Sister Mine

Nalo Hopkinson
Completed 10/18/2024, Reviewed 10/18/2024
4 stars

My reviews are going to be a little shorter for a few installments.  I have had another surgery on my shoulder and typing is one handed and slow going.  I really enjoy Nalo Hopkinson’s books, even when they’re a little uneven.  This is one such book.  I really enjoyed it, but I felt there were a few two many plot threads and jumping between them was unnerving and sometimes hard to follow.  Hopkinson infuses modern stories with Caribbean mythology and magic.  This time, the main character was a recently separated conjoined twin whose sister received all the family mojo while she received none.  It made growing up in a family of demigods difficult to say the least.  This book won the 2014 Norton Award for YA Sci Fi and Fantasy.  

Makeda is the human twin, Abby is the twin with all the mojo.  The book begins with Makeda moving to a place of her own among the humans.  She’s decided she has to learn how to live without relying on her sister.  Amidst this process, their father dies.  He was condemned to a human existence for falling in love with a human and fathering the two girls.  However, he still is a demigod and should be okay once having shirked his human body.  However, his father was suffering from dementia and part of his existence is in the invasive kudzu plant which seems to want to destroy Makeda.  She is also being chased by a haint, aka haunt or evil spirit.  So Makeda still has to rely on Abby for help in all these things.  She also has a few other people helping her, including her new landlord who seems to have some mojo of his own, and a lover of Abby’s who is in reality a guitar once owned by Jimi Hendrix.  

As you can see by the plot summary, there are a lot of strange things going on.  And the story telling jumps around among all these things.  And for there being so much Caribbean mojo, it actually takes place in Canada.  I occasionally got lost when Makeda did a lot of running from her haint, the kudzu, and other negative energy and entities.  I thought the subplots ad world building all got a little confusing.

However, I thought the characters were really strong.  Makeda is a terrific main character just trying to find her own as an ordinary human.  However, she does seem to occasionally sense mojo around her in others.  She’s convinced she’s heard messages from sea shells and trees, although she gets no support from her family on this.  Abby is a lot harder to like since she is gifted sister.  I also liked Brie, Makeda’s new landlord, who’s also a musician for a band whose music has some mojo-like effect on its listeners.  

Despite having too many plot threads and confusing world building, I enjoyed reading the book.  I was pretty gripped in the search for Makeda’s father, and what form outside the kudzu he would take, if that was even a thing.  I thought the premise was well conceived.  I give this book four stars out of five.  I have another book by Hopkinson, a collection of stories, which I’m interested in.  I might be reading that in a month or so.  

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Becky Chambers
Completed 10/9/2024, Reviewed 10/9/2024
4 stars

This was a wonderful novella by the author of the Wayfarers series, the first of which is The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.  I loved that and the other three novels in that series.  I was a little hesitant about this one; I’m not sure why.  I think because I thought she couldn’t top the Wayfarers.  But she at least equaled it with this book.  It’s about life after the Factory Age, when the Robots became aware and left.  Humans recreated their industry without them, and focused on sustainable technology after returning from the brink of self-destruction.  The book is so heartwarming and life-affirming that I had a warm glow about me all the way to the end.  I’m hoping the second book in this series is equally wonderful.  The series was nominated for a 2024 Mythopoeic Award.

Dex is a monk.  They crave the sound of crickets, becoming obsessed with it.  They decide they need a change and become a Tea Monk, bringing hand-prepared teas specifically made for each customer.  They’re sort of a Tea therapist, traveling the land, setting up a booth, and preparing teas based on what each customer tells them is going on with them.  After two years as a Tea Monk, they get the itch again to hear crickets, becoming an obsession.  They decide to cancel their next city visit and go into the mountains in search of them.  On the way in, they come across a robot.  Robots haven’t been seen in about two hundred years.  Mosscap, the robot, tells Dex it is on a journey to meet and learn about humans, and what’s happened to them since they walked away, and what do they need.  Dex however wants to be alone on his own journey, begrudgingly taking Mosscap along.

There are really only two characters in this story, Dex and Mosscap.  Dex is searching for themselves and their purpose.  So when Mosscap appears and asks what does Dex need, they can’t answer because even they don’t know.  They don’t know why their on the journey, only that they’ve become obsessed with the crickets.  Dex is kind of an every person who just wants to find meaning in life.  Mosscap is kind of the opposite.  It is out exploring and researching, but doesn’t need meaning in life.  Life is its own meaning.  Needless to say, they get in some heated discussions.

I give this book four stars out of five.  It’s like a warm hug, or should I say, a cup of tea designed especially for my needs.  While I’m not a tea drinker, I can relate to the feeling of having something so delicious, made for my palate, that I am sated with life.  That’s what this book was like for me.  It being a novella, I don’t want to go into more detail than I already have, hoping I haven’t given away any spoilers.  I just really look forward to the second novella.  

An Unkindness of Ghosts

Rivers Solomon
Completed 10/7/2024, Reviewed 10/7/2024
3 stars

This is the author’s first novel, published by a small publishing house.  I think both facts are evident in that the book tries to do too much.  I think it could have used a better editor.  However, Solomon is an important queer, black author with a lot to say.  Her second work, The Deep, was a brilliant collaboration with other writers and poets and walked away with the 2020 Lambda Literary Award.  This book just needed some help making sure the flow was better and some extraneous things were excised.

Aster is a black woman on the autism spectrum.  She lives on a colony ship called the Matilda.  The upper decks are for the white privileged people and the lower decks are for the poor, black abused workers.  Basically, they are slaves.  The separation is maintained by an adherence to a weird religious dogma that has evolved over the hundreds of years the ship has been travelling to the “Promised Land.”  Aster is the assistant to the gentle Theo, the Surgeon General who is also the nephew of the power-crazed second in command on the ship, Lieutenant.  The supreme ruler of the ship is dying of something that Aster’s mother may have died from.  Thus begins an investigation into her mother’s cryptic journals and the possibility of a ship-wide civil war against the abusive system that the Lieutenant has been upholding.

Yeah, there’s a lot in this book.  I had a lot of trouble getting through the first half of it.  It took me about that long to get that Aster was on the spectrum and experiencing things differently than the people around her.  Her relationships are quite confusing.  Theo has a deep fondness for her though she doesn’t see it.  She just tries to determine if they are friends.  Giselle, with whom she grew up, appears to have ADHD, which make their interactions very confusing in the beginning.  After a while, though, I started to get it and picked up on Aster interactions with Theo, Giselle, and others.  This is especially true of her interactions with guards, who clearly have no tolerance for someone who doesn’t communicate in a usual way.  Clearly, a lot of thought went into creation of Aster.  The characters were very well developed.  

I thought the world building was really good too.  But I had a hard time believing the ship was created as, or devolved into an antebellum South.  It came across a little too much like a parable to make a point than a futurist vision.  Perhaps I’ve read too many books that imply racial equality in the future.  This was just a little tough to suspend disbelief.  

I give this book three stars out of five, mainly because it’s a difficult read and I didn’t completely buy into the premise.  I’d like to read Solomon’s newer works to see what they are like, if she has evolved as a writer and if the editing of her books are better.  

Shorefall

Robert Jackson Bennett
Completed 9/29/2024, Reviewed 9/29/2024
3 stars

This is the second book in the Foundryside series.  It picks up 3 years after the events of the first book.  I read it for book club, only 3 months after the first book.  I remembered quite a bit, but I had trouble getting into it anyway.  It felt like it suffered from second book syndrome.  That is, the first book feels very tight, but the second book spends more time setting up the scenario for the third book.  The book is taut and fast-paced like the first one, but it just felt like it was missing something.  Perhaps it was the novelty of the magic system that was missing, or the familiarity with the characters.  It just never completely grabbed me.

The book picks up with the return of the first hierophant, Crasedes.  He’s been resurrected and he wants to control the world to stop humans from using their technology and magic for power over others.  He wants to become the supreme dictator that forces people to remain peaceful.  Sancia and her gang have allied with another immortal, Valeria, who wants to destroy Crasedes.  However, Sancia, Berenice, Orso, and Gregor have mixed feelings about Valeria.  Though she saved them in the first book, they’re uncertain about what she’s up to.  However, allying with Valeria seems to be the only way to destroy Crasedes and save humanity.

I thought the best part of the book was the relationship between Sancia and Berenice.  They twin with each other.  Twinning is not permitted with people.  It is usually saved for connecting magical devices together.  They do this on Valeria’s advice.  Once successful, they share everything, thoughts, memories, and so on, all the while being able to communicate with each other without anyone else hearing them.  Needless to say, it also enhances their romantic relationship.  However, that is put aside as the roller coaster plot keeps the danger ever-present.  

Like the first book, this one is quite grisly.  Perhaps a little more so, as the body count becomes astronomical.  There are pools of blood everywhere, and Sancia and Orso constantly seem to be spattered with it.  For Crasedes to manifest and work his magic, he needs sacrifices, and he gets lots of them.  But ultimately, it’s all a question of morality, and he wants to impose his on humanity.  He and Valeria seem to be set up as sort of god and devil, but it’s hard to tell who is really good.  Everyone seems basically evil, like there is no good or god.  And Sancia and crew must choose between the lesser of evils.

I give this book three stars out of five.  It’s a little less than the first book because I never felt completely sucked into it.  Yeah, parts were exciting, but overall, the sum was less than the parts.  If book club doesn’t pick the third book, I don’t know if I’ll read it on my own.  

Bookshops and Bonedust

Travis Baldree
Completed 9/18/2024, Reviewed 9/18/2024
4 stars

This is the second book in the Legends and Lattes series.  It is actually a prequel, taking place a while before Viv, the lesbian orc retires to open a coffee shop.  This book retains all the charm of the first, with wonderful characters, world building, and prose.  Its only fault is that the plot is not as much of a surprise as the first book.  Still, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and was glad to spend a little more time in Viv’s world.  And it was great to have another cover by the same artist, who so captures the essence of Viv and her friends.  This book was nominated for a 2024 Mythopoeic Award.  

The story begins when Viv gets injured in a battle with her mercenary compatriots while searching for a terrible necromancer.  They take her to recover in an inn in the sleepy coastal town of Murck.  One day while hobbling along on her injured leg, she happens upon an old bookshop run by Fern, a cat-like creature with a pet gryphet.  Fern gives Viv a book to read and a new friendship begins.  Viv takes an interest in the shop, helping Fern infuse it with life and a few cans of paint.  She also meets the proprietor of a bakery with whom Viv begins to tentatively date.  This peaceful tableau is soon interrupted by a strange hooded figure who has some connection with the necromancer she was hunting initially.  Soon Viv and her new friends find themselves in the midst of a mystery with wights and a homunculus skeleton worthy of a story in the Fern’s bookshop.

What I liked most about this book is the same thing I liked about Lattes.  It’s a story of getting a business going with a mystery to accompany it.  In this case, the business is an existing but floundering bookshop that needs an infusion of life.  It illustrates different strategies for bringing in customers into a town whose inhabitants haven’t been reading for a while.  Being a guy who loves books, and having spent many hours in book stores of many different kinds, it was very fun reading about all the tricks proprietors use to bring in customers.  

I just love Viv.  Yes, she’s a badass mercenary orc, but she also loves the things in life that are magical, like books, coffee, and pastries.  And the way she stumbles over her summer romance with the bakery shop owner is just adorable.  She’s the kind of orc who is a true and lovable friend.  The tie-in back to Lattes in the epilogue will just melt your heart.  

It will be interesting to see what else Baldree can do.  Will he pull another winner out of this universe he’s created, or will he move on to something else?  I’d love to spend more time with Viv, but don’t want the world to get tired.  These books are some kind of special and I want them to live on as wonderful pieces of imagination.  I give this book four stars, just missing five stars because the formula was new and exciting in the first book, and in this one, it was more familiar.  It is still tremendous, and my only regret is that I waiting so long in reading it.  

Translation State

Ann Leckie
Completed 9/10/2024, Reviewed 9/11/2024
4 stars

This book wasn’t as bad as it started out to be.  Honestly, I was predisposed to not liking this book.  I really disliked Ancillary Justice and hadn’t read anything else by Leckie since.  This book started out tough, with three points of view alternating every three chapters.  It was hard keeping up with who was who and what the point of their existences were.  I kept one foot out of the water as I was expecting this supposedly standalone book to require a lot of background from the original trilogy.  To my surprise It came together after about a hundred pages or so.  And by the end, I actually cared what would happen to the main characters.  This book was nominated for the 2023 Nebula and the 2024 Hugo and Locus SF Awards.  I dare say that maybe it deserved these noms.  

The book begins with Enae, whose grandmaman has just died.  Instead of money or property She lives hir the task to find fugitive whose been missing for over 200 years.  When she arrives at her destination, she meets Reet, a liaison/body guard with his own mystery.  He’s searching for birth parents to explain a genetic anomaly.  Finally, there’s Qven, a Presger translator.  As a translator, they will merge with a human to create a link between the humans and the very dangerous Presgers, a relationship defined by an all encompassing but fragile treaty.  These three come together in their quests and to find their true selves while keeping the treaty from exploding into all out war.

All three characters are pretty interesting.  While I didn’t like any of them in the beginning, they each grew on me.  But the real star of this story is Qven.  They want to rebel against the expectations their society has for them.  As they get to know Enae and Reet, they desire to be human, not the cannibalistic, merging creature that’s expected of them.  As Qven navigates the journey to declare themselves human, they have a lot of awkward, dare say humorous, moments.  But it is also very serious as the integrity of the treaty must hold.

In the over ten years since the first novel, the multi-gendered characters with their myriad of pronouns has become a lot less shocking.  In fact, I took it in stride and was not flustered at all by the relationships that developed between the all the non-binary genders.  I was able to focus more on the story, which initially was difficult to keep up with.  It was not easy reading about Qven before they meet Reet.  The otherness of his character was an irritating unanswered question.  But stick with it, as it comes together eventually.

I give this book four stars.  I was going to give it three, but it really is pretty well done how Qven, Enae, and Reet come together and interact.  I definitely changed my mind about Leckie, although I don’t think I’ll go back and read the other two of the initial trilogy.  Suffice it to say that this book is very good and I am now interested in reading her foray into fantasy, The Raven Tower, which I picked up on sale several years ago.  

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon

Wole Talabi
Completed 8/31/2024, Reviewed 9/1/2024
4 stars

This was an interesting book.  It is based in Nigerian mythology as well as a sprinkling of other myths and religions.  The story is basically a heist tale, but with lots of world building around the mythology.  It made for generally fun book, although, the jumping around of the timelines was a little confusing.  And, as usual, it is always fun to get out of Euro-based fantasy.  Overall, I really liked the book.  It was nominated for 2023 Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards and won the Nommo Award, which is for African Science Fiction and Fantasy.  

The story is about Shigidi, a nightmare orisha who works for the Orisha Spirit company.  He meets a succubus named Nneoma on one particular assignment.  She convinces him to leave the company and join her in eating souls outside of its soul feed distribution.    However, the elder gods will have none of that and pursue the two renegades.  Then, a high god asks the two of them to steal a Nigerian artifact from the British Museum, via both the natural world and the spirit world. 

The plot is pretty simple.  What makes the book complex and interesting is becoming familiar with the Orisha pantheon.  Some of the gods overlapped form me.  Many of them began with the letter O.  But their interactions with the main characters were fascinating.  The book also jumps around in its timeline.  From the activities of the heist, to the making of Shigidi, to the development of the relationship between he and Nneoma, and even a meeting between Alastair Crowley and Nneoma back at the turn of the 20th century.  It’s a little confusing at times, but all works together to get you to understand the reason for the heist and what transpires afterwards.  

I really liked Shigidi, for the most part.  I wasn’t always immersed in his character, empathizing with his situation.  I think part of it was the jumping around of the timeline.  The POV also changes a lot, between him and Nneoma, as well as the high god who runs a board meeting of the Orisha company.  But overall, I found him fascinating, especially when Nneoma teaches him to manipulate the clay from which he’s made.  I also like Nneoma.  Despite the misogynistic connotations of the succubus motif, she was a very well-developed character that had purpose and self-respect.  

I can see why this book was nominated for awards.  The prose was terrific and the world building phenomenal for a mythology that’s not very well known.  I give this book four stars out of five.  I also give props to the author for being able to describe a massively supernatural ending well enough that I followed the wonder of the scene easily despite the noise of reading in airports and on airplanes.  It kept me engaged and intrigued.

The Children of Gods and Fighting Men

Shauna Lawless
Completed 8/24/2024 Reviewed 8/24/24
3 Stars

I haven’t read any of the Game of Thrones books, but I have a feeling that I got a mild taste of what it would be like.  This book is a mix of Irish mythology and historical facts, creating an epic tale of the power struggle between the Kings of the different parts of Ireland for the title of High King.  When we were voting for this book in online book club, I was hoping for a little more god-human interaction.  Instead, the mythology is about two races of immortals playing politics with the crown.  It wasn’t exactly my cup of tea.  I found it rather tedious at times, though I did pretty good remembering who was who amongst the myriad of characters.  

Gormflaith is the widow of the Viking King of Dublin.  She is trying to position her son Sitric as the next king as well as the High King of Ireland.  She marries off her stepdaughter to the future King of Norway for ally support.  She also belongs to a race of immortals called Fomorians who have fire magic. There is a race of indigenous immortals called the Tuatha De Dannan who are sworn enemies of the Fomorians and are tasked with killing them, although they don’t live among the humans.  One such immortal, Fodla, is released to live with the humans as a spy on King Brian.  Disguised as a disfigured healer, she finds King Brian and his family to be less warmongering than she was led to believe.  Between these two camps is another king and the rise of Christianity to complicate matters.  

One of the things I both liked and didn’t like about the book was that there are no clear good guys and bad guys.  While one might say the Vikings are the bad guys, the indigenous Irish Kings are generally no better.  All have strange views of what peace is and of course they require power to secure it.  What I like about this is that the tale is told from both the Fomorian and the Tuatha De Dannan POV.  This gives you a taste of the morality of both sides with less judgement than a straightforward good vs. evil story.  The downside for me is that I feel rather ambiguous about both sides as well.  I don’t feel like I have anyone to cheer for.  However, towards the end, I was starting to like King Brian’s clan better.  But who knows if this is a ruse that will be revealed in the next book.

I do have to say Gormflaith is kind of a baddie, mostly because all her frustrations and tragedy in life is now vented toward getting Sitric on the High Throne.  But she is not just an evil Borg Queen of a baddie.  With the book being half told from her POV, it’s easier to empathize with her.  Fodla comes off as less of a baddie, mostly because of her realizations that all human men aren’t warmongering imbeciles.  Her task to spy is interesting because she is a healer posing as a human healer.  She is not supposed to use her supernatural powers to heal anyone.  However, this becomes more and more of a struggle as she becomes closer to the clan she was sent to spy on.  

I give this book three stars out of five.  While it is well constructed and well researched, I felt it dragged often.  I found it tough to get into in the first third, and then once I got into the book, I found it tough to stay in it.  I just didn’t find it all that interesting.  I got more engrossed in the last third, wanting to see which king was going to take a leading role.  But knowing this is a trilogy, I was prepared to be only partly satisfied.  I don’t think I’ll read more of this trilogy unless book club votes for the rest of the series.  It’s just a little too much fantasy politics for me.  

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi

Shannon Chakraborty
Completed 8/16/2024, Reviewed 8/17/2024
4 stars

This book was a terrific read, especially after the disastrous last book I read.  I loved the main character, the prose, the world building; everything just tickled my fancy.  Except for it slowing down a little before the big climax, it was fast-paced and interesting.  I generally like fantasy from the Middle East, with golems and djinns and the myriads of magical beings dreamt out of the sea and the desert.  This book was nominated for a 2024 Hugo.  It didn’t win, but would have been very high on my list.  

Amina is a retired pirate.  She was one of the greatest, most notorious pirates in the Indian Ocean.  Now she lives at home with her daughter and mother.  One day the mother of one of her former crew shows up and offers Amina a fortune to find the woman’s granddaughter.  The woman basically extorts her into the search, threatening the lives of Amina’s daughter and mother.  Amina takes the job but slowly finds out that there is more to this than just a missing granddaughter.  The kidnapper is a Frank from the crusades who was searching for one of the greatest magical objects ever.  So Amina reassembles some of the main members of her old crew to help her on this quest, with magical islands, bird-men, cthulu-reminiscent sea creatures, and an old husband who turned out to be a demon.

Even though it took me a while to read this book, I found it engrossing right from the start.  The story of Amina’s retired life was actually interesting, probably because it is based in an Arab/African setting rather than European-style fantasy.  And when you read as much as I do, different is good. 😊  The process of assembling her crew was as thrilling as some of the faster paced sections of the book.  And each old member she found added insight into Amina’s life as pirate and a person.  I’ve already forgotten the names of the major characters from her crew, but each personality was interesting.

Of course, the best character was Amina, a complex person trying to juggle her return to the seas with her responsibility to her family.  As this is the first of a series with “Adventures” in the title, we can expect that the conflict will continue into the next books.  But it is done well, with her longing for her daughter and constantly second-guessing her decisions.

Her old demon husband, whose name I think was Raksh, was fun.  He was ultimately a selfish, self-seeking coward, but colorful nonetheless.  I liked how he tried to manipulate her into doing things his way to save his own skin and Amina being able to see through it, mostly.  I also liked the granddaughter.  She was scholar and a self-made magician who had her own reasons for letting the Frank take advantage of her powers.    

I give this book four stars out of five.  I thoroughly enjoyed it, but found it dragged towards the end.  The climax itself was tremendous, but the build up to it was slow at times.  However, I’d still be interested in the sequels as they come out.  I really enjoyed the prose, good descriptions without taking away from the action.  And the different creatures and monsters were fun.  This recently came up as a book club nominee and I’ll probably work on getting it nominated a few more times.  I think it would be a good discussion book.

Isolate

L. E. Modesitt
DNF 8/4/2024, Reviewed 8/6/2024
1 star

Trying to read this book was a miserable experience.  I got to about page 100 after ten days and decided I couldn’t do it anymore.  Nothing happened in this book.  I’m not even sure what this book was about.  I can tell you a little about the main characters and what they wore and what they ate and what their jobs were.  As for a plot, I got nothing.

If you look at the cover of the book, you see a man and a woman standing in front of a car like they are body guards.  That’s the book in a nutshell.  Dekkard and Ysella are body guards.  Ysella is an empath.  She can read people.  Dekkard is an isolate.  Empaths can’t read him.  They protect a councilor, which to us would be a congressman.  Dekkard likes quince jam on croissants.  They kind of like each other.  They both mostly wear grey.  Another councilor dies under mysterious circumstances, but the news reports it as a heart attack.  The councilor Dekkard and Ysella protect gets shot at occasionally and the two have to rush him to safety.  

The world is a sort of steampunk near future.  I couldn’t tell if the government was supposed to be fascist or communist or late-stage capitalism, or some combination, but it was pretty corrupt.  There were people demonstrating demanding the councilors reveal how they voted.  

One hundred pages and there was no semblance of a plot.  It was mostly the day to day activities of two body guards.  This was a book club selection.  There are bets as to how many people will finish the book.  One friend who finished it sent me a scathing synopsis of the rest of the book, where nothing else happens.  I may publish it in my blog, but I won’t include it public site reviews where she will publish herself.  

This is a 1 star book.  Bleah.

My friend’s eloquent response to this book:

If you don’t like it at page 100, nothing changes. I soldiered along because sometimes there’s a payoff when Stuff Finally Happens…. But this is the whole book. Bureaucracy. Lists of people introduced who don’t show up again. Minutae of what the main characters are wearing (spoiler: uniforms). Not what anyone else is wearing… just him and her. Slowburn attraction. Beginnings of snatches of what might be mysteries. More bureaucracy. Laborious detail over ever meal including what everyone ordered, what the first bites were like, whether they were pressed for time while eating. Quince paste shows up 55 times in 100 chapters, and is referenced more than that when he mourns over his tomato jelly and guava jam.

There are more assassination attempts, which always occur when the pair are on duty, and are always easily thwarted with no damage or danger to anyone but the assailants— who die, easily and conveniently. There are potential plots— who is trying to kill Dekkard notCain? Or his boss? Or his girlfriend’s sister’s husband? But 50 pages from the end we’ve forgotten about resolving any of that in favor of detailed exposition on his boss’ stump speeches while he campaigns for office. Lower tariffs are promised. I mean, that’s a whole-ass chapter 60 pages from the end.

Sorry higher tariffs are promised. And regulations for the manufacture and distribution of the not-cars and not-trains.

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Ken Liu
Completed 7/25/2024, Reviewed 7/25/2024
4 stars

My introduction to Ken Liu was in the Nebula Awards Showcase 2013.  It featured the title story from this collection.  I absolutely loved it then and I loved it reading it again for this online book club selection.  In fact, I loved almost all the stories in this collection.  A few were boring, but still had beautiful prose.  The prose was a feature in every story.  It set the mood and enhanced the world-building.  Almost all the stories featured Asian characters struggling with identity.  Several of them were indictments of the treatment of the Chinese people by other peoples and countries.    In my usual manner with collections, I’ll mention a few of the stories here that I thought stood out from the others.

The Paper Menagerie was my favorite.  It’s so poignant.  It shows how a kid who is different, in this case, Chinese, tries to eschew everything about himself that is different in an effort to be like everyone else. This includes his mother, who used to make magical origami animals for him when he was very young.

The Literomancer – the daughter of an American operative in Taiwan befriends an old man and his sort of grandson.  The old man tells the future by analyzing the pictures of Chinese words.  The girl unknowingly tells her father about something the old man says which is sympathetic to the Communists which gets him in trouble. This one was very hard to read, but one of the indicting stories.

All the Flavors – Mixing history with myth, this story tells about the Chinese immigrants from the railroad days who settled in Idaho Territory.  Some of the whites are welcoming, most are not. However, one girl befriends several of them and begins to learn about their culture through stories and food.  

The stories in general are a little fantasy-ish or a little sci fi-ish, just enough to give them some flavor so that it’s not like a history lesson, but many of the stories are.  They give voices to a people who have been shut down for a long time.  It’s like Liu said, “I got a few awards for some of my stories.  Well here they are, plus a bunch that tell some uncomfortable truths about the recent history of the Chinese people.”  They may be uncomfortable, a few downright horrifying, but they are very well written and draw into the way they are told.

I give this book four stars out of five.  I didn’t care for the first and the last stories.  The first was hard to follow and the last was way too long.  I didn’t like the conceit of the last: a man figures out time travel and finds out the truth about Japanese torture of Chinese people pre WWII.   The story is told in a documentary format, which felt repetitive.  One of the stories completely eluded me.  Except for these three, the collection is marvelous.

Some Desperate Glory

Emily Tesh
Completed 7/14/2024, Reviewed 7/15/2024
5 stars

I hadn’t realized I had read this author before until I read the pages at the end of the book.  She previously wrote Silver in the Wood and Drowned Country, award winning novellas I loved.  Now she is nominated for several awards, including the 2024 Hugo for this her first novel, and I loved it.  It’s a queer space opera with an unreliable, unlikable main character.  It plays with parallel universes and trying to make the future turn out the way you want it to.  At times it was a little tough to follow the universe jumping, but once I got used to it, it was breathtaking.  The prose is as intense as the main character.  Even though it took me a week to read this, I read the majority of it on just a few nights, going to bed early on the others to catch up from reading so late LOL.  

Kyr, as in Valkyr, is a young warrior woman on Gaea, the last outpost of rebellious humans, a space station built from several war vessels on a planetoid.  She is ready to go claim vengeance on the aliens who destroyed the Earth.  When she doesn’t get the appointment she was expecting, she goes to look for her twin brother who supposedly betrayed the rebels.  Her journey takes her to a planet where a large group of humans live in peace with each other and the aliens.  There she learns the truth about her brother, Gaea, and the aliens.

Kyr is quite the intense character.  She, like almost everyone else on Gaea, lives for revenge on the aliens for destroying Earth.  She is the top female cadet, the darling of Gaea’s commander, her Uncle Jole.  He’s not really her uncle, but he adopted her and her twin brother Magnus after their mother died and their older sister betrayed Gaea.  Despite all the accolades, her “sisters” from the same age group don’t like her.  But she ignores that, living for the glory of humanity.  Even when she goes searching for Magnus, she is still intense, despite all the revelations she encounters.

The other characters are quite believable as well.  They are all pretty intense; that is how they are raised.  I liked that there were multiple queer characters, but no real romance going on.  Romance is basically eschewed for the greater glory of humanity.  And they weren’t all good.  Magnus’ seditious gay friend is bitchy and as unlikable as Kyr initially is.  Ironically, the only character in the first half or so of the book who acts human is an alien.  

The tough part about this book is that there are a lot of trigger topics.  They include, suicide, rape, forced birth, and almost every ism and phobia you can think of.  The society on Gaea exists as a militaristic installation with the sole purpose of the remnants of humanity taking revenge on the aliens.  Swept aside are things that make us human.  This is all represented in the character of Kyr.  Fortunately, she does go on a journey of revelation and change.  But it takes time for her to get there, and that may be problematic for some readers.  

I give this book five stars out of five.  I found it intense.  Kyr has completely bought into the cruel dystopia she was raised in.  When she does begin to transform, it is not sudden, and she learns the hard way what her belief system has done to those around her.  Eventually, you do come to like her, but just like for Kyr, the journey for the reader is not easy.  

Witch King

Martha Wells
Completed 7/7/2024, Reviewed 7/7/2024
3 stars

This book wasn’t my cup of tea.  It was told in two timelines, and despite being clearly delineated by chapter titles, I found it confusing.  I had trouble getting into the initial timeline, the “present,” and when the “past” began, I lost track of the objective of the present.  Then I lost track of the objective of the past.  When it all came together in the end, I was non-plussed.  I have a mixed history with Wells.  I mostly enjoyed her Murderbot series, culminating in the award-winning Network Effect (although several more Murderbot books have been released since).  I didn’t care for her fantasy novel we read for book club, The Cloud Roads.  But this was nominated for several awards, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.   It won the 2024 Locus Award for Fantasy and was nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards.  It lost the Nebula; the Hugo will be announced in August.  

The book opens with Kai being revived from being dead for a year, his consciousness being suspended while his body lay trapped in an elaborate water tomb.  He awakens and escapes, capturing a new body from a group of marauders at his tomb.  He also finds and rescues Ziede, a witch who was one of his companions and was also entombed nearby.  Kai himself is a demon with a human body and is known as the Witch King.  He takes the gender of the body he inhabits.  The two begin a quest to find out who was responsible for their situation.  They also search for Ziede’s wife Tahren and Tahren’s brother Dahin.  The book then goes back to explain how Kai was captured when the Hierarchs took over, was rescued, and then with Ziede, Tahren, Dahin, and others try to overthrow the Hierarchs.  

Despite never feeling like I got into the book, I did like Kai’s powers as a demon as well as the magic of the others in the story.  There were magical people as well as mortals.  And the magic system seemed different depending on whether you were a demon, a witch, a Blessed Immortal, or a Hierarch.  It was always an interesting scene when they were using their powers for battle.  

I didn’t care for the world building.  I never quite got the scenario of Kai, Ziede, and their cohorts riding on a boat, and then later a raft through rivers, canals, and bays.  Water played a huge part in the story, but I had a tough time understanding how it all was laid out.  I thought the prose, while extensive, focused on the wrong things at crucial times, like clothing.  Or maybe I just was not getting it as I was reading it.

I give this book a tentative three stars out of five.  A part of me recognizes that a lot of effort went into organizing and executing the production of this novel, keeping the past and the present exciting and the plots moving forward.  I just didn’t get into it enough right from the beginning to understand, appreciate, and care about what was going on.  

The Thick and the Lean

Chana Porter
Completed 6/25/2024, Reviewed 6/25/2024
5 stars

This is the last remaining book nominated for a 2024 Speculative Fiction Lammy.  The winner was I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself.  I think it deserved to win.  However, this would have been a very strong runner up.  I was floored by the power of this novel.  It’s about a dystopian planet with capitalism run amok, where fat shaming has become engrained in the government and religion.  Corporations and ministers convince people that to eat is to sin.  The poor live on the ground, vulnerable to the rising seas while the super-rich live in towers.  At first, I was rather put off by the book, but after about one hundred pages, I had bought into the premise.  I was hooked.  

There are two main characters told in alternating chapters.  Beatrice is a teen living in a corporate owned community called Seagate.  Everyone there has bought into the societal and religious doctrine to eat as little as possible, as chewing, digesting, and defecating has become taboo, worthy only of animals.  Beatrice believes in the doctrine, but also believes food can taste good.  She wants to be a chef, but of course will have to leave home to live that dream.

Reiko has graduated high school with a scholarship to an expensive technical university where she can develop her amazing programming skills and have a chance at a good job.  She is of the lower class, the indigenous people who don’t cover their mouths when chewing and don’t starve themselves on nutrition pills, but are also not considered citizens of their own land.  When her funding is cut, she takes to a life of hi tech grifting to make her way to the top of society.

I think my initial hesitation with the book was that I didn’t like the circumstances of the main characters.  It was too bleak.  Sometimes a good book is too bleak to appreciate because you don’t want to enter that world.  However, I soon found myself very much inside Beatrice and Reiko’s heads.  They are both wonderful characters with fascinating arcs.  They start as naïve teens but grow into self-empowered women.  Neither is perfect, but they are both strong.  I enjoyed reading about them even when they were making bad decisions.  

One interesting thing about this society that Porter created is that the substitute for eating is sex.  Besides controlling hunger, society, particularly religion, has normalized sexual promiscuity as a form of worship.  Eventually, the reader realizes is that it has become the substitute for eating.  The book is not one big orgy, but sex plays a major role in how people interact with each other.  For people who are monogamous, it is almost as culturally difficult as wanting to chew food.  

The world building of this book is tremendous.  I was amazed at the imagination that went into extrapolating fat-shaming into a cultural, religious, and corporate norm.  When we finally get to parts where food is savored by the eaters, it is a splendid visceral experience.  

I give this book five stars out of five.  Reading it was profound, with the experiences of both Beatrice and Reiko, regarding food, sex, and simple control over their own bodies.  It’s a dark book and may be too much of a downer for some.  But I found it to be a worthwhile experience, provoking my own hangups around food and sex.  It’s well written and beautifully imagined.  Porter hasn’t written a lot yet, but I would definitely be open to more of her work in the future.

Foundryside

Robert Jackson Bennett
Completed 6/20/2024, Reviewed 6/21/2024
4 stars

I was surprised by how much I liked this book.  I hadn’t read Bennett since City of Stairs in 2018 and loved that book.  However, I didn’t remember I had even read it until a friend found it in my blog and pointed it out to me.  It was one of those really good books that just kind of slips out of mind considering the number of books I read a year.  I’m hoping this one sticks in my head a little better.  It’s a book club read and the first in a trilogy.  It features a kind of industrialized magic in a place so entrenched in capitalism, government no longer exists and the ruling merchant houses abuse their power over the people.  I found it a gripping statement on late-stage capitalism and the pursuit of the ultimate weapon to wipe out all the competition and remake the world.  This book was nominated for a 2019 British Fantasy Award and a 2023 Best Series Hugo.

Sancia is an orphaned thief.  She’s so good, she scores a lucrative deal to steal a powerful magical artifact from one of the merchant houses.  Curiosity gets the best of her and she opens the plain box holding it.  She finds an ornate key.  When she touches it, it speaks to her.  After forming a strange bond with it, she does not hand it over to her employer and she finds herself at the center of a grand chase by unknown assailants.  Soon, she is in race to keep the key out of the hands of those who would use it to remake the world.

The book begins a little mundanely.  It feels like standard fantasy fare with a thief and a treasure.  It’s not until the key begins communicating with Sancia that the feel of the book takes a turn and it becomes completely engrossing.  I found myself wanting to understand Sancia and Clef, the key, about her horrific past, and what that means for her relationship with the Clef.  Then all the intrigue between the merchant houses and the system of magic all make sense and gives everyone their motivation.  

The little group of people Sancia ends up working with consists of dicey characters.  She has no reason to trust them except for the fact that there is no one else to trust.  They are all generally likable, although they are all very flawed.  The one character who seemed the most trustworthy was Berenice, with whom, Sancia has a little spark of a burgeoning romance.  However, not much happens in this book.  I assume their relationship takes off further in the series.  Her two other companions, Gregor and Orso, I didn’t trust until the end of the book. 

The book is very well written, with multi-dimensional characters and an unbelievably complex magic system and society.  I was constantly amazed by unfolding description of the society, including its founding by a king who tried to tap into the power of the gods, that is, the making of everything.  It kept me intrigued right up to the end, which of course leaves you hanging and wanting more.  I don’t know if I’ll actually follow through on this trilogy, but I wouldn’t be averse to it.

I give this book four stars out of five.  It’s exciting, fast paced, and one of the best world-building books I’ve read in a while.  It felt very original and well thought out.  I liked the main characters and eventually loved Sancia and was pained by her backstory.  And I was pleasantly surprised by the little romance between her and Berenice.  But the star of the book is Clef, the key.  He ties everything together and makes what could have been just another thief fantasy something extraordinary.

The Road to Roswell

Connie Willis
Completed 6/7/2024, Reviewed 6/7/2024
2 stars

I was sadly disappointed with this novel.  It’s supposed to be fun fluff.  For the most part, it was cute.  Unfortunately, it suffered from the same tired formula Willis has used in most of her books.  People don’t listen to the protagonist, they talk over him/her, the protagonist gets into some kind of trouble, someone saves them.  My disappointment was compounded by a tediously trite ending.  I’ve really liked some of Willis’ other books, including Blackout and Passage.  While they had the Willis formula, the circumstances and specifics were enough to make them terrific books.  Roswell simply didn’t have enough interesting circumstances or specifics, despite it being about UFOs and aliens.  The one thing it had going for it: it was a very fast read. 

Francie goes to Roswell to be the maid of honor at her college roommate’s wedding.  Shortly after she arrives, she’s kidnapped by an alien and forced to drive it into the New Mexico desert to some unknown destination.  Along the way, they pick up others:  Wade, an alien abduction insurance salesman; a sweet little old lady casino aficionado; a UFO conspiracy theorist; and a western movies fan in an RV.  But there’s more to these characters than meets the eye.  Everyone is hiding secrets.  As they travel together, they figure out how to communicate with the alien and Francie and Wade figure out that it needs their help to find another alien out in the desert, and it’s of utmost importance.  

As far as characters go, I actually liked them.  I thought they were a well-rounded collection of pushy people.  You may ask about Francie, the protagonist.  Was she pushy?  Actually, she had a pretty strong self-editing brain.  She didn’t need the people around her to prevent her from talking.  She prevented herself just as much.  But she was nice.  Wade clearly has massive secrets.  The hints in the text are pretty obvious, but I kind of liked him anyway.  And just when the jokes seemed to run out with a character, Willis introduces a new one.  

I’m not sure whether I liked the alien, who Wade and Francie nicknamed Indy because of the way he whipped around his tentacles.  Indy reminded me a lot of the character named Cheese from Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.  He’s comical, but if used too much, is just plain annoying.  I did like the process of Indy learning to “speak” in English, learning jargon from all the Westerns’ DVDs on the RV.  However, Indy’s mode of communication, letters or characters scrolling across their tentacles, was bizarre and a little tough to accept.  I like the concept of imagining different communication modalities, but couldn’t totally buy into this one.  

I know quite a few people who really liked this book.  I give it two stars out of five.  It would have been three stars, but the end killed it for me.  It was just too trite and formulaic.  If I’m going to read any more Willis, I think I’m going to stick with rereading the Oxford Time Travel series.  I’d recommend them to people new to the author.  To Say Nothing of the Dog particularly is much better at being a fun book than this one was.  

The Archive Undying

Emma Mieko Candon
DNF 6/2/2024, Reviewed 6/2/2024
1 star

This is the first book I did not finish (DNF) in a very long time.  I found it simply unreadable.  I got 150 pages in, about a third of the way through the book, and had to put it down.  I had no idea what was going on.  I’m pretty sure the author did, but I did not.  I found a review by one of my favorite authors these days, Rebecca Roanhorse.  In it, she articulated every issue I had with the book, and then some.  I hope I don’t repeat what she said here, but my main issues overlap with what she wrote.  For some inexplicable reason, this book was nominated for a 2024 Lambda Literary Award.  

From what I could tell, the plot went something like this.  The world was controlled by AI’s.  They collapsed or self-destructed and destroyed their central cities and killed many people in the process.  There are some people who still can communicate with the AI’s.  They are called relics.  The main character Sunai is a relic.  Sunai may also be a god, or maybe just an eternal.  I wasn’t clear on that.  But he heals very quickly, maybe even gets resurrected.  Despite this, he has a bum ankle.  Sunai’s been squandering his life with booze and anonymous sex.  After one such hook-up, he finds himself on a rig and the guy he had sex with is now his boss, Veyadi.  Adi is a doctor, I think, and the mission of this ship is to find the remains of an AI, or its city and temples, or something like that.  Then they come back and someone asks Sunai to go on another mission.  He brings Adi along even though Adi is disgraced or wanted by the Harbor.  I wasn’t clear on that either.  After a while on this mission, I gave up.  

The most confusing thing was that Candon took everyday words and changed their meanings:  Archive, relic, Harbor, ENGINE (yes, in caps), etc.  Also, the names of the AI’s and the ships were all very similar.  I think there were giant robots that wandered the countryside causing mayhem and tried to destroy the rigs Sunai and Veyadi were on.  And rigs were some kind of ships that floated like boats but also could traverse land.  I’m not sure if they could fly as well.  Lastly, the point of view changed occasionally.  The majority was general third person omniscient.  Other times, there was something in italics that I think was first person.  And there was second person narrative as well.  I didn’t know who was narrating the first and second person POVs.  From reading other reviews, the POV changed more frequently as the you got farther into the book and it got even more confusing.  

Character-wise, I think I liked Sunai.  He was a bad boy.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out what he was doing and the decisions he was making.  Apparently, he made a lot of readers mad doing a lot of terrible things.  I hadn’t gotten to that part before I put the book down.  I couldn’t figure out Veyadi at all, other than it seemed he was falling for Sunai.  

I think the prose was good in spots.  Candon chose lots of pretty words and made pretty sentences.  However, the world-building was as confusing as the plot and characters.  Occasionally, I would find myself understanding a page or two and think I was finally catching on.  Then there’d be a turn of events, or dialogue between characters that would lose me again.  

I give this book one star out of five.  It reminded me of Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning, which I also thought was unreadable.  After reading other online reviews from readers, it was clear that many people did not understand the book.  Still, some of those people loved the experience.  On the Worlds Without End site, only four people had read it so far, giving it 2, 3, 4, and 5 stars, respectively.  I’m the fifth reviewer and I give it one star, amusingly rounding out the ratings.  

Bang Bang Bodhisattva

Aubrey Wood
Completed 5/27/2024, Reviewed 5/27/2024
5 stars

This is another 2024 Lambda Literary Award nominee for Speculative Fiction.  If I had just read the tag line, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up.  It’s cyberpunk noir, two genres I generally don’t like.  Turns out, I really loved this book.  I read it in a day.  Well, technically, two days.  I started at ten in the morning and finished at one the next morning.  I found it well written, fast-paced, and above all I understood everything going on.  Usually, cyberpunk loses me in the usually large amount of invented jargon.  This book takes place only ten years in the future, so all the technology is just a little more advanced than today.  And even though a lot has to do with streaming games, which I don’t play, I understood enough that I didn’t get lost.  I also don’t always like noir, but this mystery really pulled me in.  This book really clicked for me and I forced myself to stay up to see who the murderer was.

The story is about an ex-cop PI named Angel who often teams up with a transitioning woman named Kiera to help with cyber research and occasionally getting into places he has been banned from.  One day, he gets a job from his ex-wife to find her new husband whose been missing for a week.  Turns out the man is the attorney for Kiera, helping her with pro bono work to help her change her legal identity.  When they find the attorney’s body and call it in, they are immediately made prime suspects.  More bodies pile up and Angel and Kiera get more and more implicated in all the deaths.  In addition, Kiera meets and kind of falls for a person named Nile at a party who mysteriously disappears.  After finding Nile’s hand chopped off at their apartment, they look for them too, since it seems the disappearance is related to the murders.  Since the cops are focused on Angel and Kiera, they must do their own investigating to clear their names.  Their only lead is a burned stick of Nag Champa incense left at every scene.

The best thing about this story is the rocky relationship between Kiera and Angel.  Angel is a gruff guy who’s almost old enough to be Kiera’s father.  Kiera is an almost thirty-year-old who does odd jobs for money.  Despite the love-hate relationship between the two, she always goes back to helping him because the money’s good.  But now they’re tied together because of this murder rap.  The result is a buddy story with lots of light and dark humor.  Their relationship also brings out the theme of finding and sticking to one’s authentic self against all the odds.  I really liked them both and got a kick out of their constant banter throughout the investigation.

I thought the writing was terrific for a thriller, with just the right amount of prose amid the fast-paced dialogue.  The descriptions never slowed down the action, but provided the right amount of world building and mood setting.  I thought the ending was very realistic as well, leaving enough uncertainty of the final resolution for each character to let you guess for yourself how it would end.  We do find out who the murderer is, but we’re left guessing about Angel and Kiera’s final decisions.  I thought it was a great way to end a book.  

I give this novel five stars out of five.  I was floored by how much I loved the characters and their personal journeys through the mystery.  I also thought the state of the world was masterfully imagined, so much like our own today, but extrapolated ten years in the future.  I would definitely read more by this author.  I think she has a great vision and a wealth of personal experience to pour into her stories, considering she’s also a biracial trans woman with both and inside an outside view of what’s going on in our society today.

Awry with Dandelions

JS Fields
Completed 5/25/2024, Reviewed 5/25/2024
3 stars

This is another Orycon Sci Fi convention find.  I’ve met Fields and listened to them on panels at the convention.  I really like their perspective and ideas.  That goes the same for their books.  This one is an interesting mix of science fiction and fantasy with dandelions being an integral part of both.  The characters are on a colony planet of Earth and the only species of plants to survive genetically unmodified on both is the dandelion.  It grows anywhere, even on other planets.   I enjoyed this book until the end, where I got somewhat confused about the magic with the dandelions.  But overall, a fun, inventive novella.

Orin is a non-binary person who sells dandelions wherever he can for the latex they produce (a real thing!).  Xer best friend is Blathnaid, a young man xie grew up with who helps xer in the dandelion business.  Blathnaid practices magic on the sly as it is frowned upon in their part of the planet.  

Xie has an interesting problem.  Xie is linked to Mette, a young woman, possibly a princess, through dreams.  During a dream, they have 30 seconds to communicate before the connection dissipates.  Afterward, they both get sick.  After twenty years of these nightly connections, Mette reveals she may have the answer to unlinking them.  It requires Orin to travel halfway across the planet.  Unsure if this is real or not, Orin balks until Mette travels to xer first, convincing xer and Blathnaid to accompany her back to her home, the center of the government, a land where magic is not feared.  Together, the three of them work together to make this plan to unlink the two.  As they travel, they discover that dandelions have their own magic and may be integral in this plan to free them.  

The best thing about this book is the characters.  I really liked Orin, Blathnaid, and Mette.  In this short 90 page novella, I felt like I had spent a full novel with them.  The world building is smart and interesting.  I wouldn’t mind seeing a series of novellas featuring these characters, alone or together on this colony planet.  In particular, I think Blathnaid (whose name means “flower”) would make a good main character of several more stories, as he is fun and snarky.   He studies magic and it would help flesh out the magic system employed here.  I also enjoyed this world where non-binary people are integrated into society.  They even have a way of greeting them to signify their gender:  men are kissed on one cheek, women on the other, and non-binaries on the forehead.  

I give this book three stars out of five.  Sometimes the prose is a little iffy.  At times I found I wasn’t following the descriptions too well.  And what happens at the climax was a little confusing.  I like that it ended on a middle note between happy and sad.  I don’t want to give away the ending, but it was realistic.  I have to say I liked Fields’ most recent novel, Queen, a little more.  However, I’ll probably continue reading Fields’ books as long as they keep cranking them out.  They’re fun and definitely interesting.  

Ritual of the Ancients

Roan Rosser
Completed 5/25/2024, Reviewed 5/25/2024
3 stars

I picked up this novella at the 2023 OryCon Sci Fi convention.  The convention wasn’t that good, but the group of self-published authors in the vendors room was wonderfully diverse.  I picked up books by three authors, this was one of them.  It’s a simple trans M/M paranormal mystery romance, but it’s more fun than I expected.  It started out slowly, but soon it had me pretty gripped in trying to figure out how the main characters were going to survive the situation.  The prose is average, but the plot is exciting.  There is at least one big plot hole that doesn’t make sense.  But I found myself liking the story and the characters.  I daresay I might actually read the rest of the series.

Everett is a transitioning trans man who wakes up in a dumpster.  He’s just been mugged, is covered in blood, and is thirsty as hell.  He makes his way back to his apartment building but can’t get in because the mugger stole his keys along with everything else.  When another resident approaches his thirst overtakes him.  He bites the man’s hand and starts drinking his blood.  A third resident appears and Everett attacks him, but the resident turns into a jackal.  This shapeshifter resident, Jack, tries to convince Everett he’s a vampire.  Unconvinced, they go to Ev’s apartment where they find his roommate murdered in her bed.  The police arrive and the two escape.  Turns out that Everett has stolen an amulet from the museum he works at and his boss, the local crime lord, wants it badly and will kill for it.  Jack works to try to keep this fledgling vampire alive, train him in how to be a vampire, and try to get to the bottom of who turned him in the first place, all while avoiding the crime boss.

I really liked Everett and Jack.  They were relatable.  I found myself on Everett’s side pretty quickly, empathizing with his circumstance of transitioning and the implications of now being undead.  Jack is a nice guy, maybe a little unbelievably nice.  But he also works for an organization that helps newly turned shapeshifters and vampires (lucky find) come to grips with themselves and get them to the right people.  But Everett doesn’t know who turned him and Jack takes it upon himself to help Everett get to the bottom of all his problems.  And he falls in love with him.  

The big plot hole is right at the beginning.  When Everett and Jack find the bloody body of the roommate, Everett doesn’t grieve.  Throughout the book, there’s no crying jag over her.  I got the impression she was his best friend although I don’t remember if it’s explicitly stated or not in the book. 

Another plot hole is that shapeshifters and vampires usually don’t mix.  Vampires smell like death to a shapeshifter when in the animal state.  Yet Jack pretty quickly falls for Everett.  I guess love knows no bounds, and they deal with the prejudice of the other shapeshifters and vampires pretty well.  It just makes no sense that Jack doesn’t have some initial revulsion toward Everett that he has to overcome.  It’s love at first sight, and I find it harder to believe than usual.  But once together, I’m in it and rooting for them.

I give this book three stars out of five.  It’s fun.  At the same time, it deals with big concepts like coming out to parents and hormone replacement therapy.  It even touches on transition issues after becoming a vampire.  It’s serious and also silly.  It meets the objective of the author: to write books that would have been helpful if they were around when he was beginning transitioning.  It’s a quick, enjoyable read and I’ll probably pick up the other books in the series as well.  

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

Marisa Crane
Completed 5/24/2024, Reviewed 5/24/2024
5 stars

I loved this book.  I had a hard time going to sleep last night because I wanted to keep reading it.  Then I woke up around 5 a.m. and finished it (LOL…yaaaaawn).  Narrated in first person in an unusual form, this book about a self-doubting, widowed lesbian raising her child in an unjust surveillance state was gripping.  The near future dystopian society is not much unlike where we seem to be going now, with rampant hate and scapegoating.  The theme is grief and trying to overcome it when all the odds are against you.  It's nominated for a 2024 Lambda Literary Book Award.  This is only my second nominee read, but I would consider it a strong contender if I was a judge on the awards panel.

In this terrible surveillance state, criminals are saddled with an additional shadow so that everyone can see they are criminals.  Kris is a shadester.  Her daughter, known to us as The Kid, was condemned with a second shadow at birth with no explanation.  Kris’s wife Beau died giving birth to The Kid.  Kris struggles with the prejudice of being a shadester, raising her non-biological daughter, and dealing with the grief of Beau’s death.  She has some friends and the help of her father and her mother-in-law, but she wallows in self-pity and despair.  One day, her father drags her to the only gay bar left in town to a shadester support group.  There she meets a woman who just may hold the key to helping Kris through her grief, the trials of parenting a precocious child, and just maybe live a normal life in this twisted society.

I thought the form of this book helped make it a gripping read.  It’s told in three chapters.  Each chapter is composed of short spurts, between a few paragraphs to a few pages long.  They propel you through the story rather than bog you down with long, winded prose.  It’s told in first person so you’re in Kris’ head while she goes on and on about missing Beau and her fear of raising The Kid wrong, but it doesn’t feel monotonous.  There’s constant movement forward in the plot as the world around them is revealed.  There’s the Department who watches all its citizens through intrusive cameras everywhere.  There’s the mysterious but loving neighbor Zig Zag.  There’s the drama at The Kid’s school from prejudiced teachers and classmates.  It all keeps you going as Kris slowly evolves out of her grief.

The world building is interesting, because it creates an oppressive environment without a lot of details about the government.  We know that the president is a populist who came up with the idea adding shadows to people.  The resulting fear and scapegoating kept him in office for a fourth term with no end in sight.  There’s the terrible “Department” that does the surveillance of citizens and the harassment of shadesters.  But there isn’t much more than that.  Yet Crane finds a way to make you feel the misery and oppression felt by Kris and The Kid.  And despite this, there’s a lot of humor amidst it all.  The Kid is precocious as hell and Kris’ father is a hoot.  As a reader, you feel everything the characters feel but don’t feel absolutely miserable.  For a first novel, I think Crane did a terrific job of balancing all the emotions.

I give this book five stars out of five.  I completely enjoyed it and could barely put it down.  I haven’t felt this way about a book in a long time.  It’s not a literary masterpiece by any means.  It is an engrossing book about grief with a vision of a not-so-unthinkable future if we keep on the path we’re going.  

The Light Brigade

Kameron Hurley
Completed 5/19/2024, Reviewed 5/20/2024
4 stars

Nominated for a 2020 Hugo Award, this novel was a departure for me.  It’s an intense military SF novel with time travel thrown in.  Unlike The Forever War, which had relativistic time dilation, or Starship Troopers, which was a love letter to militaristic society, this book was a basic “War is Hell” story in a world of corporate control.  Governments no longer run countries.  There are just six mega-corporations that control everything.   The armies are corporate controlled and the war is against the democratically governed Mars emigrants from Earth who have no corporate rule.  It takes late-stage capitalism to its extreme and explores the extent to which it will go to preserve itself.

The corporations have perfected something like Star Trek transporter technology, breaking down soldiers into light and sending them at the speed of light to their battle assignments.  Some soldiers, known as the Light Brigade, have completely different memories of where they were sent compared to the rest of the squad.  They are studied by the corporations and grounded, or killed.  Dietz is one such soldier.  As the book unfolds, we find that Dietz is actually jumping in time, being sent to past and future assignments, and finding out who in their platoon is getting killed in battle and who survives.  Dietz never reveals the condition to the corporate medical or psychiatric team, keeping the details secret.  But after numerous jumps through time, begins to put together the truth of the Martian war.

If you noticed, I never used a gender pronoun for Dietz.  That’s because the book doesn’t make that clear until the end of the story and I won’t give it away.  It’s an interesting conceit, particularly because the soldier is bisexual.  But that’s not the point of the story.  Dietz is an angry young person.  Their family members were not citizens and had no privilege.  Dietz’s father disappeared because of the corporation they were residents of.  Dietz’s mother died with no healthcare because they weren’t citizens.  She encouraged Dietz to become a soldier to earn citizenship.  Dietz is also angry because the rest of the family, including extended members, were killed when the Martians bombed Sao Paolo into a giant crater.  Now, as a soldier, Dietz questions the decision to fight in the war for the corporation.  

The travel by light is no where near perfected.  Besides the experiences of Dietz and the Light Brigade, there are also major mishaps in this mode of transportation.  Some soldiers are mutilated by the process.  So if you don’t die in battle, you may die getting there or coming back.  It’s an extremely dangerous career, being a soldier, and the corporations train out almost every instinct of self-preservation one has.  It brainwashes them into super killing machines, willing to die in whatever way death comes for the honor of the corporation.

I really liked the characterization.  Dietz is the narrator.  Whether you like Dietz’s personality or not, you completely empathize and understand their thought processes.  Many of the secondary characters are standard fare for military SF, or military fiction in general.  But I found myself buying into them as more dimensional than they really are.  Think of the stereotypes of soldiers in “Aliens.”  They were all caricatures, but all very believable.  Same here.

The writing is intense as well.  As we are in Dietz’s mind as narrator, the prose is angry and crisp.  There is no flowery language.  It’s war and it’s brutal.  Still, I felt I had great pictures of all the characters.  The world building was amazing.  Whether the troops were fighting on Mars or on Earth, the images of the locals and the carnage there were amazingly vivid.

I give this book a solid four out of five stars.  It’s a nearly perfect military SF novel.  It doesn’t paint a rosy picture of heroes and winning.  It’s about the truths of war and the machine that keeps it going.  I’d actually like to read some David Weber to compare and contrast his military SF with what I’ve read, despite not really liking the subgenre.  But that’s somewhere down the road.  I’m glad I read this book, which was an online book club selection.  So far, I’m two for two with Hurley’s books, having enjoyed God’s War about five years ago.  

The Saint of Bright Doors

Vajra Chandrasekera
Completed 5/11/2024, Reviewed 5/12/2024
4 stars

This book was very original in its mix of demons and anti-gods, brightly colored portals, and dystopian South Asia.  I must admit, it is like nothing I’ve read before.  At the same time, the strangeness of it made it difficult to stick to it.  The prose, though, was phenomenal.  It’s a very literary novel, with little back and forth dialogue and a ton of world building.  I assume it’s set in a dystopian South Asia as the author is from Sri Lanka, there are tuk-tuks, there’s racism and castes, and saris are worn.  But the location is never clearly defined.  I can see why this book was nominated for a 2023 Nebula, but I thought it might be a little too prosy for a Hugo.  However, it was nominated for a 2024 Hugo as well.  

Fetter lives in Luriat.  He goes to group therapy to deal with being the son of a messiah.  He wants nothing better than to have a quiet life with his boyfriend Hej in the big city.  All his life, his mother trained him to assassinate his father, but now, away from her influence, he’s trying to shed that part of himself.  But the past is hard to release when your therapist is secretly a revolutionary, trying to bring you into the overthrow of the influence of Fetter’s father on the government.  He did inherit some magic from his mother, like being able to see demons, feel cold winds from Luriat’s brightly painted doors that go to nowhere, and be impervious to fire.  Oh yeah, and his mother tore off his shadow at birth so he sometimes passes by with little notice.  But as much as he tries to avoid it, it looks like he’s on a collision course with his father and his henchmen.  

I found the book difficult to dive into in the beginning.  At first, I was in love with the prose, but then I became rather bored with it.  It was tough getting to like Fetter, who seemed aimless and kept too much to himself.  So it took a long time to decide whether I liked him or not.  The best part of him was that other people really like him, like his boyfriend Hej, his therapist, and Caduv who connected with Fetter when Caduv first came to Luriat.  But as the plot unfolded, it became easy to see why Fetter was not very likeable by the reader.  He didn’t like who he was supposed to be.  And trying to shed that persona and finding who he wants to be made it difficult to empathize with him.  

It took me nearly two weeks to read this book, which was only about 350 pages.  I went for days only reading two pages at a time, partly because I had many late evening meetings with a work team in India.   And that’s too bad because I lost some of the world building during that period, causing me to be a little lost at times.  However, I read the last 200 pages in two days, and it did come to a good climax.  I was able to recall everything I needed for the ending to make sense.  

One thing I really did like was finding out who the narrator was.  It happens at the end, so I’m not going to spoil it.  But it did surprise me.  

Reflecting on the book for a day, I give it four stars out of five.  It really is a good book.  It was nice to read a book with LGBTQ+ characters after a long hiatus from the subgenre.  I just found it hard to stay with it.  It might have a good chance at winning the Nebula, which is a peer award, and the Nebulas often reward prosy work.  But I don’t know about the Hugo.  I have to read the others to see what I think fans would reward.  Chandrasekera has written a lot of short works and I would really be interested in reading some of those stories.  This is his first novel.