Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 5

My May Reading Log

Fiction:
At the Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard follows The Hands of the Emperor and it took me a really long time. This is because it was 806 pages, which I found out when I was done. I’ll try not to spoil too much. It’s immersive and epic (in a literal sense) as Cliopher, left in charge of the world while the Emperor goes adventuring to find his successor and his old friends, ends up also going adventuring, but not intentionally at first. Many characters and themes show up from the first b...

#TBR Challenge – With a Little Help From My Friends: My Dear Watson by L.A. Fields

May 15, With a Little Help From My Friends: My Dear Watson by L.A. Fields only somewhat fits this month’s theme, as the friendships are complex. It’s narrated by the second Mrs. John Watson. She explores a queer relationship between gay Holmes and bisexual Watson throughout the Doylist canon, in sequence. I confess this bored me; I have already read the canonical stories and was hoping for more than having them reiterated, even through a new lens.

The most interesting parts were the small sectio...

My April Reading Log

Fiction:
The Hands of the Emperor (Lays of the Hearth-Fire Book 1) by Victoria Goddard was over 900 pages of fantasy about creating a good government and having your family recognize your achievements and figuring out how to incorporate your culture into a dominant social paradigm. I don’t think it needed to be quite that long; I am not fond of having the same events narrated to different people at different points in the narrative, and the same issues addressed, unless the repetition is present...

#TBR Challenge – No Place Like Home: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

I don’t live in New York City, but I’m close enough and I’ve been there enough that I felt The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin (2020) worked for this month’s theme, No Place Like Home. The book expands on the story “The City Born Great” from Jemisin’s 2018 collection, How Long ’til Black Future Month?; in altered form, that story serves as a prologue.

The conceit is that cities will sometimes, rarely, achieve sentience. When they do, creepy other-dimensional predators await to battle and often de...

My March Reading Log

Fiction:
The Frame-Up by Gwenda Bond is a paranormal heist novel set in contemporary Kentucky. Danielle Poissant is the daughter of a renowned art thief whom she helped send to prison, which led to her being shut out of the world of criminals with magic in which she’d grown up. Wracked by guilt at betraying her family (it’s complicated), ever since then she’s been working as a sort of one-person-and one-dog “Leverage” team, retrieving funds from scummy people and splitting them with the original...

#TBR Challenge – Not in Kansas Anymore: Was by Geoff Ryman

My choice for the Not in Kansas Anymore theme is Was by Geoff Ryman (1992), which I feel is perfect because it plays directly with The Wizard of Oz, both book and movie, and the making of the movie as well. There’s no actual fantasy, only historical realism. The fantasy element is what the characters wish they had, or once had and lost long ago.

This book sat on my TBR shelf for so long mostly because I feared it would be depressing. I did, in fact, find this book depressing, and difficult to re...

My February Reading Log

Fiction:
I have belatedly read The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett, and wow did it have a lot more going on than I was expecting even though, this being Pratchett, I should have expected themes such as the What Is the Meaning of Life, What Happens to Us When We Die, and Nothing Can Be Solved Unless People Talk to Each Other. And on top of all that, The Importance of Stories is a major theme. Basically, some rats near Unseen University gain speech and intelligence afte...

#TBR Challenge – Furry Friends: The Wider Worlds of Jim Henson, edited by Jennifer C. Garlen and Anissa M. Graham

The Wider Worlds of Jim Henson, edited by Jennifer C. Garlen and Anissa M. Graham is a collection of essays about various Jim Henson productions. I am huge fan of Henson’s work, but managed never to see Fraggle Rock because I didn’t have HBO; I learned a lot about the show from this book!

Some of the essays, I was surprised to note, treated the worldbuilding in a meta fashion, for instance comparing ways to “read” Fraggle Rock and The Dark Crystal through various lenses, including ecological, po...

My January Reading Log

Fiction:
Roux for Two by Aurora Rey was a cute, lowkey contemporary romance between a fat queer femme and a trans man. Chef Chelsea Boudreaux has just gotten her own show, which will be filmed in the small south Louisiana town she left behind; her career is about to take off and take her places. College academic advisor Bryce Cormier has lived in the same town with his loving family for his whole life and never plans to move anywhere else; he longs for a partner and, eventually, children. Their ...

#TBR Challenge – Once More With Feeling: Territory by Emma Bull

Territory by Emma Bull, in the fantasy sub-genre now called Weird West, was published in 2007. I bought it immediately in hardcover because I loved previous books by Bull…but then it sat in the TBR because I wasn’t very interested in the town of Tombstone and the OK Corral, which it seemed the story was about. I am pleased to report that the book is not actually about the OK Corral. Various Earps are everywhere (Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, Jim, etc.) as well as subsidiary pov character Doc Holliday, ...