Marie Brennan's Blog, page 15

Books read, January 2024

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.

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New Worlds: Houses of Sticks and Straw

Yes, the New Worlds Patreon is making a “Three Little Pigs” reference, as this week’s essay is (one of two) about building materials! Comment over there . . .

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Hugo nominations chance ending soon!

The recent news about extreme hinkiness in last year’s Hugo Awards (works ruled ineligible without the authors being notified or any reason given; questionable voting numbers; attendees’ voting rights reportedly being reassigned to the convention committee) is deeply disturbing — me, I’m in favor of a Retro Hugo for 2023 in an upcoming year, since we already have that structure in place — but for this upcoming year, the more people who get involved, the better! If you want to nominate, you have until tomorrow to get at least a supporting membership to the Glasgow Worldcon — you don’t have to be planning to attend in person to get involved.

(There are technical difficulties right now with the nominations form, which they are trying to fix, but you can still register.)

I posted about my 2023 publications back in December, but it’s rather a long list this time. If you pointed a knife at me and demanded I choose my favorites, I’d give it to “At the Heart of Each Pearl Lies a Grain of Sand” (which is unfortunately paywalled, but SMT is great and you should subscribe to it!) and the Rook and Rose trilogy in toto, now that it’s finished up with Labyrinth’s Heart being published last year. I genuinely think it’s one of the best series I’ve (co-)written: Alyc and I had a much more complete plan than usual going into it, which meant we were able to play all kinds of long games across the three books, from seeding tiny worldbuilding details that would be load-bearing later, to pacing the arcs of the characters and their relationships, to braiding many strands of plot together into a complex rope. I think it repays re-reading more than anything else I’ve written, in terms of being able to say ohhhhh, waitasec, I see where that’s going now — — which is not the only way for a series to be good, but it’s certainly one of them!

So yes, register by tomorrow if you want to nominate, whether that’s something of mine or anything else you enjoyed from 2023!

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New Worlds: Double Trouble

No, you’re not seeing double: the New Worlds Patreon is talking about twins this week! Comment over there.

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“Embers Burning in the Night”

Back in 2006, I had an idea for a short story.

Back in 2006 + 15 minutes, I had an idea for a novel trilogy, and the short story concept was lost for good.

But I didn’t sell that trilogy right then. It went onto a back burner . . . and then, year by year, it got shoved further back until it had basically fallen behind the stove. Every so often I’d peer down at it and contemplate putting in the work to fish it out, but it seemed increasingly not worth it.

Except. There were things about the idea I really really liked, things that still excited me even more than a decade later, and I was reluctant to give up on those entirely. Unfortunately, they were too central to the whole project for me to cannibalize them for some other tale; it was really all or nothing, and “all” didn’t feel like where I was as a writer or where I was going.

. . . then I read some Borges for the first time, and had the bright idea of copying that thing he often does: find some angle that lets you write the Cliff Notes version of a much larger tale.

The result is “Embers Burning in the Night,” free to read online now at Sunday Morning Transport! As indeed are all of their January stories, so you can also check out Nibedita Sen’s “Agni”, a story of religion and control, and Yoon Ha Lee’s “Cuneiform,” a dystopian look at where generative AI and writing could go, along with a story from Benjamin C. Kinney next week. And if you like what SMT’s putting out, do consider subscribing; they are a really high-quality market, but things like that need supporters to thrive. You can sign up for free to receive the one public story each month, or pay monthly or annually to get the whole shebang.

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New Worlds: Little Orphan Whoever

The New Worlds Patreon will neither blame you nor accept the blame if you get earwormed this week by songs from the musical Annie, as we turn to the topic of orphanages! Comment over there.

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New Worlds: Lost and Unwanted

This week’s New Worlds Patreon post comes with trigger warnings: the topic at hand is foundlings and infanticide. If you’re up for that, you can comment over there, but I’m well aware this one won’t be for everyone.

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New Worlds: Bringing Up Baby

A new month, a new topic: the steadfast patrons of the New Worlds Patreon have voted for discussion of certain aspects of the life cycle. We’re starting off with a look at how well or badly certain child-rearing methods can turn out — comment over there!

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Books read, December 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Books read, December 2023 appeared first on Swan Tower.

Happy New Year!

I wish you all a happy New Year, with all ten of my fingers!

. . . that’s not as much of a non sequitur as it sounds like.

Late last October, I jammed the index finger of my right hand really really hard. Since the joints of that finger already hyperextend rather significantly, I did a serious number on myself — enough so that, after a week or two in which it didn’t seem to be getting better (and may in fact have been made worse, since I kept catching it on things and hurting it every time), I decided to splint it and give it some time to recover. After two weeks or so of it obstinately refusing to do so, I went to the orthopedist; one MRI later, I was officially diagnosed as being one degree of injury short of needing surgery to fix it. The doctor told me to leave it splinted through the end of the year, and so, shortly after midnight, I let my finger out of jail for the first significant amount of time since early November.

I’ve been able to type during that period — the first question I’ve gotten from basically every writer who’s seen me in person since then — but not well; I’ve been very prone to typos and also winding up in wrist contortions that aren’t the best idea, ergonomically speaking. After a mid-December week of crunch time that required me to type quite a lot, I finally set up an auto-responder on my work email telling people not to expect to hear from me until the New Year unless it was urgent. So now I get to dig my way out from under that pile, while simultaneously being careful about not overdoing it. Right now my range of motion in those joints is laughably small, and my first order of business is to gently re-learn how to make a fist. I want that milestone now, but I know better than to lunge for it too fast.

But: I get to at least start on making progress. And that, in its own way, is a good start to 2024. May this year bring us all better things than its predecessor did.

The post Happy New Year! appeared first on Swan Tower.