firstfrost | Twenty-two reviews of twenty-sixish books

A Spindle Splintered (by Alix Harrow)

I did not realize until afterwards how heavily illustrated the text version of the book is, having listened to it on audiobook. I am quite disappointed to have missed out! Not illustrations of what's going on in the text, but trees on the side or a row of dancing headless people or armies marching across the bottom marching or children climbing trees in the right margin. (These are apparently from the original Arthur Rackham illustrations for Sleeping Beauty). The audiobook, in comparison, is quite unremarkable. It's a respun fairy tale, but with a different take - Zinnia isn't a princess, but she self-identifies with Sleeping Beauty, in that she has a fatal disease likely to kill her around when she gets to twenty-one. Then she pricks her finger, and lurches sideways into another princess's tower, and things get more complicated. Along with the sequel that I haven't read yet, an Amazon reviewer described it as "Into the Spider-verse for Sleeping Beauties", which is not wrong. There is the occasional bit of prose that glitters, like the Valkyrie-like princess Brunhild, who has "a surprisingly high voice, like the cry of a hawk far away". But I also wanted more things to happen - I guess I was thinking it was a longer book, since you can't always tell on audiobook, but it's 128 pages in print. Three stars, but I think I'll read the sequel on kindle to see the illustrations.

Sistersong (by Lucy Holland)

If I had realized (huh, I wonder if I can turn all these reviews into "Had I but known...") that this was a retelling of The Twa' Sisters (you know, the one that ends up with a harp made of someone's bones) by the time I got around to listening it, I would probably have been less surprised at how dark it got. But it's good tragedy, which makes the pain worth it in the end and not just frustrating. There's War With The Saxons, and tension between the old Celtic worship and the influential Christian priest working to stamp out paganism and enforce patriarchy, and a unique take on "Myrdhin, meddler and magician". The three royal children are all tangled together in the oncoming tragedies - the youngest, Sinne, is young and headstrong (too much so for me to find her very sympathetic, but she is not implausible); middle child Reva is scarred from a fire and her healing talents are failing as the magic fades; eldest Keyne is a young trans man in a setting where that isn't a concept (almost) anyone else in the story thinks is a thing. There are a lot of personal arcs going on in addition to the overall plot, and they braid well together. One of the major betrayals towards the end was foreshadowed so heavily that I was starting to dread that it was the plot of "If everyone had just stayed in bed all book, things would be better" but while it passes through that state, it ends on a more positive note. I also want to shout out the audiobook narrator, who does a remarkable job of painting everyone's personality and keeping everyone distinct with just tone and mood, and also does a decent job singing. Four and a half stars.

The Incrementalists (by Steven Brust and Skyler White)

Mike gave me a copy of the audiobook, with a summary: "it's about a bunch of immortals in a secret conspiracy who make the world better but just a little bit at a time". I will start by saying that I liked it reasonably well, but I found a LOT of things to nitpick, so, since Mike really likes book review rants, I decided to write him one.

First, that's a terrible summary. That's like saying Lord of the Rings is about Frodo, a descendent of the main character of The Hobbit, who lives in the Shire with his friends. Or (less good analogy) that Nine Princes in Amber is about the royal family in charge of the multiverse. The latter was my original analogy because the book did kind of remind me of Amber - the main character is trying to figure out a lot of things, including (much of the time) who they are now, and what their mechanics are, and many of the people ostensibly giving them answers are lying or manipulating them. Maybe one part Amber and one part Inception.
Next, it falls into what for me is an unforgivable production error of multi-narrator audiobooks (but sadly not an uncommon one) - of not having a standard on how to pronounce things. Mary Robinette Kowal (female viewpoint character narrator) has clearly chosen "pronunciation is based on pre-truncated word" as her rule, and Ray Porter (male viewpoint character narrator) goes with "how is it spelled". Admittedly, this only crops up for two words. First is "Ren" (name of female viewpoint character), which is at one point confirmed to be a nickname for "Renee", and she pronounces her own name "Rin" but he pronounces it like "Wren" (which makes him a terrible boyfriend, since he never gets her name right). Second is "nemone", which is what the immortals(*) call everyone else - Porter pronounces it "knee-moan", as it looks, but Kowal chooses "neh-muh-knee", like a truncated "anemone", for the association with ephemerality. Anyway, it bugs me.
I like the conceit of someone trying to figure out their mechanics. But I want to believe that the mechanics exist. There's clearly been some thought given to the immortals' shared memory gardens, but there's a jump from that to them knowing the perfect memories to manipulate people with. I just don't believe a few hundred people will have experienced enough of EVERYONE ELSE ON THE PLANET's lives to have the memories on hand for things like "I'm humming that song your dad used to hum when you and he were hanging out together, so you will irrationally trust me.".
The love plot is very very very sudden. There's reason for that, in that both parties got seriously meddled with, but neither of them seems to have found it initially suspicious, to the extent that when they figure out the meddling, it's a horrible betrayal of everything. Really, guys, it wasn't obvious?
Plot hooks just evaporate. Like, Ren agrees really quickly to join the Incrementalists, so everyone says "Oh, you must have a big agenda that you want to do right now", and she agrees. But really she agrees because she was meddled with - but she doesn't know that. What does she think her big agenda is? Is it just her work thing? O_o I suppose for this and the previous point, I might have missed something - the book keeps going forward if you space out for a bit and stop listening, and it's harder to go back and look for what you missed.
I found the punch line at the end of the book a little eye-rolly: "...So we need tell the nemones about the Incrementalists - so we should find an author to write a book for us explaining it all. (The End)" Nope, I'm not believing Skyler White is an Incrementalist and convinced Steven Brust to write a book about her.
However, they do reference the poetry of William Ashbless, which makes me smile. (I've seen him appear in two books outside of his original authors', and I always treat it a little in-joke from the author to me. I love fictional characters who manage to bootstrap themselves out of their origin.)

Terra Ignota: Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle, and Perhaps the Stars (by Ada Palmer)

I read the first (review here) when it initially came out, but waited for the rest before reading the series. Reading these were hard work, I had to reread, and reading the first one four times would have been too much. These are books that really want to be talked about, but there is a lot of plot that shouldn't be spoiled. So I'll assume you've reread the review of the first book, and talk carefully about the rest.

One of the underlying themes is the idea of destroying the existing/current world for the sake of a better/future one, and who falls one which side, and why. The 2450s in which the series happens is a better world than we have now, though not a perfect one. The last great wars, centuries ago, were over religion, so religion is legally an in-private thing only. Societies and jurisdictions are opt-in and easily changed because of ubiquitous fast travel. Gender is de-emphasized (except for the plots in which it very very much isn't). The main characters (and there are a lot) disagree with each other based on different ethical principles, not (mostly) because some of them are just Bad. One of the smaller but richer political entities (Hives) is Utopia, which embodies "per aspera ad astra". Reaching the stars is hard, and Earth is comfortable; more comfortable the better things get. To get to Utopia's future, the present future has to be destroyed, or at least, shaken up and resource-mined quite a lot. Is that worth it? Many think yes. Many others think no. And, going to the stars / bettering Earth is only one of the many many ethical dividing lines that exist, dividing the Hives and the nation-strats and the main characters and the populace in many different ways. The majority/minority dynamics that are called out by the Seven-Ten list and enumerated more precisely by Mycroft quoting Kohaku Mardi: "Population 33 percent Masons, 67 percent other Hives; land holdings 67 percent Mitsubishi, 33 percent other Hives; income 29 percent Utopians, 71 percent other Hives. 33-67; 67-33; 29-71. I've seen these numbers before..." are a quick oversimplification of how everyone splits along different lines, and that's what drives all the conflicts going forward.

There's one bit that I had a hard time with, and I think that's probably my own failure as a reader. The author gives us Bridger, an unambiguously miraculous child, in book one. The miracles are real, not fake. The reader has to accept that Bridger is a gift from God (where God is otherwise undefined, just the One Who Created This Universe). When, later, there are other character assertions about the divine, I kind of fell back to my standard agnosticism, and some major plot points just... bugged me as implausible. But that was like, if I were an alien who grew up in the asteroid belt, and then came and visited Earth, and someone demonstrated how gravity worked by dropping objects - but then I continued to boggle and find things like rivers flowing downhill, and hot air balloons, and trampolines, completely implausible, through a failure to generalize.

The writing is beautiful, brilliant, elegant. Palmer does more things with language than I've ever successfully read. (I don't count as successfully reading things like Dorothy Sayers when she digresses into French for too long for me to follow.). The characters who quoted from one language into another with the fingerprints of the first language on the phrasing in the second. All the Latin. All the new words built for purpose as needed. (Utopia, burning limited resources for good reasons: "A Wishgrant uses scarce resources. A Faustpact sets back the Project"). I highlighted so many things, but here is one that stands alone reasonably well, from narrator Mycroft who writes quite eloquently:

[Name]'s presence makes it easy -- possible -- to pour the whole truth out, instead of those rationed doses we allow ourselves in daily life, greeting even our dearest with abbreviations like 'Good morning' when the true thought in our breast is 'Every day you step into my life you make it brighter, and if you left the world, something in me would starve for you forever as when some barrier rises to shade a plant, which still has light enough to grow some but will never again taste the unbroken sun.' What is it in society that makes us veil such love behind 'Good morning' ?

And here is another, which needs a little filling in. Sniper is among other things both a Hive leader figure and a very very famous celebrity, and spends a while as an abused captive. Sniper does a lot of shouting and speechifying at their captor, which is recorded, and later the recordings are listened to by [9A], who is themselves captive for a while and gets through it by remembering "Sniper made it through." Later, they meet Sniper, and are trying to tell them how much that connection meant, but [9A] is not as eloquent as Mycroft and worries that they are making a hash of it. Sniper puts [9A] at ease:

So, people I've never met are extremely important to me, the ones who care about me the way you do. Who love me. And I think that's perfectly natural, that everyone has relationships with people far away, who inspire, entertain, role models, and also the people we work so hard for: fans, viewers, the next generation, kids somewhere, posterity. I think those asymmetrical relationships are part of what it means to be human, part of the teamwork. Humanity is teamwork. And the asymmetry doesn't for a second make those relationships any less valid or less important, or less real.

Asymmetric relationships... that gets at something that's stuck in my heart since seeing Adaptation:

Charlie Kaufman: There was this time in high school. I was watching you out the library window. You were talking to Sarah Marsh.
Donald Kaufman: Oh, God. I was so in love with her.
Charlie Kaufman: I know. And you were flirting with her. And she was being really sweet to you.
Donald Kaufman: I remember that.
Charlie Kaufman: Then, when you walked away, she started making fun of you with Kim Canetti. And it was like they were laughing at *me*. You didn't know at all. You seemed so happy.
Donald Kaufman: I knew. I heard them.
Charlie Kaufman: How come you looked so happy?
Donald Kaufman: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn't have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.
Charlie Kaufman: But she thought you were pathetic.
Donald Kaufman: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago.

But this takes it to the next level - acceptance of asymmetric relationships isn't just okay, it's necessary, it's part of the social contract. Paying it forward. Letting people you don't know inspire you. Me writing these book reviews for you, even though I don't necessarily know who "you" always is.

I think these are the hardest I've worked in reading in a long time, and I still missed a lot. Still, well worth it. (It should have won the Hugo for best series in 2022.) Five and a half stars.

Tress of the Emerald Sea (by Brandon Sanderson)

This is one of Sanderson's four secret project novels; he is aiming for Princess Bride or Good Omens adventure humor, and does a pretty good job of it. I was initially suspicious that it was Trying Too Hard - the in-world narrator has a distinct eccentric voice, and I thought that "really likes cups" as a principal character trait and "the sea is made of spores" were more like the Mad Libs sort of humor than real humor. (On the other hand, my relationship with bowls may be similar to the main character's relationship with cups, so... maybe I was just feeling mocked?) But once it settles into the adventure, cups and spores both get their due worldbuilding done on them, and it's quite entertaining. And it gives us more clues about Hoid than I've run into so far (though Hoid is one of the things in the Cosmere that I'm also suspicious of). The seed crystal for the story is basically "what if when Westley was taken by the Dread Pirate Roberts, Buttercup went to rescue him?". Tress is very Buttercup, which is not the makings of a Heroic Adventurer, but persistence and kindness and a knack for steampunk-flavored scientific research serves her well. Also, apparently this characteristic:

Tress looked toward Crow. And then, Tress took the singular step that separated her from people in most stories. The act, it might be said, that defined her as a hero. She did something so incredible, I can barely express its majesty.
I should consider this more, Tress thought to herself, and not jump to conclusions.

One of the themes that runs through the story, that makes it remind me of Pratchett and not just Princess Bride, is of helping each other, and letting people help you. Here, Tress has been struggling to come up with how to solve the final part of her quest, and is failing to come up with any inspiration. She begins to despair, when some of the crew comes in...

"All right, Captain," Salay said. "We've been giving this voyage some thought. And the protections around the Sorceress seem almost impossible to overcome."
"I know," Tress said, bracing herself. "Salay, I..I don't..."
"Therefore," Salay continued, getting out some papers, "we've been working hard on ways to overcome them. We've got some pretty good suggestions here, if you want to see them."

Four and a half stars.

Winter's Orbit (by Everina Maxwell)

A space opera romance, and up there at the top of things I've borrowed through Kindle Unlimited. The Empire of Iskat is a teeny corner of a much larger galactic semi-civilization. The treaty with the Galactics is necessary to keep them from being overrun by greedy larger teams, but empires, being what they are, are not the best of governments for the non-ruling planets. For Reasons, having functional treaty-marriage pairs is necessary in the treaty justification. So that's the space opera setting; the romance setup is that Kiem, the "least favorite grandson of the Emperor" is assigned to marry Jainan, the widower of Kiem's very-recently-deceased cousin. A lot of romance plots could be solved early if everyone Just Used Their Words - I was actually kind of impressed by the setup for why that doesn't work. Kiem is a super-charismatic talker; Jainan was abused for many years by the cousin, and his partner wanting anything makes him placate and freeze up. So Kiem is trying really hard to *not* overcharisma someone he thinks is a grieving widower, and Jainan has a flinch reflex turned up to 11 and has been trained that having any opinions of his own will just lead to trouble. The weaving of the mystery plot and the romance is both entertaining and sweet; I have picked up the second book in the universe. Four and a half stars.

Ocean's Echo (also by Everina Maxwell)

Lo, the second book. Not really a sequel - none of the same characters, but a somewhat similar pairing. Tennal, like Kiem, is a wild scion of a political family. Surit, like Jainan, is very very reserved and self-controlled (though not so abused). It's not a political marriage but a militarily mandated psychic bonding thingummy that drives the plot, on top of a bunch of military politics. I enjoyed this one maybe a little less, not because of the plot or the romance but because I find psychic (or magical) systems which are vast and amorphous, a little too slippery. (I have been putting off reading Lords of Uncreation for that reason). But still well worthwhile. Amusingly: desireearmfeldt was talking about having read some romances where the two characters divided up doing their joint tasks between the scientific one and the social one, and I could identify the books just based on that. Both of them really do have that dynamic once the pairs start working together. Four stars.

A House with Good Bones(by T Kingfisher)

This one is a horror story that doesn't seem to have an older horror story in it as a seed, though there is an excerpt of Aleister Crowley history that might serve the same purpose. Gothic-flavored, with an unusual sort of haunting and then a final digression into action-scary. Sam(antha) heads home to stay with her mom in her Gran's old house, to discover that Mom is behaving oddly. Sam's train of thought has to go the long way around through all the dementia and psych explanations, but the reader knows it's a horror book - as does Mom. The space of "this is weird but I must be imagining / dreaming / etc" is really where the most tense of horror tension lives, and it gets pretty tense for a while. (When I'm on hold for a jump scare from an audiobook, I know my nerves are racked.).

The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England (by Brandon Sanderson)

Another of Sanderson's Secret Projects. This felt halfway between the umpteen variants of the time-traveling engineer books to RPG Lit. There are an infinite variety of medieval-ish worlds you can dimension-hop to; an amnesiac protagonist finds himself in one, and gets to character growth past his temporarily forgotten weaknesses. It seemed perfectly well crafted (and the Norse-adjacent culture was nicely done) but it didn't grab me the way Tress, above, did.

Thus Was Adonis Murdered and The Shortest Way to Hades (by Sarah Caudwell)

Sarah Caudwell was a brilliant murder mystery novelist who only ever wrote four novels, due to her day job as a barrister and tax / property lawyer. Which explains why all her characters are so obsessed with tax law. I read them back when books were physical objects, and was deeply (selfishly) saddened that she died. Of all the authors who should have had a chance to create a twenty-book bibliography but didn't, Caudwell is at the top of my list. The plots are nicely twisty, but it's all about the tone - they're mostly epistolary, in the tone of a comedy of manners, with a lot of back and forth witty snark by the friends reading the letters from the other friend. For example, in Thus Was Adonis Murdered, Julia, who is a tax lawyer but also an absolute chaos muppet, is on vacation in Venice and writing letters back to her friend Selene, which are read by Selene to the other three junior lawyers plus Hilary, the professor/narrator, until after the murder, at which point some of the letters become descriptions of telephone calls or letters from one of the three who goes to Venice to help. Now they're being put out on audiobook; two of the two are out now, the other two will be released next year. There is a preface that regrets that it is difficult to preserve the ambiguity of Hilary's gender with an audio narrator, but the narrator does seem to try to do so. Alas, I wish she hadn't, or at least, I wish she hadn't chosen the voice she did for Hilary - most of the rest of the voices are cheery and clever and sparkling, but Hilary is oddly harsh. Anyway, these are quite a lot of fun and in particularly eccentric niche of mystery novels. (I may still have the physical object books around if you want to borrow them.)

Translation State (by Ann Leckie)

(Warning: a spoiler for a plot point that really doesn't surprise anyone will follow.)
This might be my favorite Ann Leckie book yet? (Though, I seem to have missed Provenance) It's small scale space opera, about belonging and becoming and family - but there's also a Threat to the Treaty with the Presger, and Sphene from Ancillary Mercy comes by to have part of one of my favorite conversations in the book. And a fascinating pseudophysics set piece puzzle.

Enae is cautious and kind and sort of forced to head out into the wider universe after the death of hir grandmother. Reet is young and a bit angry and a bit feckless, but some political radicals think he's their lost scion, and his adopted family still loves him dearly. Qven is a young Presger translator, which is seriously creepy - that seems to be about half nature and half nuture - and is having some final qualms about the last stages of metamorphosis, and the idea of having a family will prove a seductive one. The three main characters spend a while meandering towards each other (and for a little while I thought Qven was in a different timeline entirely), but they get there without too much lost time. It starts out looking like Enae's story - sie's the one going off on a Quest - it's more about Qven, who gets the internal journey of likeable-monster-turning-human. Sort of like a Murderbot, down to a fondness for adventure vids (Pirate Exiles of the Death Moons!). Here's a bit of the treaty hearing, with the semi-spoiler:

[In this scene, Translator Dlar is busy pontificating about how dangerous juvenile Presger translators are. Reet is, like Qven, genetically a juvenile Presger translator, though he was raised human. That's why there's a treaty hearing now.]

...I sincerely give the juvenile Reet all my admiration, I assure you there is not another juvenile of ours who would have restrained themself so well for so long. Qven here-" Translator Dlar pointed. A very, very rude gesture among Radchaai, Reet knew. "Qven ate or vivisected countless other juveniles."
Beside Reet, Qven frowned and looked up into some distance. "One," e whispered. "Two, three, four..."
Sphene said, "So you say, yourself, that Reet Hluid did not behave like a Presger Translator juvenile. She behaved, in fact, more or less indistinguishably from a human one."
"That's not what I said," Translator Dlar snapped.
"Fifteen, sixteen," muttered Qven.
"May I ask," began Ambassador Seimet, rising, "to clarify a few issues?" Deputy Ormat nodded at the ambassador, and she said, with a shallow bow in return, "We are all agreed, are we not, that keeping the treaty intact is of the utmost importance for all of us here?" Nods, murmurs of agreement.
"Twenty-seven," said Qven, so quietly that Reet was sure only he could hear. "Twenty-eight..."
Ambassador Seimet said, "And we all accept, I hope, that Translator Dlar and the rest of their kind are deeply concerned about preserving that treaty?"
"Thirty-four," announced Qven. "Though might have missed a few from when I was a Tiny. I don't remember that time very well. But I didn't have many teeth then."
Sphene rolled its eyes. "That's not even close to countless. I've killed more humans than that in a single day."

Also, the audiobook narrator, Adjoa Andoh, was awesome. A remarkable range of voices and accents and I liked all of them (except the blubby aquatic ambassador but happily he did not have many lines). Five stars..

Terminal World (by Alistair Reynolds)

Another standalone book by Reynolds narrated by John Lee, who is always soothing to listen to. It starts sort of fallen-world cyberpunk, and then goes steampunk with skyships, as the narrator travels between the different zones which support different amounts of technology and life (based on altitude in the city/tower of Spearpoint or geography in the rest of the world). It's a little slow but a pleasant travelogue around a post-apocalyptic landscape. Three and three quarters stars.

Fourth Wing (by Recbecca Yarros)

Hey, Mike, here is a rant for you. This is the sort of YA book that puts me off YA. Oversimplified politics I can skate through, and insufficiently motivated villains are fine. But characters having ALL THE BIG FEELS with no nuance, I'm just too old for. Anyway. The Scholomance series is "What if Hogwarts, but Evil?". I think there's a "What if Narnia, but Evil" that I can't remember more about. This is "What if Pern, but Evil?" down to almost a White Dragon. The Scholomance comes up with a reason, though, to underpin "why is it evil" which almost covers all the bases. Fourth Wing just kind of posits it: dragons are super powerful, and violent, and the humans kind of have to go along with it to keep up with their dragon team-ups. The first-year dragonrider class has something like a fifty percent casualty rate. The weak don't survive - the dragons make sure of that. But... the dragons really only get two main shots at culling the first years - during Presentation, where everyone has to walk past them and the insufficiently respectful get torched, and during Threshing, which is when the dragons choose their riders, and also torch anyone they feel like. Everything else, the college does to the kids for no good reason. In order to even enter the Rider College, everyone has to cross a slippery rail-less bridge - about fifteen percent fall to their deaths. Because if you can't keep your footing on the dragon's back, you're too weak to be worth a dragon. But also, if the psycho in line behind you decides to run after you and push you off in order to prove you're weak - well, that's fine too. If you telepathically bond with a really really strong dragon, then the trainees who didn't get a good dragon get to try to kill you in the hopes that the dragon will choose them when their chosen rider gets murdered. THE DRAGON WHO IS TELEPATHICALLY BONDED WITH THEIR CHOICE WILL CHOOSE THE GUY WHO MURDERS THEM? Why does anyone think that's plausible? And, probably the most head-smacking bit, there's the little gang of first-years who decides that not only is it their chosen duty to murder the weak riders (i.e. the main character) but also to murder the strangely small and weak dragon that shows up at the Threshing, because it clearly needs culling too. This is just bonkers - how is it that "we have go along with the powerful violent dragons even when they kill us" mutates into "and we should kill the small but probably still beloved relative of the powerful violent dragons"? (As it turns out, it's not a runt, it's just a very strong-willed baby dragon who came to see the humans. Yeah, murdering the baby dragon is going to go over real well with the grownups...). Anyway, there's just a lot of "because Evil" that doesn't seem to make any internally consistent sense.

The other bit is the love plot. There's the main character, the "weak" daughter of the psycho general, and the love interest, the son of the traitor, who is cast in the classic Mister Darcy mode of tall, smolderingly good looking, and gloweringly taciturn. At the point when I really started banging my head on the table, the love plot has gone through:

Xaden (Darcy) has sworn to kill Violet to avenge his father.
So he transfers her into the wing he's leader of, to keep her under his control.
Where he protects her from the random bullies, and gives her advice on standing up to them.
While she spies on him in an orchard and discovers that he's in a secret plot with the other kids of the rebellion.
But promises not to tell anyone.
Meanwhile, her Nice Guy (tm) friend Dain, who can read minds at a touch (remember this for later), is busy mansplaining how she needs to go AWOL because she's too weak and will die and that will make him Sad.
The psycho nincompoops try to murderize the baby dragon, but are driven off by Violet and the baby dragon's super powerful dragon friend (which is mated to Xaden's dragon). Violet telepathically bonds with both of them, which is not a thing which is done.
The psycho nincompoops try to murderize Violet because she is weak and so they can endear themselves to the super powerful dragon as Violet replacements.
Xaden rescues her. Dain refuses to believe Violet that Dain's friend was on team Murder Nincompoop and demands to read her mind. Violet begins to think maybe Dain isn't as nice a guy as he claims he is.
The murder nincompoops are executed - apparently trying to murder a fellow cadet in their sleep is against the rules. Note that it's only the "in their sleep" part that is against the rules, everything else is still fair game.
Xaden and Violet are totally falling for each other but Xaden says nope, this is a bad idea, he's Violet's commander and also he's in that secret rebellion plot and she's buddies with a telepath.
Violet badgers Xaden into acknowledging that they're still totally hot for each other. Badger badger badger. (Mushroom!). She says she won't ask him about all his secrets, but to prove he loves her, he should tell her where he went off to on his last secret plot quest. He tells her.
They have a lot of sex, for many pages which I would be embarassed to read on the subway.
Xaden doesn't tell Violet some of the details about the secret rebellion plot that she KNOWS he is in, that being that he has been smuggling anti-monster weapons to the country across the border.
Xaden is forced to drag Violet with him on this mission because their dragons are mated.
Hey, the enemy country across the border is fighting horrible monsters with the anti-monster weapons! They aren't using these weapons on the dragon-allied country after all! The rebels are secretly allied with the anti-monster gryphon riders from the other country, because monsters.
Violet doesn't believe in monsters. Everyone knows they aren't real, even though Violet has a book about them. Violet starts to get pissy that Xaden didn't tell her monsters are real, even though they obviously aren't.
It becomes clear that the dragon country powers that be have sent Xaden et al to be killed by monsters, because Dain read Violet's mind about that plot quest location Xaden told her. Everyone is about to get killed. In retrospect, Dain totally knew Violet was going off to die, and he was having Sad Feels about it.
Violet absolutely loses her shit that Xaden has LIED TO HER by not telling her about the alliance with the anti-monster people. Because of all the things going on, the fact that Xaden hasn't given her a briefing on his secret good guy plot that SHE IS NOT IN, and that SHE IS BEING MIND READ ABOUT is the most important betrayal here.

Xaden walks with Garrick, looking my way with what feels like longing. I gave him everything, and he never truly let me in. Pain rips through my chest with the kind of cut that only heartbreak can give, sharp and jagged. I imagine this is what it feels like to be cleaved apart with a dull, rust-covered blade. It's not honed enough to slice quickly, and there's a one hundred percent chance the wound is going to fester. If I can't trust him, there's no future for us.

It's so, so, utterly teenage angst, and I wanted to smack her. Also, it's frustrating because while everyone involved is a teenager, Darcy Xaden is pretty much perfect (other than carrying on with someone in his command structure) and more or less always right. If he had also been teenage angsty dramatic, I might have been more amused.

With My Little Eye (by Joshilyn Jackson)

Joshilyn Jackson is one of the authors I buy everything she writes; she's more in the thriller genre than the more standard murder mystery I read lots of. Her web site divides her books into "Thrillers" (this is one), and "Southern Fiction". It's an interesting distinction, since I had not really thought of her work as being in two separate genres. Her books do tend to have bodies in them, but the "Southern Fiction" ones are more likely to be old bodies with family secrets (or mysterious bodies but less sense of immediate threat to the other characters), and the newer books have an active threat that might generate more bodies. Still, they seem like a continuum - but possibly "thriller" sells better than "Southern". Ah - here's a web site quote: "New York Times and USA Today bestselling novelist Joshilyn Jackson writes page-turning suspense novels that revolve around timely women's issues, raising questions about justice, motherhood, career, class, and the thorny mechanics of redemption. She previously penned eight works of Southern fiction, all of which have a murder mystery or thriller lurking inside the family drama." "Race" is also obviously in the list of issues, though not as much in this one as some of the others. Anyway, "but what is this one about?". Mirabel Mills is a B list actress who has moved from LA back to Georgia to avoid a stalker, but the stalker follows. There's a nicely dense braid of characters - Mirabel and her autistic daughter, her long-ago Georgia ex, her newest LA ex, and several significant neighbors in the building. Who is dangerous and who is friendly has several different twists and fake-outs for both Mirabel and the reader. None of the characters are wasted, and none of the twists feel out of character. Jackson does her own audiobook narration, but this time it's an ensemble based on the viewpoint character, and Mirabel's daughter is narrated by Jackson's daughter, which was all of charming and well done and startling, because she was, like, a seven-year-old back when Jackson had a blog that I read. Four and a half stars.

Murder at Spindle Manor (by Morgan Stang)

This is a mixture of a fantasy-flavored cozy mystery and a weekend Assassin game. A monster-hunter (and her eccentric coachman) track their shapeshifting quarry to an isolated (and rather multiply-haunted) inn, full of a travelling party of "friends" and relatives who all bear various grudges against each other. Someone dies, of course, but there's also a bunch of running around in a mob searching for secret passages. Fluffy fast-paced over-the-top fun and will probably lure me into reading more in the series (which means it did its job as a Kindle Unlimited). I'll give it four stars, though half a star is because it was free. :)

Dinner at the inn:

First was a fish soup, which everyone slurped with quiet reverence. Then came the main course of mutton with several sides, including an assortment of salted and peppered vegetables, heron pudding, and toast with bone marrow spread (the bone marrow apparently taken from the herons before the pudding was made, as everyone knows one never makes heron pudding with the marrow intact). A block of cheese finished off the presentation.

Apparently all that about heron pudding is true! I highlighted it as a wacky fantasy food, but no!

Just One Damned Thing After Another and A Symphony of Echoes (by Jodi Taylor)

These are the first two book in the series The Chronicles of St. Mary's, which is at present a TWENTY SEVEN BOOK SERIES, good God. Maybe just ten books and seventeen short stories? Anyway, it's about time traveling historians, in the same genre as Connie Willis's series that exasperated me. The historians here are just as disaster-prone, but less whiny and self-pitying about it, so I liked them a lot more, though the books are not to be taken as seriously as Willis's. Max, the main character, is fun, in that she's a badass female character but more in the project manager sense than the combat fighter sense. The books were kind of wayward and episodic, though there is some arc plot (time wars, of course). They're both light-hearted and dark and broody (a lot of time travelers die, though I think the ones trying to investigate Jack the Ripper might have been a little more cautious and a little less gleeful - he's never just a deranged thug. Honestly, between the wayward episodic nature and the "Run forward! Run away!" nature of things, it's a lot like a version of Doctor Who without the Doctor in it. My main quibble was that it combines too much foreshadowing ("He was perfect and when I think what happened to him later, it just breaks my heart.") and maybe a little more under-explaining than to my taste, but that combination almost seems right for the out of order nature of time travelers.

From the beginning, when Max is being recruited:

"I'm quite prepared to tell you everything you want to know, but first must inform you that unless you sign these papers, I shall be unable to do so. Please be aware these documents are legally binding. The legal jargon may seem obscure, but, make no mistake, if you ever divulge one word of what I am about to tell you now, then you will spend the next fifteen years, at least, in an establishment the existence of which no civil liberties organisation is even aware. Please take a minute to think very carefully before proceeding."

Thinking carefully is something that happens to other people. "Do you have a pen?"

I'll probably keep reading them, but don't think I can binge all twenty-seven at once. Three and three quarter stars.

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance (by Foz Meadows)

This reminded me a lot of Winter's Orbit, but it's not quite. We have the a cross-country arranged marriage between Velasin and Caethari; Caethari is a popular prince from the diverse and mostly ideal country, while and Velasin is a traumatized lordling from the super-homophobic country. Velasin has been assigned to marry Caethari's sister, but he gets brutally outed while the marriage ambassdor is there, and pretty much the only thing that stops Velasin's dad from either murdering or disinheriting him is that the ambassador says "I'm here to marry him to one of our heirs, fine with us if it's the male one." So Velasin is traumatized six ways from Sunday and Caethari is kind and sensitive and understands concepts like consent (as does the whole Good Country). It's not as balanced as Winter Orbit, in that Caethari doesn't have many flaws at all, and while Velasin does have some better social skills he can bring to the plot, he definitely seems like the junior partner. On the other hand, it's very well written hurt/comfort. There's also a bit of a mystery going on to fill the scenes between the romance bits, but the final resolution was... I have some quibbles with both the villain, their motivation, and what seems like some trickery by the writing surrounding it. (Too hard to go into without spoiling the whole thing at more length than I want to do, though). Three stars.

The Affair of the Mysterious Letter (by Nicholas Boulton)

I have a soft spot for Sherlock Holmes / Lovecraft mashups, and this is a nicely done one. John Wyndham, (interdimensional army veteran of the war against the Empress of Nothing, and extremely upright prude escaped from an overbearing theocracy), has become the roommate (221b Martyr's Walk, city of Khelathra-Ven) of the eccentric Shaharazad Haas, consulting sorceress, and this is the story of Haas investigating a blackmail plot against one of Haas's ex-lovers, where the obvious suspects are: the owner of a theater of demons, a criminal underlord, a poetess, a vampire countess, and a Carcosan ex-prince / party loyalist. Most of the book is a romp through these settings and dimensions, and it's only a bit of a spoiler to say that all of the suspects are eventually ruled out, and (in Haas's words) "When you've eliminated the possible, all that remains is the impossible, and I find that so much more satisfying to work with."

The travelogue is a lot of fun; other readers might get tired of the running joke of Wyndham constantly rephrasing/bowdlerizing everyone else's dialogue: "What the pish is wrong with you?" (He did not say "pish."), but I never did - possibly because on audiobook, the narrator made the embarassed prudishness sound rather endearing. The segment in Carcosa is quite surreal and rather like a recurring nighmare - and remarkably worked a lot better for me than most of Lovecraft's dream narratives. It's all quite over the top in its weirdness - Haas's landlady is a series of dead bodies inhabited by a hivemind of necromantic wasps, because of course she is - which is the entire point. The "mystery" is just an excuse to visit and poke around the various settings - there are no real clues to piece together - but it was just such sheer over the top baroque that it was engaging the whole way through. Four stars set in the stygian expanse, pulsing with an eerie radiance, ancient sentinels of a cosmic malevolence that transcends mortal understanding, their eldritch whispers weaving a tapestry of madness in the minds of those foolish enough to gaze upon them.

Provenance (by Ann Leckie)

Turns out I had read it before, but didn't remember it very well. Ingray is one of the adopted proto-heirs of a high-level politician of a not very important planet; in order to prove herself with her demanding mother, she sets out on a somewhat ill-thought-out mission to yoink someone from prison ("Compassionate Removal") to use in a convoluted plot. Ingray is naive, kind, and basically loyal to her mom and locale, but she's trying to be someone ambitious and savvy, and she's not very good at it. This verges close to irritating but I do like kind and loyal as virtues, so it didn't actually irritate me. As the plot goes on, she stays kind but becomes less naive, and the transformation seemed solid. But it is more YA-ish than many of her other works, and some readers think Ingray is kind of insipid and privileged. On the other hand, that's totally a Leckie thing - her characters who have tons of privilege, whether racial or political or imperial/colonial, are products of their upbringing, and not usually particularly woke about it. It's because the stories have viewpoints from both inside and outside the privilege that the reader can see it in a way that the characters usually don't. Anyway, I enjoyed it. Four stars.

Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz (by Garth Nix)

A collection of short stories, sort of along the lines of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, except that they're agents of the Council of the Treaty for the Safety of the World, acting under the authority granted by the Three Empires, the Seven Kingdoms, the Palatine Regency, the Jessar Republic, and the Forty Lesser Realms (though two out of three empires have fallen and the Seven Kingdoms have splintered...), and one of them is a sorcerously animated puppet. They're kind of interesting, and kind of enh - Sir Hereward is compassionate, human, and an artillery expert (!), while the puppet Fitz is super-powerful and kind of glacial. If an interesting named woman shows up, she's likely to catch Sir Hereward's interest, and either be evil or an unavoidable sacrifice, and either way dead by the end of the story. That might be sufficient to be annoying, but if it isn't, the varied settings infested with good and evil godlets, and the sort of tired but dogged endurance keeping dealing with the evil godlets (the reason to kill them is that they are essentially dimensional parasites that can grow exponentially, not just that they glow to Detect Evil), are a reasonably interesting variant on decent swords-and-sorcery. Three stars.

Thistlefoot (by GennaRose Nethercott)

One of the descriptions that caused me to pick this book up was saying it was similar to American Gods. It's similar, in that it's a modern world with the weird and divine threaded through from the Old to New Worlds, but it's different in the American Gods was a sprawling tapestry and Thistlefoot is more of a complex braid that all turns out to be tied together. Isaac and Bellantine Yaga are siblings, but haven't seen each other in years, until they get a message telling them that they've inherited something, come and pick it up in port. The scene of going into the dim shipping container to see that what has been sent to them is, inexplicably, a small house, and then the house clambers to its feet on chicken legs, is a nicely dramatic one, like the curtains being fully drawn back after the prologue of a story. The story braids Baba Yaga into Jewish shtetl and Russian pogrom, forward into America's own supremacists and xenophobes, fed by the Longshadow Man's flask of smoke... it's all very well done, and I think my main complaint is that Isaac is just an asshole. Both Isaac and Bellantine have weird powers - Bellantine's trying to run from hers, while Isaac embraces his, which are a mimicry/shapeshift that he uses to be an exceptional con man, against both his marks and his friends. It's all very well to be a rogue against The Man, or The Rich, but this is just pure asshole:

Within an hour, he'd packed a bag and lifted his roommate's truck keys while the Australian was in the shower. Max was here without a visa-he wouldn't report a missing vehicle. It was why Isaac had chosen him as a roommate to begin with. The most useful people were always the ones who had something to lose.

Still, I liked the writing, and I liked Bellantine, and I liked the setting it painted. I just pretty much hated Isaac. I'm going to leave you with a large chunk of the prologue, just because it set the scene so well.

BEHOLD: KALI TRAGUS, THE Russian thistle. A bushy lump of a plant, green flowers vanishing into green leaves. Its stem, striped red and violet as a bruised wrist. The leaves are lined with spikes, sharp like stitching needles. You are advised to wear gloves when handling it, if you must handle it at all. Should the thorns prick you, pretend you don't feel it. It doesn't do any good to gripe in times like these. There are worse wounds to be had than a thistle prick. Much, much worse.
The Russian thistle swells to life in the most arid climates. It thrives on disturbed land-flourishes in those places where a strange violence occurred. Among burned crops. Thirsty fields. Once-thriving farmlands ravaged by blight. Despite it all, the Russian thistle survives. Multiplies. It can grow between six and thirty-six inches tall. When it dies, it breaks off at the base and journeys across the earth, dropping seeds as it travels. The thistle moves like a living beast, rolling and waltzing in the summer wind, licking up dust, shimmying against the unhinged expanse of the land.
There's a story people tell about a man back in Russia who was executed by the state. His head was severed. When the head thumped to the ground, it turned into a fat fox and ran out through the crowd of onlookers, out of the city limits, out into the forest where it lives to this day. The Russian thistle, it's not so different-rent from the root and running, running.
But then, you knew this plant already. Even if you've never been to the old country, nor dragged your fingertips along photographs of the steppe, nor paged through yellowed tomes of Slavic folktales, you know it. You've seen it in old films, somersaulting down desolate stretches of highway. Coyote plant, wind-howler, the starting pistol of every good standoff. When you see the Kali tragus, you can almost taste lonesomeness, bitter somewhere in the back of your throat, or smell it in the air like a perfume. It represents all words left unsaid, stories untold, the memories that have been kicked up by storms and carried off across the untamed prairie. So many meanings, many names. Kali tragus, the Russian thistle, windwitch-the tumbleweed.
Did you think the tumbleweed was from here? Montana, perhaps? Nebraska? No. It is a foreigner, too, like so many of us.

Three and a half tumbleweed-twirling stars. It might have been four and a half if I hadn't hated Isaac.

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter (by Brandon Sanderson)

Another Secret Project! I liked this not quite as much as Tress but a lot more than Frugal Wizard. The two settings were interestingly odd, though not nearly as odd as they turned out to be once some plot twists have appeared and twisted. Both rock-balancing and nightmare painting are kind of cool to read about. (Real life rock balancing is even more interesting, in a way that I find completely implausible.) The painter is a more interesting character (to me) than Yumi - he's flawed but in understandable-if-terrible ways (and also considered flawed in ways I didn't think were flaws), while Yumi is mostly perfect but hindered by excessive Lawfulness. Liyun, Yumi's warden, is also interesting - she starts as a one-dimensional but well drawn unpleasant person, the sort that use niceness as an edged weapon in a way that is nothing at all nice:

"How did I do today, Liyun?" Yumi finally asked, rising to her knees.
"You did your duty," Liyun replied, her voice soft yet rasping. Like ripping paper.
"I... have never heard of a yoki-hijo summoning thirty-seven spirits in one day," Yumi said, hopeful. It wasn't her warden's job to compliment her. But...it would feel good... to hear the words nonetheless.
"Yes," Liyun said. "It will make people question. Were you always capable of this? Were you holding back in other cities, refusing to bless them as you did this one?"
"I..."
"I'm certain it is wisdom in you, Chosen," Liyun said, "to do as you did. I am certain it is not you working too hard, so that the next town in line gets a much smaller blessing and therefore thinks themselves less worthy also."
Yumi felt sick at the very thought. Her arms dangled at her sides, because moving them was painful. "I will work hard tomorrow."
"I am sure you will." Liyun paused. "I would hate to think that I trained a yoki-hijo who did not know how to properly pace herself. I would also hate to think that I was such a poor teacher that my student thought it wise to pretend to be of lower potential, in order to have an easier time."

But she gets more depth as she goes, as well. Anyway, I liked this a lot, and the accompanying art is lovely. And there's a nice thread of tragedy that runs through everything, making it a sadder, bittersweeter story than Tress, as well. Hmm. The more I write about it the better I like it, so now I'm not sure I liked Tress better after all. (I also continue to be suspicious of Hoid - he has less of a role here, but is still the narrator.) I'll leave you with one last quote:

Regardless, here's the thing: art doesn't need to be good to be valuable. I've heard it said that art is the one truly useless creation -intended for no mechanical purpose. Valued only because of the perception of the people who view it.
The thing is, everything is useless, intrinsically. Nothing has value unless we grant it that value. Any object can be worth whatever we decide it to be worth.

So, I decide this one is also worth four and a half stars, which is three and a half more than exist in this particular world.

Twenty-two reviews of twenty-sixish books

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