Short list for me this month. I did not have a ton of brain for reading, and then the latter part of the month got devoured by 1) preparing for Worldcon and 2) being at Worldcon. (Normally it wouldn’t be so bad, but running a table in the dealers’ hall entails a lot of stock counting, packing stuff for transport, and prepping ancillary materials like booth decorations.)

Death on the Caldera, Emily Paxman. There’s been a minor surge in “fantasy on trains” lately, and I am here for it! Though this one is only briefly on the train, as an accident soon derails it and leaves the characters trying to solve the mystery of both the crash and the ensuing murders while stranded in a hostile environment. I think I wanted a bit more on both the mystery and hostile-environment fronts, but there’s not a ton of room to develop those things when you’re also dealing with several different magic systems and the politics around witches, who are welcomed and honored in some places and very much not in others, and are almost certainly responsible for the crash.

The witches were an interesting twist! In this world, they’re a Jekyll-and-Hyde setup: a normal human woman — they’re all women — may also have a witch self, which takes over when someone else utters her witch name, and reverts to her human self when that name is spoken instead. It takes time and effort for those two halves to even remember what the other side has been doing, and they’re reliant upon/vulnerable to other people switching them back and forth. I feel like it may have been slightly too complicated of a concept to play nice with the plot premise of the crash and subsequent murders, though, at least at the length of this novel; both elements felt a little short-changed by the need to fit in the other material at the same time. This is clearly a setup for a longer series, so possibly, with the groundwork in place, later novels will feel more balanced.

(BTW, I have zero reason to think Paxman read my Doppelganger novels, but the combination of “all witches are women” and “they exist in bifurcated halves” certainly did remind me of those.)

The Library of Amorlin, Kalyn Josephson. Do not go into this expecting much library-ness; the titular Library is much more of a menagerie with some books. That’s not a flaw, just something to set your expectations around. (“The Librarian” is admittedly a much more attractive title for the male lead than “the Zookeeper” would be.)

This is an odd world where ordinary animals have nearly gone extinct, replaced by magical beasts that are variously useful and dangerous. Different kingdoms respond to them differently, and the Library is responsible for dealing with problems when beasts wander where they shouldn’t be and/or attack humans. The protagonist comes from a realm where beasts are universally hunted and killed; as a criminal, she’s been sentenced to the front lines of that fight. But someone approaches her with a deal: if she infiltrates the Library, replacing the woman who’s supposed to be sent as the Librarian’s new assistant, and helps get the current Librarian removed from power — thereby furthering the agenda of her kingdom, which hates what the Library stands for — then she’ll be pardoned of her crimes.

Overall I liked the book, but a few things niggled at me. Of course you know going in that Kasira is working for the bad guys and will ultimately not wind up serving their interests, but that pivot takes a while to happen, and I wasn’t quite sold well enough on her reasons for staying the course. She’s traumatized by being kept in solitary confinement (but not nearly as traumatized as she should be, given that we’re told she was there for years) and fears going back, plus she thinks the people at the Library will immediately turn on her when she’s unmasked. Which is generally reasonable, but something about the presentation of it just wasn’t quite persuasive enough to keep me from being mildly irritated as she passed up one opportunity after another to come clean and ally with the Library.

The narrative also regularly fudges her point of view: more than once, Kasira engineers a situation to ingratiate herself and earn trust from those at the Library, but the reader doesn’t know until well into the scene (or even after it) that she arranged the whole thing. I would have liked to see the book use Allaster’s viewpoint more often; that would have gotten around that issue while also developing him more as a character — though then the fact that he’s hiding a secret, and the reader doesn’t know the full story of it until the end, might have been harder to dodge.

So anyway, I had a lot of quibbles here, but none of them added up to me quitting the book or vowing not to read the sequel. The world is interesting, I want to know what’s up with the kingdom that’s gone incommunicado, and none of my gripes were deal-breakers.

The Last Contract of Isako, Fonda Lee. I know many people who love the Green Bone Saga, but I am so profoundly allergic to stories about organized crime that I just could not get into Jade City no matter how good the writing was. (Vargo in the Rook and Rose trilogy is Alyc’s creation, and the parts of his narrative that focus on the gang end of things were usually not my favorite bits to write.) This book, therefore, gave me a chance to try out something of a different flavor!

Mind you, I’m not super enthused by corporate plots, either, so that bit was an uphill climb. I was more here for the worldbuilding — especially the fact that Lee commits to and does not back down from the harshness of a more realistic terraforming situation than I normally see in SF. The process takes centuries and is nowhere near being done; in the meanwhile, it’s a situation where resources like oxygen and heat are extremely limited. And so people who can no longer contribute to the success of the colony’s efforts are incentivized to “resign”: they walk out into the lethal landscape, and how far they get before they die is celebrated as a marker for the progress of the terraforming. Their surviving family members get their resignation bonuses, and later, when the domed city expands to encompass where they fell, they’re memorialized by having streets and the like named for them.

Of course, this is far from an egalitarian process. The whole planet is a company town, and the directors and board members get to enjoy life-extending treatments or even a second life in a cyborg body, along with greater rations of resources. But even if you were able to transform the colony into a utopia (and this is very much not the kind of story where that’s going to happen), there still would fundamentally not be enough resources to go around. And there are other neat elements to the worldbuilding, too, like “kiths” people belong to that form a second kind of non-biological family, and raising kids on behalf of bio-parents is a vital line of work. There’s also the weird cognitive dissonance of greenhouse gases being exactly what everybody needs to produce more of, to aid the terraforming efforts.

I’ve got Breath of the Dragon, Fonda Lee’s collaboration with Shannon Lee, on my TBR, and I really need to check that one out — fantasy being much more my speed than SF!

Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman, trans. Erica Moore and Elizabeth Manton, narr. Rutger Bregman and Thomas Judd. It took me quite a while to get through this one in ebook, but it was worth it.

Bregman’s core thesis is that, contrary to all the sources we have telling us that humans are inherently selfish and violent, we’re actually inherently generous and kind. The first part of this book systematically works through some of our most famous narratives for People Are Terrible — Lord of the Flies, the environmental devastation of Rapa Nui, the murder of Kitty Genovese, psych studies like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment, etc. — and debunks them: the actual Tongan boys who wound up in a Lord of the Flies situation survived through intense cooperation and support; Rapa Nui was devastated by rats rather than human wastefulness; people did call in Genovese’s murder and were there for her in her final moments; the experiments had a heavy thumb on the scales, misrepresented what the data actually said, or both.

But of course, we do not live in a utopia. So why do people act badly, as they so obviously do? Building on the first part, Bregman shows that many of the usual explanations are wrong. For example, though the Nazis famously claimed they were “just following orders,” the actual evidence shows that the leadership were motivated to propose ever-more horrible plans out of a desire to impress Hitler; Milgram’s participants were more likely to quit pushing the button when they were nakedly ordered to do so. Most of them kept going because they thought they were making an important contribution to science that would help people in the long run. All too often, bad actions arise out of good impulses: our kindness and generosity, our loyalty to the people around us, can be leveraged to encourage us toward horrible acts.

One of the only bits of received wisdom that still holds water in this book is “power corrupts”: yes, it does, absolutely. The minute you put someone in a position of power, the odds that they will begin to abuse it rise noticeably, even if they were a decent person before. And, of course, leadership often attracts people who aren’t decent. (The average terrorist is a normal person who thinks they’re fighting for a good cause, but the average terrorist leader is a genuine psychopath.)

The final section of the book is simultaneously the most delightful and the hardest to swallow. Bregman turns his attention to efforts that aim to leverage our good qualities, rather than controlling our bad ones: alternative approaches to incarceration and criminal rehabilitation, alternative schools (the usual model is practically designed to produce bullying), alternative corporate structures, etc. These things sound incredibly naive and Pollyanna-ish, and it’s hard to wrap your brain around the fact that . . . they work? If you can let go of the feeling that We Need to Punish Criminals, you can massively reduce recidivism and get fewer criminals in the long run. If you stop punching Nazis (which makes them feel tough) and instead turn their annual march into a fundraiser for de-radicalization charities, the Nazis stop marching. A key part of the dismantling of FARC in Colombia literally involved putting Christmas trees out in the forest with notes about how your mother would love for you to come home.

And the narratives matter. I have long been extremely tired of post-apocalyptic worlds that assume an instant and inevitable descent into dog-eat-dog tribalism, because I know that’s not what we see during actual disasters. But Bregman also shows how much things like our news media reporting terrible behavior measurably increases terrible behavior, while stories of cooperation and charity up the likelihood that people will cooperate and be charitable. That doesn’t mean every story needs to be a cozy thing in which everyone is nice all the time, but it does mean I’m taking a good hard look at what motivations we ascribe to characters and what strategies we show as being successful.

Death on the Cherwell, Mavis Doriel Hay. Sonya Taaffe mentioned this in passing as making a pair with Gaudy Night for mysteries taking place in the same year at fictional Oxford women’s colleges, so when I saw the library had it in ebook, I picked it up! This is much slighter than Gaudy Night and not so concerned with having an overt conversation about feminism, scholarship, and so forth, but the first half in particular feels extremely Nancy Drew, in a charming way: a group of undergraduate girls are about to pronounce a hex on their collage’s disliked bursar when they find her dead. Ultimately those girls are only part of the investigation, and not the load-bearing one at the end; it is a police officer who finds the culprit, though aided by some information the girls provided. It’s a great look at then-contemporary college life, though, from a number of different perspectives.

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.

The Tricky Business of Faerie Bargains, Reena McCarty. Something about the marketing of this one — the cover art, the cover copy, and so forth — made me think it’s a cozy novel. It absolutely is not. Which isn’t to say it’s grimdark, because it isn’t that, either; just that the stakes here are higher than cozy reaches for, and the trials the characters go through have sharper edges.

Which for me was a good thing, because I was extremely uncertain if I was going to like a cozy book about the fae. (That tips over into twee with shocking ease.) So I was very pleased to instead get a novel in a world where fae have always been known to exist, but Europe has largely — and deliberately — destroyed its own Otherworld, while the U.S. has set up strict laws governing how people are and are not permitted to make deals with the fae. The faerie courts are not the familiar Seelie and Unseelie, but they absolutely have their own politics, which unsurprisingly turn out to underlie the small-scale disaster the protagonist is trying to set right.

The fae themselves are pleasingly alien (even if I find the human-sounding ones like “Sloan” rather distracting). There’s just enough echo of dysfunctional human patterns like narcissism to keep their weirdness from feeling random, and McCarty does a good job of selling the idea that the fae simply do not have the same priorities and mentalities as mortals do. The ending was particularly effective in that regard!

Below the Root, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Discussed elsewhere.

The Murderer’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. I continue to gravitate toward shorter books at the moment, which is probably contributing to how many mysteries I’ve been reading lately.

By this point in the series, it is well established that the first scene will be from the viewpoint of the title character. So when you name your book The Murderer’s Tale . . . yeah, Frazer is not faking you out. From the start, you know who the killer will be, and you can very rapidly guess who the victim will be, too. The killer is an unpleasant piece of work, thoroughly convinced of his own superior significance and misreading the motivations of everybody around him, who of course are lesser. Though I thought it was a deft touch when you see him being judgmental toward certain characters, and then soon after that you’re in Frevisse’s perspective and seeing her be judgmental toward them, too. Class distinctions are very real to these people. But this one really does read like a tragedy, because you see what’s coming, it shouldn’t happen, and of course you can’t stop it.

A Case of Mice and Murder, Sally Smith. A newer mystery, set in 1901 London, about a barrister of the Inner Temple very comfortably settled into his routine, who gets piked out of it because the Lord Chief Justice has been murdered — within the Temple! — and the guy in charge of the place is extremely motivated to get the case solved as discreetly as possible. I very much like the central conceit here, which hinges on the fact that the Inner Temple’s governance means the City of London police can only intervene there if asked; since the Temple is very much an elite bastion of the sort that thinks scandal is the kind of thing that should only happen to other people, having an insider investigate is exactly how such men would handle even a murder.

And Gabriel Ward is a congenial detective, very nerdy and obsessed not only with the law but with a whole array of historical tidbits. I like how Smith handles his very obvious OCD: another book might have made more emotional hay out of the stress and pressure of the condition, but Gabriel has long since arranged his life in ways that accommodate it. He does, over time, become more aware of the restrictions it places on him, but since he’s a well-off gentleman cushioned by his residence in the Temple, it is not really a source of angst. It’s just how his life works.

I enjoyed this one enough that I started out listening to it in audiobook and then transferred to ebook, not because the narrator was bad — I liked him, despite fluctuating volume levels that sometimes made the quiet bits difficult to hear — but because I have approximately 1-2 hours of audiobook listening time in a given week, and I didn’t want to wait that long to get the whole story!

Cinder House, Freya Marske. This is the point at which I pivoted to reading the Hugo-nominated short fiction categories. I also read the short stories and novelettes this month, but since those weren’t published under separate cover, they don’t get tracked here.

It takes a fair bit of effort to make a Cinderella retelling feel original, but Marske manages it well — starting with the fact that the protagonist gets murdered at the start of the novella and spends the rest of it as a ghost haunting the house now held by her stepmother and stepsisters. Marske also adds in a fresh layer by giving the prince his own story, with a curse that belongs nowhere in the original while fitting well into the general shape of fairy tale tropes. Be warned that there’s some fairly heinous abuse here, quite apart from the murder; it turns out there are ways to torture a ghost who is more or less coterminous with the house she haunts, and one of the stepsisters eagerly explores those. The ending, however, finds a lovely and unusual resolution for the core problems.

Murder by Memory, Olivia Waite. SFnal murder mystery in space, aboard a vessel that’s not so much a generation ship as a reincarnational one: people regularly save their memories to data “books” and upload the contents to their new body after their old one dies. The crux here is that someone has been murdered at the same time that several books were destroyed, with many complications ensuing.

I do tend to engage less with SF titles, but given the mystery kick I’m on right now, this one fit right in with my current mood. I enjoyed it a lot, even if I’m not sure it stands out in a way that would make me say it’s award-worthy. There’s another one out in the series and a third one on the way; I may well hunt them out.

Automatic Noodle, Annalee Newitz. Also SF, this time firmly in the cozy corner. In the aftermath of a war that saw California win independence from the United States, robots have their freedom . . . sort of. They’re still discriminated against in a number of ways, many of which pose problems for a group of bots who want to open a restaurant.

I am extremely hit or miss with cozy books, because sometimes the warm fuzziness winds up making the perils feel a bit too toothless for my taste. Here, Staybehind lists at the outset several things that could go badly wrong, and then almost none of them happen. I suspect that actually dealing with those would have required this to be a novel, not a novella, and also it would have been markedly less cozy.

The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar. This, on the other hand, is so firmly up my alley that I might as well have painted a target on myself. Folkloric-mood novella based on a murder ballad, with a central motif that plays off the connections between language and magic? YES PLEASE. And the writing is a lyrical (without being overwrought) as usual. If Amal wants to write another six of these, all riffing on different ballads, I will be first in line for them.

And All Between, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Discussed elsewhere.

The Summer War, Naomi Novik. Last of the novellas, and I’m a little puzzled: in the Hugo packet it gets labeled as a “sample,” and there’s a link to request the whole thing on Netgalley. I wasn’t minded to create an account just to do that, so I figured I would read what’s here . . . and it feels like it’s all but maybe the last two pages? Anybody who’s read the full thing, I’d love to know how much the sample cuts off.

Anyway, I was feeling jaundiced because of that whole “sample” business, but this won me over. There’s a tenuous peace between Faerie and the mortal world, but given the way faerie memory works, that means almost nothing: the events that set off the original war are as fresh today as the day they happened. The main character winds up in the thick of that, of course, and has to figure out how to protag from within very constrained circumstances.

The pacing of this one did feel a little odd to me, in that it spends a lot of time on setting the stage before we get to the main act. In ways I understand — without that setup, much of the resolution would be less satisfying — but it took me a bit longer to get into it as a result.

Until the Celebration, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Discussed elsewhere.

A Case of Life and Limb, Sally Smith. Second of the Gabriel Ward mysteries, and the last for now, though there’s a third coming next year. While eventually you get a murder here, much of the novel concerns someone sending packages with desiccated body parts to an assortment of men in the Inner Temple. (There’s an entertaining discussion about whether this is even a crime, under the laws of the era.) Gabriel is once again tasked to investigate lest — oh, the horror — the journalists of Fleet Street find out and splash it all over their papers.

I should note that each book also involves some trial Gabriel is involved in, with the investigation taking away from the precious time he needs to prepare for that. I like that his trials are not murder trials; the first concerns a very tangled question of intellectual property rights around a beloved children’s book, and this one concerns a defamation case brought by a popular stage entertainer. Topsy Tillotson is a delightful character, and I like how getting involved in her situation causes the rather mousy Gabriel to grow some unexpected teeth. (In my head he is played by Eddie Marsan, specifically channeling Mr. Norrell, sans that character’s less admirable qualities.)

One other note I want to make, though, I’ll put behind rot-13 — not because it’s directly spoilery, but because it might prejudice a reader’s thoughts in spoilery directions: Gur jnl gung Tnoevry’f pheerag pnfr unf gb or gvrq va fbzrubj jvgu gur pevzr jvaqf hc aneebjvat gur svryq bs aneengvir cbffvovyvgvrf snveyl funecyl. Bs pbhefr vg jbhyq srry n yvggyr enaqbz vs vg jrera’g pbaarpgrq, ohg abarguryrff, gur aneebjvat fyvtugyl qvfncbvagf zr.

Over the years I’ve picked up a few books by Zilpha Keatley Snyder that I remembered loving as a kid — specifically, The Egypt Game and The Velvet Room. But the one I kept wondering about was Below the Root and its sequels (And All Between and Until the Celebration), which form the Green Sky trilogy, and recently I found I could get them all in ebook from my library. So I did a binge!

And (like I did for the Seven Citadels quartet), I want to talk about whether they held up. In this case, though, the answer is “no, sort of, but not really, except for the bits that do.”

Be warned that Here Be Spoilers. Partly because I can’t talk about what does and doesn’t work here without getting into them, but also because honestly, you’ll see most of the twists coming three miles off. So it doesn’t feel like there’s much to spoil.

***

Background first, and this is part of what does work. The setting here is indeed as imaginative as I remember: a world with low enough gravity that the Kindar (a human population) live high in giant trees and glide to lower levels in wing-suits called shubas. They eat a vegetarian diet of fruit, nuts, tree mushrooms, and so on; they make tools out of the hard, sharp beaks shed by local birds; they make furniture out of tendrils of the Wissenvine that can be easily shaped while living, then harden very rapidly when cut. Their books are embroidered on silk, with disposable texts being scratched onto large leaves. Young adults who haven’t yet bonded with a mate live in communal youth halls; it’s implied that they sleep around as they please, with contraceptive “youth wafers” keeping them from having kids until they want to. Their news is spread by newsingers who stand at major intersections along the branchpaths and cry out announcements to passers-by.

They also have psychic gifts of various sorts: pensing (telepathy), kiniporting (telekinesis), grunspreking (plant control), and others that have been lost for a long time. Even those main gifts are in decline; most children lose the ability long before they reach adulthood, though in the past even grown-ups retained them strongly enough to achieve great deeds.

It is an extremely hippie society. (The trilogy was published in the late ’70s.) Children go to Gardens for classes in topics like Love, Joy, and Peace. Their society doesn’t know violence; while obviously they understand that death exists, they don’t have the verb “kill,” and it’s shockingly vulgar for someone to say “I’ll dead you!” as a non-serious threat. They don’t have words for negative emotions like anger, either, except to say that someone is unjoyful.

The main fly in the ointment is the Pash-shan. The Kindar are terrified of the forest floor below, because horrible monsters exist below ground, trapped there by the magical Root of the Wissenvine which was — in a great act of grunspreking — grown across the entire surface of the planet to hold them back. Sometimes Kindar who fall or venture too low are never seen again, because the Pash-shan reach out through the Root to grab them and kill them.

. . . yeah. No prizes for guessing there are no Pash-shan: only a population of humans exiled there long ago by the leaders of the Kindar. The people who go missing are the ones who saw something down below they shouldn’t have, or asked too many questions; they get exiled below the Root by a secret cabal within the priestly class that rules the Kindar, the Ol-zhaan.

In fact, quite a few things about Kindar society are not as great as they initially seem. Their birthrate has been dropping for a long time now, and increasing numbers of Kindar are falling victim to a “wasting” that sounds a lot like major depressive disorder. They aren’t merely encouraged toward harmony and peace; showing negative emotion of any kind is shameful, even stigmatized. Unsurprisingly, they also have a growing problem with people getting addicted to the soporific berry of the Wissenvine. The Ol-zhaan enjoy a ton of luxuries and privileges ordinary Kindar don’t get, and new recruits undergo a year of being honored and feted all over before they start taking up their training — a maneuver one of the Ol-zhaan later notes is explicitly designed to make them enjoy being treated as special and above the rest of their people.

Meanwhile, below the Root, there are different problems. The Erdlings (what the Kindar call Pash-shan) have a booming population and insufficient food — in fact, I do think the worldbuilding falls apart a bit down there, though in pursuit of interesting goals. To make them contrast with the Kindar, Snyder has them reaching out through gaps in the Root (which is magically indestructible) to set traps for animals whose flesh they eat and whose skins they make into clothes. I’m not sure the caloric economy there works, but whatever. I’m even less sure it makes sense for them to be industrialized, with metal-working and coal-burning and railcars to reach the deeper mines, a monetary economy for goods and services, and so forth. But it does make them very different from the Kindar!

***

What’s not so good here is the writing.

I don’t remember if I just gave more of a pass to the two books I re-read in previous years, or if Snyder’s writing genuinely is just worse here, but man is it not good. Possibly it’s because she was trying to reach for an elevated, High Fantasy kind of style, and instead landed on stiffness? (Though, in that ’70s way, this is revealed to actually be science fiction: the Kindar fled Earth for another planet to escape the wars there. Psionics totally count as SF instead of fantasy, doncha know.) It serves a worldbuilding purpose to have the Kindar speak of someone being “unjoyful,” but what do we gain by people engaging in their morning food-taking at the table-board? Just say they had breakfast at the table.

And there is so much repetition. Here is a direct quote from the dialogue: “I could only pense that the plans troubled D’ol Raamo. D’ol Raamo was very troubled about what they were planning to do.” That happens not only on a small scale from line to line, but on a large scale, too. Nearly the entire first half of the second book is basically a recap of the first book from different perspectives, with us wading through verbatim repetitions of dialogue, or a summary of scenes we’ve already read, or a summary of a different character reporting to somebody else about the scene they spied on.

This would be tedious enough if the first book had been jam-packed with action and we gained in richness by seeing other perspectives on those events, but . . . it really, really isn’t. I know we talk about Kids These Days having shorter attention spans and needing more action, but c’mon; in the time it takes Raamo to get to the plot, Nancy Drew would have had six thrilling encounters. The load-bearing events of the first book basically consists of: Raamo becomes Ol’zhaan, learns about the secret cabal, finds a child on the forest floor he thinks is a Kindar who escaped the Pash-shan, and learns she’s actually an Erdling. Better prose could have packed that into half the space, and left room for the events of the second book: two other characters find the way below the Root, bring back some Erdlings to try and convince the non-cabal Ol’zhaan to free them, and then when the bad guy threatens violence, everybody gets saved by a deus ex machina.

***

But then there’s the third book.

I don’t think I ever read it as a kid. Possibly I did and jettisoned it from my brain, but I was vaguely surprised to see this was the Green Sky Trilogy, and the title of the third book wasn’t at all familiar. I also remember nothing that happens in it . . . which is funny, because in some ways I think it’s better.

On the level of execution, a lot of it still isn’t very good. There is a ton of summary narration, and any notion of there being a central character — already badly tattered after the hopscotching omniscience of the second book — basically goes out the window. Tons of complex stuff just gets nodded at, and there is so much complex stuff that there’s barely any sense of narrative momentum.

But that latter happens because Snyder actually does a decent job of exploring how “hey, everybody, the monsters of your nightmares are people like you, exiled because your priestly leadership has been lying to you about the past!” does not result in instant kumbaya. Both a faction of of that priestly leadership who don’t want to give up their status, and an Erdling faction that hates them for their oppression, hive off to become radical sects opposing the reintegration of the two populations. Kindar who have spent their entire lives terrified of the forest floor cannot bring themselves to go down and meet the Erdlings who are terrified of climbing the trees. Some Erdlings embrace Kindar ways, and get ostracized by their own people as a result. There are shortages of shubas and other things the Kindar economy is not equipped to distribute to all these new people. Kindar complain in horror about smoke (which they think is instantly poisonous) coming from Erdling cookfires and about the rough games Erdling children play, which might make somebody unjoyful. Erdling parents don’t want their children taught in Kindar Gardens, where they’ll learn to repress rather than express their emotions. The dying of the Wissenvine, and with it the soporific berries, results in people who want to avoid their feelings getting addicted to a much more dangerous hallucinogenic fruit instead. Etc.

And on top of all that, two very interesting threads of tension. One involves a “tool-of-violence” — a weapon, though nobody has the word for it — that is kept by the leader of the Ol-zhaan as a lesson about the past, and also because they can’t safely destroy it. (It seems to be some kind of handheld radiation weapon.) People are horrified by it, but also some of them want to use it to destroy the people they’re afraid of so they can . . . go back to their peaceful lives where they never have to worry about violence? It’s very plausible illogic.

The other, and my favorite, has to do with that deus ex machina ending in book two. The Spirit-gifts of the Kindar and Erdlings have been waning for a long time; the story indicates this is because of the separation in their society, not just between those two populations, but between Kindar (who know only vague stories about the past), Ol-zhaan (who know the truth of it), and that secret cabal (who know about the people exiled below the Root). Unity and community appear to be necessary for the flourishing of those powers. So, when a Kindar child and an Erdling child become friends and play psionic training games together, their powers strengthen, culminating in a display of “uniforce”: the gestalt power that worked so many wonders in the past.

In the third book this results in both societies idolizing that pair as “the holy children” who will save them all. Raamo — the central character of the first book, and himself a bit more Spirit-gifted than most Kindar teenagers — has vague premonitions of the future, and he keeps futilely warning people that it is not good to hang so much expectation and responsibility on two children. It’s bad for the kids, and it’s bad for the adults, too. A chunk of the third book revolves around both extremist factions wanting to get hold of the pair and maybe do violence against them.

But — and I actively liked this part — when the two girls vanish, it’s not because either group got them. In fact, horror at the belief that their leaders might indeed have done something bad to children costs both extremist factions most of their members; meanwhile, the girls ran away with the help of some friends and have simply been hiding out this whole time. Which on the one hand was really horrible for their parents, but on the other hand, it winds up teaching everybody an extremely salutary lesson about how it’s community, not Extra Special Privileged Leadership, that is going to save them all.

***

So, yeah. Mixed bag. The worldbuilding is frequently interesting, the prose is frequently dire, the plot is lackadaisical at best, and there are some very legitimately thorny complications buried in a morass of summary narration. The Snyder estate will probably not authorize me to redo the entire thing from the ground up. I doubt I’ll feel the need to re-read them ever again, but it was — despite how often I was skim-reading — worth revisiting, for the memories and for what I’m pretty sure was entirely new to me.

Much less reading in May than in April. Partly that was because I was less in a mood for reading; partly it was because I started in on some longer, denser books that I didn’t get through before the end of the month. The latter in particular is why this post skews toward shorter, lighter reading . . .

The Antiquarian’s Object of Desire, India Holton. Third of the “Love’s Academic” series, and I’m glad to say this one felt stronger than its predecessor. It looks like I never posted about that one, so in brief: The Geographer’s Map to Romance suffered from a collision between its core trope (the romantic pair are in a marriage of convenience but estranged) and the series pattern of “the characters will spar a lot while secretly being into each other and also sure the other person doesn’t reciprocate their feelings.” In the first book that worked fine, because the leads were rivals in a contest and started out by thoroughly deceiving one another in pursuit of their goals; it therefore made sense that any signs of romance would fall under suspicion of being just another gambit. But in the second book, it required a degree of emotional stupidity on the part of the characters that I found more grating than charming.

In this third book, the trope is friends-to-lovers, which means the growing warmth between them can be interpreted in that light/suppressed because they don’t want to ruin the friendship. Meanwhile, the sparring is because the heroine’s job security will be threatened if she’s suspected of canoodling with a colleague, so they’ve agreed to fake-hate. This combination works much better than it did in the previous book. Meanwhile, though I found the magical plot to be slightly muddy in its execution, the ending was entertaining.

I think the series is complete here. Each book stands on its own, though (it’s a series in the romance model, where the volumes follow different characters), so you can skip the second one if you want. Me, I think I’ve had enough of this particular madcap flavor for a while; I overdose on it very easily.

Star*Line 49.2. I’ve gone ahead and joined the Science Fiction Poetry Association, which means I now have a subscription to their quarterly poetry journal. I don’t know that I have a ton to say about it, but poetry was a good match for my short attention span in May!

A Counterfeit Suitor, Darcie Wilde. Another of the Rosalind Thorne Regency mysteries. The mystery in this one did not pull together terribly well for me; there was never a point at which I felt the satisfying “click” of the pieces slotting into place, just “oh, okay, I guess that’s what’s going on.” The personal side was much better, with the heroine’s sordid family history rearing its head as a real threat to the life she’s built for herself.

At this point I am done with the official Rosalind Thorne series, but I’ve been told the Useful Woman series is a direct continuation under a different name. So if I want more of these, they’re available!

The Bishop’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. As mentioned before, I’m slightly sad that the last couple of books in this series have taken Frevisse out of her nunnery, because one of the things I enjoy here is the view into medieval religious life. However, the usual mystery series consideration applies: you can only have so many murders in one place! Especially when that place is supposed to be cloistered away from the world!

In this case the reason for the departure is very moving, though, and I liked the mystery. It was very obvious to me (as it probably is to many readers) just how the victim actually died — as opposed to what the characters initially think happened — but the “who” was less immediately obvious. It also built up to a moment of very effectively understated drama at the end.

The Fallow Year, Margaret Owen. Not actually a novel in the conventional sense, but at over 60K words I’m treating it like one. These are ten connected short stories Owen wrote (and posted to AO3) to cover the year that passes between the second and third books of the Little Thieves trilogy, and what goes on with Vanja and Emeric in that time. I sort of wish I’d known about these stories before I read Holy Terrors, because of course the key events here get described there. If you’re invested in the characters, though, it’s absolutely worth reading the mini-novel that explores those events in greater detail.

Platform Decay, Martha Wells. New Murderbot! Not my favorite Murderbot, though, I have to admit. It’s a perfectly fine extraction mission with good character moments, but at this point I find myself wanting a stronger feeling that some kind of metaplot is approaching culmination, and that’s just not what the series is here to do. Murderbot’s emotional growth continues, but the external events are much more self-contained, rather than building much on previous installments (though there is a little bit of the latter).

The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China, Philip Ball, narr. Derek Perkins. This was one of the longer, denser things I started, and the only one I finished this month. I’m not sure audiobook was the best choice: though my familiarity with Chinese names is better than Malagasy ones (cf. last month’s post), it’s not so excellent that I didn’t occasionally lose track of details. Also, while I’m not qualified to judge Perkins’ pronunciation, I was irritated by the frequency with which his intonation and pacing announced THIS IS A CHINESE NAME — he has a tendency to put micro-pauses around them, in a way he doesn’t for European names. Possibly that’s meant to be an aid for listeners like me, but I found it grating.

The book itself, however, is great! Enough so that I bought a paper copy afterward so I can re-read the sections I’m the most interested in. Ball is comprehensive in his approach to the topic of “water in China”: it starts off with information about the hydrology of the region and what its rivers are like, then wanders through the role of water in Chinese philosophy, why it plays such an important practical and symbolic role in politics, historical and modern efforts to control it, how it factors into poetry and art — you name the angle, there’s probably a chapter for it. The result is very interesting both from a “learn more about China” perspective and a “learn more about rivers” perspective.

The Boy’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. Because these are such comfort reads, I ended up reading a second one this month. Yay, we’re back at the convent! I had a theory for who the killer was that I quite liked until circumstances pretty obviously spiked that theory, but it would have been in keeping with a pattern I’ve noticed with Frazer: the killer is rarely A Bad Person Who Deserves Their Punishment. Quite frequently it’s someone for whom you’re invited to have sympathy — which does mean that, despite these being comfort reads, I shouldn’t pack them too close together. The discovery of the culprit often comes with a side order of feeling bad for how everything fell out, even when I’m enjoying the story.

Painted Devils, Margaret Owen. Second of the Little Thieves trilogy, which I started last month and promptly fell in love with.

Most trilogies, having clearly established a romantic relationship in the first book, would immediately start the second book by finding some way to break up the pair or otherwise put them on the outs with each other, so as to maintain some kind of tension in that plotline. I found it striking how thoroughly Owens does not do that: yes, there are multiple factors pushing the two of them apart, but they talk to each other and work through those problems and then a new problem comes along and they keep doing what it takes to deal with each one in turn. Meanwhile the plot has a fresh premise — instead of trying to con her way to a fortune, Vanja has inadvertently created a cult — and the structure gives that plot occasion to roam more widely than the single-city setting of the first book. The ending was the good sort of frustrating, where I yelled AUGH and then immediately checked out the third installment in ebook so I could run a search for a certain character’s name and reassure myself that they show up enough in the story that I could hope for them to eat dirt the way I really wanted them to do. The only reason I didn’t read the third book right away was my usual policy of trying to space out volumes of a series to keep from overdosing.

Ancient Night, David Bowles, ill. David Alvarez. I knew this was an illustrated book, but I didn’t realize just how short it is. Very much a picture book rather than a book with pictures, relating a Mexican myth about the sun and the moon.

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen. This is the kind of oddball niche history I’m sometimes very much in a mood for. Allen does his best to approach the subject topically (rather than chronologically, which would be well-nigh useless), starting with things like the advent of accounting ledgers and ranging through how families, artists, musicians, naturalists, housewives, writers, and people dealing with traumatic experiences have used them for different purposes. He also touches on the effect of technology: the notebook itself is dependent on paper, but creating things like lined pages affected how people use them. And then in turn, of course, there’s digital technology, which has reduced our use of notebooks — reduced, but not eliminated. The final section delves briefly into the neuroscience of how devices like notebooks act as an accessory to the brain, effectively making part of it live outside our bodies.

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World, Mary Beard. As usual, Mary Beard is extremely readable — even when, as is the case here, her topic is inherently fuzzy. This is not a chronological or biographical approach to individual Roman emperors, though those elements appear in passing; instead, it’s an attempt to figure out what it meant to be the emperor of Rome.

This is harder than you might think to pin down, because there’s a ton we simply do not and probably never will know, like how and where exactly the business of government was carried out. (We have vague outlines, but nothing resembling an org chart, or even a map of how the Palatine palace was used.) And when it comes to the emperors as people, Beard does a good job of outlining how the facts we know really add up more to an image of a “good emperor” or a “bad emperor” — what they were expected to say and do and look like — than the actual men behind those terms. I particularly liked her argument that the “good” or “bad” reputation had more to do with succession than the actual reign: if you were your predecessor’s designated heir, you had a vested interest in depicting him as a benevolent ruler who made wise decisions, whereas if you came to the throne after a bloody civil war, it was much better for you to depict the previous guy as a corrupt and immoral bastard responsible for all that chaos. We have only shreds of contemporary sources to leaven the later hagiography or demonology, but Beard does the best she can to piece those shreds together into something like a more balanced image.

(Also, I got a poem out of this.)

Into the Riverlands, Nghi Vo. Third in the Singing Hills Cycle, though this is not a series that requires you to read them in order. I think this one might be my favorite so far, as Chih grapples with both violence and the fact that you can never know everything about a person. I do, however, continue to have the niggling feeling that I would like these novellas to be longer, so they can dig a little deeper into the tasty meat at hand. They don’t need to be a hundred thousand words long — that would probably overstay the welcome — but the sort of short novel Tachyon publishes might be ideal.

A Lady Compromised, Darcie Wilde. Fourth in the Regency-set Rosalind Thorne mystery series, which is not the Useful Woman series about Rosalind Thorne. (I will probably at some point poke my nose into that one and see if it’s a sequel series to this one or what.)

There’s been enough of a gap since I read the previous ones that I can’t say for sure if this packs an extra ten pounds of material into the sack, but that’s definitely the impression I got. A duel that never happened because one combatant was murdered first, marital intrigues, ethnic tensions, land improvements, the possible rekindling of a romance, and a background strand of blackmail continued on from a previous book . . . it’s a lot! I think the ending came together a touch too easily, but that’s counterbalanced by characters being put through a brief physical and emotional wringer. Looks like there’s one more after this, before I investigate that other series.

Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline, Paul Cooper. Right at the outset, Cooper acknowledges that he’s not trying to assemble a grand analytical theory of why civilizations collapse. (He defines that not as portions breaking away, a la decolonization, but as a full-on crash: population takes a nosedive, economy craters, cities are destroyed, etc.) I understand why not — this is an outgrowth of his podcast, and goes into the box of “pop culture history underpinned by research” rather than a major academic work — but it does mean that the component chapters are mostly just potted histories of the civilizations he’s looking at, rather than anything deeper.

I don’t mind the potted histories, though! Especially for the ones I’m not very familiar with. He divides the book into three sections: the ancient world (Sumerians, Late Bronze Age Collapse, Assyria, Carthage, Han China, Roman Britain), the middle age (Maya, Khmer, Byzantium, Vijayanagara), and “worlds collide” (Songhai, Aztecs, Inca, Easter Island). I should note, though, that where I am familiar with the material, I can see Cooper sometimes accepting a little too readily the standard line on a certain topic, only mentioning in passing — or omitting entirely — a more nuanced view. Having read Cline’s After 1177 B.C. last fall, for example, I raised an eyebrow at Cooper crediting a “Dorian invasion” for the breakdown of Mycenean civilization during the Late Bronze Age Collapse — despite Cline being one of the sources Cooper references here! And I read the Carthage chapter right after Bret Devereaux started his series of posts on Carthage, in which one of the first things he (I think convincingly) debunks is the notion, repeated here by Cooper, that Carthaginian citizens rarely fought as soldiers for their own land.

Which is to say, this is the kind of book that’s a better starting point than a stopping point. But it’s still an interesting starting point! I appreciate the breadth of its scope, and even if Cooper doesn’t set out to do macro analysis, you can still see for yourself a number of patterns in the data. I did side-eye the ending a bit, though, where he first decries “doomerism” about our own situation . . . then proceeds to sketch out an extremely doomy scenario of what global civilizational collapse might look like.

(Got a poem out of this one, too. Though not that depressing last bit.)

The Iron Garden Sutra, A.D. Sui. I start a lot more SF novels than I finish, simply because a premise will sound interesting and then I remember that SF is not as much my cuppa as fantasy. Here, though, I was particularly interested in the monastic protagonist — shocker, that’s on my mind right now. Plus the scenario (investigating a derelict generation ship) lands squarely atop my interest in Big Dumb Object stories, so I was very much on board.

And I did enjoy it, though I think Vessel Iris was a little too dissociated from his own troubling emotions for me to be quite as gut-punched as I wanted to be about some of the developments. There’s good in-story reason for it, but at times it started to feel like the narration was hiding information from me that the point of view knew for a little too long. Still, I will be keeping an eye out for the sequel — which it does have, though this book wraps up fine if you don’t mind ending on a bittersweet note.

The Outlaw’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. Third of the Dame Frevisse medieval mysteries. I know it’s inevitable that sooner or later the story would move outside the convent, but I’m a little sad to see it happen so soon, as I enjoyed the exploration of what it was like to live under the Benedictine rule. Parts of that remain here — Frevisse feels guilty when her investigation causes her to repeatedly miss scheduled prayers, and is extremely not okay with the prospect of being seen by a man while not dressed in her habit — but it’s not the same.

Frazer remains, however, interested in the textural details of life in that period, and in neither romanticizing them nor (to use a later SF/F term) being grimdark about them: things like how miserable it would be to live out in the woods when you can’t even reliably keep the rain off your head. The premise here is that Frevisse’s cousin, outlawed years ago for accidentally killing a man in a fight, wants her to leverage her connections to get him a pardon so he can stop being stuck with an outlaw’s unromantic life.

I was a little startled to find how not sympathetic the cousin is. He’s the kind of man who can turn on the charm for Frevisse (because he wants her help), but he’s an asshole to everyone else. And so, when the murder inevitably happens — something like halfway through the book! — he’s the natural suspect, which means (by the logic of murder mysteries) he’s the second least likely culprit after Frevisse herself. I liked how that resolved in the end.

The Killing Spell, Shay Kauwe. I’ve been excited for this book ever since I met the author briefly at Worldcon! I knew from that conversation that it was about language-based magic, and specifically about the author’s own experience with Hawaiian, which was enough to sell me on the premise; turns out that it delves into how different languages are suited to different kinds of magic, and furthermore that poetry is often integral to making spells work! So, yeah, sufficiently far up my alley that I might need to see a doctor about that . . .

This is a very post apocalyptic setting, but I appreciated that while the apocalypse clearly chimes with climate fiction, it’s not straightforwardly mundane: an event called the Flood not only sank the Hawaiian Islands very rapidly, but brought magic back into the world. That was long enough ago that the U.S. has essentially collapsed, leaving city-states defending themselves against magical monsters; the Hawaiian survivors are clinging to semi-independent existence outside of an L.A. ruled by a council of magicians representing different approved languages.

Plot-wise, it’s a murder mystery where the protagonist gets roped in because the victim seems to have been killed by a Hawaiian-language spell, but in a place very few people can access. It moves at the thriller/urban fantasy-type rapid clip where the characters don’t get much breathing room between events — which means there’s not as much time as I would have liked spent on the art of smithing spells, whether that’s Kea wrestling with a Russian-language spell sent awry by the lack of good rhymes for a crucial word, or attempting to create a new signature Hawaiian-language spell for her family so she can join the council of Hawaiian elders who rule their enclave. But then, I would quite happily have read entire chapters of that! So perhaps I am not the best judge. 😛 It is still very much my kind of book, and I hope I’m right about the vibe I got from the ending, that this plot is done but there could be more in the future.

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, David Graeber, narr. Roger Davis. Probably I should not have listened to this one in ebook. I was lured in by its brief length (five hours; as Graeber says in the introduction, it’s an overgrown chapter of another book split off on its own because “everybody hates a long chapter but loves a short book”), but given my complete lack of familiarity with Malagasy names, I might fared better in following the argument here if I could see names like Ratsimilaho and the Betsimisaraka.

Anyway, in the late seventeenth century there was supposedly a democratic pirate kingdom in Madagascar. Graeber’s general thesis here is that while “Libertalia” as described never existed, the interaction of European pirate customs with local Malagasy culture — in particular Malagasy women — did lead to some interesting dynamics that he considers to be part of the global experiment in Enlightenment and democracy. But I am probably not doing the best job of summarizing that because, per the above, this was not an ideal thing for me to listen to rather than read on the page. What I followed of it, though, was interesting!

Holy Terrors, Margaret Owen. I decided enough of the month had passed for me to go ahead and read the third book. 😛

In this one the story goes full Holy Roman Empire, with an imperial election — made more complicated by the fact that somebody is murdering the prince-electors. In tandem with that, Owen goes hard on the emotional front, complete with an interpersonal conflict not easily resolved because the problem at its foundation is not one that can be handwaved away. I very much liked how that got resolved in the end. And the metaphysical strand of the story also continues, with the fascinating problem that the Pfennigeist, the persona Vanja has been using for her less than legal activities, has earned enough fame that it’s starting to exert its own force on her, whether she wants it to or not. So basically, allllllll the tasty things wrapped up in one excellent package! I highly recommend this to anybody who finds its subject matter appealing. (And the writing is good, too. There’s so many good descriptions in here, and quips that heighten rather than kneecapping the emotional weight.)

Owen has another duology I will be eager to check out, once I’ve given myself another breather.

The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson. More ravens than I was expecting, less scholarship — but that’s okay, because the ravens are great. (Or rather I should say, magnificent.)

Certain things about the premise here have a YA whiff to them, with basically everybody choosing one of eight animal deities to be their patron, and a competition among warrior representatives of each one to see who will be the next emperor. (Also, murder of a candidate: I didn’t mean to read two novels about that back to back, but . . . I did.) However, Neema is not at all a teenager, and the plot gets into a lot more political complexity than I normally see in YA-ish competition tales — generations’ worth of it, in fact. I see why some reviews I saw commented on the number of plot twists along the way, but I didn’t particularly mind.

Not quite everything here worked for me. I see why there’s such a long opening section taking place years before the main action — it’s important that the people and events there carry more weight than a mere summary would be likely to give — but it did odd things to the story’s momentum, and the approach to point of view was not entirely successful for me, either. Hodgson is doing enough that’s interesting, though, for me not to get hung up on the stumbles. I’d rather an author swing for the fences and maybe miss a few balls than play it safe all the time.

This month I finally did something I should have done ages ago: I checked out every library ebook currently available from my wishlist there and put holds on as many others as they would let me hold at once, so I could browse — the way I once would have done in a bookstore. The truth is that there are many books where I can tell within the first ten pages that they’re unlikely to be for me, and by taking some time to give a quick look to a bunch of things, I was able to clear a good portion of that bunch off my list.

. . . meaning that instead of my TBR being seventeen miles long, it is now a mere sixteen miles long. But that’s progress! And it in no way interfered with me being able to finish a goodly number of books last month.

(more…)

Beastly: An Anthology of Shapeshifting Fairy Tales, ed. Jennifer Pullen. Sent to me for blurbing purposes. This is a cross-section of fourteen largely (though not exclusively) European tales themed around the “beast bride or bridegroom” motif, some of them very well known — “Beauty and the Beast,” of course — and others more obscure. But Pullen casts a fairly wide net, such that transformations in general wind up here, e.g. with “The Little Mermaid” making an appearance. Each comes with some introductory context from Pullen as well as footnotes throughout, many of which are overtly more about her personal thoughts on the tales than academic analysis. On the whole, I’d say this is very approachable for a layperson.

A Thousand Li: The Fourth Fall, Tao Wong.
A Thousand Li: The Fourth Wall, Tao Wong. These two were actually separated by the following title, but I might as well talk about them together. Normally I make a point of spacing out my reading of a series — especially a long series — because I’ve realized that otherwise I tend to overdose and stop enjoying them quite so much. Since these are the final two books, however, I said “screw it” and read them very nearly back to back.

(. . . mostly the final two books. They conclude their series, but Wong has begun a sequel series. Which, ironically, is even more on point for the genre research impulse that led me to pick up A Thousand Li, so I guess I’ll be reading those as well?)

I do appreciate how Wong maneuvers in the back half of this series to change up exactly what kind of scenario and challenges his protagonist is facing. In The Fourth Fall, it’s international diplomacy: Wu Ying has to accompany a delegation to first secure an alliance and then attempt to negotiate an end to the ongoing war with a rival land. Since Wu Ying is not a great diplomat, this is definitely a challenge, but also he’s not at the forefront of it, so he feels a bit peripheral at points. On the other hand, when things (inevitably) blow up into a climactic battle, there’s a delightful “when life hands you lemons, make lemonade bombs to throw at your enemy” bit of tactics, which sets the stage for the final book.

As for the final book . . . I very much liked the beginning of it, which addressed the fallout from before (including with some good pov from the secondary characters), and the ending of it, which leaned into the philosophical elements I’ve always found to be one of the stronger parts of this series. The middle, however, felt a bit like it was there to keep the beginning and the ending from bumping into one another. It wasn’t bad, but it felt less like vital connective tissue and more like “let’s put some obstacles in the way of the conclusion.”

I should note, btw, that apparently this series will be getting a trad-pub re-release. I’ll be interested to take a look at the first book, because I’m curious whether it’s just getting repackaged, or whether it will have gotten a thorough editing scrub first. I stuck it out for all twelve books first because it was a useful tour of the cultivation genre, then because it manages some genuinely good moments of genre philosophy along the way, but . . . well, the writing has always fallen victim to the self-pub trap of reading like it was pounded out very fast with essentially no time for revision. (I think it was the eleventh book that used the word “stymie” over and over again, sometimes where that was not actually what the word means, and in at least one place, misspelled.) I’m hoping the trad pub version will polish that up, and maybe also address the less-than-stellar handling of female characters early on — which, I’m glad to say, improved as the series went along.

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, Nghi Vo. Novellas are interesting because sometimes they read like short novels, and sometimes they read like long short stories. This is the latter type, with the plot essentially consisting of “Chih and companions get cornered by talking tigers who want to eat them; Chih stalls for time by telling a story, during which the tigers argue with how they’re telling it.” The tension with the tigers was excellently done, as was all the arguing, but the result did feel a little slight for what I was expecting from a novella.

Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore, Adrienne Mayor. This is specifically a book about geomythology, a term for which — as with Pullen above — Mayor takes a broad definition. Sometimes it’s “here’s a story about these offshore rocks that clearly sounds like a mythologized record of the tsunami that likely put them there,” and sometimes it’s “here’s a famous tree; now we’ll talk about the lore surrounding that type of tree.” Interesting fodder if you’re the kind of person who finds such tidbits suggestive of stories!

Ausias March: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Arthur Terry. Read because March is possibly the most famous Valencian poet ever, so this was research for the Sea Beyond. I have no problem with Terry choosing to translate March’s work as prose, because I understand the very great challenges inherent in trying to balance the demands of meaning and style while also making it work as poetry. However, Terry has a comment toward the end of his introduction about how he makes no pretense regarding the aesthetic merit of his translations, and boy howdy is there none. This is the kind of “just the facts, ma’am” translation that’s useful for being able to look at the original text on the facing page and see how they line up . . . but it made for stultifyingly boring reading, and in no way, shape, or form helped sell you on March being a great poet.

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen. Would you believe I never read this before now? We read Emma in high school, but that’s it for me and Austen on the page. A friend linked to an interview with Colin Firth, though, which made me want to re-watch the A&E miniseries, and then for comparison I watched the more recent film adaptation, and after that I thought, hey, maybe I should read the book while those are fresh in my mind!

And, well, surprise surprise, it is very good. I know the A&E miniseries well enough that naturally I envisioned and heard all the characters as those versions, but that was in no way jarring, because it’s such a faithful adaptation. It was delightful to see the bits that didn’t make it onto the screen, though, like Elizabeth opining on the power of one good sonnet to kill off a love affair.

Star*Line 49.1, ed. John Reinhart. I am technically in this, insofar as there’s an interview with me. Otherwise, quite a lot of SF/F poetry packed into a tidy little volume.

You Dreamed of Empires, Álvaro Enrigue, trans. Natasha Wimmer. This novel is bonkers. It’s about Cortés in Tenochtitlan, and about how Moctezuma and the people around him responded to that, but it’s got the kind of meta voice that feels free to wander omnisciently around and also to comment from a modern perspective, like when it explains the difference between Nahua and Colhua and Mexica and why some Europeans in the nineteenth century looked at that tangle and said “fuck it, we’re just gonna call them all Aztecs.” And then it goes trippy alternate history on top of all that.

Literally trippy, because a lot here hinges on the use of indigenous hallucinogens. I don’t know this history well enough to tell if Enrigue is really playing up just how stoned Moctezuma in particular was, but here it’s very much presented as part of the political turmoil in Tenochtitlan, with the huey tlahtoāni retreating into drugs rather than dealing with the problems around him. But don’t worry, this book is here to show you the ugly underbelly of both sides of the conflict — and also things that aren’t the ugly underbelly; I very much appreciated how much time (in a relatively slender novel) is spent on exploring the agency and complicated dynamics of the various people involved, so you understand at least one interpretation of why Cortés was allowed to get far enough in to do what he did, and what different individuals thought they might gain from it.

If I have one objection, it’s that Enrigue gives a strong impression that most of his key indigenous characters didn’t really believe in their own religion, just went along with it because of tradition and social pressure. That’s an angle I always side-eye, because it generally feels like modern mentalities failing to understand those of the past. But it’s a small quibble for a book I very much enjoyed.

The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, ed. Roger Dutcher and Mike Allen. This anthology collected the short and long form winners of the Rhysling Award (the biggest SFF poetry award) up through 2004. What’s interesting about that is how it lets you see the trends come and go: there’s a stretch of time where a lot of the poetry was very science-y (sometimes more that than science fiction-y), or the bit in the early 2000s which I can best sum up as “my kind of thing.” I did skip a few that just got too experimental and weird for me to get anything out of them, but otherwise, good cross-section.

Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance: The Forgotten Founding Mothers of the Fairy Tale and the Stories That They Spun, Jane Harrington, ill. Khoa Le. This is about the French salon writers of the late seventeenth century, Madame d’Aulnoy and her ilk — emphasis on “her ilk,” because half the point of this book is to talk about the ones who aren’t as famous. Harrington’s general thesis here is that the fairy tales they wrote were their way of expressing the troubles they faced and/or imagining better worlds, e.g. where women could choose the husbands they wanted. Each chapter gives a short biography of one of the writers, including connecting her to the others who were perhaps relatives or friends, then retells one or more of their stories.

I did like getting to read tales less familiar than “The White Cat” (which also shows up in Pullen’s book), but I wish Harrington had gone more for translation than retelling, or at least had tried to adhere to a more period tone. I feel like her “yay early feminism, so relatable” mission statement led her to modernize the language more than I would have preferred, and in the cases of the stories I don’t already know, that leads me to question whether the plots have also been presented in a more “updated” fashion. And while she does have an extensive bibliography at the end, the way she talks about “rescuing” these writers from obscurity does give a self-aggrandizing whiff to the whole thing, as if Harrington is the first person to pay attention to this topic. Wound up feeling like a bit of a mixed bag.

The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, Stephen Fry. Yes, that Stephen Fry, the actor. Didn’t know he wrote poetry? That’s because he writes it purely for his own enjoyment, not for publication. (He mentions toward the end of the book that, among other things, he knows his celebrity status would warp how those poems are received, and he’d rather just not deal with that.)

His comedic skills shine through here, as this is a highly readable introduction to formal poetry — meaning not “poetry always about serious subjects,” but “poetry that adheres to a particular form.” The introduction is not shallow, though: when he leads you by the hand through meter, he doesn’t stop at showing you the different feet and explaining how to count them. Instead he talks about things like the different ways you can futz around with iambic pentameter, where a trochaic substitution will sound okay vs. weird, and what effect it has if you put a pyrrhic substitution in the third foot vs. the fourth. (Though right after reading this, I came across a blog post that characterized what Fry considers a pyrrhic substitution very differently: same phenomenon in the end, but a good demonstration of how there’s no One True Answer for a lot of this stuff.)

Be warned that this book is unabashedly opinionated. Fry says there are free verse poems he likes, but on the whole he has a very poor opinion of modern poetry being just about the only art where people are told “Don’t worry about rules or technique! All that matters is that you ~*express yourself*~!” He thinks that acquiring a solid handle on meter and rhyme is equivalent to a visual artist learning the rules of perspective: they’re vital skills even if you wind up breaking those rules later. When he gets to the section discussing particular forms, he’s also unafraid to bag on the ones he doesn’t think very highly of — mostly modern syllable-counting forms like the tetractys or nonet, but also elaborate stunts like the sonnet redoublé, where you’d better be damn good at what you’re doing for it to seem like anything more than a stupid flex.

The guidance, though, is very thorough and I think very accessible — though admittedly I come at this as someone who’s never had trouble figuring out how meter or rhyme work, so I’m not the best judge of that. He gives copious examples from literature, and also practice exercises for which he provides his own demonstrations: the exception to him not making his poetry public, but only a quasi-exception, because he says outright that these are pieces meant to practice the basic skills, with no expectation of them turning out good. And that is useful in its own way, because it helps chip away at the notion that poetry is some mystical, elevated thing, rather than an art whose basics you can drill without worrying about whether you’ve produced immortal verse.

Highly recommended for anybody who would like a solid entry point into writing poetry!

I have fallen out of the habit of doing these posts! I stopped for a while when I couldn’t talk about Sea Beyond research, then failed to really ingrain the practice again. But no time like the present to start up once more!

What if the Moon Didn’t Exist? Voyages to Earths That Might Have Been, Neil F. Comins. I would not call this book well-written on a prose level, but it’s conceptually interesting. Comins goes through a number of different astronomical scenarios and looks at, not just what that would look like now, but how it would (likely) affect things such as the evolution of life. For example, if the moon were closer to Earth, tides would be much stronger, greatly increasing the distance covered by the tidal zone, which would make it harder for sea life to transition onto dry land.

Worth noting, though, that this was originally published in 1993, so it doesn’t take into account more recent advancements in astronomy and biology. We’d just barely confirmed our first exoplanet sighting back then, and also Comins very much assumes that “life” must look like it does here. On the other hand, it’s sort of charming — in this age of climate change — to see his final chapter explore a doomsday scenario where we’ve completely wrecked the ozone layer, which was a major concern at the time. (In fact the “ozone hole” is healing now, and we should be back to 1980 levels within the next couple of decades.)

Comins has another book along these lines, What If the Earth Had Two Moons?, which I may pick up. Dry prose notwithstanding, these are very interesting to read with an eye toward designing different kinds of worlds!

And Dangerous to Know, Darcie Wilde. Third in a series of Recency mysteries I started reading last year, which are very fun — though demerits to the author, or perhaps her publisher, for the fact that A Useful Woman is NOT the first book of the “A Useful Woman” series, though both that series and this one, the “Rosalind Thorne Mysteries,” involve the same characters. It’s more than a little confusing.

But anyway! The premise here is that Rosalind Thorne is of a good family that (thanks to her father) fell on hard times a while ago, and so she scrapes by kind of being an assistant-slash-fixer to ladies of quality, handling everything from sending dinner party invitations to hushing up minor scandals. Naturally, the series involves her getting involved with rather more large-scale problems, which bring her into contact with both an attractive Bow Street runner and her former suitor, who unexpectedly inherited his family’s dukedom and so couldn’t possibly wed a gentlewoman teetering on the edge of being utterly fallen.

This is the third volume in the “Rosalinde Thorne Mysteries” series, and as the title suggests, it tangentially involves Lord Byron — specifically, some indiscreet correspondence with him which has gone missing. (Byron himself does not appear, which I think is probably for the best.) I suspect you could hop into this series wherever you like, but there’s no reason not to start at the beginning.

Copper Script, K.J. Charles. I very much enjoyed Death in the Spires and All of Us Murderers, so I went hunting for other books of Charles’ that are more mystery than romance, the latter being less my cup of tea. I’m pleased to say that Copper Script breaks from the similarities shared between those other two titles — not that the similarities were bad, but it was going to start feeling predictable if all of them followed similar beats. This one is likewise set in the early 20th century and involves a m/m romance that has to maneuver around the prejudices and laws of the time, but the main characters (a police officer and a man who, having lost one hand in WWI, now ekes out a living by analyzing handwriting) are not former lovers who had a bad falling-out some time ago, etc. The story this time is also sliiiiiiightly fantastical: the handwriting analysis slips over the line into psychic perception. Apart from that, though, it’s a satisfying non-speculative mystery, with police corruption and blackmail and murder.

Some by Virtue Fall, Alexandra Rowland. In one of the months I didn’t report on, I read Rowland’s A Conspiracy of Truths, which is a very odd book — the main character spends essentially the entire novel imprisoned or being shuttled between prisons, only able to affect things through the people he talks to. I enjoyed it, though certain things about the ending left a sour taste in my mouth; I’m pleased to see that the sequel may address those things.

But this is not that book! Instead it’s a standalone novella (I think in the same world), focused on the cutthroat world of Shakespearean-style theatre in a land where only women, not men, are permitted to act upon the stage. The rivalry between two companies gets wildly out of hand, and mayhem ensues. The main character was slightly difficult for me to empathize with, being very much an “act first think later if ever” kind of person, but I felt it all came together pretty well in the end.

Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil, Oliver Darkshire. Straight-up one of my favorite things I’ve read recently, and also (I am not the first to make this observation) the most Pratchett-esque thing I’ve read not written by Terry Pratchett.

But that doesn’t mean it’s just a Discworld knockoff! Darkshire has built a similarly bonkers world — e.g. the sun beetle does not travel at a steady pace across the sky and sometimes decides to turn around, making the length of a day rather difficult to guess at — but his leaping-off point is a story from the Decameron, and the overall vibe is much more medieval English smashed into the Romantics (a Goblin Market plays a large role in the story). You’ll know if you want to read this one about three pages in; either you vibe instantly with the voice or you don’t. I did, and I’m looking forward to the sequel even though the protagonist of that one is a thoroughly unsympathetic antagonist from this book.

Audition for the Fox, Martin Cahill. Novella about a character who needs to win the patronage of one of ninety-nine gods and has already failed with ninety-six of them, so she tries the trickster fox god. Surprise, he throws her a curveball! She winds up in the past, assigned to make sure a key event happens in the revolution that freed her country from the grip of its invaders.

I loved the folkloric interludes here (stories of the Fox and other gods), and the fact that Cahill doesn’t have his heroine single-handedly win a war. Her job is merely to facilitate one specific event, which is one of many dominoes whose fall started decades of fighting. Which doesn’t make it not important! I love how that part played out. But it’s also not One Person Saves The Day, which is very, very good.

The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English, Hana Videen. I had managed to overlook the subtitle, so I thought this book was primarily about language; turns out it’s halfway between that and the kind of daily life book I read on the regular anyway. Videen digs into different aspects of life and looks at the words used back in Anglo-Saxon days, seeing how they do and do not map to the words we use today, and how vocabulary reveals the ways things got categorized and connected and what this means for how people lived. Being a language and culture nerd, naturally I found this right up my alley!

A Letter to the Luminous Deep, Sylvie Cathrall. My other favorite thing I’ve read recently! I think it’s no accident that both this and Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil are very quirky in their premises and voice-y in their execution.

Here the voice is Victorian-style letter-writing, and the premise is a world (you’re soon able to guess it’s a colonized planet) where, thanks to a catastrophe in the distant past, everybody has to eke out a living on an ocean where there’s basically only one landmass of anything like meaningful size. Society is organized around Scholars in different fields — a concept that extends to things like art — and the main body of the story is the correspondence between a Scholar of Boundless Campus (a fleet of migratory vessels) and a woman who lives a shut-in life in the underwater habitat built by her eccentric Scholar mother. Around that you get a second set of letters between the siblings of those two, who are trying to piece together what led up to the explosion that destroyed the habitat and caused the main characters to disappear.

Cathrall does have to indulge in a bit of contrivance to get the whole story into letters, diaries, or other written documents, and to control the pacing of reveals. But I didn’t mind, because it all just felt so original and engaging! This is the first book of a duology, and I promptly ordered the sequel, which is sitting on my desk as I type this.

City of Iron and Ivy, Thomas Kent West. Disclosure: this book was sent to me for blurbing purposes.

Alternate-history fantasy, in an England where floral magic is put to uses both trivial and epic, both fair and foul. The era is essentially Victorian, but West acknowledges in the afterword that he’s taken a number of liberties with the period. That includes the Reaper, who is obviously meant to be an analogue to Jack the Ripper (the story starts in 1888), but — and for me, this was crucial — is different enough that it didn’t trip my very strong opinions about how to handle the historical evidence of those murders.

But it is not entirely a story about murders. Elswyth, a scarred young lady, has to come to London to seek a husband after her more beautiful and sociable sister Persephone disappears, because otherwise she’ll have no future and her father’s entire estate will go to a loathesome cousin. Only Elswyth is convinced her sister’s disappearance has to do with the Reaper, and furthermore that the Reaper is probably a gentleman or noble, so her attempt to navigate that world is cover for her investigation.

I read the whole thing in about a day, and very much appreciated the ways in which the ending eschews some of the easy resolution I anticipated. I don’t know if there will be a sequel, but some dangling threads are left for one, while the main plot here resolves just fine.

The Tinder Box, M.R. Carey. Disclosure: this book was also sent to me for blurbing purposes. (I read three such over the holidays, but finished the third after the New Year.)

Labeling this one “historical fantasy” is kind of interesting, because it both is and it isn’t. I’d almost call it Ruritanian fantasy, except that term means works set in a secondary world without magic, whereas this is more Ruritanian in the original sense of the word: it takes place in an imaginary European country (circa the late 18th century), and then adds magic to that. If it weren’t for a couple of passing references to real places and the fact that Christianity is central to the tale, it could almost be a secondary world.

Anyway, genre labeling isn’t the important thing here. The story involves a soldier demobbed from his king’s stupid war due to injury, who finds that making a living back home is easier said than done, thanks to the peasantry being squeezed to the breaking point and beyond by said war. He’s employed for a time with an unfriendly widow, only for everything to go haywire when a giant devil falls dead out of the sky and the widow, who turns out to be a witch, pays him to loot the body. He pockets one innocuous-seeming item for himself — a tinder box — which of course turns out to be exactly what the witch was looking for, and so begins a chase.

I think of this book as being anti-grimdark in kind of the same way I used that term for Rook and Rose: it starts out there, but it doesn’t stay there. Mag is living on the edge of starvation and then makes a variety of incredibly stupid decisions in how he uses the tinder box (in fairness, partly due to repeatedly not having time to think things through), while Jannae, the witch, is deeply untrusting of everyone and everything. Meanwhile, the tinder box turns out to contain three trapped devils, and I’m often leery of “deals with the devil” type stories. But I loved the direction Carey took this in, and the ultimate trajectory is toward hope and healing rather than pyrrhic victories. It’s a standalone, and absolutely fine that way; you get a complete meal here, without being teased with anything more.

Death in the Spires, K.J. Charles. An excellent historical mystery, straddling the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Years ago, an Oxford student was murdered in his room; thanks to one small detail of this case, the surviving members of his group of friends know that one of their number must have done it. But no one has ever been convicted.

The detail in question felt slightly contrived to me, but I accept it as the set-up for what is otherwise an engaging story about personal relationships. The novel proceeds in two parallel tracks, one building up the history of these friends at university, the other showing what’s become of them since the murder. It does the thing a dual-timeline novel needs to do, which is keep suspense around the past: yes, we know who’s going to get murdered, but the lead-up to that matters quite a lot, first as we see how this group coalesced into such brilliance they were nicknamed the “Seven Wonders,” and then as we see how things fell apart to a degree that you can form plausible arguments for basically anybody being the murderer. (I say “basically” because it’s deeply unlikely that the protagonist, who is digging back into the case against the advice of everyone around him, is the killer. There are stories that would pull that trick, but this never pretends it’s one of them.)

I found the ending particularly gratifying. The past sections do enough to make you like and sympathize with the characters that finding out who’s responsible is genuinely a fraught question; once the answer comes out, there’s a deeply satisfying sequence that tackles the question of what justice ought to look like in this situation — for more than one crime. Those who deserve it wind up with their bonds of friendship tentatively healing after years of rift. I got this rec from Marissa Lingen, and she tells me there will be a sequel; I look forward to it enormously.

Voyage of the Damned, Frances White. The writing in this book had me at the first paragraph. The protagonist of this book, for a little while at the beginning, almost put me off it.

I did come around to liking him, don’t worry. But when your protagonist’s firm goal is to make everybody around him hate him so much he’ll never have to attend an event like this one again, it’s hard for that not to grate somewhat on the reader as well. Fortunately, the plot steers him toward one person he’s less deliberately offensive toward, and from there things improve a great deal.

The setup of the story is bonkers, and the kind of worldbuilding that is unabashedly aiming for “vivid” rather than “realistic.” It feels reminiscent of L5R with the saturation turned up high: the land is divided into geographically and ecologically distinct regions (this one’s a desert! this one’s a swamp! this one consists entirely of frigid mountains!) ruled by animal-themed clans, with a wall closing them off from not only the monsters to the south but the clan that betrayed them all, the Crab. Each clan is ruled by a Blessed, the single person who has inherited a magical power from their founder; the rules around how that inheritance works are tailor-made to be the worst possible version of bloodline-based magic. Now the next generation of Blessed have been put on a giant magical sailing ship to go conduct a special ritual . . . but Ganymedes, heir to the scorned Fish Clan, is hiding a secret: he doesn’t have a Blessing. It went instead to one of the many unknown bastards his father sired in direct contravention of the rules for the Blessed. Hence Ganymedes needing to convince everyone to stop (reluctantly) including him in their reindeer games; his best hope is to get himself disinvited from any future events, then cross his fingers that he can live out his life without anyone ever realizing the truth.

Mind you, his life may be shorter than he expects. Because on board this ship where the only passengers are the twelve Blessed and the magical servitors assigned to each one, somebody has started murdering the Blessed. Be prepared for a ton of people to get whacked — but also, many of those people are extremely terrible, because wow is this society dysfunctional from top to bottom. The ending of the novel promises change in that regard, but don’t look for deep exploration of what that’s going to look like; the focus here is almost entirely on the narrowing pool of possible murderers and why all of this has been set in motion. Quite enjoyable, if you like the voice and aren’t put off by Ganymedes being a deliberate asshole!

A Thousand Li: The Third Realm, Tao Wong. The abrupt cessation of my fiction reading last year in favor of a face-first dive into research put a big pause on my progress through this series, a self-published cultivation saga. I’m not sure if this was a good point at which to pick it back up or not — I think so? This book (as the author himself notes) is much more episodic in structure, being loosely organized around Wei Ying wandering the land as a Core cultivator, i.e. someone powerful enough that he has to learn to be more thoughtful around when and how he intervenes in other people’s conflicts. Dunno what to say beyond that; if you’ve read up to this point, you already know what to expect from the writing. If you haven’t read up to this point, for the love of little fishes, do not start here.

The Kings in Winter, Cecelia Holland. I’ve known about Holland’s historical fiction for ages, but this is the first time I’ve picked it up. The story here leads up to the Battle of Clontarf, which pitted one Irish king and his Viking allies against other Irish kings, but the actual vector of the narrative is the chief of an invented clan that nearly got wiped out some years ago, who cannot seem to convince anybody that all he wants is for his people to be left in peace in the new territory they’re occupying. He has a very clear-eyed understanding that pursuing vengeance for past slaughter will only result in more slaughter going forward, and he would very much rather stay out of the impending war. Unfortunately for him, this is a society in which social ties and the actions of others may drag you into conflict whether you want it or not. The book is short and the narration is fairly sparse; it is, overall, not a very happy book. It’s good, though, and I’ll certainly look up more of Holland’s work.

A Crane Among Wolves, June Hur, narr. Greg Chun and Michelle H. Lee. In general I like Hur’s Korean historical novels, but for some reason this one didn’t work as well for me as the others I’ve read. Some of it was that I felt like the side characters latched onto and helped the protagonist a little too readily, but mostly I think it comes down to the elements of the plot not cohering well enough.

Hur seems to have a fondness for setting her novels during the eras of Korea’s worst royalty; in this case, that’s Yeonsangun, during the period when he’s become a murderous tyrant. The protagonist, Iseul, has come in search of her sister, one of the countless women taken by force to be a concubine. Her first plan for rescue is to figure out the identity of a mysterious killer, called Nameless Flower, who’s targeting royal officials, since Yeonsangun has promised a boon to anybody who solves that puzzle. Everybody else assures her, though, that the king will never actually let her sister go, so Iseul instead winds up joining forces with a rebellion that seeks to overthrow him, by way of a prince (a fictional one, I think) with whom there is of course a romance.

The problem here is that the focus is all over the place. The Jungjong coup, while a real event, is mostly being driven by historical personages, so while Iseul and Prince Daehyun do things, that part of the plot ultimately doesn’t hinge on them. Meanwhile, Iseul remains determined to identify Nameless Flower, even though that’s . . . kind of irrelevant? He kills one sympathetic character, but in general it’s hard to be invested in unmasking a guy who’s targeting royal officials — until eventually he targets Iseul and Daehyun, but he only does that because Iseul has figured out who he is. So I felt zero urgency around the resolution of that mystery. Possibly I would have cared more if I’d been better able to follow the backstory behind who the killer is and why he’s doing this, and possibly I would have followed it better in print rather than in audiobook, but overall my reaction that plot — which takes up a significant portion of the book — was “meh.”

I recommend Hur’s books overall, but I wouldn’t start with this one. It felt much more YA in its tropes (Iseul and Daehyun start off very tsundere) and much less well-knit than the others.

The Oleander Sword, Tasha Suri. That big hiatus in my fiction reading put a more significant dent in this series than A Thousand Li, because this story is far more politically and culturally intricate, and I’d forgotten quite a bit since reading The Jasmine Throne. I persevered, though, and I’m glad I did, because I do enjoy this trilogy. The romance dynamic between Priya and Malini doesn’t quite hook me (the emphasis on “I’m not a nice person”), but I am absolutely here for the rest of it, especially everything going on in Ahiranya. A shallower series would say, look at these oppressed people and their religion which the empire has tried to stamp out of existence; now they get their religion back, yay! This series says, yay, they got their religion baOH CRAP THIS ISN’T GOOD. You get vibes in the first book that the yaksha are not warm fuzzy nice nice: well, here those vibes become very in-your-face plot. I am keenly interested to see how the various religions of this setting shake out in the finale, and what path the characters manage to chart through the threats they face.

Forget the Sleepless Shores, Sonya Taaffe. Disclosure: the author is a friend.

This is not a collection I could zoom through; the prose is too dense with imagery for that. The pieces collected here are less intensely sea-focused than As the Tide Came Flowing In, but that’s still very much present. Some of them I’d read before, like “The Dybbuk in Love” and “The Trinitite Golem,” but many were new to me. There’s a lot of folklore and mythology woven in here, too; I wouldn’t have minded author notes to unpack the references I didn’t catch on my own, as I’m sure there were some.

The Novice’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. Historical mystery, and the good news is that the series is seventeen books long! I can keep reading about Sister Frevisse for quite some time, if I choose to — and I probably will for a good long while, because I quite enjoyed this.

These are set in the fifteenth century, with a Benedictine nun as the protagonist. (The internet tells me about a third of the books actually take place at her convent; the rest find reasons for her to be out in the world at large.) As with Death in the Spires, this is not a mystery you read for the mechanics of the crime and its investigation. Instead you’re here for other things, like the exploration of life in medieval England, especially but not limited to religious life, and the ways in which the specifics of the culture at the time shape both what kind of investigation you can conduct and why someone might commit murder in the first place. I was mildly frustrated with how long it took the characters to ask a couple of fairly obvious questions, but I will accept that as the price for scenes like the nuns holding the line against a bunch of armed men by singing the “Dies Irae” at them until half of them slink away in shame.

Killers of a Certain Age, Deanna Raybourn, narr. Jane Oppenheimer and Christina Delaine. This was not as fun as I was hoping it would be.

It must be admitted up front that I’m always iffy on assassins as protagonists, even when they’re assassins for a good cause. In this case, the “Museum” — that being the euphemistic name for the organization our murderous protagonists belong to — was founded to hunt down Nazis who had gone into hiding after World War II; when the supply of surviving Nazis began to dry up, they shifted their attentions to arms dealers, sex traffickers, and the like. But, y’know, history and (unfortunately) the present moment are full of people who were convinced they were killing for a good and righteous cause, hence me being iffy on the whole thing.

However, when you tell me the assassins in question are a bunch of women in their sixties about to retire from their careers, I do perk up and decide to give it a try.

Things I liked: the continual attention to the fact that, while these characters are in good shape, aging is leaving an increasing number of marks on them. (The touch of the central character, Billie, taking a moment for some repair stretching after winding up in an unexpected bout of hand-to-hand combat was very nice.) The tour of interestingly scenic locations in which to kill people. The fact that the women all had distinct personalities, and they didn’t always get along despite generally being friends.

But although the review where I heard about this book led me to believe there was going to be a good amount of “get revenge at last for all the sexism you’ve battled throughout your career,” that featured much less than I expected. The events that led to the Museum suddenly deciding to off the protagonists on their retirement cruise turned out to hinge not on them, but on internal Museum politics that — because they’ve largely been offstage — I didn’t much care about. I thought the story would show the characters attempting to clear their names as they dodge assassins sent to take them out; instead they pivot very quickly to “I guess we have to kill all the people in charge of the Museum” and only after several murders do they attempt to make a bid for exoneration, at which point it rings rather hollow. And I think I got wrong-footed with the book when two of the characters stand around complaining that their target (who can hear them) is taking too long to die, because that tipped it way too far over into unsympathetic territory for me, rather than fun murder caper times. By the time I got to the final act — wherein the change of audiobook narrator meant a character who’d had a nice voice in the flashback segments suddenly acquired a bad cockney accent and vocal fry — I was willing to finish it out, but not much more than that. I wanted this to be lighter on its feet than it was, and more ferocious on the topic of feminism, and I didn’t quite get either.

A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher, narr. Eliza Foss and Jennifer Pickens. This is the first of Kingfisher’s novels I’ve read (well, listened to), and I had a bit of tonal whiplash. On the one hand, there is some really awful stuff that happens here; on the other hand, the rest of the book feels almost . . . cozy? Like, by and large this is a story about people realizing a character is being abused and going to great lengths to show her kindness and help her escape her abuser. But also, abuse — along with brutal murder and various other things. I wonder if I would have found it less whiplash-y on the page than in audio, where the narrators’ voice wouldn’t have been setting a particular mood. I also suspect I was not well-served by knowing the folktale that ostensibly underlies this story; in truth, the novel bears very little resemblance to that tale, and expecting more caused me to wildly misread one character until fairly late in the game.

The Swifts: A Gallery of Rogues, Beth Lincoln. Sequel to A Dictionary of Scoundrels, which I noted at the time felt like it had reached a good conclusion and didn’t really need a sequel (though I would read more about the Swifts at other points in time, maybe). Turns out, Lincoln had a good answer to that! This book takes Shenanigan Swift and various other relatives across the Channel into France, there to deal with their distant — and deeply estranged — cousins, the Martinets. This book is every bit as bonkers as its predecessor, but it introduces enough sorts of new bonker-dom to not feel like it’s treading water. And there is more fun with language, which is absolutely part of what I’m here for. I hope there will be a third book, and more after that!

Buddhist Folk Tales, Kevin Walker. This was an odd collection. The author is apparently a professional storyteller who converted to Buddhism, so this mixes both actual traditional stories (many of them from the Jataka tales) with others he’s made up — or in one case, a story made up by students of his, used with permission. Mostly it left me feeling like I should get a straight-up collection of Jataka tales, as I didn’t find this book all that satisfying.

The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul, Eleanor Herman. Do not read this if you are easily nauseated by descriptions of gross things. If you can tolerate those, however, it’s fascinating.

Although the title references poison, and Herman does spend a little time talking about deliberate attempts to off people with various toxins, the focus of this book is really in the subtitle: Herman’s thesis is that people in the late medieval and early modern period had WAY more to fear from their environment than from any would-be murderers. Poor sanitation, contaminated food, and so, so much lead, mercury, arsenic, antimony, sulfur, etc. basically guaranteed that any person of wealth — the same people who feared poisoning — had a lot of ways to fall suddenly and suspiciously ill. And when medical science isn’t yet advanced enough to distinguish the cause of your stomach pains or difficulty breathing, it’s easy to declare you’ve been poisoned.

The central part of the book delves into that in depth, because it’s a series of case studies about historical individuals who were rumored to have been killed by poison. Herman gives the background on the individual and looks at the contemporary accounts of their symptoms and demise, then turns to modern analyses of the evidence (including, where applicable, forensic examination of their remains) to give a verdict on their most likely cause of death — which occasionally was indeed a massive and likely deliberate dose of poison! This was my favorite part of the text, but also rather hard reading, because most of the people under discussion did not have an easy passing. (For my own curiosity, I also did some side research on whether they could have been saved with the medicine of the time, had anyone known what was really going on. Most of the time, the answer was no.) Then it closes with a brief discussion of poison use in our own era, especially the extensive Russian efforts to develop exotic and unprovable means of murder.

Vespertine, Margaret Rogerson. I really enjoyed Rogerson’s novel An Enchantment of Ravens, which is unrelated to this book. This is a world where, following a cataclysm a long time ago, the dead don’t rest easy unless they are given proper rites; to ensure that — and to deal with spirits that escape the net — there is a religious order dedicated to handling their ghosts. Furthermore, some of those spirits get bound into artifacts so their powers can be used by priests and nuns for the defense of the realm.

I don’t mean it as a sideswipe when I say this reads a lot like the fantasy sibling of Ninefox Gambit. When a massive wave of malevolent spirits threatens the countryside, the main character, a novice named Artemisia, inadvertently finds herself wielding a high relic: an artifact that contains the most powerful type of spirit, so strong that it actually possesses her. Since she never got trained in how to do this, she doesn’t know how to banish it back into the relic, so she’s going through the story in an uneasy alliance with an entity that will happily take over her body and use her to murder everybody in sight.

The ISFDB lists Vespertine as the first (and so far only) book in a series, but it works well enough as a standalone. If there do wind up being sequels, though, I’ll happily read them; this was an engaging story in an interesting world.

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, Tabitha Stanmore, narr. Anna Wilson-Jones. I liked this one enough that after listening to it in audiobook from the library, I turned around and bought myself a physical copy.

Stanmore is explicitly pushing back against the internet view of medieval and early modern magic, i.e. “female witches keeping alive ancient traditions get persecuted by the mean men in the Church.” Citing tons of historical case evidence, Stanmore shows that people at the time — particularly in England, though she does touch on other parts of Europe occasionally — absolutely distinguished between witches (bad, and of either gender) and cunning folk (good, and of either gender, though over time there is a drift towards men), and they made regular use of the latter. Service magicians, as Stanmore terms them, filled a number of needs in society; when they show up in court records, it’s because they had a disappointed client suing them for fraud, or they strayed too far into dangerous territory (e.g. trying to curse someone to death).

So yeah, if you saw that post going around Tumblr about priests doing “wizard shit” and telling their superiors they keep trying to explain to their flocks that it isn’t real but everybody expects them to do wizard shit, this is basically That: The Book. But very well-supported with citations.

The Lies We Conjure, Sarah Henning. I am not generally an eager audience for the genre of Rich People Behaving Badly, even when it’s the fantasy variant thereof. The premise of this one, however, was interesting: a pair of sisters get hired by a rich old woman to masquerade as her granddaughters for a night at a family reunion. It’s only after someone’s been murdered and the estate has been locked down that the sisters realize literally everybody else there is a witch and assumes they are, too — and that odds are very good they’ll be killed if this secret cabal of powerful people learns they’ve been infiltrated by outsiders.

Over the course of the next several days, as they get sent on a both a murder investigation and a kind of magical scavenger hunt to figure out who will be the next leader of the witches, there are of course tons of ugly familial secrets that come tumbling out. I was slightly disappointed that the sisters don’t have to dance harder to convince everybody they’re who they claim to be — the witches assume early on that the girls’ memories have been magically manipulated to make them forget what they used to know — but that would have required them to be master con artists rather than two teenagers who happen to look enough like the old lady’s granddaughters to pass muster, so I’ll cut it some slack. This had interesting characters and good tensions between them, and I enjoyed it.

The Serpent Called Mercy, Roanne Lau. This does the thing I really like, where there’s a ton of worldbuilding that isn’t strictly needed to make the plot go, but it makes the setting feel more three-dimensional and lived in. The core of the plot focuses on gladiatorial-style battles between “conquessors” and magical beasts brought in from outside the city, and a pair of poverty-stricken friends (who do NOT wind up in a romance together!) who decide to risk their lives in the arena in the hopes of winning enough money to raise their status in a highly unequal society. But around that there’s all kinds of other stuff, like the religion one of them practices very devoutly, and the backstory of how their ancestors came to live in that area, and the weird magical powers people can sometimes access for a very brief time — there used to be other magic, but their ancestors lost it when they migrated — and so on and so forth.

Much like Vespertine, this tells a complete story. Here, however, there is an obvious dangling thread for sequels, in the form of a notorious thief whose exploits against the wealthy keep being mentioned in passing, so I suspect there may be at least one more book, sales permitting.

The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens, Nicola Clark. As Marissa Lingen noted in her review (which is where I heard of this book), by “Tudor queens” what we actually mean is “queens of Henry VIII.” But I guess “Henrician queens” would not be as catchy.

That’s not a slam on the book overall, though. Much of the reason Clark takes this period as her focus is that Henry VIII’s serial matrimony — often to an attendant of a previous queen — made this an unusually tumultuous time to be a lady-in-waiting. Not only are the royal households repeatedly being dissolved and reconstituted, but the intrigues surrounding the behavior of certain queens and the uncertainty of what will happen tomorrow meant there were opportunities both to advance your family’s interests at court, and to get you and your family in a great deal of trouble. And what does “loyalty” mean when you’ve sworn your oath of service to a woman who is now out of favor with the king you also serve? Some ladies-in-waiting stayed fiercely faithful to their mistresses; others dropped them like a hot iron. Throughout the book, Clark is very clear that being a lady-in-waiting didn’t mean you were a piece of furniture: they were an essential part of the machinery of court as well as active political agents in their own right, albeit ones whose actions were constrained by the sexism of the time. Very much recommended for anybody who would like a look at that court machinery, insofar as we can reconstruct the smaller pieces from the documents that survive.

He Who Drowned the World, Shelley Parker-Chan. Sequel and conclusion to the Radiant Emperor duology, which presents an alternate version of the transition from the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty to the Han-led Ming one.

There is not enough therapy in the world for some of these characters. Two of them are basically powered by rage and self-loathing; another has replaced that with howling amounts of dissociation. Even the most functional character here (the protagonist) still has a nigh-terminal case of “it’s impossible for this not to happen when I want it so much.” If you want a front-row seat to trauma playing out, here ya go. I think it’s very well done overall, though after a time I started wishing that each individual instance of watching somebody spiral down into their own personal hell was just slightly less in-depth, as the amount of time spent marinating in those was quite large. But for all of that darkness — and boy howdy is there a lot of it — things actually turn out pretty well. Not for everybody, of course, but the fear I had at the end of the first book did not materialize. This is ultimately an alternate history, so even though you still end up with a Zhu Yuanzhang founding a Ming dynasty, it’s not the same Zhu Yuanzhang, and so there is every reason to believe it might have all the good features of the actual Hongwu Emperor’s reign, with less in the way of murderous purges.

When Among Crows, Veronica Roth, narr. Helen Laser, James Fouhey, and Tim Campbell. Probably a novella, based on the audio length. Contemporary, Chicago-set fantasy focusing primarily on creatures from Polish folklore, but not exclusively; there’s mention made in here of . . . I may not be remembering the name correctly, but I think it was the O’Conner-Vasquezes, a blended banshee/llorona family, which was a nice touch. This plays out over the course of just a few days, but it does a good job of packing enough intensity into the events that I believe in the relationships that get built along the way, as a visitor from Poland strikes a bargain to get help in seeking out the witch Baba Jaga. As seems to be a theme with this month’s titles, this works perfectly well as a standalone, but there’s a sequel coming later this year.

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, Sarah Brooks. I’ve seen a couple of books lately that center on train journeys, so I guess that’s having a Moment right now, but by and large this is a very different setup from a lot of the novels out there, which is part of what drew me to it. It’s the late nineteenth century, I think (I forget the exact year), and it’s years since Siberia suddenly and inexplicably became overrun with . . . something. Some kind of strangeness dangerous enough that the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway was an even bigger undertaking than it was in reality, and now passengers are cautioned not to spend too much time looking out the windows, as even seeing what’s out there can have odd effects on the mind.

The novel is entirely the story of a single journey, from start to finish (with a little bit before and after). There are a few moments in here which edge toward horror, but the number one word I’d use to describe it is tense. As in, one night I took a break from reading it because there were so many things poised to go disastrously wrong, and I didn’t know which one was going to blow up first. The ending is not a downer, though, and the narrative even has some sympathy toward characters who honestly brought their fates upon themselves. So long as you don’t mind never actually getting an explanation for what happened to Siberia — that is not a question this book has any interest in answering — it’s very well-done. The only reason I didn’t inhale the whole thing faster was that my nerves couldn’t take it.

I’m baaaaaaack!

I know I started posting again about my reading last month, but, like, this month I’m really back. As in, I am finally reading fiction again, not because there’s a book club meeting I want to go to, not because I owe a blurb, but because I felt like it. And I’m reading a lot. Still a surprising amount of nonfiction mixed in there — I would have expected myself to go off that for a while — but this feels more like what I’m used to.

Sea Beyond 1 My own work doesn’t count. Though I’ll note that part of the reason for the pivot toward reading, away from the video games I’ve been playing so much, is because I was putting in long hours at the computer on revision and didn’t want to stay there when leisure time started.

The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase, Mark Forsyth. First of the two books that sparked this post the other day; this is the one I particularly praised for drawing its examples from modern song lyrics as well as classics like Shakespeare and the Bible. It also does something that I liked at first, which (unfortunately) got a little grating as I went along: basically every chapter ends with him saying something like, “that quote is also an example of [next figure of speech]” or “if the author had said XYZ instead, it would have been [next figure of speech].” It was a nice segue the first few times, but it became a bit too much over time. Then again, if I read the book more slowly, spacing out those transitions would probably have helped. Regardless, I highly recommend this if you want to know more about the tricks of rhetoric!

The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, ill. Zenchu Sato. I haven’t yet gotten around to monasticism in my Patreon essays, but research for The Sea Beyond made me realize just how much my knowledge of the subject is specifically Catholic-inflected. This is the first of three books I wound up reading this month on Buddhist monasticism, and it makes for an interesting contrast with how “Zen” is conceived of in the popular Western consciousness — it’s not all serenity and enlightenment! In particular, the image of monks being forcibly dragged to meetings with their teachers is rather at odds with the quiet, dignified image we have of such matters. This book also helped me better understand the role koans play in Zen teaching (which itself is not a monastic thing, of course, but still interesting in its own right).

Flower, Song, Dance: Aztec and Mayan Poetry, trans. David Bowles. I have another collection of Aztec poetry I read a while back, by Miguel León-Portilla, but that one’s more focused on literal translation of the surviving corpus, whereas here Bowles explicitly tries to make his translations read like poetry. It’s useful to have both! Though worth noting that Bowles was making free aesthetic decisions about how to shape his poems; we don’t really know what the underlying principles of Nahuatl poetry were, other than that they were often sung. So these are not translated “in the same form,” but rather are transposed to meters and such that Bowles thought would create a suitable effect. Very glad to have both this and León-Portilla’s work on my shelf together.

On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers, Kate Marsden. Picked this one up semi-randomly because Marissa Lingen posted about reading it, and for starters, just look at that title. How can you resist? (Probably many of you can resist just fine. I, clearly, did not.)

This is a late 19th-century account of a nurse who went deep into Siberia on an ostensible quest to find an herb used there to treat leprosy, reputedly with efficacious results. But it’s a weird book because the herb gets forgotten more or less immediately; mostly it’s an account of how she got people to fund her expedition, the trials and travails she faced along the way, and the horrendous conditions under which most lepers in Siberia at the time were forced to live, which she agitated to improve with the construction of dedicated hospitals. (Plus some side strands about things like her evangelizing to criminals in prison, because she also kinda sorta wound up inspecting jails from a health-and-sanitation perspective.) Ultimately, what this book was really meant to do was to silence her detractors who thought she’d just gone off on a pleasure jaunt in Russia and surely did not do the things she’d claimed. Since there were apparently memorials in her honor erected later on in Siberia, and this book quotes extensively from the letters and reports of people she dealt with about what she was doing, I think it’s fair to say her detractors were full of hot air. (Also full of homophobia: Wikipedia tells me there were accusations later on, which, because of the mores or the time, significantly tarnished her legacy at home.)

Anyway, I mostly picked this up because I thought it would be useful and interesting to read about how travel at the time was effected. And I was not wrong! Yeesh, what a difference a train makes to a place like Siberia.

Buddhist Monastic Traditions of Southern Asia: A Record of the Inner Law Sent Home From the South Seas, Śramana Yijing, trans. Li Rongxi. Hah, so, um, yeah. I’m fairly certain that when I bought this book, as part of my “let’s learn something about Buddhist monasticism” bender, I didn’t read the description in much depth. In contrast with the Zen book, written in the twentieth century, this one is from . . . the seventh. It is literally just a translation of a Chinese monk’s writings home from India, which can be summed up as “guys, we’re doing Buddhism wrong.”

Which, I mean — that’s kind of fascinating in its own right! At least if you’re the type of nerd I am. You learn things about how Buddhist concepts got adapted — and in some cases, warped — in translation from India to China, accommodating stuff like a different climate (clothing that’s fine in the tropics will kill you with hypothermia in a more northern winter) and different cultural expectations. But also, um, this is full of things like very precise instructions on how you’re supposed to filter water before you drink it so as to avoid killing any insects. It gets nitty-gritty, is what I’m saying. And that is probably not something most of us feel deeply compelled to read about.

Mexican Bestiary/Bestiario Mexicano, David Bowles. A short, bilingual work on supernatural creatures of Mexico, by the same author as the translations above. As a matter of personal taste, I would have liked this to focus a bit less on modern cryptids and more on traditional material, but it’s still a nice addition to my library.

The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began, Valerie Hansen. I enjoyed this book, but I also ranted about it at some length to my patrons in the monthly New Worlds book review.

The heart of my issue is that, while I recognize that popular nonfiction benefits from having a hook — in this case, the idea that globalization really “began” around the year 1000, i.e. when the (brief) Norse contact with North America meant that for the first time, trade networks formed a daisy-chain of (potential) contact around the globe — I would have preferred Hansen to simply write more broadly about long-distance networks before the early modern period, instead of going for the gimmicky premise. Reading this book, it was blatantly obvious that the date 1000 C.E. comes with error bars of several centuries to either side, rather than being an actual turning point I found persuasive.

Whereas, had this been broader in focus, it could have been organized with an eye toward what gets transmitted over long distances, and what factors shape the answer to that question: when and why is it raw materials like metals, when and why is it religious ideas, when and why is it slaves. Hansen might also not have wound up in what felt to me like a weird middle ground, where the book neither really explores the historical specificity of a given place and time in depth, nor doesn’t explore it — you get these random blobs of detail here and there, which mostly made me want the book to either be longer and do more of that, or shorter and do less.

Interesting reading in that it covered areas and eras I frankly know very little about, but I kind of want that other book I imagined instead.

Discipline & Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, Michael Lempert. Third book of my “let’s read about non-Christian monasticism” binge. This one wound up being slightly off-topic from what I expected, but in ways that are differently useful.

The focus here is on Tibetan Geluk (or Gelug) monasteries that have been . . . transplanted? re-founded? whatever verb you pick has implications . . . in India, and how traditional life there butts up against modern politics around Tibetan sovereignty. Lempert’s thesis is that the Dalai Lama, in order to gain necessary Western support, has promoted a certain image of Tibetan Buddhism, while the religion as it’s practiced in the monasteries Lempert looked at doesn’t entirely fit that image. “Violence” here is meant in a more diffuse sense than I originally thought, though, as it encompasses things like very confrontational (and deliberately asymmetrical) debate practices as well as physical discipline of monks.

Tibetan politics are another thing I’m woefully ignorant of, so this was as beneficial in teaching me something about what’s been going on in that whole corner of the world as it was in telling me anything about Tibetan Buddhist monasticism. Though it was that latter, too.

The Palace of the Dragon King, Matthew Meyer. Fifth of his yōkai books, illustrated as usual with his own art. The focus this time is generally on water, culminating in a look at the idea of the Dragon King of the sea and his court.

Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase, Arthur Quinn. This was the other rhetoric book I read recently. Older and shorter than The Elements of Eloquence, with much more of a focus on older examples of the figures, I still found it very entertaining. It also groups the figures according to their nature much more than Forsyth’s book does, which I liked.

The Wood at Midwinter, Susanna Clarke. Illustrated short story Clarke was commissioned to write. Being a short story, naturally it’s very slight; the illustrations do not really a whole book make. I ultimately found it not all that compelling, though I like and agree with Clarke’s point that honestly, saints might very well come across as weird rather than plaster figures of piety.

Mother of Rome, Lauren J.A. Bear. Historical fantasy novel about Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus, the first of whom is the legendary founder of Rome. Although I wasn’t a fan of how much it relied on long, italicized flashback scenes, I did like the book overall; in particular, the key maneuver it uses to keep Rhea involved in the plot throughout made a lot of sense to me. I also like that — spoiler, but one I think is worth spoiling, since otherwise certain readers who might enjoy this would otherwise be put off — it denies the interpretation where the god Mars raped her, and instead has Rhea being an active and enthusiastic agent in getting pregnant. Fair warning, though; there is still a lot of violence against women here, including some perpetuated by other women. Utopian “back in the Good Old Days of matriarchal paganism” this is not.

Sound the Gong, Joan He. Second half of the Kingdom of Three duology, which gender-flips and eventually presents a very alternate version of The Romance of Three Kingdoms.

I say “second half of the duology,” but really, it’s the second half of a book published in two volumes. As in, this one literally starts with Chapter 26 (or whatever the actual number was). Enough time had passed since I read the first one that I really could have used more of an on-ramp to get me back up to speed — for pity’s sake, at least a recap at the front! — but I enjoy the duology enough that I persevered and was soon right back in the swing of things. He does not pull punches on the consequences of her premise; be prepared for scads of betrayal and some really gruesome murder. (Her afterword points you at a bonus story on her website if you need some healing afterward.)

. . . oh, and yeah, ostensibly the main characters here are, like, teenagers. It’s the Six of Crows thing where you just ignore that and the rest of the text reads just fine with you imagining them as grown adults instead. This does not read as trope-y YA, in large part because, well, look at the source material.

Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey. First book of a duology, though I didn’t know that when I picked it up, and I think this one arrives at a reasonably acceptable stopping point.

I also think this must have read very differently when it first came out. The starting premise is that, in the face of multiple waves of a deadly flu pandemic sweeping the globe (. . . yeah), the U.S. decided to build first one, then two walls to close off the border with Mexico (. . . yyyyyyyeah). The eponymous town of Santa Olivia is one of the ones caught in the fifty-mile zone between the walls; everyone who chose not to abandon their home was informed they henceforth lived in the military installation of Outpost 12. Oh, and they’re no longer U.S. citizens.

Yeah.

Now, if I stop and look at this through a rational lens, I suspect the setup falls apart. There is zero mention made of agriculture or really any other productive industry in the former Santa Olivia; basically every job there is a service job, whether that’s directly serving the military (running restaurants and bars, prostitution) or serving the other residents of this Outpost. Even allowing for the worldbuilding details about lots of stuff not being available anymore or not getting replaced when it breaks down, the only plausible explanation is that Outpost is wholly dependent on the U.S. for, uh, absolutely everything, to support a community that is way more than what’s needed to maintain the military base. While also pouring effort into making sure nobody ever gets out of Outpost to tell the world what’s going on there. For decades on end. I’m not sure I actually believe that over just forcibly relocating everybody.

But those were post-book thoughts, and while I was reading the book, Carey did a good job of creating a tense and plausible atmosphere. One which had much, much less to do with what’s described in the cover copy than I thought: while it’s true that the main character, Loup, teams up with some friends to do vigilante things as the town’s eponymous saint, Santa Olivia, that’s a surprisingly small portion of the book. Much of the rest has to do with the monthly boxing challenges organized by the commander of the base, who 1) really really loves watching boxing matches and 2) has promised that if any Outposter manages to beat whichever army champion he puts them up against, they and one other person will get a ticket out of there, back into the U.S. I, uh, don’t think it’s a spoiler to say this offer turns out to be less than honest and fair. Really, my thought while reading this was “did Carey take up boxing and then write this book?” It very much has the feel of an author building a story around their new hobby. I don’t mean that as a criticism, though; I liked the detail on that front, and I think she did a good job of building some interesting twists into the plot.

Not sure if I’ll read the second book, though. Based on the cover copy, it sounds like it would be very different in a lot of respects, and I’m not sure I’m that interested in where that goes.

Heavenly Tyrant, Xiran Jay Zhao. Sequel to Iron Widow, but this is not a duology. Whether it will be a trilogy or more, I don’t know, but this is most definitely not the end.

Kinda hard to talk about this one given how much it builds on key elements from the end of the previous book. The best I can do is to say that I did not expect the mecha + kaiju + primal scream against the patriarchy blend of Iron Widow to expand to include, uh, <checks notes> a communist revolution? But it does, and Zhao goes into a lot more detail about the mechanics of that than I usually see in fiction — without landing simplistically on a “yay, good!” or “boo, bad!” result. If there’s a way to pursue the good ideals of such a revolution without falling into excess and cruelty, the characters do not find it here, but boy howdy do they try. I also thought the relationship between Zetian and a certain new character (the one introduced at the end of the first book) was excellently complicated, with all kinds of admirable and horrifying elements blended together until there’s no separating them anymore.

Once again, the ending majorly shakes things up, though it takes a bit more time in the shaking and so avoids the worst of Iron Widow‘s feeling of the wheels coming off the car as it screeches across the finish line. Warning for a lot of gender-based violence as well as regular violence, though — which, come to think of it, also applies to Santa Olivia. Between these two and Mother of Rome, plus Sound the Gong‘s very non-gendered violence, I did not have a lighthearted month for fiction . . .

Life in a Medieval City, Joseph and Frances Gies. Pretty sure I’ve read this before, but if so, it was roughly twenty years ago. And this book wasn’t new then (it was originally published in 1969), so yeah, I could probably be reading something more recent. But it was on my shelf, and I was not wrong in remembering that it’s quite readable, and I have several different story ideas rattling around my head that would benefit from being firmly seated in actual medieval life rather than the watered-down, microwaved, fourth-generation photocopy that infests popular media, so I read it. They use Troyes in France as their focal city, but there are also comments in here about how things are in Italy or England around the same time (1250), and for the purposes of writing in a secondary world, that’s enough for me.

It’s been a minute since I posted one of these! And by a minute, I mean a literal year.

As I mentioned a while ago, I stopped blogging about what I was reading because everything I was reading was research for a book series (The Sea Beyond) that I couldn’t talk about yet. Then I was able to talk about it, but all my reading was still research, and while I know some of you would be interested in hearing about that, it was draining enough of my brain that writing extra about it, beyond my notes, was really not an appealing prospect.

But! While this post does contain one book from the tail end of that binge, and there are a few others I’ll probably work my way through later (as we get started on the second volume of the duology), for now, I’m actually reading some other stuff.

Fiesta y tragedia: Vivir y morir in la España del Siglo de Oro, Enrique Martínez Ruiz. Last of the research binge, and the fifth book I read in Spanish. This was actually the one I started with, but there are two reasons it took me forever to get through: first, it’s over six hundred pages long in ebook, and second, a Spanish friend has confirmed that this guy’s writing sometimes gets a little impenetrable. As in, I clocked a 127-word sentence, and that might not even be the longest one in here. For someone like me, barely muddling through a second language, daisy-chaining that many clauses together makes following the point of the sentence rather challenging. But there are few enough books on daily life in early modern Spain that beggars could not be choosers, and I got some very useful information out of here even if I had to do a lot of work to get it.

Language of Liars, S.L. Huang. Disclosure: I know the author through the Codex Writer’s Group, and I got sent an advance copy of this for blurbing purposes.

Forthcoming SF novella about linguistics that is, among other things, taking some potshots at nineteenth-century anthropologists (my comment about that was “it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, where the fish deserve it”). The story itself is not for the faint of heart, and I won’t be surprised in the slightest if it winds up on awards lists.

Dragonsong, Anne McCaffrey. Re-read, or rather re-listen, for an upcoming book club. I remember really liking the Harper Hall trilogy; I’m not sure how much of that memory owes itself to later books in the series, and how much is rose-tinted glasses. But man does this one take a while to get started. You’re fully a quarter of the way in before it gets to what I remembered as the plot; everything before that basically consists of detailing just how much Menolly’s life at Half Circle Hold sucks. And then even once the plot gets started, way more time and attention is spent on what other characters are doing than I recalled — in fact, parts of it felt rather like they were more there to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the other Pern books than to really tell a story about Menolly and her fire lizards. It was a quick listen, and doing it in library audiobook meant it was filling time I spent in the car rather than leisure time at home, so I don’t really regret it, but . . . yeah, I was not impressed this time around.

The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett. Also read for that book club. I very much enjoyed Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy, and I was very interested in the premise of a detective story in a fantasy world, but the basic principles of the setting here are not as much my cup of tea — I’ve never been a fan of the New Weird/body horror/etc. The notion of engraving is cool, and I liked Din reasonably well as a character (Ana a bit less so; you could get a pretty good bender on by drinking every time she grins), but I’m not sure I’m invested enough to continue. I do get the feeling that there is an Inevitable Revelation coming concerning certain things, and I’m curious to know what that is, but I might be at the level of “ask a friend” rather than reading the rest of the series myself.

Filling Your Worlds With Words: A Writer’s Guide to Linguistic Worldbuilding, C.D. Covington. Disclosure: Turning Darkness Into Light is one of the books discussed in here, because back when the author was doing her linguistics column for Tor.com/Reactor, I shamelessly asked her if she’d like to read my novel about translation.

This is a Kickstarter-funded book about many aspects of language and worldbuilding. It starts off with a fairly technical discussion of things like sound production and how those might differ for non-humanoid species, but this is not a book about conlanging; instead she touches on things like how names and speech styles reflect culture, how difficulties of translation can play into your plot, and why universal translators will never work outside of straight-up magic. The formatting for the print edition is not great, but the information is excellent, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling, Henry Lien. This admits up-front that it’s making sweeping generalizations about “Eastern” and “Western” storytelling, and that it’s deliberately taking the piss out of the latter in an attempt to shake up the brains of readers for whom that’s an unexamined default. It’s a slim book (I read it in an evening) that unpacks the four-part story structure usually referred to in English by its Japanese name, kishōtenketsu, as well as nested and circular storytelling, and also the cultural values that tend to go hand-in-hand with these forms. Lien uses various bits of fairly well-known media to illustrate his points, so it’s not all abstract discussion. Lots of food for thought here!

Temporarily redacting some of what I read in March, so this is a shorter post than usual.

Legends of Rotorua and the Hot Lakes, A.W. Reed, ill. Dennis Turner. Last of the folklore books my parents picked up for me during their travels in New Zealand and Australia. This one is not only regional but to some extent focused on toponymy, which is to say, the stories behind why certain places have the names they do — which connects it a bit with Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places, though so far as I know the Maori don’t have the same practice of using toponyms in daily conversation as a way of commenting on and influencing each other’s behavior.

A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, ed. Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman. Continuing my efforts to read some of the anthologies that have piled up unread in my wish list . . . this one focuses specifically on writers from South, Southeast, and East Asia telling stories based on folklore from their own heritage, and I really appreciated the explanatory note after each tale. Even when I could recognize the source on my own (which wasn’t all the time), I liked seeing the authors talk about why they chose that one, what it was their brains snagged on and wanted to respond to, etc. My favorite may have been Rahul Kanakia’s “Spear Carrier” — certainly not the only one I liked, but I’m writing this post while out of the house and unable to glance back at the stories, and that’s the one that stands out most distinctly in my memory (in a good way), a really interesting sort of time travel/portal angle on the Mahabharata.

The Fated Sky, Mary Robinette Kowal. Second of the Lady Astronaut books. These are interesting to look at from a structural standpoint, because their subject matter — humanity needing to establish colonies on the Moon and/or Mars before the Earth becomes uninhabitable in the decades following a massive meteor strike in the ’50s — means these have much less of the conventional plot shape than most SF/F novels. They have to cover years at a time, in a sphere of activity where progress is made up of incremental advances rather than a solution assembled and delivered in a lump, and so while the ending delivers a milestone, it’s less climactic than most stories. Whether you like these will depend much more on how much you like the journey to that point, with all the technical and political and interpersonal challenges to be surmounted along the way (some of which will, in very realistic fashion, not so much get surmounted as fade into the background). I do like that kind of story, and without getting into spoilers, lemme just say the bag was one of the most effectively horrifying things I’ve read in quite some time.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo. First novella of a series I’ve been reading about for some time. The cover copy made getting into this a little rockier than it needed to be, because it focused my attention in the wrong place for how the story actually begins, but once I got past that I very much enjoyed it. This pulls off the trick of being able to suggest a large and vivid world despite working in a confined length — and I know I will get to see more of it as I continue the series!

An Enchantment of Ravens, Margaret Rogerson. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve largely gone off reading YA for the time being, but this one was on my list and I was in a mood for something about fae. Rogerson does a pretty good job with them, in part because this avoids some of the stereotypical YA feel: yes, there’s a hot faerie prince the protagonist is in love with, but said protagonist is convincingly established in an adult life of her own, and as such, she spends part of this book debating what love even really is, and whether what she’s feeling qualifies for that name. The realm of the fae is compellingly detailed (and avoids the bog-standard Seelie/Unseelie divide), the threat there feels real rather than contrived, and I think my only real quibble is that there’s one detail at the end which I wish had been delivered just a little bit differently. Sadly, Rogerson does not seem to have written more in this world, because I would probably read it if she had.

Embroidered Worlds: Fantastic Fiction from Ukraine & the Diaspora, ed. Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Olha Brylova, and Iryna Pasko. Anthology Kickstarted last year. I’m trying to read more anthologies in general, because I keep adding them to my wishlist and sometimes my bookshelf, but it’s a bit hard; I would almost always rather pick up a novel.

This one is broad in tone, because its theme is (obviously) a particular community rather than a topic or even a genre. As with The Way Spring Arrives, you get everything from epic fantasy to literary contemporary fantasy to surrealist SF to horror, based on whatever it is the author in question likes to write. Naturally, that meant I didn’t wind up enjoying all the stories, because some of them are just not my type of thing. But sometimes it’s nice to get a broad cross-section.

Network Effect, Martha Wells. Murderbot does a novel! I was enjoying the novellas, but it was nice to get a more substantial plot to sink my teeth into, with more stages along the way. Very happy to see a certain character return, and I legit laughed at “Anybody who thinks machine intelligences don’t feel emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now.” And as much as I like Mensah, I was glad the plot didn’t feature her; she’s got her rhythm now with everybody’s favorite rogue SecUnit, and in a lot of ways it’s more interesting to make Murderbot deal with people it doesn’t remotely have that rapport with (yet).

This book did also deliver more of what I was commenting on before, with regard to the remnants. Oddly, though, I still feel a little unsatisfied there — not sure if it’s just me, or what. That aspect still strikes me a bit like a Macguffin to make the real story go, and I don’t know if it will stay there or eventually rear its head to be the actual focus of the narrative or not.

(Side note: I always find it pleasing when I think “I wonder if this story will ever do X” and then five minutes/fifty pages later, X happens. In this case, it was the whole business with Three. I am pleased by this kind of thing because it means I’m on the correct wavelength for the story, foreseeing what might happen without either waiting too long for a development or being disappointed because I can see a cool possibility the author appears to be ignoring.)

The Language of Power, Rosemary Kirstein. Thus do I join the ranks of those waiting for this series to be finished! Not to mention poring over the bits and pieces Kirstein has shared from books five and six over the years/deleted scenes from earlier volumes/etc. in an attempt to divine something from their entrails. I know a lot of readers these days are extremely cynical about starting to read a series that isn’t yet complete (which is bad for the chances of many series ever being completed), and it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that this one was published in 2004, with nothing else released yet. But 1) keeping the torch alive through recruiting new readers improves the odds that Kirstein will be able to spare the time from paying the bills to finish the last two books and 2) as I said in a discussion with a friend about my Wheel of Time fannish days, some stories are actually very rewarding to read while they’re incomplete, because they leave you time and space for speculation.

This particular volume does seem to raise more questions than it answers, most of which I can’t really say anything about here other than obliquely, e.g. “wtf was it that Kieran saw.” I joined a Steerswoman fan Discord after finishing this, and at least nobody else seems to have a solid answer, either? Though there is much theorizing, about that and other things. Which really is one of the great delights about this series, and why I find myself being much more spoiler-averse in talking about it to friends than I normally am: I have enjoyed piecing together the clues to date, and I don’t want to rob anybody else of that experience. Especially since “gather evidence and theorize about it” is kinda what steerswomen are for.

1602, Neil Gaiman, ill. Andy Kubert, col. Richard Isanove. We’ve been watching Marvel’s What If? show, and the “1602” episode reminded me that Gaiman once did a comics miniseries by that name (and of similar, though not remotely identical, plot). Being a nerd for that period of history, of course I was interested in picking it up.

It’s . . . okay? Admittedly, I’m coming into this not from a comics background; most of these characters I know from various movies. But also, this struck me as way too overstuffed — more than two dozen superheroes crammed into eight issues, like Gaiman felt he had to get as many fan favorites in there as possible. I would have preferred fewer characters and more time spent exploring each, so we get to enjoy seeing how their particular powers and personality manifest in this era. I also would have preferred it to be its own, freestanding thing, rather than having it explicitly tie back into the Marvel multiverse and the main canon; it would have been great to have a Captain America who was actually Native American. Ah well.

Riding the Trail of Tears, Blake M. Hausman. So, imagine that the old Oregon Trail game was a virtual reality simulation. Except that instead of being (implied white) pioneers heading off to colonize other lands, all players/customers are Cherokee Indians being forcibly removed west. And in addition to perils like dysentery, you also have to concern yourself with being murdered by soldiers. (But don’t worry! When you die, you get to go talk to the Wise Old Medicine Man, who is programmed to spout exactly the kind of New Age-y platitudes you want to hear.)

I really liked this book for a while. The first chapter was disorienting, but in a way that I trusted would make sense later, once the story looped back to focus on the narrator and what’s going on there. After that, you follow one of the simulation’s tour guides, Tallulah Wilson (one-quarter Cherokee), as she takes yet another group through the Trail of Tears — only for things to start going very, very wrong. That part was great: kind of horrifying (their tour is for some reason operating at a higher severity level than the customers signed up for), very full of tension, and also dropping all kinds of historical information along the way that, surprise surprise, my classes as a kid never mentioned.

Unfortunately, that didn’t last. One of the tourists gets separated from the group — not just separated in the simulation of the Trail of Tears, but off somewhere else entirely in the VR system — and her alternating chapters are full of characters having the sort of frustrating conversations where the other people aren’t explaining anything and mostly everybody is talking past each other, the teeth of the gears constantly slipping and grinding. And then once the book moves into its final act, it basically opts to go full lit-fic rather than spec-fic, with more cryptic/elliptical conversations, a focus entirely on Tallulah’s personal transformation rather than the question of what is going on with the simulation, and only the most fleeting of nods back toward that first chapter and the narrator presented there, so that all of that winds up feeling like a metaphor rather than the actual genre content I expected it to be. Even the Homeland Security agents who get mentioned time and time again (because people think the stuff going wrong might be the work of terrorists) end up not really mattering, their questioning of Tallulah afterward essentially irrelevant to the conclusion.

So, very disappointing to me in the end. Possibly more interesting to those who like lit-fic better, who don’t mind the stylistic quirks here and the way the genre elements are more set dressing than actual content. Me, I would have enjoyed a book that kept following the Trail of Tears, fleshing out a history I don’t know well at all, exploring the decisions made in coding this experience for capitalist consumption, and answering more of my questions about the ghosts in the machine.

Hideki Smith, Demon Queller, A.J. Hartley with Hisako Osako and Kuma Hartley. A fracking endeavor in North Carolina inadvertently releases Japanese monsters; the story is partly about how a pair of half-Japanese siblings deal with the issue, and partly about why exactly there are Japanese monsters in the North Carolina mountains in the first place.

The plot, for the most part, is ordinary enough, in terms of the tropes and so forth you expect out of this type of contemporary fantasy; what made me enjoy this one was the characters. Caleb and Emily (aka Hideki and Kazuko, though they never use those names) have been raised by an aggressively assimilationist nisei mother and a mild-mannered English father in a dying rural town where their immigrant grandmother is the only other Asian person in sight. The reason Hisako Osako and Kuma Hartley are co-credited with A.J. Hartley on this book is that the latter is writing from secondhand experience; his Japanese wife and mixed-race kid don’t have it as bad as the Smith family, thanks in part to living in a more cosmopolitan area, but Hartley is definitely trying to represent their perspective here, with their input.

But it isn’t all racism and suffering, either. I actively enjoyed the sibling relationship between Caleb and the slightly older Emily, which strikes an excellent balance of plausible bickering over love, support, and entertaining banter. Caleb’s almost total ignorance of everything Japanese is laid against Emily’s stealth investigations in that direction, sneaking behind their mother’s back to stay in touch with the heritage — and the grandmother — the mom is so determined to cut all ties with (for reasons that, yes, tie into the story). The cast of supporting characters is relatively small, in part because this is so short, but there’s a foundation there for more in the future; this book wraps up its own plot while leaving the door open for future adventures.

Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants, James Vincent. Nonfiction that wasn’t quite what I expected it to be — not necessarily a bad thing. Although Vincent starts out by discussing things like where we get our oldest units of measurement from, how they were maintained, and what happened when you got different competing units within nominally the same country, he’s equally or more interested in the political side of how those measurements get used. As a result, many of the chapters are about things like the attempts to measure people (the guy who invented the first IQ test actively didn’t want it being used the way we’ve wound up using it! he was trying to identify and then help students who had trouble in the classroom!), land (the surveying of the U.S. and how that was used to further the colonial project to oust indigenous tribes), and the various statistics we track about ourselves now, through devices like smartwatches. There’s an entire chapter on metricization, why it’s never fully happened in the U.S. — though we use metric here in more ways than you may realize, e.g. as the means by which we define our yards and gallons and so forth — and why some people in the U.K. are still trying to roll it back.

So ultimately, the focus is pretty heavily on the role measurement plays in our lives and our politics, with a slightly lesser proportion of attention to the creation of the measures themselves. I read it pretty quickly but didn’t find it super engaging overall; as far as “readable nonfiction” goes, I’d place this in the middle of the pack.

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries, Heather Fawcett. I kept hearing about this book in the context of comparisons to the Memoirs of Lady Trent, and, well. Female scholar in the nineteenth century travels the world to study dragons, told in the form of a memoir; female scholar in the early twentieth century travels the world to study faeries, told in the form of diary entries. Yeah, I can’t say the comparison isn’t apt.

This was enjoyable, though possibly the similarities made me read critically in ways I might not have otherwise. For example, I didn’t feel this leveraged the diary format as effectively as it could have; there were places where it seemed to be forgotten or missed opportunities to play with the way time and event interact in that setup. The academic world as presented also felt a little out of period (not to mention gets multiple things about Cambridge profoundly wrong). It did a good job of evoking its environment, though, and I liked several aspects of how the fae were presented. I’m not sure if I’ll read the second, because I kept quibbling with it so much as I read, but this isn’t a case where I regret how I spent my time.

Summerland, Hannu Rajaniemi. 1930s espionage between Britain and the Soviet Union over the Spanish Civil War, with the added twist that an afterlife has been confirmed to exist — the Summerland — and so the spying is conducted across the borders between life and death. As the tag line goes, how do you deal with a spy who’s already dead?

I liked this pretty well up until the ending. A female SIS agent finds out from a Russian defector that there is a double agent in her organization’s ranks; in contrast with many stories that have that setup, she’s told outright who the mole is, and so the challenge is not to identify him. Instead she has to figure out how to stop him when he’s politically very well protected. Meanwhile, you also get the mole’s side of the story, showing why he went over to the other side. (Er, the Soviets, I mean. But also the Other Side, because he’s dead.) There’s lots of great detail around the period and the premise.

Where it fell down a bit for me was the conclusion. Information comes to light that changes the playing field quite a bit; that part was great, as I am a sucker for complex realignments of loyalties. But the information itself is kind of an enormous bombshell that just . . . doesn’t get dealt with in this book. Or ever, I think, since as far as I know, Summerland is a standalone. I recognize that following up on this element would send the story in a very different direction from the espionage games it started with, but its insertion wound up feeling a bit like something enormous was needed to make the ending fall out in a certain fashion, and the consequences were left by the wayside. Still enjoyable overall, but it didn’t quite stick the landing.

Suffer the Little Children, Ann Swinfen. I am now halfway through this historical series, and while this one is more successful than The Portuguese Affair — once again, it makes the intelligent choice to focus largely on events in a historical context, rather than historical events so large the protagonist is only a spectator — it’s a structural mess. The title refers to the book’s major focus on the problem of orphans and abused children in Elizabethan London, with lots of smaller strands having to do with Kit looking for ways to help them; that part was fine. Then there’s a major plot about a rich five-year-old heiress being kidnapped for ransom, in which the kidnapper appears to be a bit of an idiot and also some of the street children play an excessively convenient role (they just happen to be in the right place at the right time to do something pivotal).

And then oh, btw, there’s an assassination plot against Queen Elizabeth that has nothing whatsoever to do with the kid-related stuff, which gets mentioned at the start and then almost completely forgotten until the last 10% or so of the book. (At which point the identity of the assassin becomes screamingly obvious to the reader.) The only element vaguely stitching these two things together is the continued presence of Burbage’s theatre company, because they’re invited to perform at the Twelfth Night festivities where the assassination attempt will occur, and they help out with some of the kid stuff.

I’m still reading this series for the same reason I read Swinfen’s Oxford Medieval Mysteries, which is that I enjoy the exploration of the period setting. She does her research and brings interesting nuggets of it into her stories. But much more than that other series, this one really does feel like three separate things awkwardly grafted together: why is a physician deeply involved in code-breaking and espionage and also theatre people keep showing up in the story even though they’re not really relevant? (Those latter two could fit together more smoothly if Swinfen were more willing to make use of Marlowe, but in his brief appearances here he’s presented as a thoroughly dislikable and anti-Semitic jerk, and since Kit is a Portuguese crypto-Jew of confused religious sentiment . . .) It might have worked better to choose two out of three, or to write multiple series in this time period.

System Collapse, Martha Wells. With this, I have run out of Murderbot to read. (Yes, I’ve tracked down the short stories.) I didn’t expect this one to be such a close continuation of Network Effect; the latter ends in a fashion that made me expect new adventures somewhere else. I don’t really mind, because the conflict here is genuinely a different one than in the previous book, despite being in the same place and involving the same situation; the hunt for the other installation was nicely tense, and then the revelation of what problem has to be solved was a good twist away from what you were being primed to expect.

In a way, though, I think I’m glad to be pausing for a while here. Although I’ve spaced the material out a bit, I did read the whole series in about two months, and I think I’m hitting the point at which I’m overdosing on the flavor. I was really hoping to see something here that, in hindsight, was unlikely to happen because it’s at odds with the series’ tone: for all the combat that happens in these books, I’ve realized I find them emotionally cozy. The stakes in that regard are things like “will Murderbot learn to accept other people caring about it.” So when I realized I was mentally rooting for the story to go harder on that front, it felt like a signal that I’ve had enough of this series for the time being, and am in a mood for something different that will put its main characters through more of a wringer. I’ll be happy to return here when there’s more!

Artificial Condition, Martha Wells. Choo-choo, the Murderbot train keeps rolling!

I found the beginning of this one slightly rocky, in terms of trying to orient the reader in a world that basically didn’t show up within the constrained space of All Systems Red. I was also unsure how I would feel about the story, given that I enjoyed the character interactions in the first novella, but all of those characters had now left the stage. Fortunately, soon there was ART! And Murderbot’s difficulties in figuring out how to navigate the broader world without getting caught or giving away its identity as a rogue SecUnit were engaging enough after those slightly stiff opening pages. I had to tell myself I shouldn’t read the next one immediately after, because I know I like series better with a bit of breathing room between installments.

Bartholomew Fair, Ann Swinfen. Since I had a less than enthusiastic reaction to the previous book in this series, I was relieved to find this one much better. It helps that, unlike the passive tour of the failures of the Counter-Armada in The Portuguese Affair, this volume weaves its own, fictional plot around and through the historical event at its core (the protest at Bartholomew Fair by a group of demobbed soldiers demanding some kind of pay for their work and pensions for the many many widows and orphans left behind by the Counter-Armada’s failure). Because of that fictional plot, Swinfen has a lot more room here for Kit to protag instead of just watching events go down. I hope later books in the series are more in this vein, because I’ll quite enjoy them if they are.

Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells. So I didn’t read it immediately after: I read it a day or two later, however long it took me to get through Bartholomew Fair. 😛

I do wish these novellas had less generic titles; it means I have to work to remember which volume is which, even though I’m enjoying all their plots. This is another one where I think I crave just a bit more context and breathing room; all the stuff about what GreyCris is going for (and willing to kill to hide) feels more Macguffin-y than I think it has to, just because there’s no space in the novella to get into why that stuff matters. Possibly Network Effect will satisfy me in that regard; we’ll see when I get there. The action, however, is very enjoyable, and it landed squarely on the button of a trope I enjoy when Murderbot had to throw all stealth and caution out the window and reveal its capabilities as a SecUnit because the alternative was letting people die.

Moonwise, Greer Ilene Gilman. It has been a long time since a book made me feel this stupid.

As you can tell by these posts, I read fairly fast, and it’s rare for me to feel like I’m having difficulty with anything. (Uninterested, yes; incapable of processing the words on the page, no.) The writing here, however, nearly defeated me. It is intensely poetic; the language is dialed up to 11 basically all the time, except when it goes to 13. There were places where I genuinely had trouble figuring out what was even going on, because I was getting so lost in the weeds of the words.

But, well. I’m stubborn, and I didn’t like the idea of conceding defeat, of accepting that I’m just not smart enough to figure out this book that other people have loved so deeply. And I had this feeling that I would adore the story and the world of Cloud if only I could comprehend what I was reading — I read the interview with Gilman in Uncanny, and everything she was saying there sounded amazing. So, aided by determination and this quasi-dictionary by Michael Swanwick, I persevered.

And it got better, or I did. Or both. I think it was a combination of three things: this assistance of Swanwick’s piece, me just getting used to the language over time, and me getting past the part of the novel where Ariane is trying find a way into Cloud. Gilman says in the interview that Ariane attempting all kinds of different rituals to effect passage “simply shadows my frustrations as a novice writer, trying to go on,” and I kinda suspect that bleeds through into the writing during that section. It was by far the hardest section for me to parse. Once she met the tinker . . . well, it didn’t become easy, but I no longer felt like I was beating my head against a gorgeous and impenetrable wall.

Once past that wall: yes, this is kind of amazing, and mythic in ways I think very few writers achieve. It makes me reflect on the idea that magic systems must have rules, and my conviction that they don’t need mechanics so much as an underlying symbolic logic. That logic is absolutely here, just of a sort that defies your rational, “to do X you need Y and Z” approach seen in so much fantasy worldbuilding. Things work when it is right that they should do so, when the key fits the metaphorical lock.

I have Cloud and Ashes on my shelf, and actually tried to read that one before Moonwise, but I bounced straight off “Jack Daw’s Pack” because of the language thing. Now that I’m a little better oriented and versed in the language and stylistic mode of this world, I may try it again and see if I have more success.

Daily Life in Spain in the Golden Age, Marcelin Defourneaux, trans. Newton Branch. This book is from the ’60s, so not what you’d call super up to date; however, it’s also the only “daily life” kind of book I’ve found for this place and period — if you know of others, I would welcome titles!

Age aside, it does something I find fascinating: the first chapter is written as if from the perspective of a contemporary traveler, complete with all the unapologetic prejudice that brings. Defourneaux backs off from that after the opening chapter in favor of your more typical attempt at modern objectivity, but I actually found the fictionalized perspective really interesting when placed alongside the later chapters . . . especially since I wanted those later chapters to go into more depth and detail. This is thin compared to, say, a Liza Picard London book (but then, I’m a Picard fangirl). Still and all, it did what I wanted, which is to give me some sense of how Spain in this era differed from the areas I know better, like England.

A Stranger in the Citadel, Tobias Buckell. Novella or short novel, I’m not sure which, in a setting that . . . well, some of what I would say is a spoiler, and some of it is left a bit unresolved even once you reach the end of the book. Let’s just say that at multiple points along the way, the story likes to change the game.

Anyway, this has a great tag line: “You shall not suffer a librarian to live.” Books and writing are taboo, seen as foul magic and ascribed all kinds of incredible, malevolent power — so, naturally, the very first thing that happens is that a traveler is caught with a book. This leads to many changes in the life of the protagonist and destabilizes the city she lives in, leading to a journey across a wasteland toward many discoveries. I think the idea here could have supported a longer, more detailed novel; I enjoyed it in its existing form, but there were a couple of emotional beats that would have come through more strongly for me if they’d had a little more space to develop, both in terms of time elapsed and pages spent exploring them.

Bridezilla, Kathy Bailey and Kurt Pankau. Alyc and I recently did a podcast on collaboration with Kathy and Kurt, so in preparation for that, we swapped novels.

I didn’t expect to read the entirety of this, because it’s not my usual fare: a fast-paced contemporary fantasy about a town where brides-to-be have started turning into literal kaiju when they snap under the pressure of the wedding-industrial complex. Having aimed to read fifty pages for the podcast, though, I found that zipping by in no time at all, and so I wound up inhaling the whole thing in about a day. It’s definitely the type of story that has a “just roll with it” element — why does nobody outside Appleville seem to be investigating this Bridezilla phenomenon? Don’t ask, because that’s not the point. If you’re in the mood for some commentary on patriarchy by way of kaiju, logistics like that will only slow the story down.

Exit Strategy, Martha Wells. A longer gap this time because I had only ordered #2 and #3 before, and had to wait for the next volumes to arrive!

This is the culmination of an arc within the series, with all the payoff that implies. It’s very pleasing to get Mensah and some of the Preservation people back on stage — Mensah especially, because I really like her interactions with Murderbot. (I also read the Tor.com short story from her perspective, after I finished this novella. It was pleasant, but also admittedly felt more like a nice piece of fanfic than a proper short story.)

This one pulls off something not all such works do, which is to have its back half be nearly non-stop action without making me feel like I just want a breather from it all. I think it benefits from being a novella and part of a series — novels that try to maintain this pacing for too long tend to exhaust me — but also, it doesn’t neglect character moments along the way, like how Mensah works with Murderbot to get off the station. The recovery period at the end was also interestingly done.

Dust Up at the Crater School, Chaz Brenchley. (Disclosure: the author is a friend.) Second of this series of “what if British boarding school books, but on Mars”; I don’t think you need to have read the first to enjoy it, though Three Twins at the Crater School does establish who some of the key players are. As per usual, this is more about episodes in the lives of the characters than a central arc plot.

For me, these fit into a pleasant niche of feeling cozy without becoming completely toothless. There’s conflict; it’s just not world-ending or generally driven by somebody being a villain. There are no abusive teachers or Mean Girl cliques. Instead, the students want to misbehave, the teachers want to stop them, the students know they’ll probably face consequences but are often prepared to accept that as the price of having fun, and the teachers want the girls to show independence of spirit even as they try to prevent that independence from causing problems. Meanwhile, you also have alien encounters and a massive dust storm that pens the members of the Crater School inside for an extended period of time. This is very much not your Scientifically Accurate Mars; it is instead Pulp Mars, and delightful for being so.

Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells. I know this was published after Network Effect, but since it takes place before, I decided to read it first. (For those of you who read them in the opposite order, I’m curious what you thought of them being out of sequence.)

Murderbot does a murder mystery! The need to investigate by more mundane routes than just hacking all the systems within reach created a useful and plausible obstacle, and although I suspected the answer to the plot a little before it was revealed, that didn’t make the result disappointing. I like reluctant allies, and I loved the mass organization of bots at the climax. The method of rescue was great, too, with the reminder that SecUnits — for all their combat capability — aren’t actually made to fight; they’re made to protect their clients. If they can solve problems without killing people, great, let’s do that.

A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, Robert Bringhurst. This goes back and forth between segments of Haida literature and discussions of same, with digressions into history, anthropology, and the situation at the time of the collection of these stories and poems, which happened right at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. I really like the fact that Bringhurst never loses sight of the fact that specific people told these stories, and a specific man recorded them; none of this is the timeless, universal product of a culture en masse (which nothing ever is anyway, but you don’t always have the evidence to see more clearly than that).

It does make for hard going in places, because Bringhurst repeatedly reminds you that when Swanton went to Haida Gwaii to record these stories — or rather, to do a lot of anthropological work which he mostly neglected because he went all-in on the stories instead — the people there were being hit extremely hard by the effects of colonialism, with their population having suffered a catastrophic decline and many of their ways of life being pressured out of existence. I also kind of wanted to rip my hair out when Bringhurst contrasted Swanton’s excellent-for-the-time methods with all the ethnologists who only ever published summaries of the texts they had recorded, even when their notes included more detailed transcripts of what the storyteller actually said (and not all of them bothered with that in the first place). It really drives home how much we lost — and I do mean we, because I do think that the extinction of so many stories is a loss to humanity as a whole, not just the communities who told those tales.