Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 53

I made a list!

This does NOT happen often--and there are tons of excellent stories out there, so I never particularly mind. Still, it feels great to be included! ( "The Boy on the Roof made Locus's 2019 Recommended Reading List)



The page also includes Locus's recommendations for novels, novelettes, nonfiction, collections, anthologies, and illustrated/art books in the SFF field.

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Wednesday reading: The Raven Tower and Embassytown

I finished The Raven Tower. I really liked it, especially the god-narrator's story arc. I loved him, and I loved his best-friend god, the Myriad, who was initially a meteorite but spends most of her time incarnating in swarms of mosquitoes. There was a Justice-of-Toren moment in the story that was very perfect. Ann Leckie sure does know how to show strong emotion in beings that aren't given to emotions; sometimes a very few words indeed will do. And the god-narrator's reflection on the...

Library of Small Catastrophes

A package from Copper Canyon Press came for me. I imagined two improbable scenarios.

(1) I had somehow sent something to them, then forgotten about it, and now they were publishing it--or no: someone else had, and now I was getting a copy of the collection or whatever that it was in.

(2) Someone had bought me a present.

It was neither of those. Inside the package was a magazine-seeming thing, and an envelope with a note: "Thank you so much for your kind words about Night Sky with Exit Wounds...

magic photo

I took this in the stairwell of the parking garage at Logan after dropping Wakanomori off there.




I didn't look at it when I took it, so boy did I get a surprise afterward. It's not quite like in the stories where you manage to photograph a ghost, but atmospherically it's trending that way.

--Because when I took the picture, what I saw was a space filled with light (it was about noon at the time), and then the bright blue plexiglass piece, which was reflecting a deep blue square on the floor. I...

the power to make truth

I'm reading Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower right now, and finding it VERY thought provoking if a little slow with regard to actual story-stuff happening. The narrator is a god, and gradually from the narrator we learn what that means. Which is interesting, right? The parameters and limitations of divinity.

One thing that characterizes gods is that what they say MUST be true. It's a requirement. Instead of this fact conferring great power, though, the causality works the other way: a god can only...

Time of Daughters 2

Time of Daughters II
Sherwood Smith



Over my holiday I finished reading Time of Daughters II, the second half of Sherwood Smith’s novel set in the martial land of Marlovan Iasca, about a century after the time of the great hero Inda (a principal character in her teratology of that name).

Structurally, the novel takes you through a series of battles as the kingdom is threatened in different ways and directions: these are all brilliant—and harrowing. People act foolishly or thoughtlessly and have...

drive-by short-story recommendation

A short, wonderful tale by Marissa Lingen, "Every Tiny Tooth and Claw," in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. (I read it, but it's also their audio feature.) It's an epistolary story (yay!), a correspondence between two academics in magical fields (yay!) in a time of political upheaval. They have to be careful of what they say, and reading between the lines of their messages is totally my jam. And/but also, all the details are just charming and wonderful:

In any case, Yudit and I got reacquainted with...

The Wolf and the Girl

The Wolf and the Girl
Aster Glenn Gray




A wonderful thing that Aster Glen Gray does in The Wolf and the Girl—which she also did in Briarley—is transpose a fairy tale to a very particular time and place and make you really feel that time and place. For Briarley it was World War II England; for The Wolf and the Girl it’s pre-Revolutionary Russia—and then early-twentieth-century France.

The first part is like a Russian lacquer box—dark, jewel-like, beautiful. As a small child, Masha would be with...

This is so sad Alexa play Despacito

Although *my* photos are still trapped in a disposable camera, Waka has kindly let me use his. Here is a shot of an iconic house (painted with the Puerto Rican flag) in La Perla, the neighborhood in San Juan where the video for "Despacito" was shot.



Let's take a brief moment to fully appreciate "Despacito." I chanced across it in May 2017, not knowing anything about it, and fell in love with both the song and video on one view. When it became the most-watched video on YouTube, I cheered. The...

I was away but now I'm back

Wakanomori and I went on a five-day holiday. We thought our phones would work in our destination--our phone plan said they would ... but they didn't! His at least worked for non-calling/texting purposes (e.g., taking photos, looking at internet) if we were in wifi range, but mine had decided to try to do an update and so it was a brick.

That's all right though, our destination was fascinating and fun anyway. It did, however, suffer bunches of earthquakes while we were there, including one that...