Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 26

The Everlasting Rose and The Beauty Trials, by Dhonielle Clayton

This is the completion of the trilogy that began with The Belles, which sounds like a standard "Everyone is ugly and beauty is controlled by the government" dystopia, but it really isn't. It feels more like a lost novel by Tanith Lee with lots of fairytale motifs and canon FF. It's decadent, immersive, and I highly recommend it

The second two books are also very good and worth reading, though I do think the first is the best. They don't answer all the questions that were raised by the first book, but they do answer some of them. They also go in some unexpected and interesting directions.

Worldbuilding spoilers: (  Read more...  )

What Clayton is interested in, particularly in the second two books, is how the Bells are exploited, forms of enslavement and resistance, and how people deal with an unjust society. There are still plenty of gorgeous dress descriptions and teacup pets, don't worry.

The second book has an author's note at the end that is pretty jaw-dropping. Don't miss it. The third book has a new narrator, which is fun, and is a bit of a mythic take on the Hunger Games. The end felt a little rushed and oddly paced but the final outcome is satisfying.

Clayton is now on my "buy anything she writes" list. She has an interesting, original voice and set of concerns, and her books are compulsively page-turny and just a pleasure to read.

he has a new book out, a middle grade fantasy, which I will read shortly.

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Three Apocalypse Novellas: Killjoy, Salman, Tchaikovsky

These three novellas deal with the issue of community, oppression, resistance, and violence in worlds which are dealing with the aftermath of an apocalypse.

Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Ogres are bigger than you.
Ogres are stronger than you.
Ogres rule the world.

In this apparently medievaloid fantasy world, humans are ruled by ogres. In addition to being bigger and stronger, ogres are physically capable of eating meat, which makes humans very sick. Humans are passive and non-violent... until a young human, Torquell, dares to fight an ogre. Torquell then flees to the forest, where he meets some Robin Hood-like human outlaws. But that's just the beginning...

From this premise alone,I had a pretty good idea of where this story was going. With the exception of a nice final twist, I was absolutely correct.

(  Read more...  )

Ogres has a strong leftist theme about class warfare and resistance, but as a story, it's pretty cliched. The Hugo nominees liked it more than I did.

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Everything That Isn't Winter, by Margaret Killjoy

A tea-growing anarchist commune after the apocalypse is threatened by violent outsiders.

Killjoy is a trans woman anarchist of the practical variety: self-sufficiency, community-building, and punching Nazis. I approve. She has a great Twitter and two excellent podcasts, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff (resistors in history) and Live Like The World Is Dying (prepping for anarchists).

I was excited to read her fiction, but this novella was just... fine. It's exactly what it says on the can.

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Nothing but the Rain, by Naomi Salman

In a small town where it rains all the time, the rain has started to erase people's memories. A single drop will take away the memory of the last few moments. More than that, the last few hours. And so forth. Enough exposure will erase your entire mind. No one can remember exactly when or how this started, because by the time anyone realized that they need to write down what happened, a lot of their memories had already been erased. The town is surrounded by soldiers who won't speak to them or let them leave.

The narrator, Laverne, is a doctor who keeps a journal to try to keep her self as intact as possible, and to read it back to remember what the rain erases. This structure is essential to the story, and used in a really brilliant manner. She's more isolated than many of the people in the town, for reasons which are gradually revealed, but she does have one contact, a woman with a toddler.

The premise is really well done, working out all the implications in a terrifyingly believable manner. I would call it a horror story, not because of any conventional jump scares, but because the entire premise is essentially horrific.

Be aware going in that you will never get an explanation of exactly why the rain is happening or what's going on in the wider world, though you do get enough bits and pieces that you can construct a plausible explanation for some questions.

(  Read more...  )

Thanks to just_ann_now for the rec; I never heard of this before and it's great.


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All these novellas deal with community and resistance to oppression.

In Ogres, resistance is necessary, violent resistance is also often necessary, but there is a danger of new bosses taking over for the old bosses.

In Everything That Isn't Winter, community is most important thing and the threats to it are primarily from outside forces. But because there are threats from outside, self-defense is necessary. This story deals with cost of violence on the people who commit it, even if their reasons are essentially good.

Nothing but the Rain has an optimistic view of people's willingness to resist, but a pessimistic view of its likelihood of success. It deals with the impossibility of staying morally pure in extreme situations, and the awful choices people are forced to make in order to survive.

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A Caribbean Mystery, by Agatha Christie

Miss Marple's writer nephew Raymond sends her on a relaxing Caribbean vacation, and even arranges for the perfect house sitter so she won't have to worry about that:

A friend who was writing a book wanted a quiet place in the country. "He'll look after the house all right. He's very house proud. He's a queer. I mean –"

He had paused, slightly embarrassed – but surely even dear old aunt Jane must have heard of queers.

I found that oddly sweet. Stereotypical, of course, but it's nice to know that Raymond has gay friends (who are writers!). And the joke is that Miss Marple absolutely, 100% knows about the existence of gay people. Miss Marple knows about all of humanity via her village microcosm.

(I now want the parallel book in which the gay writer friend solves a mystery in St. Mary Mead while Miss Marple is away.)

Raymond thoughtfully even provided a novel for her to read:


"Do you mean that you had no sexual experience at all?" demanded the young man incredulously. "At nineteen? But you must. It's vital."

The girl hung her head unhappily, her straight greasy hair fell forward over her face.

"I know," she muttered, "I know."

He looked at her, stained old jersey, the bare feet, the dirty toenails, the smell of rancid fat… He wondered why he found her so maddeningly attractive.


Miss Marple wondered too! And really! To have sex experienced urged on you exactly as though it was an iron tonic! Poor young things…


This book was published in 1964, and I regret to say that I know exactly what sort of novels this excerpt was parodying.

But on to the mystery. Miss Marple is a bit bored at her Caribbean resort... until another guest, the elderly old bore Major Palgrave, claims to have a photograph of a murderer who got away with it, hastily shuts up and hides it when he sees other guests approaching, and is found dead the next day, the photograph gone...

Miss Marple does more active sleuthing herself in this book than in some of the others, coming up with clever lies and excuses that play on people's perceptions of her as a doddering old lady. But the book really gets fun when she joins forces with another guest, a very old, rich, sick old man, Mr. Rafiel. He's her opposite in many ways - wealthy, cosmopolitan, privileged, used to ordering people around - but they recognize each other as intellectual kindred spirits. And they both want to see justice done.

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Christie scale: MEDIUM amounts of RACISM. Honestly less bad than I expected given the setting.

Next up: At Bertram's Hotel, another one where Miss Marple goes on a relaxing vacation. It's one of my favorite Christies and has a very different setting and tone to A Caribbean Mystery, despite surface similarities.

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Vids, Lost and Found

Last night I went down a vid rabbit hole, and discovered that I failed to download two of my all-time favorite vids and my links to them are broken. Does anyone have copies of Sisabet's Buffy vid "Peacekeeper" or a really sexy Xena vid, "Boom Boom Ba?"

I don't really know anything about vids and find them difficult to comment on beyond "I liked this!" but I enjoy watching them. Here are a few I enjoyed watching or re-watching last night.

Please link your own favorite vids in comments, and we'll have a vid-watching party.

Multi-fandom: Space Girl, by AurumCalendula. Girls doing stuff in space.

Annihilation: Wreath, by absternr. Beautiful, horrific, thought-provoking. Like the movie, it makes me feel things I can't quite name.

Everything Everywhere All At Once: Ramalama (Bang Bang), by mithborien. Just incredible editing, really fun to watch, illuminates a lot of the movie's themes and motifs.

Legion: Sweet Dreams are Made of This, by Sisabet. Really captures the feel of season one; scary, hypnotic, surreal. Makes me want to re-watch S1 and then continue as I somehow failed to notice that there were two more seasons!

Twelfth Night: that strain again! by ryfkah. Fascinating, brilliant comparison of a ton of versions of the play.

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The Snows of Jaspre, by Mary Caraker

Another atmospheric anthropological science fiction novel by Mary Caraker.

Morgan, a teacher from the Space Federation, is given a teaching assignment on the icy planet of Jaspre. It's home to two sets of colonists. One set live in the cities, and another, descended from the indigenous people of Finland, live in the snowy outlands in very rough, rural conditions. The latter are called snowgrubbers, a term used with contempt by outsiders but embraced with pride by the snowgrubbers themselves.

Jaspre's sun is very dim, so it has an artificial satellite, Argos, that focuses and concentrates its light. This gives the snow beautiful rainbow colors, and in certain places it's believed to be concentrated enough that anyone who goes there will either get psychic powers or become an insane cannibal. (The usual two options!)

A plan is afoot, spearheaded by the Space Federation, to install a second Argos. This will make a lot more of the icy planet habitable, but will flood out the snowgrubbers and destroy their icy home, and cancel out the rainbow light.

Anders, a snowgrubber man, has attained psychic powers and is running what's either a cult or a planned psychic community - even by the end of the book, which is very much an open question. Definitely some of the people who join act like they're in a cult - a local woman is desperate because her wife (not stated as such but they lived together and shared a bank account) joined, and her wife refuses to leave and seems uninterested in anything but developing her new powers. But the powers are very real and Anders seems largely benign. His main deal seems to be to help people safely develop their powers by not letting them go to the psychic/insane cannibal-making glacier unless they can handle it, and agitating against Argos 2.

Morgan's eighteen-year-old daughter, Dee, arrived in Jaspre depressed and sickly. But the rainbow snow has an energizing effect on her, which leads her into contact with the cult.

I've now read all three SF novels (plus a fixup about Morgan's earlier teaching jobs) by Caraker. Their plots are unconventional. They're not about a single character who changes or learn something, though that may happen in them, nor are they based around conflict, though that may be present. They're about a place and its culture, during a time in which a major change is happening.

This is a completely valid type of novel, in my opinion, and Watersong especially is a fantastic example of it. But it's not a form of novel that's much recognized or respected in Western countries, certainly not at the time these books were written, which is probably partly why they never got to be very well known. They're very atmospheric, and ambitious in a quiet kind of way. I wish she'd written more.

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Boy's Life, by Robert McCammon

We had a monster in the river, and a secret in the lake. We had a ghost that haunted the road behind the wheel of a black dragster with flames on the hood. We had a Gabriel and a Lucifer, and a rebel that rose from the dead. We had an alien invader, a boy with a perfect arm, and we had a dinosaur loose on Merchants Street.

Cory Mackenson is twelve years old in 1964, in Zephyr, Alabama. This is the story of that year in that place. There's an overarching plot concerning the murder of an unknown man at the bottom of a lake, but most of the book is about Cory growing up in a place that's both magical and real, in both beautiful and terrible ways. Zephyr is the white town, and Bruton is the black town. Segregation, racism, and the Civil Rights movement are major parts of the story; the tone is often nostalgic but it's the nostalgia of a man for the boyhood he loved, not the nostalgia that believes the past was objectively better.

Reminiscent of Stephen King and Ray Bradbury in their more wistful modes, this novel has elements of horror and dark fantasy, but also lots of humor and beauty. Despite its clear inspirations, it feels very much its own thing. There's genuine magic and monsters, but some elements that could be magical or science fictional turn out to be metaphors, fantasies, or wonders of the natural world. This gives the whole book a feeling that there are wonders and terrors everywhere and in everything, and whether or not they're strictly real is less important than what it feels like to experience them.

A lot of the chapters are constructed as self-contained short stories. One of my favorites is about Cory and his friends and their dogs growing wings and flying, told in an almost magic realist style. Is it real magic, or a game that feels like real magic? There's a clear answer, but the chapter would have been just as satisfying if it had been the other one. In another chapter, Cory meets characters who we gradually realize are Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, and Dracula. Or possibly a washed-up boxer, his manager, and his trainer. Or maybe it was all a dream... but in this book, a dream is never just a dream.

I won't argue for this as a perfect book by any means, but I think it's a legitimately great one for all its flaws. As it says in the prologue, it has a dinosaur that runs amok, a Wild West gunslinger, a very cleverly constructed murder mystery, a monster in the lake, a semi-sentient bicycle, a ghost car, a green feather clue, the world's slowest handyman, the world's strongest glue, and more. Much more. Robert McCammon wrote other books I've enjoyed but he never wrote anything else like this. He put everything in it.

(  Read more...  )

Content notes: violence, some kid-type grossness, bullying, depictions of period-typical racism and racist and homophobic slurs, dead dogs and other dead animals. If you want to avoid a really gruesome dead dog story, it's chapter "Case #3432."

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How to Sell a Haunted House, by Grady Hendrix

She put her back to the wall and tore puppets from her body, flinging them as far as she could. The crashing headlamp showed flashes of the nightmare all around them: puppets with no legs dragging themselves over the carpet like felt slugs, puppets swinging from the doorframes, puppets hurling themselves toward Louise, their eyes fixed on her, their mouths screaming. The three-foot-long articulated Danny the Imagination Dragon ran across the ceiling upside down, clinging to it with foam claws, wings outstretched. Red and white striped candy canes her mom had made for a Santa Claus pageant pogoed toward them...

How to Sell a Haunted House is exactly what it says on the can. When single mom Louise's parents die in a car crash, she and her estranged alcoholic brother Mark inherit the house, which is filled with dolls and puppets, as Louise's mother collected dolls and made puppets for her puppet ministry doing Bible stories with puppets.

Louise and Mark are thrown into a series of horrifyingly/hilariously relatable situations following that, such as fights over the will, fights over what to do with the house, attempts to sell the house, sorting through their parents' possessions, and generally dealing with family issues - all complicated by the house and/or its puppets and dolls being haunted.

I was a little hesitant to start this book as Grady Hendrix's books are a bit hit or miss for me. The hits are spectacular, but his previous book, The Final Girls Support Group, was a big miss for me.

I'm not sure if it's that Hendrix is more into evil puppets than slashers or if I am or both, but How to Sell a Haunted House is a great return to form. In fact, it is now one of my favorite of Hendrix's books. It's scary, compelling, often very funny, has a lot of heart and an excellent central relationship, and even has some very interesting points to make about the symbolic uses of masks and puppets, and the differences between puppets and dolls. Louise and Mark's relationship is a lot more interesting and complex than it first appears to be, as are their pasts and relationships with their parents. The book is very thematically unified and just a whole lot of fun; I read it in a single sitting.

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The Perilous Descent, by Bruce Carter

Two WWII RAF fighter pilots are shot down over enemy lines, then fall into a strange world at the center of the Earth!

This 1952 boys' adventure book is charmingly enthusiastic. It opens with a note on how the author found the manuscript in a war-torn area and believes that it's absolutely true, then dives into first-person accounts of the two pilots, Johnny Wild and Danny Black, who are shot down! Over water! In enemy territory! And fall into a pit! Where they almost die of hunger and thirst! Before they realize that they can parachute down into an even deeper hole! And arrive in a strange land in the center of the earth that's at war! And help the inhabitants build an airplane!

This is a lot of fun but I couldn't help wishing that the amazing plot had been written by W. E. Johns; Carter's style is a little dry, and despite telling us that Johnny is the leader and the smart one and Danny is the follower and the strong one, they feel interchangeable. But the plot is great and it's full of fascinating little period details: emergency chocolate concentrate is dry and bitter, and parachutes were equipped with inflatable dinghies and paddles! (Or did he make that up?) The underground world is also full of cool little details, like that there are no animals so everyone is vegetarian, and they have advanced electrical/battery technology but no gunpowder.

I'm surprised I never heard of Bruce Carter (real name Richard Hough) before because he's one of those "does more stuff than any normal twelve people" guys that I tend to enjoy - he was a RAF fighter pilot in WWII, wrote 90 books, was a maritime historian, married children's book author/illustrator Charlotte Hough who served prison time for assisting in the suicide of an 85-year-old friend (Her daughter recalled that, afterwards, "She was always saying, 'When I was in prison' and bringing dinner parties to a shuddering halt."), and had five children of whom three became authors.

Content note: Period-typical, relatively mild, completely random racism, like We passed the time whilst walking discussing the merits of white, yellow, brown, and black skins.

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Book Poll

I want to check out some of the most incredibly obscure unread books on my shelves. In some cases (Alcock, Cameron, Cooney, Park) I got them because I liked other books by the same author. In other cases the answer seems to be "contains a cat or a horse." In other cases, I have no clue.

Please comment if you've ever read any of these!

View Poll: #29504

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More of Me, by Kathryn Evans

I have grown in strength inside her. Filled her cells with mine until we must split apart. It's not my choice – that's how it's always been for us.

Though we've done this many times before, I know she is afraid, because I share her heart. Her memories are mine, his he sometimes, but mine. I feel what she feels. I have walked where she has walked, been in her every step. I have kissed where she has kissed. I sigh, but the breath that comes out is hers. It's time to breathe for myself. It's time to live.

She is in that dream place where her body cannot move into her mind is unsure and scattered. I stretch and fill every cell, feel them all expanded and swell to make room for me. I search for the weakest point to break out and find it: the little finger of the right hand.

Some deep memory tells me it's always been this way. The first cell splits with a tiny pop; she hardly notices. I'm controlling our breathing now. We take a deep lungful of steadying air and tense. I press her shoulders into the bed and that's when she realizes. That's when she starts to fight.

Teva is a 16-year-old girl who is also a 15-year-old girl. And a 14-year-old girl. And so forth, all the way down to a 3-year-old girl. Every year she spontaneously clones a version of herself who remains stuck at the age when it happened. All the Tevas live together, with only Four and Five missing. Why they're missing is unknown, along with why any of this is happening. Their single mother is terrified that they'll be taken away and experimented on if anyone finds out, so they all live together with only the most current Teva allowed to leave the house and attend school. Each successive Teva steps into the life of the previous one.

The current Teva is determined to somehow stop the next cloning so she can keep her life. The previous Teva, Fifteen, is furious at her for stealing her friends, her boyfriend, and her entire life.

This is an amazing premise I have never come across before, and the book generally lives up to it. There is some excellent body horror, a genuinely shocking climax, and a very satisfying ending. I wish there was more about the other Tevas – the book mostly focuses on the current one and Fifteen – but we do see enough of them to get a sense of who they are and how they interact. I'd also have liked more of the almost surreal, poetic voice of the opening - the rest of the book is more standard YA in prose and tone. But I was overall very impressed by More of Me. Evans only seems to have written one other book. I will snatch it up.

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