Skin Folk

Nalo Hopkinson

Completed 11/27/2024 Reviewed 11/27/24

4 Stars

I’ve read quite a bit by Hopkinson.  Sister Mine, The Salt Roads, and the amazing Brown Girl in the Ring are just a few of the books by her I’ve read.  Skin Folk is a collection of short fiction, all of which are based in Caribbean mythos, which is her specialty.  Specifically, these stories all have the similar theme of being able to change or remove one’s skin, literally or figuratively.  They vary greatly from story to story, some more magical realism, some fantasy, some fairy tale, some science fiction.  But they all deal with the concept of acceptance.  

Several of the stories were way over my head.  I felt like I completely missed their message or the point of the story.  However, the prose was always wonderful to read, even if I didn’t get the story.  I could also have been the fact that these are short stories based in unfamiliar mythology.  Even though I’ve read many of her novels, I still don’t know a lot about Caribbean mythology.  It could also be that I’m more used to getting the mythos with a longer narrative.  Whatever the case, reading Hopkinson is always an adventure, and usually an exciting one.  Here are several I found noteworthy:

Snake – A very disturbing story of a serial child molester and murderer who receives justice at the hands of old people and birds.

The Glass Bottle Trick – Sort of a Mr Fox/Bluebeard type tale.  A woman marries a man and finds out he murdered his previous wives for getting pregnant.

Slow Cold Chick – A woman cracks an egg that holds an odd baby bird.  She accidently gets hot sauce on it and it grows into a violent cockatrice.  With the help of magical neighbors, she tames the creature.

Fisherman – A woman dresses as a man and works as a fisherman, trying to gain acceptance from her coworkers.  So she goes to the local cathouse like them and has her first sexual encounter with a prostitute with a heart of gold.  

Greedy Choke Puppy – A tale about Caribbean werewolves and vampires.  Specifically, the soucouyant is a woman who can shed her skin and as a ball of energy, can suck the life force from babies.

Ganger (Ball Lightning) – A very strange tale about a couple who use special body suits to enhance their sense of touch during sex.  After an intense session, they leave the suits charged and at the foot of their bed, jumbled together.  The suits’ contact generates a Ganger, a being of energy that attacks the couple.

As you can see, the stories are quite strange and intense.  After about the first five, I started to really get the point of them and found them profound.  I give this book four stars out of five, missing five stars only because I didn’t get the first few, which could be me, a function of not really knowing Caribbean mythology, or simply the story not being long enough to get the point across to me.  Still it’s a great collection and I look forward to reading other short works of hers.

Service Model

Adrien Tchaikovsky
Completed 11/24/2024 Reviewed 11/24/24
5 Stars

I was completely blown away by this novel.  It’s only my second Tchaikovsky read.  The first was novella, Made Things, which I really liked, but this book was amazing.  It’s quite apropos of the current debates over AI.  Here, robots take over the world and humankind falls.  It has great world building, prose and character development.  Most of all, I felt fully immersed in the world and empathized with not only the main character, but also a secondary character.  And the ending blew me away.  This book was published this year, so it’s up for awards next year.  I hope it gets nominated for at least a few.

The book begins with Charles, a valet robot for his human master.  He finds himself performing his normal routine despite nothing around him changing.  Eventually, he figures out that the master is dead.  However, he has trouble getting out of his routine because of how he’s programmed.  He calls the police and paramedics, but they are also bound by their logic.  Or more accurately, stuck.  It is revealed that Charles murdered his master, but he has no memory of it.  So he takes himself to get repaired.  The repair station is also stuck within its logic and no robots are getting repaired.  However, he meets up with another robot, the Wonk, and begins a journey of finding another master to serve.  

The book is written in third person, but from the point of view of Charles (who becomes known as unCharles).  In addition to hearing his thoughts, the narration reads like it has a robotic perspective as well.  It completely immerses you in the world of robots.  It is some of the most amazing writing I’ve ever read in science fiction.  I knew Tchaikovsky wrote beautifully, but I was not prepared for how well this was written.  

I also like the premise of the book.  The Wonk believes that unCharles has a virus that makes him sentient.  However, unCharles does not believe it.  The Wonk tries to get unCharles to think for himself outside his logistic programming, but he refuses.  Instead, he believes all will be well if he can just find a human master to serve.  So they travel the countryside looking for a human in need of a valet.  Unfortunately, he mostly finds degraded humans and robots in various levels of chaotic logic, from other valets to warrior soldiers who can’t stop fighting.

UnCharles is a terrific character.  Just when you think that he’s on the verge of acting with free will, he sticks to his programming.  It’s fun and frustrating, as it is for the Wonk.  The Wonk is pretty awesome as well, being a cheerleader for unCharles figuring himself out.  But she pops in and out for various reasons.  

I give this book five stars out of five.  It’s the first five star I’ve given in a while.  I still have yet to read Children of Time series, the first of which is supposed to be amazing.  As I mentioned in my previous review of Made Things, I don’t know why I’m not reading more of this amazing writer.  

Redemptor

Jordan Ifueko
Completed 11/15/2024, Reviewed 11/15/2024
4 stars

The second book in the Raybearer duology was just as good as the first book, if not a little better.  The real standout was the world building, specifically, the really interesting and creative Underworld.  It made the ending very powerful.  I was further impressed when I read the Afterword from the author.  Raybearer took fifteen years to create.  Then having published the first book, she had to crank out the second book in less than a year.  And it was all done during the time of the pandemic and the biggest black movement in the US since the ‘60s.  Somehow, Ifueko produced a nearly flawless conclusion.  This book was nominated for several awards, including the Andre Norton Award for YA genre literature. 

The book picks up where the first left off.  Tari has claimed the title of Empress, which has been suppressed since the founding of the empire.  She has offered herself in lieu of children as a sacrifice to the Underworld to rescind the treaty with the demons of the Underworld.  She has two years to win over and anoint her chosen eleven as Daro did.  However, she is haunted by the souls of the hundreds of thousands of children who have been sacrificed over the centuries, demanding she pay for the sins of the empire.  And she must do all this without dying in the Underworld herself.

The journey for Tari is to learn to be an empress and balance it with doing the best possible things for her people.  Her goal is to provide peace, justice, and unity.  However, she is hampered by her quest to anoint her chosen eleven.  The stipulation put on it by the demons of the underworld is that the eleven must be the eleven rulers of the nations making up the empire.  So Tari has a long lesson in politics and how to use honesty in the best possible way to win over the rulers.  As you would guess, one of the eleven plays games with her, preventing her from completing the quest.  And this one is somewhere between debonair and smarmy.

The good thing about the Tari, though is that while she is occasionally distracted by men, she does not give herself over to them, holding her own moral ground, and working for what’s best for the empire.  That’s not to say she isn’t tempted.  She is, but continues to grow through each experience.  I think she makes for a terrific role model as a strong, black teen girl.  

I give this book four stars out of five.  It’s a little stronger than the first book, getting to the point much more directly.  The climax is terrific.  The prose is good, the character development of Tari is excellent, and the world building, as I said above, is awesome. I still feel that this duology is more for older teens than young teens, but that’s just me.  I’ll probably read more of Ifueko in the future.

By the Sword

Mercedes Lackey
Completed 11/9/2024, Reviewed 11/9/2024
3 stars

I have a mixed history with Mercedes Lackey.  I really enjoyed the Magic’s Pawn trilogy from the massive Valdemar series.  I had mixed feelings about the Oathbound trilogy.  Overall, I like many aspects of Lackey’s books, but sometimes, they just don’t come together for me as a whole.  That happened with this book as well.  It’s a standalone in the Valdemar series, although it relies on information from the previous eight books in the series, six of which are the two trilogies I mentioned above.  So I had some background for this book.  However, it just felt rather dull.

The story begins as a sumptuous feast with Kerowyn, aka Kero, and her father, brother, and brother’s fiancé, as well as many others.  The feast is attacked by the forces of an evil mage, killing her father, wounding her brother, and kidnapping the fiancé.  Most of the men are slaughtered.  Kero picks up her sword and tries to find the fiancé.  She comes across her grandmother Kethry and her partner Tarma who give her the sword named Need, a magic sword that helps woman in danger.  Kero rescues the fiancé, but realizes she is meant to be a warrior, not simply a wife, and leaves her brother to study under Kethry and Tarma.  After a while she joins a mercenary company fighting as needed, culminating in major campaign to keep Valdemar from being invaded.

Like the previous six books of Lackey’s that I read, this one has amazing world building.  Even though it’s been two years since the last Oathbound series, her storytelling style had me right back in their world.  Reading a Lackey novel is sumptuous for its prose, creating vivid descriptions of the characters and the world they are living in.  

The characters are also very well drawn.  Not only do we get a great sense of who Kero is, but other characters as well.  Daren, the third son of a king with whom Kero trains, is a perfect spoiled royal who seems to grow up but still doesn’t understand how Kero wants to be a soldier but not someone’s wife, namely, his.  Fortunately, he grows up and returns later in the book as a much more mature prince.  I also liked Eldan, a Herald from Valdemar, from whom Kero learns about the peace-loving people, and with whom she falls in love.  The conflict between her love for him and desire to continue to be a mercenary is well played out.  

While this book has all these positive things going for it, I found reading it to be a chore.  I liked the beginning, but the subsequent parts felt directionless.  This book is kind of a third-person diary, describing the life of Kero.  There is no real overriding arc.  It’s like several different stories about her bound in one book.  And the stories take a long time to play out.  This e-copy of the book didn’t have page numbers, and I was constantly wondering if this book was really five hundred pages, or much longer.  

I give this book three stars out of five.  It was one of those situations where the sum of the parts did not equal the whole.  I guess I never really cared about Kero, even though she was a kick-ass soldier and leader, in whose head we spend a lot of time.  I still think Lackey is a terrific writer, with great prose, world building, and character development.  This book just didn’t do it for me.

Raybearer

Jordan Ifueko
Completed 10/30/2024, Reviewed 11/5/2024
4 stars

I was pleasantly surprised by this book.  It is listed as a YA novel, nominated for multiple awards including the Andre Norton award for YA Sci Fi and Fantasy.  It turned out to be one of those books that’s classified as YA because the protagonist is young.  I think the plot is pretty mature and seems to be written for teens at the youngest.  Well, that’s my opinion anyway.  But it takes a rather standard plot and turns it on its head a bit.  So even though it seemed like it was going in one direction, it went in several others.  I liked that.

Tarisai has been growing up with tutors and servants.  Her mother, known only as The Lady, visits every now and then.  Tarisai is lonely with an intense desire to belong.  At about age 9, she sort of gets her wish, and is sent to the capital to compete with others her age to be chosen as one of the eleven of the council of the heir to the throne.  Reluctant at first, she finds she bonds with many of the other children.  However, she has a gift that doesn’t allow her to touch other people, lest she share minds with them.  That gift however, just might elevate her above the other children to be one of the selected.  There is a catch though.  The Lady commanded Tarisai to kill the prince once she is selected and becomes close to him.  This leaves Tarisai with an existential dissonance:  remain a part of the next ruling body of the kingdom, or overthrow the monarchy to fulfill her mother’s revenge plot.

The thing I liked most about this book was that Tarisai did not fall in love with the prince whom she is obligated to assassinate.  She does become very close to him, along with two others selected for the council.  But Ifueko very nicely sidesteps the falling in love with the target trope.  Instead, the book focuses on Tarisai’s relationships with the prince, others on the council, her guardians, her vindictive mother, and her magical father.  At the same time, the plot moves fairly quickly and keeps the action going at a decent pace.  I liked the world building.  Like the plot, it’s recognizable, but with twists.  The twelve realms are like the various parts of our world, with a few extras added in, plus some things based on African folklore.  

I give this book four stars out of five.  I really liked it and empathized pretty well with the main character.  My biggest gripe was that it didn’t feel like a YA novel.  Yeah, I know that the classification is a publishing marketing thing, but I think it’s still misleading.  I thought this book was quite adult in its content.  I’m looking forward to the sequel of this duology.  Hopefully, I’ll be reading it in a few weeks.