rarely as interested in anybody’s twentieth- and twenty-first history as I am in older stuff, but the insight into the various and sometimes conflicting dynamics between movements was quite valuable.

The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems, N. Scott Momaday. Another poetry collection because I could get it in ebook. This is the inverse of the previous one, in that it is mostly lineated poetry with the occasional bit of prose interspersed; it is also substantially longer — though still, because poetry, not all that long of a book. Oddly, the slowest part for me to get through was the cycle of one hundred haiku (or senryu or zappai or whatever; I’m not interested in getting hung up on precise terminology) about midway through the book, because however short they were individually, zooming through them all together felt like it would be doing them a disservice. I didn’t notice any overlap between this and the other collection, though, so if you decide you like or are interested in Momaday’s poetry, you can pick up both of these without concern for repetition.