Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 282

Recent Reading: A Crown of Bitter Orange by Laura Florand

So, a few days ago, I had to get through a somewhat tense day filled mainly with hours and hours of waiting. I tweeted something like, “You know what would make today easier for me is @LauraFlorand’s newest book and it won’t be out till the end of the month!”

Ping! Fifteen minutes later, A Crown of Bitter Orange appeared in my email. That was certainly a nice surprise. Plus, I was right. It’s the perfect sort of book for a long tedious day: charming and engaging, quick-witted and sweet, filled with sympathetic characters getting their lives sorted out and with a guaranteed happy ending. I read the whole thing in one quick swoosh, and if you like romances at all, I do recommend it for, say, doctor’s waiting rooms, airports, anything of that kind which you may have coming up.

Anyway, A Crown of Bitter Orange

Okay, if you’ve been keeping up with Laura Florand’s romances, you remember the Rosier family, filled with all those male cousins – Matt and Damien, Raoul and Tristan and Lucien (currently absent). Also, pretty clearly, Antoine. The family seems a little slow on the uptake there, though I suppose us readers get a few hints about Antoine that they don’t.

Also the family patriarch, the grandfather, famously a hero in WWII; and Great-Aunt Colette, ditto. Those two of the elder generation are always important background characters in this series, but never more so than in Bitter Orange.

The male lead in this book is Tristan, who is kind of the emotional heart of the family – he plays an important role in holding the family together. But the tension in Bitter Orange arises from the female lead, Malorie Monsard, and her background. Tristan has always been drawn to her, but she’s never for a second believed that he cares for her – her in particular – because all the girls in the world fall at Tristan’s feet. Or so it seems to her. And she doesn’t believe anybody could really care for her, certainly not a Rosier, because . . .

I said the older generation is important here, right? Well, here’s why: Malorie’s great-grandfather also used to be important in perfume, the Monsards were another economic cornerstone of the region, but far from being a war hero, he collaborated with the Nazis. He was directly responsible for the deaths of some of those working with the Rosier’s grandfather and Colette.

How about that for setting up background tension for a relationship? Also, Malorie’s grandfather and particularly her father were nothing to write home about, either. You know how family is so important to the Rosiers. Well, Malorie practically doesn’t have a family. She’s spent her whole life making absolutely sure she will never need to depend on anybody, especially not a man.

So, after building a perfectly decent life for herself in America, Malorie comes back to her grandmother’s house, with its orchard of bitter oranges and its occasional hidden secrets. Should she sell it and leave again or try to restore it and stay? Tristan is determined to help her with that decision. Things develop from there. There are misunderstandings, but not the kind that drive the reader mad as they percolate through half the book before finally getting resolved. It’s not quite as sweet a story as Once Upon a Rose, not quite as infused with warmth as A Wish Upon Jasmine. But it’s a delightful return to the fragrant world of the La Vie en Roses series.

Also, there’s an indication that the next Rosier book will focus on Lucien, the prodigal cousin. Good. That’ll be quite something, I’m sure, with Lucien’s background. I’m looking forward to it.

Incidentally, at the end, there’s also a brief excerpt from Trust Me, which is the direct sequel of Chase Me, which as it happens I also re-read during the past couple of days. I see Trust Me is coming out in April 2017. I doubt I will be spending a lot of time waiting for various situations to resolve themselves in April, but hey, if I am, you can bet I will be hitting up Laura Florand for an early copy of that one, too.

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Cybil Awards Finalists

I’m happy to see that The Keeper of the Mist is a finalist for the Cybils Award this year!

We had 1163 books nominated, across all categories. Out of those books, 99.7% of the books were read by at least one panelist. And 98.3% were read by two panelists. Thinking of all the person-hours that entails boggles the mind.

It does, doesn’t it? Thanks to all the judges who devoted so much time to reading these books and to the hard task of sorting them out.

Mist up against tough competition. Here are the other titles in its category:

Illuminae by Amie Kaufman

Labyrinth Lost (Brooklyn Brujas) by Zoraida Cordova

Still Life with Tornado by A.S. King

The Door at the Crossroads by Zetta Elliott

This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity) by Victoria Schwab

When the Moon was Ours: A Novel by Anna-Marie McLemore

Now, Illuminae is the one that most catches my eye on that list. It’s not an ordinary novel; it’s epistolary or something like that. Amazon says: “Told through a fascinating dossier of hacked documents—including emails, maps, files, IMs, medical reports, interviews, and more—Illuminae is the first book in a heart-stopping trilogy about lives interrupted, the price of truth, and the courage of everyday heroes.” I understand one should get the paper copy, not the ebook, because there are lots of creative uses of page space and fonts and stuff. I’ve got a copy and I’m looking forward to reading it.

I have read Still Life With Tornado and that’s a good book but an interesting outlier on this list, because it’s hard to decide if it’s SF that reads like contemporary or contemporary with a magical realism element or what. I suspect most readers will not be thinking of it as SF, but I could be wrong. I did really like it.

The others I haven’t read. If you have, what did you think of them?

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Author interview

Yes, yes, I have been busy, distracted, and short of sleep for the past few days, but all is well and I should be keeping up with the internetz stuff better now. Besides, this interview just got posted by DJ at My Life My Books My Escape, which incidentally isn’t that a good name for a blog?

One of the questions DJ asked was: What do you think readers will be talking about most once they finish The Mountain of Kept Memory? My answer was:

What happens next! I have no immediate plans to write a sequel, but although this book is self-contained, there would certainly be room for a sequel.

I’ll add that, to me, King Osir is such an interesting character and so ambiguous that I hope readers wind up thinking about him and about his role in the story.

I am curious: was I right? If you did think about or talk about Mountain after finishing it, were those the topics?

Lotta other Qs and As at the post, so click through if you’re interested and read the whole thing.

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Recent Reading: PEEPS by Scott Westerfeld

PEEPS was the very last book I read in 2016, so there’s a landmark of sorts. I enjoyed this YA vampire novel quite a bit, even though I ordinarily prefer supernatural monsters and vampires to pseudoscientific ones. In this case, vampirism is definitely pseudoscientific. It’s caused by a type of parasite, and the chapters focusing on the main story are interspersed with chapters about different real-world parasites, such as snail flukes and Toxoplasma and so on.

After a year of hunting, I finally caught up with Sarah. It turned out she’d been hiding in New Jersey, which broke my heart. I mean, Hoboken? Sarah was always head over heels in love with Manhattan. For her, New York was like another Elvis, the King remade of bricks, steel, and granite. The rest of the world was a vast extension of her parents’ basement, the last place she wanted to wind up.

The main character is Cal, who was infected with the parasite and is now a carrier – meaning he gets lots of the vampire superpowers, but is not crazy like real vampires. It also means he accidentally infected various previous girlfriends like Sarah, so now he is hunting them down and handing them over to a secret organization that deals with stuff like this.

The female lead is Lace, short for Lacey, a girl with brains and either nerves of steel or else a serious lack of common sense. Or both. I mean, when she follows Cal down under the gym level of the apartment building, jeez. Anyway, she figures out what’s going on and joins Cal in fighting for truth, justice, and the salvation of humanity.

The plot is possibly a tiny bit unbelievable, but the story is quick, fun, fast-paced, and generally successful at sweeping the reader along through the implausible moments. As I say, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Including the parts about the various parasites. But.

For a guy who evidently did a fair bit of research while writing this book, Westerfeld does make a couple mistakes, including one that is really egregious. On p. 15, right at the beginning of chapter 2:

The natural world is jaw-droppingly horrible. Appalling, nasty, vile. Take trematodes, for example. Trematodes are tiny fish that live in the stomach of a bird.…

And here I skidded to a halt and readjusted my expectations for this book.

Let me recast the above error in order to make it more obvious. Trematodes are microscopic mammals that live in the stomach of a bird. There, does that sound crazy enough? How about this: Trematodes are tiny monkeys that live in the stomach of a bird.

To me, those sentences sound no more ridiculous than the original. Because trematodes are most definitely not fish. They are Platyhelminthes. Flatworms. So far removed from fish that you might as well insert tiny monkeys; the sentence does not get more wrong. It is probably not really the copy editor’s job to fix errors of fact, except it kind of is, but this is probably not the kind of fact a copy editor is likely to know off the top of their head, which means Westerfeld should have been more careful because no one else in the publishing team was likely to catch this kind of craziness.

It turns out that nothing else in the novel is as totally off base as the little fish, not that that’s a high bar. Lots of things are dramatically simplified or else slanted to support the kinda silly plot. But that’s fine. It’s a fun story that isn’t trying too hard for plausibility.

But good merciful God. Tiny fish.

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Best of 2016

Okay, assuming I didn’t forget to many books on my Bought in 2016 / Read in 2016 list, it looks like I acquired 184 books over the course of the year — that’s a lot, even more than usual. Two bundles, a historical fantasy bundle and a noblebright bundle, contributed to that. So did free books and ARCs given away at various conventions. So did that massive Open Road Media sale in December — I picked up 40 books from that sale alone. Of those 184 books, I’ve read 59, or about a third; and DNFed about half a dozen others. Also, I read 49 other books, or just over 100. How many books I read per month totally depended on whether I was working seriously on a project of my own, so I read from 0 to 16 novels per month. Here’s how the months stack up:

Best January: Powers by Hetley / Burton

I read nine books in January. My goodness, I loved this one. It was a great way to start the reading year. Click through to read my comments about it.

Best February: Silver on the Road by Gilman

I only read 4 books in February, so I must have been working on something. Yeah, I bet it was the revision of The Dark Turn of Winter (or whatever its title turns out to be). That was kind of a big revision and the deadline was March. But the few novels I read were all good, especially this one. I’m so pleased the sequel is coming out this January. I feel like I can probably read it right away without re-reading the first book, but I may re-read it even though I remember it pretty well. Incidentally, for some reason this is the single book where the most people told me they bought it because of my recommendation, so yay! Because I’m really happy to spread the love for this great series.

Best March: Archivist Wasp by Kornher-Stace

I must have sent off that revision about on time, because I read 8 books in March. What a wonderful and interesting book this one was. I hope Kornher-Stace is working on another novel.

Best April: Visitor by Cherryh

I mean, hello. Any Foreigner novel is probably going to wind up on the top of my list for any given month. But I only read five books in April, mostly romances, which means I must have been working on something. Don’t remember what.

Best May: The Steerswoman by Kirstein

I almost always take the first half of May off because I’m waiting for the summer break to start serious work on something. So I read 12 books during the first half of May and nothing in the second half — I was working on No Foreign Sky, my space opera.

Best June: Seveneves by Stevenson

I read all the other books in the Steerswoman series so far in June and they were fantastic, but since I already picked that one for May, I’ll say Seveneves is my pick for June. Wow, what a surprise. Totally did not expect to love this book, but it was so much fun.

Best July: Rose Under Fire by Wein

I read 12 books in July, and loved several of them, but Rose Under Fire is definitely my pick.

Best August: Wings of Fire by Sutherland

10 books in August. These were my favorites.

Best September: Yeah, didn’t actually read any fiction to speak of in September. Busy busy.

Best October: The Raven Boys series by Stiefvater

After a very busy summer, I was so glad to take a serious break in October. Also very pleased to finally settle down and read the entire Raven Boys quartet.

Best November: The Call by O’Guillin

Revising No Foreign Sky kept me busy during the entire month. I read only 4 books, of which The Call was the surprise favorite.

Best December: Nine Goblins by Ursula Vernon or T. Kingfisher, don’t remember which name she wrote this under. I may buy a copy for my vet. She likes fantasy and hey, one of the main characters is pretty much a vet. Which is one reason I loved it so much. Really, Ursula Vernon is one of my favorite discoveries of the past couple years. I believe she has a lot of books out I haven’t read yet, which is great.

Now, let me filter the list in a different way:

Best male lead: Ronan from The Raven Boys. I love how physical he is, how he is oriented toward violence and action rather than language. I love his loyalty and passion.

Best female lead: Rowan from The Steerswoman. Totally not like Ronan at all. I love how scientifically oriented Rowan is, in a world that barely has a concept of science. Overall best cast also goes to The Steerswoman because all the characters are just outstanding as is the worldbuilding.

Best surprise: Persona and Icon by Valentine. I would never have expected to enjoy such claustrophobic celebrity-focused books. At this point I’d try anything Valentine writes because if she can pull this off, she can probably make me love anything.

Best secondary fantasy world: The Edge of Worlds by Martha Wells. The world of the Raksura is going to be my favorite forever. I’m so looking forward to the fifth and final Raksura book. I will probably re-read the whole series … again … when that comes out in 2017.

Best fairy tale: Bryony and Roses by T. Kingfisher. Completely charming Beauty and the Beast story.

Best contemporary setting: Bone Gap by Ruby. I love how Ruby wove the Persephone legend into this contemporary setting. Also, certainly in the running for Best Male Lead.

Best historical setting: Clash of Eagles by Smale. Love the Cahokians versus Romans thing. Love it.

Best SF setting: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Chambers. Such a cheerfully complicated space opera setting, with great characters. Looking forward to the sequel.

Best romance: Softly Falling by Kelly. I am so glad I am not spending a winter on the Great Plains. But a wonderful setting for an excellent romance.

Best Georgette Heyers: Cotillion. I can’t believe how long it took me to realize who the male lead of this romance actually was. After that I enjoyed the story so much. Also in the running for Best Male Lead.

Most perfectly beautiful: Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen. This was a re-read. What a lovey story.

Best Short Story / Novella: Penric’s Mission by Bujold. I expect we’ll see more novellas, because we certainly need to know how this new relationship works out for Penric!

Best Nonfiction: Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Won’t Stop Talking by Cain. It’s an extrovert’s world — unfortunately. I shudder at the thought of the all-group-work-all-the-time thing that has engulfed grade schools. I’m glad schools provided more space for introverts when I was a kid. Interesting and thought-provoking book, especially when Cain discusses the way in which a charismatic extrovert can lead a corporation or other group right off a cliff by steamrolling over more cautious and rational introverts.

OVERALL BEST OF 2016: DRUMROLL PLEASE

The Steerswoman series. Not quite finished yet, though the overall shape of the story is clear. I can’t wait for Kirstein to bring out the next volume, which I know she is working on now.

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Rules for writers

I’ve been a bit out of touch over Christmas, but I see Janet Reid has a series of short posts up, thus:

Rules for Writers: be rational

I’d NEVER had someone refuse to let me read something. As you can well imagine, it’s 100% the other way around, I’m refusing to read stuff left and right.

To say I’m stunned is to say Lee Child sold a few books last year.

In the next five nano-seconds I think the following things:

1. He’s read my blog and he thinks I’m a foul mouthed bitch.

2. He’s read my blog and he thinks I’m incompetent.

3. He knows me and doesn’t like me.

4. He’s heard of me and doesn’t like me.

Now, these thoughts aren’t as lucid as this list. It’s mostly just an overwhelming feeling of self doubt and the instant assumption his refusal was about ME.

In the next moment, I have a blinding, and I mean BLINDING, realization that this is how some people who query me react to form rejections. I think the last time there was a bolt like this Saul might have been on the road to Damascus.

Rules for Writers: be imperfect

Fear of mistakes leads to paralysis. If you’re so afraid of making a mistake or annoying me that you don’t query, or don’t write, or don’t finish, the result is the same: nothing.

Rules for Writers: be reachable

One person sent me the email address for an author who needed some specific questions answered. I clicked on the address, sent an email.

Boing! Boing! Bounced back faster than you can say “googleschmoogle”

Rules for Writers: be positive

I don’t mean you are Pollyanna. When you find out your sales figures aren’t anywhere near what you were sure they’d be you don’t clap your hands and shout “oh yay!” No, you weep and rend your garments and curse the fates, BUT THEN you pick yourself up and say to your agent “OK, let’s deal with this. Strategy time.”

What you do NOT say is “oh they must think I suck as a writer, woe is me.”

Rules for Writers: be ready

The contest only required three chapters. But if all you have is three chapters, it’s hard to snag an agent. And if you win a contest, there’s a golden opportunity to be in front of some people who might want to help you reach the next level.

If the contest is three chapters, finish the novel and then enter. If you win, you’re ahead of the curve.

Of course each entry has more stuff than the snippets I quoted here, so click through and read each post. It all sounds like good advice to me.

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Good News Tuesday

Here’s a kinda random clutter of items, in the order I noticed them over the last week or so:

A Major Breakthrough In Modern Medicine: Regenerative Medicine Is Finally A Reality!

As part of a multi-center trial, doctors at Keck Medical Center at the University of Southern California, employing Asterias Biotherapeutics’ AST-OPC1 experimental treatment, injected 10 million oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) into the damaged spine of Kristopher (Kris) Boesen a 21 year-old California man who was paralyzed from the neck down after suffering a traumatic cervical spine injury in an automobile accident on March 6th, 2016….in late April, just 2 weeks after receiving the 10 million dose of OPC, he started to show signs of improvement. And barely 2 months after his experimental treatment, Kris was able to feed himself, write his name, use his cell phone, became mobile with the help of a motorized wheelchair and a whole lot more…like, lifting weights(!!!) and moving his toes!

As you can tell from the exclamation points, this article is not written in a staid professional style. But it pretty much deserves some exclamation points. Here’s hoping it leads to really noteworthy advances in the treatment and ideally complete reversal of paralysis! !!!

New Ebola Vaccine Gives 100 Percent Protection

In a scientific triumph that will change the way the world fights a terrifying killer, an experimental Ebola vaccine tested on humans in the waning days of the West African epidemic has been shown to provide 100 percent protection against the lethal disease.

The vaccine has not yet been approved by any regulatory authority, but it is considered so effective that an emergency stockpile of 300,000 doses has already been created for use should an outbreak flare up again.

I doubt very much that anything anywhere is effect in 100% of cases. Among other things, we know that many vaccines are not as effective as they should be if the recipient is already under stress when the vaccine is given. But one can hope this vaccine is mostly effective.

New drug gives hope for those with progressive multiple sclerosis

I can’t cut and paste from the article, but it’s just what the title says. Apparently about 15% of people with multiple sclerosis have a particularly recalcitrant form that resists all kinds of treatments, and a new drug may now offer significant benefits for those people.

Here’s one which is just fun:

How Stanford Built a Humanoid Submarine Robot to Explore a 17th-Century Shipwreck

Most ocean-ready ROVs are boxy little submarines that might have an arm on them if you’re lucky, but they’re not really designed for the kind of fine manipulation that underwater archaeology demands. You could send down a human diver instead, but once you get past about 40 meters, things start to get both complicated and dangerous. Ocean One’s humanoid design means that it’s easy and intuitive for a human to remotely perform delicate archeological tasks through a telepresence interface.

There’s a picture at the link. You might call the robot more . . . half humanoid. But it does look pretty cool. Okay, next:

A Bizarre New Species Of Fish Has Been Discovered At A Record Depth

Scientists exploring the deepest place on Earth — the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean — have captured footage of a never-before-seen fish at a record depth of 26,722 feet (8,145 meters).

As reported in New Scientist, the ghostly fish was spotted by an expedition led by Jeff Drazen and Patty Fryer of the University of Hawaii. Marine biologists suspect that the new species is a kind of snailfish, but they’re not entirely sure; its body is shaped differently from other known varieties. It has broad, translucent fins, “stringy appendages,” and a tail that allows it to glide gently through the water. It appears to be ‘rowing’ through the water with its strange fin-like appendages.

It does indeed look like a ghost fish. Click through if you have a minute — there’s a short video.

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Recent Reading: Stained Glass Monsters and The Sleeping Life by Andrea K Höst

I hope you all had a merry Christmas, if you celebrate Christmas, or at the very least a pleasant weekend. A nice quiet Christmas here: all adults, no children. Nice, but not as exciting as a Christmas with lots of kids running all over the place.

We had such a non-white Christmas here in south-central Missouri: sixty degrees and light mist/drizzle/fog all day. It’s going to be the same today, I believe. Possibly it will be dry enough to take a couple of the dogs hiking. Still, though I do like a white Christmas, this is far nicer than an ice storm.

Meanwhile, recent reading — lately I’ve had more time than usual for reading, plus this dratted cold is dragging on a bit, which makes me look for comfort reads. So I finally opened up almost my last unread Andrea K Höst novel, Stained Glass Monsters:

When a motionless woman dressed in white appears in the village of Falk, Kendall has no inkling that the strange apparition will soon leave her homeless and tangled in the affairs of mages and monsters…

What a creepy image that is. An unconscious woman in white, lying on her back with her arms spread. Too heavy for anyone to lift, the air surrounding her heavy as well.

No doubt in a different kind of story the woman would seem helpless. Harmless. Saving her could be the object of someone’s quest. Not in this story. In this story, she’s a portent of disaster.

Kendall is kind of at the edge of events through the whole first book of this duology. She might be a mage someday, but at the moment she just makes pebbles quiver slightly. She’s an interesting pov character, though. Suspicious, practical, irreverent. Not accustomed to magic or well versed in history, which allows Höst to explain things to the reader smoothly and unobtrusively.

It seems that several hundred years ago, a mage queen tried an experimental bit of sorcery which was supposed to make her a goddess. This kind of went wrong in several unexpected ways. We’re seeing the conclusion of those events now, as her descendent, Rennyn Montjuste-Surclere works to prevent disaster and set things right.

There, I think that’s fairly accurate as well as extremely vague and spoiler-free.

What I liked:

The characters: Kendall is a perfectly fine pov character, but the protagonist I appreciated most was Rennyn. In her confidence and strength, she reminds me of Maskelle in Martha Wells’ Wheel of Time. Like Maskelle, Rennyn has no need to be concerned about life’s little inconveniences and problems and dangers. As you might imagine, this leaves the big problems and dangers.

The plotting: Andrea K Höst pulls off startling plot twists better than practically anybody else I can think of. These books aren’t as extreme that way as the Medair duology or And All the Stars . . . to be fair, not much equals the plot twist in And All the Stars . . . but there are definite surprises. I certainly didn’t work out Rennyn’s plan ahead of time. Or, in the second book, what was going to happen with her Wicked Uncle. These things make sense in context, but they’re pretty darn startling.

The worldbuilding: I loved the Kellian. Everybody’s going to love the Kellian.

Light did weird things to the Kellian. Sunlight turned them golden, their eyes yellow disks, their hair and nails pale flames. At full moon, they were silver, and they even went a kind of rose during a painted dawn. Kendall had never seen one in light as strong as this, and for a moment couldn’t even tell who it was, saw only a vaguely human shape of burning blue-white. Even the clothing was lit or lost in the glare.

But of course it was Captain Faille. One lighting-tipped hand found Rennyn’s throat, touched, her cheek, then he picked up a cloak from the seat opposite and laid it over them.

What I didn’t like:

There wasn’t enough Captain Faille!

Oh, well, his role expands as you go through the first book and he is an important character almost from the beginning of The Sleeping Life.

But I almost always particularly appreciate Höst’s male leads. Faille is no exception, but it takes a while for the reader to understand that he is in fact the male lead.

Other comments:

I would say that basically the first book stands alone, but you really need to go straight on to the second book after you finish the first. This isn’t just because Faille comes more into his own in the second book. It’s also because Kendall’s character arc doesn’t conclude until the very end of the second book. Other situations also get resolved in the second book, but Kendall’s story is where you’re going to get a real sense of completion. I will add that at first it looks as though the second book is more removed from the first than is actually the case, so don’t be put off by the introduction of a new character at the beginning of the second book.

How does the Eferum duology compare to Höst’s other work?

I haven’t read Pyramids of London . . . waiting for more of the books in the series to be released . . . but I think I’m caught up other than those. So.

1. Touchstone trilogy. Honestly, it’s hard to beat the Touchstone trilogy. Every time I read anything of Höst’s, I wind up re-reading bits of the Touchstone trilogy.

2. And All the Stars. Just a wonderful story, with the most amazing plot twist imaginable. Perfect for people who like YA, people who like superhero stories, people who like alien invasion stories, people who like post-apocalyptic stories, people who are not quite sure they like science fiction . . .

3. Medair duology. This is the other one I go back to and re-read bits of.

4. I love Aristide a whole bunch, so I would tend to put The Bones of the Fair next. Then the rest are hard to sort out.

How about you all? How would you sort out Andrea Höst’s books (those you’ve read)?

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Recent Reading: Still Life With Tornado by AS King

Okay, so, a contemporary YA problem novel. Not ordinarily my thing. But every now and then, I guess it is my thing. Like Marchetta’s contemporary YAs, starting with Saving Francesca. I liked those a lot, much better than her fantasy series.

I really liked Still Life With Tornado too. It’s completely different from Marchetta’s books. Also, it’s not quite a straight contemporary. I was drawn to this one because of the suggestion that Sarah, the protagonist, runs into other Sarahs during the course of the book – past and future selves – and I thought that sounded cool. And so it proved.

Spoiler: the past and future selves are realer than one might expect in a typical contemporary. I see why King commented that she writes “weird” books, because it *is* weird. The real Sarah – the most-real Sarah – is sixteen. She is clearly having a kind of breakdown during the course of the book. But when ten-year-old Sarah shows up, everyone can see her and interact with her. The past and future Sarahs are way more real than makes sense in a true contemporary. Yet this story doesn’t read like a fantasy, either.

It’s very well written, whatever it is.

I look out to the street and the cars that go by and the people walking with their groceries or their kids and I see the world’s horizon line separating foreground from background.

Ten-year-old Sarah is in the background. All my future Sarahs are behind me as I view the scene. They aren’t in the picture yet.

I am the horizon line.

Nice, eh? This is a beautifully written story. I think maybe I’ll have to seek out some more of AS King’s work.

All right, so. The interaction among the Sarahs is important to the story. Also their interaction with everyone else. When ten-year-old Sarah comes over for dinner, she’s a six-years-younger version of Sarah. Imagine how strange that would be! And her father doesn’t recognize her. That right there gives you the fundamental shape of the problem this story addresses.

So Sarah’s family life is not precisely ideal and never has been. But she doesn’t really remember some of the most important events that have shaped her current life – but ten-year-old Sarah does. And forty-year-old Sarah makes it clear, without saying so directly, that things must come out all right in the end.

This story is about living a lie; it’s about living in a family where everyone is and always has been living a lie; it’s about figuring this out and reshaping your life into something more honest. The journey takes us back and forth through time and sort of back and forth though reality and perhaps even sanity. It’s not particularly difficult to read, though, so no need to shy away from it if you’re wary of picking up a really intense book. From the fact that I liked it quite a bit, you can assume that everyone who deserves to winds up in a better situation at the end.

For me . . . I guess I’d say four stars because although I did truly like this book, it is also truly not my favorite type of story. The journey through a breakdown will never appeal to me as much as a quest to save the world. Minuses, for me: I never really could wrap my mind around the mother getting herself stuck in this situation. And I don’t honestly think I truly believed in the father, either.

In terms of actual quality, I’d have to say, probably five stars. Pluses: the sheer quality of the writing. The relationship between the ten-year-old Sarah and the sixteen-year-old Sarah. Also the relationship between Sarah and her brother – the “voicemail conversation” was delightful and clever and very believable.

If you are into fantasy AND contemporary YAs, you should definitely try this. If you are into one or the other, you may well enjoy it. If you’ve already read it, let me know what you thought!

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Novellapalooza

From File 770, this long post followed by a comment thread featuring thoughts about recent novellas.

Thus, my opinions on the following novellas vary wildly: stories I thought I would love but didn’t, stories I didn’t expect to love but did, and stories which aligned with my expectations – whether high or low. Bear in mind that while I enjoy both, I tend to prefer Science Fiction over Fantasy – and that while I enjoy suspense and thrillers, I have very little appreciation for Horror (and to be honest, I think Lovecraft is way overrated). My personal assessments are therefore not intended to be the final word on these stories, but merely a jumping-off point for Filer discussion.

I thought it would be helpful to have a thread where all the Filers’ thoughts on novellas are collected in one place, as a resource when Hugo nomination time rolls around. I’ve opined on a few of these previously on File770, so I’ve put those at the end, so as to not give them an unfair amount of bandwidth.

Which of these novellas have you read? And what did you think of them?

By my rough count, 39 novellas are reviewed here, including the “Penric” novellas by Bujold and a handful of others I’ve at least heard of, if not read. This is a post I’ll be interested in spending some time on, since novellas are the shorter form I like the best.

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