Nine Books

[firstfrost]

The Wicked Deep (by Shea Ernshaw)

Unusually, I had a hard time getting over the suspension of disbelief for the initial setting: a small coastal town in Oregon, in which three teenagers are drowned every summer because of angry ghosts. So it becomes a tourist destination for ghost season! On the other hand, maybe I'm discounting the allure of things like going to Nascar for the crashes, or the chance of the toreador being gored in a bullfight? It's nicely poetic, very teen-romance-angst, and the plot twists are interesting if not completely revelatory. It's a ghost story without being a horror story, with the slightly dreamlike quality that that implies. Also, the cover is really pretty, which I admit I am a sucker for. Four stars: reasonably entertaining but I don't have to insist you read it.

Catfishing on CatNet and Chaos on CatNet (by Naomi Kritzer)

Light and fluffy, but perfectly written light fun fluff. The short story Cat Pictures Please won the Hugo (see here for story), and it's about an accidentally sentient AI that really wants to help, and really likes cat pictures. It's charming. The two novels are the same AI, and some friends, and larger, novel sized plots. They are also charming. Five stars.

In the Shadow of Spindrift House (by Mira Grant)

I did not care for this. Basic premise: a group of ghost hunting friends (just think of them as the Scooby Gang), no longer teenagers, goes to investigate a Lovecraftian house. Things do not go well. It definitely sounds like my thing, but enh. The same sort of dreamlike ghost story atmosphere, except that it toyed with the idea of having ghost hunting mechanics but not really, and it spent way too long rehashing the protagonist's backstory. I mean, it was a fine backstory, but she angsted over the same ground over and over without really making progress. And the horror parts were almost the least atmospheric parts of it. Enh. Three stars.

The Atlas Six (by Olivie Blake)

Mike strongly recommended this one, but it is much more a Mike book than a me book, so I guess I have to write a rant. It has eldritch librarians, which is pretty much his favoite genre. Anyway, the Library of Alexandria (a magical library) trains six students every decade, but only five will survive. One always dies. The five students accept this without a blink, and segue straight into figuring out their alliances to make sure it's not them. Nobody seems interested in asking "why?" (and the one student who asks a lot of questions in general gets roundly mocked by everyone else for it.) There are classes, except that it doesn't really talk about the teaching, or the subject. There is independent research, but it's all like "The two physics mages see if they can create a black hole. They can! One of the other mages mocks them for how pointless their research is." But the thing that bugged me the most is that it seemed in dire need of a good copy editor. There were just all these sentences that would have been evocative if some different word had been used. But as it was, I would just stop and think "wait what".

• A little slip of parchment from his head ignited suddenly in flames; curling edges that fell to smoldering pieces, crumbling to ash.
  (Did the paper fall from his hand and it was a typo? Was the paper on top of his head? Does he have a lot of slips of parchment in his head?)


• That Dalton had been sleeping with Parisa for months was, if still a secret among the others, not a very well kept one, and certainly not to Callum. More than once Callum had witnessed Dalton experiencing Parisa within every parapet of his being without touching her, with only the silhouette of former senses; muscle memory for lovers.
  (The last bit, the silhouette of former senses and muscle memory, is nearly poetic. But what the heck is with "parapet"?)


• Comforted, Nico finally closed his eyes and drifted, the warmth of his memories slowly fading into the precipice of rest.
  (OK, rest can be a precipice. "Falling asleep" in fact. But everything leading up to precipice is a slow soft diminuendo - so the shift to falling is...odd).

My other major problem with the book was that I did not like any of the characters, and honestly wouldn't mind if they all died instead of just one. (The fact that nobody seems bothered that the price of admission is someone's death is the first tell, there.) Example: Tristan, mulling over the fact that he might need to dump his gorgeous heiress girlfriend for someone prettier and more powerful:

He had such a talent for finding women who put themselves first. It was like he was some sort of sniffer-dog for emotional fatality, always able to dig it up from the one person in the room who would have no trouble making him feel small. He wished he were less attracted to it, that brazen sense of self, but unfortunately ambition left such a sweet taste in his mouth, and so had Parisa.

Ugh. Die in a fire, Tristan. The rest aren't much better.

Project Hail Mary (by Andy Weir)

Maybe not quite as perfect as The Martian, but miles and miles better than Artemis. Like The Martian a lot of of it is the story of one solo astronaut, but this one isn't a variant of Bringing Matt Damon Home - Ryland Grace, the protagonist is the only survivor of a one-way mission to a nearby star system, in order to avert an extinction level event on Earth.
Grace wakes up with amnesia, so while the story is mostly of his adventure, there's a lot of backstory told in flashback as he regains his memory. And there are some interesting twists, but the nature of the story makes it hard to discuss most of the plot without some spoilers. So I'll say four and a quarter stars, but THERE BE SPOILERS after this point.
* * *

• I was pleasantly surprised with the addition of the "first contact" plot with what I kept thinking of as a Motie tarantula. Weir did a good job at making the alien species an interesting combination of both more and less competent than humans.


• The premise (why would you need to go to another solar system to save humanity in the first place) was nicely set up, and reasonably plausible from a non-hard-SF perspective. I'm sure from a hard SF perspective there are tons of holes, but I really liked the little FTL bacteria.


• The backstory plot of the science and the Hail Mary felt too much like an Assassin game research plot. Too much of that part of the plot felt driven by the character demands of the story - in particular, the final revelation of Grace refusing to volunteer and having been press ganged, felt like it was only necessary so that his final self-sacrificial impulse to save Rocky could be a moment of character growth.


• It was really lucky that Grace ran into an super-engineer alien to team up with, because the mission doesn't seem to have packed a lot of investigatory tools. It seems to have counted on being able to figure out the cure for the problem based on distance observation only, and no remote samplers.


• The slow drumbeat of Things Going Wrong was well done and very Martian-esque. Weir seems to excel at PvE plots, while his PvP plotting is iffy. Stick to your strengths!

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (by V. E. Schwab)

This isn't the first book, or even the second, about women who slip through life invisible, cloaked in the power of being instantly forgotten. It is apparently a Genre. I liked this one pretty well - it doesn't try to come up with a real metaphysics for the effect, it just says "made a deal with the devil" and has done with it. It's a story about survival, and a love story, and a different sort of love story, and maybe isn't super-deep but it's pleasant enough. Three and a half stars.

The Private Life of Elder Things (a book of short stories by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Keris McDonald, and Adam Gauntlett)

A bunch of short stories, basically each of them a riff on a Lovecraft story. Not a direct rebuttal of things like the racism of the original the way some authors have done, more like a different story in a different genre with the seed coming from the original. One has environmental Deep Ones, there are some unionized shoggoths, etc. Mostly reasonable. I did highlight: Doctor Rillental, the department head, whose doctorate was apparently in inter-departmental politics because it amused me. The story notes at the end are also amusing, including this nice bit of snark: In Frank Belknap Long's "The Hound of Tindalos", the last thing would-be explorer of the fourth dimenion Halpin Chalmers does before expiring messily is write "Their tongues -- ahhh --" Speaking for myself, I've always felt that if you have time to actually write down, with an honest to God pen, the word "ahhhh", you're not in as much danger as you'd like me to believe. However, a phone call works just fine, he says guiltily.

The Last Moriarty (by Charles Veley)

The first of a series ("Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James") which was perfectly well made but did not grab me. Alas. The series is 29 books (!) so if I had been psyched by it that could have been fun.

Comments

[mathhobbit]

Eee! Thanks for the link to the cat picture short story!

[kelkyag]

I had not known there was more of it. Yay!

That's some good snark from The Private Life of Elder Things. :)

Motie tarantula??

[mjperson]

How much more Tinoori does something have to get?

Re: Motie tarantula??

[firstfrost]

They have to have unusual requirements about truth to count as a Tinoori. :)

(There is a different book I'm in the middle of where the humans call the aliens Jellies but I call them Deciders...)

[desireearmfeldt]

Books!

[marcusmarcusrc]

Thank you for the reviews! And for the cat story link! I should take more photos of my cat. =)


I similarly enjoyed Project Hail Mary. Slight quibble - they aren't FTL bacteria, they are nuclear fusion bacteria.