Siavahda's Blog, page 87

May 9, 2021

The Crescent Classics 101 & the Book That Started It All

images by Svetlana Alyuk on 123RF.com

When I was a young teen, I was not impressed with the books we were made to read for school. When my teachers tried to explain that they were all classics, I declared that I’d make a new set of classics. And they would all be Fantasy, because that is Obviously The Best.

I called them the Crescent Classics, because I have loved alliteration from day one, okay?

What started as a protest in my English Literature classes (yes, I was that kid, be glad you never had to share a classroom with me) has grown into a deeply personal, deeply meaningful project over the years. I’m a queer, disabled, neurodivergent person: I love Fantasy with all my heart, but my genre doesn’t always make me feel welcome. Writers like Tolkien and Lewis and Brooks and Eddings? They weren’t writing for me, or people like me.

The Crescent Classics are meant to be a collection of books for people like me.

In choosing a book to dub a Crescent Classic, I like to go through Italo Calvino’s criteria for classics, a 14-point list that is beautiful to read and think about. But most important is point 11;

‘Your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.
Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?

It’s that ‘your‘ classic bit that’s important. My classics may not be your classics, and that’s okay. But for Wyrd & Wonder, I’m going to write a series of posts sharing a few of mine, and explain why they are CCs. And I’d really love to hear what you think, and what your classics are!

Now enough rambling: allow me to introduce the first of the Crescent Classics!

Kushiel's Dart (Phèdre's Trilogy, #1) by Jacqueline Carey
Representation: Queernorm world, bisexual MC, bisexual love interest, secondary M/M or mlm
Genres: Epic Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
ISBN: 0330493744
Goodreads

The land of Terre d'Ange is a place of unsurpassing beauty and grace. It is said that angels found the land and saw it was good... and the ensuing race that rose from the seed of angels and men live by one simple rule: Love as thou wilt.

Phèdre nó Delaunay is a young woman who was born with a scarlet mote in her left eye. Sold into indentured servitude as a child, her bond is purchased by Anafiel Delaunay, a nobleman with very a special mission... and the first one to recognize who and what she is: one pricked by Kushiel's Dart, chosen to forever experience pain and pleasure as one.

Phèdre is trained equally in the courtly arts and the talents of the bedchamber, but, above all, the ability to observe, remember, and analyze. Almost as talented a spy as she is courtesan, Phèdre stumbles upon a plot that threatens the very foundations of her homeland. Treachery sets her on her path; love and honor goad her further. And in the doing, it will take her to the edge of despair... and beyond. Hateful friend, loving enemy, beloved assassin; they can all wear the same glittering mask in this world, and Phèdre will get but one chance to save all that she holds dear.

Set in a world of cunning poets, deadly courtiers, heroic traitors, and a truly Machiavellian villainess, this is a novel of grandeur, luxuriance, sacrifice, betrayal, and deeply laid conspiracies. Not since Dune has there been an epic on the scale of Kushiel's Dart-a massive tale about the violent death of an old age, and the birth of a new.

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Anyone who’s known me for approximately 0.7 seconds knew it could only be this book. This series, really. But I started this project with Kushiel’s Dart way back when I was just 14, and it will always be the first.

I could write you an essay on why Kushiel’s Dart ~~should be considered~~ is a classic, but I’ll try to keep this reasonably short. It’s a Crescent Classic because it quietly, calmly, and totally upends conventional Western views on sexuality: it is sex-positive in a way I’ve never seen any other book manage, regardless of genre. In a way, it normalises sex; in another way, it exalts it. And it does this for sex that is not just between two people who romantically love each other – and who preferably are married – but for any consenting adults, in any combination of genders or numbers or kinks. It’s a book (series) that says that sex is natural, that it should be enjoyed without shame – and that consensual sex is beautiful, always, even if it might look strange to someone outside the relationship. We live in a world where sex is either something dirty or commercialised or trivial – sometimes all three. Kushiel’s Dart portrays sex as something sacred and joyful, where there is no way to make consensual sex dirty or trivial. In the world we live in, that…is pretty gamechanging.

And I say all of that as someone who’s asexual, for the record. I don’t want to have sex, myself. But I still want to live in a world where sex is viewed the way Carey writes it.

It’s also a series that doesn’t pretend humans are more – or less – than we are. Even those most full of grace can have their moments of pettiness. Even the quietest of mice can unleash glory. It deconstructs traditional views of evil; invaders and enemies are people too, not monsters. Just because someone is on the other side of the line from you doesn’t make them sub-human. There are no nameless, faceless hordes of orcs here who can be cut down without thought or guilt; these are people, with their own songs and favourite foods and children and hopes. And their own cultures: one of the most beautiful aspects of this series is the way in which all gods, all myths, all pantheons co-exist and deserve respect. Your religion is precious: so is your neighbour’s, and neither of you are wrong. But these books also redefine heroism, exploring and featuring the kind of strength that is still not talked about very much: the strength of the survivor, the strength of mind and soul rather than body. The kind of strength that is often called ‘women’s strength’, and which I use here for lack of a better term: undramatic and unflashy and quiet, and which can accomplish things no warrior’s sword could.

And I could write a whole manifesto on the single precept Carey introduces via her D’Angelines: Love as thou wilt. It seems like it should be such a simple law to follow, but it isn’t, and the entire series is an exploration of that precept, in its different interpretations and repercussions. Again: it’s a gamechanger. It’s something that is genuinely mindblowing as the full meaning of it unfolds for the reader, page by page, changing the way you think forever. You never look at the world quite the same way again, after.

There is always some new layer to uncover in these books. The joy of reading them never fades, no matter how many times I reread them. There is always something else to think about, something new to discuss with the others who have read it. It never stops being meaningful or beautiful or inspiring. It never stops being breathtaking, in scope and story and significance.

In a genre that often portrays women as playthings for men, and where sex-workers are there to be abused at best, this is Epic Fantasy that puts a woman, a bisexual courtesan front and centre, placing the fates of kingdoms and even worlds in her hands. This series is a classic because it subverts The Classics wholly and exquisitely.

This series is a classic because how could it not be?

What Fantasy book is one of ‘your’ classics?

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Published on May 09, 2021 12:47

May 6, 2021

A Wonderful Read, But a Poor Standalone: The Witness For the Dead by Katherine Addison

images by Svetlana Alyuk on 123RF.com

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

The Witness for the Dead (The Goblin Emperor, #2) by Katherine Addison
Representation: Queer MC (unclear if gay or bi), past M/M or mlm
on 22nd June 2021
Genres: Queer Protagonists, Secondary World Fantasy
ISBN: 0765387425
Goodreads
four-stars

Katherine Addison returns at last to the world of The Goblin Emperor with this stand-alone sequel.

When the young half-goblin emperor Maia sought to learn who had killed his father and half-brothers, he turned to an obscure resident of his Court, a Prelate of Ulis and a Witness for the Dead. Thara Celehar found the truth, though it did him no good to discover it.

Now Celehar lives in the city of Amalo, far from the Court though not exactly in exile. He has not escaped from politics, but his position gives him the ability to serve the common people of the city, which is his preference. He lives modestly, but his decency and fundamental honesty will not permit him to live quietly.

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~gravestones are IMPORTANT
~so much opera
~even more tea
~ghosts
~a very unsuitable yellow coat

The first, absolutely most important thing you need to know about this book is: it is not The Goblin Emperor. I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed by Witness just because they’re going to open it up expecting – or at least hoping for – an experience like the one they had with Emperor.

And they’re not going to get one.

If you decide to pick up Witness For the Dead, pretend that you’ve never read Goblin Emperor. Pretend you’ve never even heard of it. The more you separate the two books in your mind – the more clearly you see Witness for what it is, and not what you want it to be – the higher your chances are of enjoying the book.

Do not go into Witness expecting that warm optimistic glow Emperor left you with. Do not expect court politics and princes and treason and an imperial marriage. Do not expect a main character much like Maia, whose lack of education about the court and whose determination to be good made us all fall in love with him.

Pretend you’ve never even heard of The Goblin Emperor.

So: Witness for the Dead is, in essence, a murder-mystery. (It is also written in first-person and has no chapters, only scene breaks. Even structurally it’s vastly different from Emperor.) Celehar, a minor but important character from Emperor, has the ability to ‘ask’ the dead very basic questions – and get answers – if he can touch a corpse that isn’t too old. This makes him ideal, obviously, for investigating suspicious deaths, and also for a number of other more mundane tasks, like determining which of the conflicting versions of a person’s will is the real one. Pretty much immediately as the book opens, he is tasked with both: investigating the death of an opera singer, which his powers confirm was definitely a murder, and sorting out a confusion of wills for a respectable, fairly well-off family. Over the course of the novel, he also undergoes religious trials, pilgrimages, visits the opera, officiates funerals, looks into another, older death to try and figure out if something’s not right about it, and ‘puts down’ ghouls, a kind of monster that come about if graves aren’t taken care of properly.

I have a hard time figuring out whether or not I actually liked it. The ending especially soured my feelings, because I despise Agatha Christie-esque ‘solutions’ to mysteries; ie, when there’s no way the reader could put the answer together, even in hindsight, because the author prefers a ‘le gasp!’ reveal at the second-last moment to working clues into the narrative. And I don’t feel like it’s much of a spoiler to let you know that’s how one of the major plotlines gets wrapped up, because I’m not telling you which one – and it’s something I would want to know, if I was going into a story that is, for the most part, a murder-mystery.

However I felt about the ending, though, I really enjoyed the reading experience. I finished my ARC in about 24 hours, which is rare for me these days, but I just couldn’t put it down. Addison’s writing is beautiful, and I loved the attention to detail that went into the worldbuilding, from street names to terms of address. Celehar himself is a very sympathetic character; I would like to offer him a hug, if the impropriety of it wouldn’t horrify him. He’s an intrinsically honest and straightforward person who is deeply dedicated to his duties – and not just his duties, but what he sees as his duties, which include many things not officially demanded of him, but which he is capable of and which will help people. He carries around a lot of guilt for past ‘indiscretions’, and will work himself to the bone to give comfort or take care of others.

Every other character, as well, no matter how minor, felt impressively fleshed-out. Addison has created an interesting cast – not too big to juggle, but enough to give the reader a bit of an idea of just how diverse Celehar’s city is, and enough that they all get enough page time to feel like real and complete people. It’s really impressive from a writing perspective, and a treat from a readerly one!

Basically, I have nothing but praise for most aspects of this book. But once I take a step back, I find myself hugely unsatisfied with it as a standalone. It reads like the start of a series, maybe, but if that’s supposed to be it – and I think it has been stated that this is supposed to be a standalone – then it’s just… I’m not sure I’ve ever said this before, but if Witness is all we get, then I don’t know what the point of it was. I know it should be enough that it was a fun read, ending notwithstanding…but it doesn’t feel like enough, this time. I like standalones. But this doesn’t feel like a standalone. This feels like a slice-of-life, not a self-contained story; like we saw a few weeks or months of Celehar’s life at random. Does that make sense? In that sense, it doesn’t really feel like a story. It’s just… A bit of Celehar’s life. It doesn’t really build to anything, and closing the final page doesn’t leave me with the vague but happy sense that I know how the characters will get on now the story is done.

Maybe this is very normal of mystery novels, and I’m unhappy because I’m not familiar with what’s actually a perfectly normal structure for a mystery novel – I don’t read mysteries, I don’t know if this is how it’s supposed to go. The closest thing I can think of is that certain sub-section of urban fantasy where you have some kind of detective-y character solving cases, stories which tend to be quite action-heavy, and where each book in the series has its own internal plot that may or may not interlock with the next book. I’m not usually a fan of those, and Witness didn’t feel even like one of them, to me. I’m not sure why, because Celehar is detective-ing too, isn’t he? Maybe it’s just that the tone is so completely different; although Witness moves along briskly, it never feels like being stuck in an action movie. Maybe the more introspective, thoughtful prose undercuts a sense of urgency? Which leaves the ‘cases’ Celehar’s investigating feeling…like this is his everyday-work, rather than something that needs All The Solving RIGHT NOW.

There’s also a few threads which feel like they’re building up to something, but which are cut off by the book’s ending before they can really go anywhere. In particular, Witness seemed to be hinting that one of Celehar’s friendships was going to develop into a romance, but that didn’t happen – which left me feeling like an important thread had just fizzled out instead of becoming something. I don’t care about romantic plotlines, but I don’t like being encouraged to root for one only for it to not happen. That just leaves me confused and frustrated.

Ultimately, my critiques come down to two main points: I think this is a very poor example of a standalone (a critique which obviously becomes null and void if it turns out the plan is to write more Celehar books), and the ending felt very abrupt. Like I said, I was left wondering what was the point? Which is not something I’m used to thinking about books, ever!

On the other hand, I really enjoyed actually reading this book. Addison is a great writer, the cast is wonderful, the worldbuilding flawless. I have to give it four stars for all those reasons, and in gratitude for the hours that disappeared like seconds while I was reading. If you accept Witness for what it is, then there’s no way to call it a bad book.

So basically: if you’re okay with murder-mysteries set in a highly detailed fantasy world? Then absolutely go for it! But if you’re looking for something else, I urge you to look elsewhere. Just because you loved The Goblin Emperor does not mean this is the book for you.

But if you can accept Witness for what it is, then I think you’ll enjoy it.

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Published on May 06, 2021 12:38

May 5, 2021

What Fibromyalgia Taught Me About Fantasy: Or, Dragons are Real, Actually

Whatcha reading? by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law

When I was ten years old, I told the child psychologist who’d come to talk to me* that I wasn’t actually human; I came from another world and was just temporarily incarnated here.

I wasn’t really lying.

*As part of the latest round of custody battles between my parents

When I was 14, my mother told me that none of the abuse had ever happened. She insisted I’d made it all up.

I’m still not sure if she was lying.

When I was 21, the doctor told me that the pain taking over my body was all in my head.

He wasn’t lying either.

What makes something real? What makes it true? The doctor and I both told what we thought was the truth. (I can’t speak for my mother – who the hell knows?) But is believing in something enough to make it real?

I have fibromyalgia. It’s an incurable pain condition with lots of nasty details. But you can’t see it in a blood test or an x-ray, on a brain-scan or an ultrasound. It’s diagnosed by testing and checking for every other possibility, and when everything comes up negative, they write ‘fibromyalgia’ on the dotted line. It’s a fancy-sounding way for the doctors to say ‘we don’t know what’s wrong with you’.

(Don’t make that joke in a doctor’s office. They get grumpy at you.)

Open me up, and you won’t find anything wrong with me. It’s completely invisible. No one else can see it or detect it or perceive it at all.

So is it real?

They believe in fibromyalgia because enough people have come forward looking for an explanation for similar-enough symptoms that the medical community accepts that something is going on, even if they can’t verify it in the way they verify everything else.

…Makes you wonder why we don’t believe in UFOs, doesn’t it? Thousands of people have come forward describing the same or similar-enough experiences re aliens or abductions, but we don’t believe them.

I don’t know whether aliens exist or not. But I do wonder why a thousand people saying this thing is proof that it exists, but a thousand people saying this other thing does not prove that it exists.

Shouldn’t the burden of truth be the same for every question? Shouldn’t there be a set amount of ‘proof’ we need to accept a thing as true? And it shouldn’t it be the same every time?

It’s not, though.

Why is that?

It’s pretty hard to define ‘real’, when push comes to shove. The Oxford English dictionary gives us the definition “actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed.” Which sounds nice and simple, until I have to try to prove I have fibromyalgia and there’s nothing to say that I’m not imagining it.

Except for the thousands of other people who are describing the same thing.

But it’s not as simple ‘as other people saying it makes it real’, is it? Rumours can spread like wildfire, can be shared and believed by thousands of people, but that doesn’t make them fact.

It’s not as simple as saying ‘real is something I can touch’. There’s all kinds of things we can’t touch. Nobody can touch pain – you can touch something that hurts you, but that’s not the same thing. We can’t touch hunger or happiness. We can’t touch patriotism or faith or hype. We can see the effects of those things, the ways they interact with and affect the physical world, our bodies, our brains, our behaviour. But we can’t touch them.

I think we’d all agree they’re all very real, though.

So…is something real if it affects us? If we feel it? But there are so many things that don’t affect us. The dark side of the moon. The Marianas Trench. Microbes doing their thing on planets billions of light-years away.

There are stars that have died, that don’t exist any more, but we can still see their light.

So are they real, or not-real?

Unless you have it (and I hope you don’t) or someone close to you does (I hope they don’t), then fibromyalgia might as well be fictional to you. If you walk past me on the street, you won’t see it. If you talk to me, you won’t hear it. If you inspect me, run tests on me, experiment on me, you won’t find it.

It’s as if it’s all in my head.

What’s the difference, then, between fibromyalgia and fantasy?

(Other than the fact that one of them sucks, and one of them is brilliant and only sucks some of the time.)

Only I can experience my own fibromyalgia. But if you and I read the same book? Then we experience the same story.

It’s not real. It’s only in our heads.

But.

A story can be experienced by many people; millions of people, sometimes. Sometimes even many people simultaneously: when people watch a movie together or read a book at the same time, or play Dungeons & Dragons together, that’s multiple people sharing an experience that every participant can verify independently.

Yes, our experiences may vary a bit – maybe you like this character more than I do, maybe I preferred that part of the story – but the core experience is the same. It may affect us in different ways, but the very fact that it affects us at all, the fact that it affects us both is…something. Isn’t it?

Does that make it real?

I would argue: more verifiably real than my fibro.

When I read, the dragons are only in my head.

But they’re not, if they’re in yours too.

What would it take to make you believe in aliens?

You’d probably believe if you saw one. If you experienced an abduction for yourself. Right? It’s very hard to argue that our own experiences aren’t real. Even if a thing is a trick, it still happened to you. You still experienced it. The experience is real.

We experience magic every time we read about it. And those experiences affect us – we have emotions, we daydream, maybe we even create fanworks. We walk away from a story a little different than when we started reading it.

How many parts of you are there because some story planted a seed in you? How much of your courage, your kindness, your hope, your stubbornness, your snark, your strength, your gentleness, did you learn from a story? How many of your idols weren’t historical personages or celebrities, but fictional characters? How much of the way you interact with the world comes from the stories that were told or read to you, or that you read to yourself? From the movies that mattered to you, that reached in and grabbed hold of something in your heart and didn’t let go?

I bet you’ve been shaped by stories at least as much as I have by my illness. I bet the way you interact with the world is determined by stories at least as much as my fibro determines how I interact with it. I bet you wouldn’t be you without the stories you’ve loved.

Maybe that other-you would only be a little different. Maybe a lot.

But they wouldn’t be you, would they?

I can’t show you my fibro. But I can hand you a book and show you dragons.

It’s all in your head.

So what? It’s still real.

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Published on May 05, 2021 12:23

May 4, 2021

10 Fantastical Recent Reads of Mine

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish and is now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. Check out upcoming Top Ten themes on Jana’s blog!

Today’s prompt is simply: the last 10 books you read.

The Wyrd & Wonder spin on this is, obviously, to list your last 10 fantasy reads – which makes very little difference to me, since I barely read anything else! But it’s a good prompt to get me to write little mini reviews for my most recent reads, so here we go, in reverse order!

House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland
Representation: Bisexual MC, lesbian secondary character, poc secondary character
Genres: Queer Protagonists, Urban Fantasy
ISBN: 059311034X
Goodreads

Seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow has always been strange. Something happened to her and her two older sisters when they were children, something they can’t quite remember but that left each of them with an identical half-moon scar at the base of their throats.

Iris has spent most of her teenage years trying to avoid the weirdness that sticks to her like tar. But when her eldest sister, Grey, goes missing under suspicious circumstances, Iris learns just how weird her life can get: horned men start shadowing her, a corpse falls out of her sister’s ceiling, and ugly, impossible memories start to twist their way to the forefront of her mind.

As Iris retraces Grey’s last known footsteps and follows the increasingly bizarre trail of breadcrumbs she left behind, it becomes apparent that the only way to save her sister is to decipher the mystery of what happened to them as children.

The closer Iris gets to the truth, the closer she comes to understanding that the answer is dark and dangerous – and that Grey has been keeping a terrible secret from her for years.

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House of Hollow comes very close to crossing the line from Fantasy into Horror, but I think it just about manages to stay on my side of the line. Iris is the youngest of three sisters, all of whom disappeared for a month while they were children – and when they came back, they were strange. Now, when Iris’ oldest sister Grey disappears, Iris and her other sister, Vivi, have to go digging into the past they don’t remember if they want to get their sister back.

Without question my favourite aspect of this book is the prose, which is just decadent. I highlighted so many sentences and passages, because they just read like beautiful poetry. Sutherland seems to delight in mixing the macabre and the stunning,

The Centaur's Wife by Amanda Leduc
Representation: Disabled MC, Lesbian PoV character, secondary F/F
Genres: Urban Fantasy
ISBN: 0735272859
Goodreads

Amanda Leduc's brilliant new novel, woven with fairy tales of her own devising and replete with both catastrophe and magic, is a vision of what happens when we ignore the natural world and the darker parts of our own natures.

Heather is sleeping peacefully after the birth of her twin daughters when the sound of the world ending jolts her awake. Stumbling outside with her babies and her new husband, Brendan, she finds that their city has been destroyed by falling meteors and that her little family are among only a few who survived.

But the mountain that looms over the city is still green--somehow it has been spared the destruction that has brought humanity to the brink of extinction. Heather is one of the few who know the mountain, a place city-dwellers have always been forbidden to go. Her dad took her up the mountain when she was a child on a misguided quest to heal her legs, damaged at birth. The tragedy that resulted has shaped her life, bringing her both great sorrow and an undying connection to the deep magic of the mountain, made real by the beings she and her dad encountered that day: Estajfan, a centaur born of sorrow and of an ancient, impossible love, and his two siblings, marooned between the magical and the human world. Even as those in the city around her--led by Tasha, a charismatic doctor who fled to the city from the coast with her wife and other refugees--struggle to keep everyone alive, Heather constantly looks to the mountain, drawn by love, by fear, by the desire for rescue. She is torn in two by her awareness of what unleashed the meteor shower and what is coming for the few survivors, once the green and living earth makes a final reckoning of the usefulness of human life and finds it wanting.

At times devastating, but ultimately redemptive, Amanda Leduc's fable for our uncertain times reminds us that the most important things in life aren't things at all, but rather the people we want by our side at the end of the world.

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This book…was a mistake. It’s grim and depressing as hell, and the weird, fantastical elements are just sort of…there. It starts with a cataclysm – cities destroyed by meteors – and then Nature decides humanity’s time is up and starts killing people. It’s very bitter, although the disability rep is great. The writing itself seemed good, but no, it’s just…so grim. Wish I’d skipped it!

The Memory of Souls (A Chorus of Dragons, #3) by Jenn Lyons
Representation: Bisexual MC, Genderqueer bisexual li, Bisexual li, Asexual MC, Asexual li
Genres: Queer Protagonists, Epic Fantasy
ISBN: 1250175577
Goodreads

The Memory of Souls is the third epic fantasy in Jenn Lyons’ Chorus of Dragons series.

THE LONGER HE LIVES THE MORE DANGEROUS HE BECOMES

Now that Relos Var’s plans have been revealed and demons are free to rampage across the empire, the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies—and the end of the world—is closer than ever.

To buy time for humanity, Kihrin needs to convince the king of the Manol vané to perform an ancient ritual which will strip the entire race of their immortality, but it’s a ritual which certain vané will do anything to prevent. Including assassinating the messengers.

Worse, Kihrin must come to terms with the horrifying possibility that his connection to the king of demons, Vol Karoth, is growing steadily in strength.
How can he hope to save anyone when he might turn out to be the greatest threat of them all?

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This is the third book in the Chorus of Dragons series, which I have mixed feelings about – I love how original and subversive it is, not to mention all the queerness, but I’m not in love with the pacing and writing style. (I don’t mean the narration with all the footnotes, I adore those. But it’s very action-y and tell-y, the writing almost blunt at times… Not my fave.) Book 2 was a massive improvement on book 1 for me, but Memory was a slog. Completely redeemed by its ending, though, which was…probably the best cliffhanger I have ever seen. I’m pretty sure I’ll be reading this series to its end, if only to know if my OT3 actually manage to get together before the world ends!

Love Bites by Ry Herman
Representation: F/F
Genres: Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
ISBN: 1529406307
Goodreads

Angela likes Chloe. Chloe likes Angela. It should be simple enough - there's just the small matter of Angela's aversion to sunlight. And crosses. And mirrors . . .

In 1998, Angela was a smart, gothy astronomy student - until her then-girlfriend accidentally turned her into a vampire. A year later, she divides her time between her post-graduate degree (working on it in a dark, basement room, and only at night) and controlling her need for human blood.

Then she meets lonely but wryly humorous slush-pile reader Chloe, who's battling demons of her own. Chloe's anxiety and depression can make it hard for her to leave the house, while memories of her ex haunt her at night.

As sparks fly and romance blooms, Angela and Chloe struggle to hide their difficulties from each other - but sometimes the only way out is to let someone else in.

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I found this one really dreary. I loved the premise – a vampire astrophysicist and a depressed editor getting together and trying to figure out all their baggage – but it turned out to be very mundane. I empathised enormously with Chloe’s depression – been there, still taking the meds – but… I guess it felt like the story was stretched out a lot longer than it needed to be? Like a lot of it was padding, or uninteresting introspection, and I get that they’re both in not-great situations, but I don’t enjoy reading about misery upon misery upon misery, you know? It made a lot of great points about depression and abusive relationships, but as a story, it just didn’t work for me.

In the Eyes of Mr Fury by Philip Ridley
Representation: Gay MC, M/M or mlm, minor sapphic characters, minor trans character
Genres: Fantasy, Magical Realism, Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
ISBN: 1943910375
Goodreads

On the day Concord Webster turned eighteen, the Devil died. The Devil's real name was Judge Martin, but Concord's mother called him the Devil. She said he boiled babies for dinner and made lampshades out of human skin. So why did she, who hated him so venomously, have a key to his house?

The key will unlock more than just Judge's front door. It will also unlock a multitude of stories - where magic children talk to crows, men disappear in piles of leaves, and James Dean lookalikes kiss in dark alleys - and reveal a secret history that will change Concord's life forever.

Philip Ridley's second novel (following the sexually charged tour de force Crocodilia) was an instant cult classic when originally published in 1989. Now, for this new edition, Ridley has reimagined the story, expanding the original novel into the world's first LGBT magical realist epic. A vast, labyrinthine, hall-of-mirrors saga, its breathtaking imagery and stunning plot twists - covering over a hundred years - reveal Ridley to be one of the most distinctive and innovative voices in contemporary fiction.

'Philip Ridley's stories compel attention.' - The Times (London)

'Ridley is the master of modern myth.' - The Guardian

'Ridley is a visionary.' - Rolling Stone

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There’s actually a story to how I came across this book – one of my work colleagues was talking about how it had been their first queer fantasy, that they’d read as a teen in the library, but they hadn’t seen a copy since. While they were mournfully explaining this to us, I was on my phone and found that it had a new edition and was in print again. So, obviously, I got them a signed copy because everyone deserves their first queer fantasy, okay? Okay.

It took me a while to get around to reading it myself, but I ended up loving it. I think it’s a bit more (heavy) magical realism than urban fantasy, with so many weird and interesting and intersecting backstories, and wonderful crows, and magic memory-movies. And it’s queer as hell. It’s very different from any book I’ve loved before, but it went straight onto my favourites shelf and I’m so glad my coworker told me about it!

War for the Oaks by Emma Bull
Representation: Black li
Genres: Urban Fantasy
ISBN: 0765349159
Goodreads

Acclaimed by critics and readers on its first publication in 1987, winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel, Emma Bull's War for the Oaks is one of the novels that has defined modern urban fantasy.

Eddi McCandry sings rock and roll. But she's breaking up with her boyfriend, her band just broke up, and life could hardly be worse. Then, walking home through downtown Minneapolis on a dark night, she finds herself drafted into an invisible war between the faerie folk. Now, more than her own survival is at risk—and her own preferences, musical and personal, are very much beside the point.

By turns tough and lyrical, fabulous and down-to-earth, War for the Oaks is a fantasy novel that's as much about this world as about the other one. It's about real love and loyalty, about real music and musicians, about false glamour and true art. It will change the way you hear and see your own daily life.

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This is another favourite of mine, the standalone recognised as the first Urban Fantasy novel, with the Sidhe going to war in Minneapolis and conscripting human musician Eddi to make the battles stick. It’s this really beautiful blend of vaguely-British Isles mythology and the modern (well, maybe not quite modern, it was published in 1987, but close enough!) music scene, and the prose! I mean, it’s Emma Bull, so obviously it’s flawless, but it still deserves saying that the entire book is just *chef’s kiss*

The Defiant Heir (Swords and Fire, #2) by Melissa Caruso
Representation: Bisexual main/secondary character, secondary F/F
Genres: Secondary World Fantasy
ISBN: 035651062X
Goodreads

Across the border, the Witch Lords of Vaskandar are preparing for war. But before an invasion can begin, they must call a rare gathering of all seventeen lords to decide a course of action. Lady Amalia Cornaro knows that this Conclave might be her only chance to stifle the growing flames of war, and she is ready to make any sacrifice if it means saving Raverra from destruction.

Amalia and Zaira must go behind enemy lines, using every ounce of wit and cunning they have, to sway Vaskandar from war. Or else it will all come down to swords and fire.

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Gotta admit, this was a bit of a let-down after the first book, Tethered Mage. But equally, I can’t put my finger on why I didn’t enjoy it as much – on paper it should have been even more fun, with all kinds of new characters and places and magics introduced that should all have been exactly my jam. Maybe it was just bad timing on my part – maybe I needed to be in a different headspace for it – but I ended up having to force myself to finish. I do want to get to the final book in the trilogy, but it’s definitely dropped down a few places on my priority list.

Very glad I got to read The Obsidian Tower (set in the same world, centuries later) before this trilogy.

The Charmed Wife by Olga Grushin
Representation: minor sapphic character, minor F/F
Genres: Fantasy
ISBN: 0593085507
Goodreads

A sophisticated literary fairy tale for the twenty-first century, in which Cinderella, thirteen years after her marriage, is on the brink of leaving her supposedly perfect life behind.

Cinderella married the man of her dreams--the perfect ending she deserved after diligently following all the fairy-tale rules. Yet now, two children and thirteen and a half years later, things have gone badly wrong and her life is far from perfect. One night, fed up, she sneaks out of the palace to get help from the Witch who, for a price, offers love potions to disgruntled housewives. But as the old hag flings the last ingredients into the cauldron, Cinderella doesn't ask for a love spell to win back her Prince Charming.

Instead, she wants him dead.

Endlessly surprising, wildly inventive, and decidedly modern, The Charmed Wife weaves together time and place, fantasy and reality, to conjure a world unlike any other. Nothing in it is quite what it seems, and the twists and turns of its magical, dark, swiftly shifting paths take us deep into the heart of what makes us unique, of romance and marriage, and of the very nature of storytelling.

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This absolutely delighted me??? I have no idea why I started reading it, it was probably a whim, or maybe someone I follow mentioned it – but regardless, I’m so happy I read it! It’s this surprisingly incredible telling of the Cinderella story after the happy ending, and in Grushin’s book, Cinderella isn’t, you know, a smart, wicked badass or anything. It’s not that kind of a story. Instead, she’s…well, the kindest word is probably naive. And maybe a little bit shallow, but I feel cruel saying that, because she does go above and beyond to try and fix her marriage – it’s just that she thinks it needs fixing in magical ways, because there’s a curse or something, rather than…she and her husband maybe not being all that compatible.

And then she wises up, in several senses of the word, and asks the witch at the crossroads for a spell to kill her husband.

It’s just – wry??? and sneaky??? There’s this whole thing about her mice companions, and how it never occurs to her that mice don’t live that long, and in fact the mice she lives with now are the great-great-great grandchildren of the original mice, and I promise you, the mice are having their own adventures. There are epics to be written about the mice. (AMAZON WARRIOR MICE, YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU.) It’s this bizarrely successful marriage of fairytale to cynicism? Sorta? I don’t even know, except that I loved it and recommend it to anyone who wants their happily-ever-afters injected with botox.

The Fifth Sacred Thing (Maya Greenwood, #1) by Starhawk
Representation: MCs of colour, queernorm world, bisexual MCs, open love/polyamory
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists, Science Fantasy
ISBN: 0553373803
Goodreads

Imagine a world without poverty, hunger, or hatred, where a rich culture honors its diverse mix of races, religions, and heritages, and the Four Sacred Things that sustain all life - earth, air, fire, and water - are valued unconditionally. Now imagine the opposite: a nightmare world in which an authoritarian regime polices an apartheid state, access to food and water is restricted to those who obey the corrupt official religion, women are property of their husbands or the state, and children are bred for prostitution and war. The best and worst of our possible futures are poised to clash in twenty-first-century California, and the outcome rests on the wisdom and courage of one clan caught in the conflict.

Ninety-eight-year-old Maya has helped shape the ecumenical culture of the North by reviving and re-creating an earth-based spiritual tradition. Madrone, the granddaughter of Maya's longtime lovers, is a healer trying to thwart recurring epidemics that she suspects are biological warfare waged by the tyrannical South. Bird, Maya's grandson, returns from ten years in a Southern prison with warnings of impending invasion and an urgent request for help from the resistance in the hills.

When Madrone travels south to aid the rebels and search for a cure to the deadly viruses, she finds herself fighting for her own life alongside battle-weary guerrillas and beautiful pirates. Meanwhile, in the North debates rage about how to repel the invaders.

"All war is first waged in the imagination, first conducted to limit our dreams and visions," Maya says, and warns that by killing their enemies, they may themselves become transformed by violence and destroy all they have built. Bird champions her alternative vision and becomes a leader of the faction calling for nonviolent resistance. When he is captured and pressured to cooperate with the enemy, the fate of the North hangs in the balance.

Richly imagined and beautifully written, The Fifth Sacred Thing is a powerful novel of ideas and the future of human life itself .

This acclaimed, best-selling novel set a new standard for fiction of its genre, continues to be widely read, and is used in numerous college courses. Winner of the Lambda Award for lesbian and gay science fiction.

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I’m working on a full review for this one, because this is…an incredible book that feels almost too big to talk about. In the most superficial way, it’s about a hard-won utopian City having to decide what to do when the extremely dystopian South declares war. It’s a book about witchcraft – in the Wiccan and neopagan sense – and spirituality, about different religions co-existing and fighting so hard to protect nature in the wake of an environmental collapse. It’s also about how religion can be twisted, about racial and gender politics and militaries and what happens when you put a price tag on water. The Fifth Sacred Thing is a dream of what a utopia might look like, and a manifesto of what it takes to build it, and an open question to the reader on how one can protect a utopia from those who wish it harm. It’s about violence and its costs, about monsters, about forgiveness, about humans.

It’s also a really great story of rebel groups and resistance and magic of all kinds, so, you know. You should definitely read it!

The Unbroken (Magic of the Lost, #1) by C.L. Clark
Representation: Sapphic MC of colour, cast of colour (mostly), queernorm world, secondary F/F
Genres: High Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
ISBN: 031654275X
Goodreads

Touraine is a soldier. Stolen as a child and raised to kill and die for the empire, her only loyalty is to her fellow conscripts. But now, her company has been sent back to her homeland to stop a rebellion, and the ties of blood may be stronger than she thought.

Luca needs a turncoat. Someone desperate enough to tiptoe the bayonet's edge between treason and orders. Someone who can sway the rebels toward peace, while Luca focuses on what really matters: getting her uncle off her throne.

Through assassinations and massacres, in bedrooms and war rooms, Touraine and Luca will haggle over the price of a nation. But some things aren't for sale.

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This one really deserves a full review too, although I’m not sure I’m up to writing one. It’s just…brilliant. Utterly incredible. And I kind of want to laugh because when I was first approved for an ARC, I couldn’t get into it. But the problem must have been me, because the second time I tried I couldn’t put it down. There’s so much great stuff about colonialism and power dynamics and race, about found family versus blood family, about what makes you part of a country – and all of it’s been woven into a story that doesn’t lecture you about any of those things, because it doesn’t need to: you just…absorb it all, in between hunting for hidden magics and rebels and the political shenanigans of too many dickheads.

It is so good, is what I’m saying.

That’s my 10! Have you read any of these? Let me know!

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Published on May 04, 2021 11:50

May 3, 2021

Must-Have Monday #33!

There are SEVEN marvelous spec-fic releases to feature today, ranging from boarding schools on Mars to Greek myths and sky-island mysteries!

Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon
Representation: Black albino MC, Indigenous characters, intersex, lesbian, bi/pan rep
on 4th May 2021
Genres: Queer Protagonists
ISBN: 0374266778
Goodreads

Vern - seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised - flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.

But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future - outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.

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I’ve heard nothing but praise for this one, and after how incredible An Unkindness of Ghosts and The Deep both were, there’s no way you’re keeping me away from it.

Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace
Representation: Asexual aromantic MC
on 4th May 2021
Genres: Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
ISBN: 198214274X
Goodreads

Like everyone else she knows, Mallory is an orphan of the corporate war. As a child, she lost her parents, her home, and her entire building in an airstrike. As an adult, she lives in a cramped hotel room with eight other people, all of them working multiple jobs to try to afford water and make ends meet. And the job she’s best at is streaming a popular VR war game. The best part of the game isn’t killing enemy combatants, though—it’s catching in-game glimpses of SpecOps operatives, celebrity supersoldiers grown and owned by Stellaxis, the corporation that runs the America she lives in.

Until a chance encounter with a SpecOps operative in the game leads Mal to a horrifying discovery: the real-life operatives weren’t created by Stellaxis. They were kids, just like her, who lost everything in the war, and were stolen and augmented and tortured into becoming supersoldiers. The world worships them, but the world believes a lie.

The company controls every part of their lives, and defying them puts everything at risk—her water ration, her livelihood, her connectivity, her friends, her life—but she can’t just sit on the knowledge. She has to do something—even if doing something will bring the wrath of the most powerful company in the world down upon her.

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I’ll be honest, this doesn’t sound like my thing, but I really loved Kornher-Stace’s Archivist Wasp and Latchkey, so I’m very willing to give her sci fi a try!

The Ones We're Meant to Find by Joan He
on 4th May 2021
Genres: Sci Fi
ISBN: 1250258561
Goodreads

Cee has been trapped on an abandoned island for three years without any recollection of how she arrived, or memories from her life prior. All she knows is that somewhere out there, beyond the horizon, she has a sister named Kay. Determined to find her, Cee devotes her days to building a boat from junk parts scavenged inland, doing everything in her power to survive until the day she gets off the island and reunites with her sister.

In a world apart, 16-year-old STEM prodigy Kasey Mizuhara is also living a life of isolation. The eco-city she calls home is one of eight levitating around the world, built for people who protected the planet―and now need protecting from it. With natural disasters on the rise due to climate change, eco-cities provide clean air, water, and shelter. Their residents, in exchange, must spend at least a third of their time in stasis pods, conducting business virtually whenever possible to reduce their environmental footprint. While Kasey, an introvert and loner, doesn’t mind the lifestyle, her sister Celia hated it. Popular and lovable, Celia much preferred the outside world. But no one could have predicted that Celia would take a boat out to sea, never to return.

Now it’s been three months since Celia’s disappearance, and Kasey has given up hope. Logic says that her sister must be dead. But as the public decries her stance, she starts to second guess herself and decides to retrace Celia’s last steps. Where they’ll lead her, she does not know. Her sister was full of secrets. But Kasey has a secret of her own.

One of the most twisty, surprising, engaging page-turner YAs you’ll read this year—We Were Liars meets Black Mirror, with a dash of Studio Ghibli.

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This sounds out of my typical comfort-zone, but in a really good way? So many reviewers and bloggers I trust have adored this, so I’m definitely going to be giving it a go!

The Dragon of Jin-Sayeng (Chronicles of the Bitch Queen, #3) by K.S. Villoso
Representation: Cast of colour
on 4th May 2021
Genres: High Fantasy
ISBN: 031653272X
Goodreads

The stunning finale to the Chronicles of the Bitch Queen trilogy where the queen of a divided land must unite her people against the enemies who threaten to tear her country apart. K. S. Villoso is a "powerful new voice in fantasy." (Kameron Hurley)

Queen Talyien is finally home, but dangers she never imagined await her in the shadowed halls of her father's castle.

War is on the horizon. Her son has been stolen from her, her warlords despise her, and across the sea, a cursed prince threatens her nation with invasion in order to win her hand.

Worse yet, her father's ancient secrets are dangerous enough to bring Jin Sayeng to ruin. Dark magic tears rifts in the sky, preparing to rain down madness, chaos, and the possibility of setting her nation aflame.

Bearing the brunt of the past and uncertain about her future, Talyien will need to decide between fleeing her shadows or embracing them before the whole world becomes an inferno.

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I have not yet made my way through the second book in this trilogy, but it would be so remiss to exclude the finale from this list! Villoso’s writing has always been addictive as hell, setting a high fantasy story in a Phillipines-inspired setting, and it’s so hard to avoid spoilers as I rush to finish the second book!

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
on 4th May 2021
Genres: Fantasy
ISBN: 125077358X
Goodreads

As Princesses of Crete and daughters of the fearsome King Minos, Ariadne and her sister Phaedra grow up hearing the hoofbeats and bellows of the Minotaur echo from the Labyrinth beneath the palace. The Minotaur - Minos's greatest shame and Ariadne's brother - demands blood every year.

When Theseus, Prince of Athens, arrives in Crete as a sacrifice to the beast, Ariadne falls in love with him. But helping Theseus kill the monster means betraying her family and country, and Ariadne knows only too well that in a world ruled by mercurial gods - drawing their attention can cost you everything.

In a world where women are nothing more than the pawns of powerful men, will Ariadne's decision to betray Crete for Theseus ensure her happy ending? Or will she find herself sacrificed for her lover's ambition?

Ariadne gives a voice to the forgotten women of one of the most famous Greek myths, and speaks to their strength in the face of angry, petulant Gods. Beautifully written and completely immersive, this is an exceptional debut novel.

A mesmerising retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Perfect for fans of CIRCE, A SONG OF ACHILLES, and THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS.

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I am very, very tired of Greek mythology, but I have heard good things about the prose here, and I’m very interested to see how Saint concludes Ariadne’s story, since it can go a few ways depending on which version of the myth someone is telling.

Three Twins at the Crater School by Chaz Brenchley
on 6th May 2021
Genres: Sci Fi
ISBN: B091J95VBD
Goodreads

Mars, the Red Planet, farthest flung outpost of the British Empire. Under the benevolent reign of the Empress Eternal, commerce and culture are flourishing along the banks of the great canals, and around the shores of the crater lakes. But this brave new world is not as safe as it might seem. The Russians, unhappy that Venus has proved far less hospitable, covet Britain’s colony. And the Martian creatures, while not as intelligent and malevolent as HG Wells had predicted, are certainly dangerous to the unwary.

What, then, of the young girls of the Martian colony? Their brothers might be sent to Earth for education at Eton and Oxbridge, but girls are made of sterner stuff. Be it unreasonable parents, Russian spies, or the deadly Martian wildlife, no challenge is beyond the resourceful girls of the Crater School.

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I first heard about this book years ago, when Chaz Brenchley began writing it on his Patreon, and I’ve been keeping an eye out for it ever since. I’m so excited that it’s finally available as a whole novel! It’s earned high praise from the likes of Ellen Kushner and Sherwood Smith, and it sounds like a ridiculous amount of fun. I can’t wait to finally get to read it!

Unwritten (The Zweeshen Chronicles, #1) by Alicia J. Novo
on 8th May 2021
Genres: Portal Fantasy, Urban Fantasy
ISBN: 1947796658
Goodreads

Books whisper to Beatrix Alba. But they aren’t the reason she has never fit in. Bullied at home and school, she keeps a secret—a power of violence and darkness.
When the spell that keeps her hidden fails, she’s catapulted into the Zweeshen, a realm where all tales live, and her dream of meeting her favorite characters comes true. But wishes are tricky, and behind its wonder and whimsy, the Zweeshen is under attack. A character is burning bookworlds in pursuit of a weapon to rule both stories and storytellers. To succeed, he needs a riddle in Beatrix's keeping.

Now he’s hunting her down.

Joining forces with William, a cursed conjurer, Beatrix must face an enemy who knows her every weakness in a realm where witches play with time, Egyptian gods roam, and Regency heroines lead covert operations. And with her darkness as the only weapon, she may have to sacrifice everything to save a world that rejects her.
----
Praise for UNWRITTEN

“Fascinating and magic-filled, the fantasy novel Unwritten promises adventure right up to its final page.” — Foreword Reviews.

“Novo’s well-crafted story will delight and engage readers ... A satisfying and socially relevant story about acceptance and sacrifice.” — Kirkus Reviews.

“Wholly original and wondrously imaginative...” — Reader’s Favorite Reviews (5 Stars).

"Its surprising confluence of fantasy and its unexpected twists and turns, supported by strong characters, draws readers into a story that is satisfyingly unpredictable and hard to put down." — Midwest Book Review

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I tentatively have high hopes for this one, mostly because which of us doesn’t have a tiny part of us still hoping we can fall into our favourite stories? The premise sounds fantastic, so it’s going to come down to the prose for me. We’ll see!

That’s it for this week! Will you be reading any of these? Let me know!

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Published on May 03, 2021 07:07

May 1, 2021

Wyrd & Wonder-full: My Many Plans for May!

It’s Wyrd & Wonder again! That means a whole month of awesome people sharing their love of all things fantasy, and I’m ridiculously excited (and bizarrely nervous???) about taking part for the second year in row! There are so many things I want to do, I honestly don’t know where to start.

But when in doubt, I make lists. So let’s break it down!

TBR

These are the books I desperately want to read this month – many of them I’ve already started, but want to focus in on (I read 40 books simultaneously, switching from one to the other and back again as the mood takes me – it slows me down, but then I end up finishing a bunch of books all at once, so it works out). I feel ridiculously spoiled with all these awesome books to read, honestly!

Feature Lists

Last year I had a lot of fun doing my Fantastic Beasts, Here You’ll Find Them posts; rec lists of books featuring different magical creatures. I did one for unicorns and one for dragons. This year I’d like to do one for pegasi, in honour of this year’s Wyrd & Wonder mascot, and one other – but I haven’t decided on the second beastie yet. Suggestions or requests are welcome!

I also want to do rec lists for

Decadent FantasiesStandalonesSo You’re Tired of Greek MythologyWonderful Worldbuilding: Worlds I’d Run Away ToAmazing Fantasies You’ve Probably Never Heard OfGentle Books for Trying Times

As well as sequels to my Coolest Magical Systems and Coolest Magical Abilities posts from last year.

I don’t know if I’ll manage them all, but I’m going to try!

Essays

I have two essay-things I’m working on and hope to post this month, one about mythopoeic fantasy (which will obviously include recs), and another tentatively titled Being the Fantastic: Reading Fantasy and Living as the Other, where I have Thoughts about outcasts and disability and how much Tolkein would absolutely despise people like me. It might morph into something equally pretentious about The New Generation of Fantasy. We’ll see!

Crescent Classics

The Crescent Classics started when I was 15 and Very Unimpressed with the books I had to read for school – and especially unimpressed because none of them were Fantasy! Which is, as any sensible person knows, the best genre. Who were these fools creating our academic reading lists, and where could I send a letter of outrage???

My teacher would not tell me where I could send a letter, so instead I started making a list of books I thought should be considered classics.

Which were, of course, all Fantasy.

That list has changed – and grown! – a fair bit since then, but I still hope to have a four-part series (one post a week) sharing some of the books on it. What I’d really love is to get a (friendly!) conversation going about whether other people agree or disagree with my choices, and what other books people would make Fantasy Classics if they could.

I’m willing to bet I won’t manage all of this, but it’s going to be fun trying. Let the magic begin!

IMAGE CREDIT: pegasus images by Svetlana Alyuk on 123RF.com

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Published on May 01, 2021 12:27

Wyrd & Wonder-ful: My Many Plans for May!

But when in doubt, I make lists. So let’s break it down!

TBR

Feature Lists

I also want to do rec lists for

Decadent FantasiesStandalonesSo You’re Tired of Greek MythologyWonderful Worldbuilding: Worlds I’d Run Away ToAmazing Fantasies You’ve Probably Never Heard OfGentle Books for Trying Times

As well as sequels to my Coolest Magical Systems and Coolest Magical Abilities posts from last year.

I don’t know if I’ll manage them all, but I’m going to try!

Essays

Crescent Classics

My teacher would not tell me where I could send a letter, so instead I started making a list of books I thought should be considered classics.

Which were, of course, all Fantasy.

I’m willing to bet I won’t manage all of this, but it’s going to be fun trying. Let the magic begin!

IMAGE CREDIT: pegasus images by Svetlana Alyuk on 123RF.com

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Published on May 01, 2021 12:27

April 30, 2021

In Short: April

This month, Tor tweeted my review of Helm of Midnight, and Erehwhon Press gave me auto-approved status on NetGalley! I feel like these are Book Blogger accomplishments that ought to be recorded.

Anway: onwards!

Books Read

I got so much reading done this month!!! I’m not sure how – although it’s probably at least partly due to the fact that I’m reading 40 books at once at any given time (no, I’m not kidding, I’m just…weird). It means I’m slower to finish, but then I finish a whole bunch of books at once. At least half of these I started reading before April.

I have to admit, by the end of the month I was feeling pretty raw. Love Bites and Memory of Souls were real chores to get through, for the most part, and Route, Wife, and Hollow all ended up being either depressing-awful or horror-awful. (Although I will say that in House of Hollow‘s case, I mean awful in its archaic definition, inspiring awe. It’s a very good, beautiful book. I just wasn’t prepared for how it would rip my heart out.) I think I’ll be steering clear of anything even a little bit dark for a while.

Now: in April, out of 20 authors, I read

14 women, 6 men, 1 genderqueer author3 authors of colour

Same number of non-white authors as last month. Not cool. 3/20?! I have got to do better.

Of the books;

5 Rereads

The Waking EngineThe Goose GirlThe Golem and the JinniThe Fifth Sacred ThingWar for the Oaks

3 ARCs

Gifting FireThe Unravelling The Route of Ice & Salt

11 New-to-Me

The Seventh PerfectionA Ferry of Bones & GoldTravel LightThe Library of the Dead The UnbrokenThe Charmed WifeThe Defiant Heir In the Eyes of Mr FuryLove BitesThe Memory of SoulsThe Centaur’s WifeHouse of HollowBooks Reviewed

Ten reviews this month!!! WOO! Although only four of them were ‘full’ reviews; the rest were DNF mini-reviews.

There were a lot of books I wanted to review properly this month, but I didn’t spend a lot of time on the computer in April, so not much typing up got done.

…Although in fairness, I did also manage to write 25 mini-reviews of my r/Fantasy Book Bingo reads. Even if each of those only counts as half a ‘real’ review, I think it comes up to a respectable number overall!

Books DNF-ed

Most of these got mini-reviews that cover why I didn’t finish them, bar Stone Road and Wood Bee Queen. So: The Stone Road was made completely unreadable by having commas everywhere they shouldn’t be, and lacking where they were needed. It’s a shame, because if you lifted the commas away, the prose beneath would have been quite lovely.

The Wood Bee Queen was a prose issue as well; the writing was just…off. Sentences were given unusual structures, common phrases had the words in slightly different order than expected, and the dialogue was stilted. I honestly wasn’t sure if the effect was deliberate or not, but either way, it really didn’t work for me.

ARCs Received

I was (and am) so beyond excited to get approved for Witness for the Dead, Light From Uncommon Stars, In The Watchful City, and The Actual Star!!! They’re all on my most-anticipated 2021 list!

I wasn’t sure what to expect of Monkey Around, but I took a gamble, and so far it’s been a lot of fun, with great writing and a unique take on shapeshifters and magic. Summer Sons was another gamble, but it’s paying off; there’s a great juxtaposition between pretty lovely prose and the actions that are taking place. The All-Consuming World didn’t sound like my thing at all, but after Circe Mokowitz’s endorsement I had to give it a go – and within three pages I was head over heels in love, so. And just today, For the Wolf! Which I have heard so many good things about, and the very first sentence hooked me. Many new and unexpected loves this month!

ARCs Outstanding

Some of these I’ve finished, some I’m in the process of reading. I think that at least Wolf and the Woodsman and Catch Lili Too are going to end up with mini-reviews rather than huge sprawling essays. I make no promises about the rest of them.

Looking Forward

I was losing interest in the Chorus of Dragons series – not because it’s not wildly clever and subversive, but because the prose is kind of…blunt? But I forced my way through Memory of Souls just a few days ago, and that ending!!! Singlehandedly catapulted House of Always onto my grabby-hands list. The Unravelling and In The Ravenous Dark are both books I’ve had ARCs of, but I’m so excited to see them be released into the world at last!!! Having read an amazing book no one (or almost no one) else has read yet is its own kind of torture; I can’t wait to be able to talk about these with other readers, finally!

Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake is not even a little bit spec fic, but it’s by Alexis Hall so I don’t care one little bit. It’s about a bisexual baker in a baking competition, with romance thrown in. Maybe I wouldn’t be so interested if it were by another author, but it’s Hall. His books are always perfect.

Wyrd & Wonder 2021

May is Wyrd & Wonder month, where we celebrate all things fantasy, and I plan on taking part again this year! I have a list of ideas for posts and rec lists and so on, and I’m praying my fibro behaves itself so I can actually get them all written. I’d really love to have some deep, meaningful essay like last year’s Why Fantasy?, but I have not yet come up with any deep, meaningful topics I feel qualified to write about.

Unless it’s finally time to start talking about Book Magic? Hm. Perhaps.

Regardless, I’m really excited to see what everyone else will be writing about and sharing! I added so many books to my tbr after last year’s Wyrd & Wonder, and found so many other bloggers to follow. Hee!

MAY IT BE A WONDERFUL MAY FOR ALL OF US!

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Published on April 30, 2021 13:12

Weird, Wonderful, Wise: The Unravelling by Benjamin Rosenbaum

The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Representation: Nonbinary genders, group marriage/polyamory
on 27th October 2020
Genres: Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
ISBN: 164566001X
Goodreads
four-half-stars

In the distant future, somewhere in the galaxy, a world has evolved where each person has multiple bodies, cybernetics has abolished privacy, and individual and family success are reliant upon instantaneous evaluations of how well each member conforms to the rigid social system.

Young Fift is an only child of the Staid gender, struggling to maintain zir position in the system while developing a friendship with the acclaimed bioengineer Shria—a controversial and intriguing friendship, since Shria is Vail-gendered.

Soon Fift and Shria unintentionally wind up at the center of a scandalous art spectacle which turns into a multilayered Unraveling of society. Fift is torn between zir attraction to Shria and the safety of zir family, between staying true to zir feelings and social compliance . . . when zir personal crises suddenly take on global significance. What’s a young Staid to do when the whole world is watching?

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~leave all your notions about gender at the door
~ever wanted to be in two places at once? HOW ABOUT SIX???
~would you like a tail??? you can have a tail
~’I don’t want to lead a revolution I just want to maybe kiss my friend’
~the Clowns are Up To Something
~spoons

Oh, how I adore this strange, wonderful phantasmagora of a book.

…And I’ve been sitting here staring at the screen for minutes upon minutes, wondering how on earth to describe it.

Well, let’s start with that, I guess: Fift’s world is not ours. The story takes place far, far in humanity’s future, and on another, apparently long-since-terraformed, planet. Here, everyone has multiple bodies, which they inhabit and direct simultaneously; everything everyone does is visible to anyone who looks them up in the Feed; and the concept of ‘men’ and ‘women’ is nowhere to be found. Instead Fift’s society is divided up into Staids and Vails, which have nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s (extremely customisable) biology; instead, gender is assigned to newborns by the nearly-all-powerful Midwives. Violence and crime are so rare as to be the stuff of legend, food and clothing are created and available at the push of a button, and humanity has conquered disease: Fift and the others of zir generation are expected to live to be 900 years old.

It’s a utopia. A very odd-looking, but apparently genuine, utopia.

Except, obviously, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Rosenbaum doesn’t pull punches and he doesn’t hold the reader’s hand: you hit the ground running, on this far-future world, and it’s on you to keep up (at least until the story sweeps you away). I think the biggest complaint we’re going to see about this book is readers struggling to wrap their heads around the world Rosenbaum’s created; you have to pick up the meaning of many new concepts from context instead of having them explained to you, and while I think most Sci Fi readers are going to be used to that, The Unravelling is a delightfully weird icecream-swirl of ‘hard’ sci fi and ‘soft’ sci fi. No, you don’t need a grasp of esoteric numerology or particle physics to understand what’s going on…but you do need to adjust to the fact that Fift, the main character, may be having three very different conversations at once in a given scene, simultaneously, and you need to follow all of them. At the same time, Rosenbaum seems to be deliberately, defiantly whimsical when it comes to things like place names: it’s a great bit of dissonance to go from pondering multi-bodied nonbinary gender-politics one moment, and come up against place-names like Fullbelly and Stiffwaddle and Tentative Scoop the next.

What I’m saying is; whether you’re a fan of of hard or soft sci fi, something about this novel will jolt you out of your comfort zone. Whichever you go in thinking The Unravelling is, some aspect of the world or story will discombobulate you…and I am 100% certain that Rosenbaum wrote it that way on purpose.

Because The Unravelling is a compelling, brilliantly-written story. But it’s one that wants you to leave all your biases and opinions, everything you think you know or believe, at the door. It wants to take you completely out of the world we know so that we can ponder some big questions without all the emotional and historical baggage those questions carry in our reality.

Some Analysis; or, Sia Geeks Out

Take gender. In Fift’s world, as I’ve already said, everyone is either a Vail or Staid. Vails use ve pronouns; Staids use ze. And at first, I thought this was just a cool concept – I love stories that play with gender, especially nonbinary genders. And it is a cool concept! But it’s also a way to get all of us to talk about gender without us bringing our baggage to the table. A lot of The Unravelling, story-wise, could have worked just fine if Rosenbaum had decided to use a male/female gender binary – but if he had, then all of us would miss some of the nuance. The Unravelling strips the conversation of concepts like ‘patriarchy’ or ‘feminist’, dodges millennia of our own gender-politics, all our pre-conceived notions of gender roles, refuses to play the ‘who’s more oppressed’ game. There’s no room for anyone to throw ‘feminazi’ or ‘not all men’ around. It’s a conversation about gender where no one needs to feel defensive, or vindicated; the point Rosenbaum is making doesn’t point the finger at anyone. Instead, it’s so simple that even someone who has never come across the idea of nonbinary genders before can grasp it easily, without even realising they’re doing so–

No matter what system you use, assigning genders instead of letting people decide for themselves means everybody suffers.

If Rosenbaum had tried to make that point using a male/female gender system, there would always be people who would resist it. But by reframing the question using entirely fictional genders, in a world that is so clearly not ours, Rosenbaum gently dissolves that resistance, ensuring that every reader naturally and inevitably reaches the conclusion on their own.

I had no resistance to the idea begin with, and it was still seriously impressive to watch.

I want to say that The Unravelling is not some kind of political manifesto dressed up as a novel. And it isn’t. But there’s no getting away from the fact that Rosenbaum has taken a whole bunch of social and political issues – social media and influencers, the trade-off between privacy and security, the question of how to have police without violence – and gone full-on reductio ad absurdum with them. And maybe that was just to create a really, really interesting setting for his story! I don’t pretend to know what he was thinking. But the effect is a quiet critique – or maybe a warning? – of the directions some of those issues seem to be going in, in the real world.

…ALL THESE WORDS AND I HAVEN’T TOLD YOU ABOUT THE STORY YET!

The Story

It’s pretty much what it says on the tin: Fift is a kid in a world that is going to look really weird to any reader. Ze is a Staid, which means suppressing emotional outbursts, learning and deploying logic in all things, and studying the sacred history of humanity (something Vails are not permitted to do).

And long story short, Fift goes to a show with zir friend…and the whole world kind of explodes.

Not literally. There are no bombs, but there is some physical violence of the kind typical in riots. Fift and zir friend Shia get caught up in it. And in a bizarre but strangely believable series of events, they become symbols for a revolution that really has nothing to do with them.

Except for how it does.

I did a lot of thinking, reading this book. I wrote a lot of notes. And a lot of them revolved around how and why Fift and Shia become so important to so many people.

I think this is a story about how the people we remember as heroes were just people too. I think it’s a story about how life-changing, even world-changing events can start from an accident or misunderstanding.

And I think it’s a story about how we don’t actually need heroes at all.

Because, look: Fift and Shia, wholly by accident, are the sparks that set off a big, big flame. But there would have been no flame at all if the society they lived in had not been gathering, creating, producing fuel for such a long, long time. A spark does nothing if there’s nothing to set alight. It’s not really Fift and Shia who start anything; the story they get swept up in is really the long-suppressed, fair and genuine grudges and resentments and sufferings of so many people finally boiling over. Fift and Shia aren’t the catalysts for anything.

They’re just the ones who happened to be standing at the right (wrong?) photogenic angle to the chaos when it all burst loose.

And your heart will ache for them. I defy anyone to read this book and not immediately wish to gather all of Fift’s bodies together for a great big hug. Fift is the sweetest, and the bravest, and the smartest; not in a way that makes zir a superpowered genius or a hero, but in a way that makes me so proud of zir – even though, obviously, zir accomplishments have nothing to do with me! But it’s just – you can’t not cheer zir on. You can’t not take zir side. You can’t not feel huge amounts of sympathy and protectiveness for this cinnamon roll who slowly realises ze doesn’t want to be just a cinnamon roll anymore. Who gradually grows into a strength and grace that is honestly enviable.

Also, I desperately want to slap all of zir parents. Well, almost all of them.

The Unravelling is a story that doesn’t go where you expect it to go, which is fair, because everything about it seems designed to subvert the reader’s expectations. And it does that bloody marvelously.

The post Weird, Wonderful, Wise: The Unravelling by Benjamin Rosenbaum appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

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Published on April 30, 2021 06:14

April 29, 2021

I Wish I Hadn’t Read That: The Route of Ice & Salt by José Luis Zárate

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

The Route of Ice and Salt by José Luis Zárate, David Bowles
Representation: Gay MC
Genres: Queer Protagonists, Historical Fantasy
ISBN: 1927990297
Goodreads
one-star

A reimagining of Dracula’s voyage to England, filled with Gothic imagery and queer desire.

It’s an ordinary assignment, nothing more. The cargo? Fifty boxes filled with Transylvanian soil. The route? From Varna to Whitby. The Demeter has made many trips like this. The captain has handled dozens of crews.

He dreams familiar dreams: to taste the salt on the skin of his men, to run his hands across their chests. He longs for the warmth of a lover he cannot have, fantasizes about flesh and frenzied embraces. All this he’s done before, it’s routine, a constant, like the tides.

Yet there’s something different, something wrong. There are odd nightmares, unsettling omens and fear. For there is something in the air, something in the night, someone stalking the ship.

The cult vampire novella by Mexican author José Luis Zárate is available for the first time in English. Translated by David Bowles and with an accompanying essay by noted horror author Poppy Z. Brite, it reveals an unknown corner of Latin American literature.

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~Lick it or fantasise about licking it, I guess
~suckerfish vampires
~don’t trust your dreams
~Dracula is a dick

Head’s up: minor spoilers ahead. Major spoilers for anyone who hasn’t read Dracula.

Well, I wish I hadn’t read that.

In a way, I guess that’s kind of a back-handed compliment: this is a horror novella, I generally avoid horror because I’m a wimp, and I found this utterly horrifying. That’s what a horror novella is supposed to be, right? Horrifying?

So.

The Route of Ice & Salt is the untold story of the doomed ship captain – and his crew – who, in the original novel, are hired to transport crates of the dirt of Transylvania to England for Dracula. In Dracula, the crew go unnamed and are discovered dead, their ship adrift, by the heroes; here, they get to be full characters, which of course makes their deaths even more tragic. It’s hard to feel real grief for the unnamed bystanders who are killed by the villain, but give them names and a chance to connect to them, and their deaths become much more powerful.

I absolutely hated it.

Critique the first: by all the gods, shut the fuck up already. The novella is first-person from the perspective of, you guessed it, the captain, and he is the most…pretentiously miserable/philosophical wretch. Every other sentence leads us into a paragraph of overly flowery prose (I’m not sure I have ever called prose too flowery in my life, I love purple prose, but this – just no) meditating on…anything his gaze lands on, I guess. The waves, the sky, the ways of rats. Pages and pages of this nonsense

The cold suffices until itself; the heat demands that we partake.

We can take refuge from the frost. It does not belong to us. We can cover ourselves with furs and approach the fire.

But what to do when the heat comes from within?

In the dead of night, our blood is like a sweat inside the body, warm sea nestled within our flesh, skin feverish and throbbing.

How to seek shelter from that which runs through our very veins?

That is one passage. From chapter one.

I will absolutely grant that there are some great images in there – I like ‘warm sea nestled within our flesh’, more or less – but the good gets drowned in the mess. Piled on top of each other, it crushes the whole. Sinks the ship. Whichever metaphor you prefer, the point is, it doesn’t work. Not for me.

Critique the second: I see what you tried to do there, but you fucked up.

In the afterword essay written by Billy Martin (NOT Poppy Brite – Poppy Brite is his deadname, Martin is a trans man, I need people to stop being gross about this) it’s explained/pointed out that while, traditionally, vampirism is a metaphor or stand-in for sex and sexuality, Zárate deliberately places queerness and vampirism in opposition. The novella is, in a way, meant as a rebuke and critique of the perception of queerness, particularly the queerness of gay men, as being predatory and perverted and generally monstrous. Zárate makes it very clear: that (Dracula) is a monster. This (the captain) is a gay man. They are not interchangeable; they do not overlap. To be gay is not to be a monster, which is a concept pretty radical for the captain himself, seeing as the story is set in the late 1800s.

(The Route of Ice & Salt was first published in 1998. Given that there are still people who think gay = monster, it was probably a fairly radical concept in 1998, too.)

However.

This message is pretty severely undermined by the fact that the entire novella preceding it has portrayed the captain as a seriously, seriously gross human being. Up until quite near the end, he does almost nothing except obsessively fantasise about every member of his crew, in excessive and graphic detail (I mean, that’s a given, everything about this novella is done in excessive and graphic detail). He thinks about having sex with them constantly – basically embodying the fear so many straight men have about queer men, ie that queer men are fantasising about them constantly.

With his dying breaths (or rather, thoughts) the captain basically says that because he didn’t act on those thoughts, he is not a predator like Dracula. Which is correct!

However.

In chapter two, before the ship sets sail? He goes up to the men who have delivered the grave-dirt – ‘wild servants of some noble boyar’ – and first touches him fairly intimately (laying his hand on the man’s neck), and then LICKS AND SUCKS ON HIS NECK.

If I am a boyar, they should be instruments. I watch them as if they were things.

They are not. They are living flesh, movement, warm sweat…

But their decisions are no longer theirs. Puppets of firm faces, of naked necks that tense while they work, highlighting their skin, which invites me…

HEY ASSHOLE, HAVING SKIN IS NOT ANY KIND OF INVITATION.

Bear in mind, by the way, that these men, Tziganes, don’t share a language with the captain. They can’t communicate with him. I feel like that makes it worse.

I bring my lips to his neck and touch his salt.

My tongue a blade, a short finger that digs into his skin. Rough, earthy, bitter. And at that moment, mine. I surround it with my mouth, savoring that flesh intimately before slowly pulling away, letting my lips caress it, spiraling upon those muscles in smaller and smaller circles, until I withdraw, leaving a small trace of saliva.

HI.

YEAH.

NO.

So basically – yay, you don’t use your power over your crew to force them to have sex with you, or something. But you’re apparently perfectly happy to force yourself on someone who literally can’t tell you the word ‘no’. That makes it look a lot more like you’re ‘behaving’ with your crew because they could actually tell you what they think of you – and wouldn’t hesitate to hurt you for it – than it makes you look like a person who cares about consent.

What I’m saying is, I find the captain mostly gross as a person. That’s not bad writing. What is bad writing is building your entire story up to the revelation that gay men are not predators…using a character who has already revealed himself to be a predator.

It’s a stake to the heart of your message.

Proper horror fans (which I am not, I guess) will hopefully be happy to learn that there is so much horror to be found here. Most of it is sexual – the captain has sex with a rat in a dream (almost certainly Dracula’s influence), and later with the ship (definitely under Dracula’s influence). There’s mindfuckery galore, in a very traditional Dracula vein (yes, I went there, I will get some joy out of the trainwreck that was reading this book). There’s one particularly great image just before the climax, which would definitely make the movie posters if this were ever adapted for the screen, and sends chills down your spine in a genuinely impressive way.

But…I really wish I hadn’t read this. I feel like I need a gazillion baths after being in the captain’s head. It was a gross place to be in before Dracula started fucking with him. I need so much brain bleach.

My rating isn’t based on my being squicked out, but on the ridiculous prose and the undermining of the central message.

The post I Wish I Hadn’t Read That: The Route of Ice & Salt by José Luis Zárate appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

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Published on April 29, 2021 04:02

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