firstfrost | 29 books and the perpetual guilt that I should do this aggregation more often (Reply)

The Bone Harp (by Victoria Goddard)

This is a stand-alone book by the author, not part of her Nine Realms series but set in Elfland. The tag line is "Thrice-cursed bard and warrior-elf Tamsin wakes up in Elfland after what might or might not have been his death, healed and hale for the first time in millennia. Somewhat confused but not entirely unhappy with this turn of events, he sets off in the hopes of finding a way home." It is fascinating, especially compared to everything else I've read by Goddard, in that it reads like an epilogue to a long and dramatic tale, in which the hero finally gets his happily ever after (I kind of wonder whether there was a particular tale this was written as a response to). There's no real opposition, other than against his fears and trauma and past. It's a pure comfort read - you can go home again. You can be forgiven, be healed. The people you loved don't despise you now. It's like the opposite of the Cliopher stories, in which he keeps trying to go home and is continually hurt and rebuffed (but also kind of continually rebuffing the people he wants to go home to). I think this would be the perfect thing to read after a tragedy in which everyone ends up doomed, like falling asleep in a comfy bed after an awful day. Four silver shining stars in a clear bright night.

Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands (by Heather Fawcett)

The promised sequel to Emily Wilde's Book of Faeries. My Kindle app taunts me by saying "You have 2 out of 3 books in this series" but the third is not expected until 2025. Hmf.

The first book started with Emily as a solo character, and became more charming when Wendell appeared for her to bicker with. Here, there's a slightly larger adventuring party to start with (once the adventure starts) - Emily and Wendell, and Emily's niece, and a rival researcher. Each pairwise combination has their own dynamic, which is quite fun. Before the adventure starts, Emily notes:

I'm afraid I have not gotten over my resentment of him for saving me from the Snow King's court in Josland earlier this year, and have made a solemn vow to myself that I shall be the one to rescue him from whatever faerie trouble we next find ourselves in. Yes, I realize this is illogical, given that it requires Wendell to end up in some dire circumstance, which would ideally best be avoided, but there it is. I'm quite determined.

So of course Wendell does need rescuing, and Emily does a fine job of it. The romance continues to charm - the rival researcher keeps pointing out that mortals who end up in romances with faerie kings do not end well, and Emily has enough KS:Faerie to know that's true, so that's a nice external source of tension that isn't Stupid Misunderstandings. Anyhow, I quite enjoyed this one too, and am looking forward to book three. Four and a quarter stars; I think I liked the second half of book one a little better, but have to remember that I thought it got off to a slow start. Book two doesn't - there's an exciting swordfight very early on!

Hero Forged (by Josh Erikson)

A con man gets in over his head in the weird shit plot, with ancient evil gods trying to get back into the world. Part of the conceit is that it's set in Lincoln, Nebraska, rather than New York or London or whatever, but it might as well have been Springfield; I didn't get a strongly Nebraska sense of place from it. (Maybe Nebraska doesn't have a very strong sense of place? I wouldn't know.) I do have a soft spot for con men stories, especially when they are also heist stories, but while this one starts with a heist it's not really a heist book, it's more like a series of monster fights book. It was fine, I have only mild quibbles with it, and I read it for free (though actually I should stop thinking of Kindle Unlimited as free - if I only read one KU book a month, that's the price of a full price novel...). It's a fun romp if you like monster fights, and there's a bit of depth with Gabe's relationship with his not so great father. One of the Amazon reviews praises it for "no stupid woke/SJ stuff" and there's definitely some male gaze going on, but certainly no worse than Dresden Files. I think Dresden Files is more or less what it's aiming for, but it's a first novel. The author could well get there with more practice.

Half a Soul (by Olivia Atwater)

This is listed as "Regency Fairy Tales, Part One", and I found it a charming romance. Theodora was nearly kidnapped by a faerie when young, and it stole half her soul, leaving her strange and generally unemotional. She makes for an interesting main character - within hailing distance of unsympathetic, sort of like the brusque and unempathetic Olivia Wilde, but written with a warm blunt honesty rather than the more traditional "I say I'm being honest when I'm really just being mean." The Lord Sorcier, the initially aloof male lead, also becomes sympathetic quickly, though for a bit I was seeing him as Astarion (Baldur's Gate 3) after this description:

As she watched, a tall man stepped up behind her. His messy, white-blond hair and pale skin flickered in the unearthly candlelight; his eyes were a peculiar molten reddish-gold that danced along with the flames. He was dressed in full evening attire: a fine white jacket and a silver waistcoat. His neck cloth was subtly loosened, however, and the smile on his handsome face held a faintly devilish edge to it.

Not to mention he's quite snide to begin with - but underneath he's a Dickensian social justice warrior, so not actually Astarion at all. Anyway - nearly all the characters have a dash of sympathetic and a dash of unsympathetic, often in surprising combinations, and it's generally charming. My main quibble is that the faeries, though they have the vicious inhumanity that all proper fey villains should, they are also a little too goofy. A pleasant confection, and I'll likely look for the other "regency fairy tales". (They look to be independent stories, not the same characters). Three and three-quarters stars.

The Mountain in the Sea (a novel) (by Ray Nayler)

Another book about umwelts and octopus sentience - I think Andy recommended this at the same time as Immense World. This is not a light-hearted murder mystery with an octopus detective, but a spooky not-quite-horror not-quite-first-contact set in a near-future dystopia. I'm a little dubious about the linguistics - it seems to hang too many things on variations on one symbol mapping - but I love the communication puzzle solving. I also found the slaves-on-fishing-boats subplot horrifically compelling - it's easy to write a novel set in fictional Victorian London which takes swipes at workhouses and the lack of women's rights, but that's cheap righteousness. It was relevant when Dickens was doing it, but it doesn't earn much real credit now. Writing a novel which takes swipes at corporations buying overfished seafood caught by slaves on fishing trawlers... I suppose that's still uncontroversial to be against, here, but it's something we mostly don't think about when we buy shrimp. Anyway. I don't know that I enjoyed it, it's not really any fun, but it felt worthwhile to have read.

The Josephine Tey Collection: 6 Alan Grant Novels; Brat Farrar; & Miss Pym Disposes: The Man in the Queue; A Shilling for Candles; The Franchise Affair; To Love and Be Wise; The Daughter of Time; The Singing Sands; Miss Pym Disposes; Brat Farrar (by Josephine Tey)

Audible has been putting together collections like this, and I hadn't read any Josephine Tey, as far as I can recall. She's another Golden Age author, but doesn't go for what I think of as the Classic Puzzler. Alan Grant is at least a Scotland Yard detective, but one who is remarkably diffident about catching his quarry and spends a lot of time fishing. Miss Pym encounters a crime and... I'm not going to go so far as say detects, but she thinks about whodunnit, and comes to some conclusions. Brat Farrar is more of a cousin to Martin Guerre than Hercule Poirot, and in Daughter of Time, Inspector Grant is laid up in the hospital and solves the mystery of ~~uplifted spiders~~ whether Richard III really murdered the Princes in the Tower. I was really not expecting that last one, and feel that I was tricked into reading a history rather than a detective novel, but, but, I still wanted to know how it went! It can go up with The Guns of August as making history interesting reading. Also, I am now firmly on the side of Richard III as Not Having Dunnit. Shakespeare was a paid propagandist.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In (by John Wiswell)

This is certainly the only book in the "body horror cozy romance" genre that I've read. Shesheshen is a monster, like a squishy ooze blob that can disguise herself as human if she eats enough structure and other people's bones to build an internal skeleton (or can keep things like bear traps in her chest for use in fights). A badly beaten-down woman rescues her from falling off a cliff, and doesn't realize she's a monster. Various romantic hijinks and monster fights ensue. I have some minor quibbles, like hermit-monsters understanding the nuances of consent before touching, but the amount of suspension of disbelief necessary for the premise really should sweep any number of nuances under the rug. Anyway, it's surprisingly sweet, in one of the more "you have to be kidding me" genre's I've been reading lately.

All of Homily's generosity, from fishing Shesheshen out of the river all the way to inviting her to supper last night, was echoed in this. She wasn't kind because of some angelic virtue. It was insecurity. It was an adaptation to cruelty. Shesheshen wrapped her arms around Homily and held her to her chest for a moment, mourning the realization that she'd fallen in love with someone's pain.

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma (by Claire Dederer)

This is a musing on what it is to be a fan of someone's work, when that someone is a monster. It starts with the author's early disquiet with loving the movies of Roman Polanski, then snowballs through MeToo and Trump. She contemplates various moral equations, digresses into what sort of women are perceived as monsters compared to men, and then finally comes home to something that feels true and universal to me. As a self-narration of someone thinking about hard questions, I really enjoyed it, and I recommend it for anyone else who finds themselves struggling with how to shun or not-shun great art by awful people.

I realized that for me, over the past few years of thinking about Polanski, thinking about Woody Allen, thinking about all these complicated men I loved, the word had come to take on a new meaning. It meant something more nuanced, and something more elemental. It meant: someone whose behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms.
A monster, in my mind, was an artist who could not be separated from some dark aspect of his or her biography. (Maybe it works for light aspects too. Maybe there are golden monsters. But it seems very unlikely, or at best very rare.)

(I also found myself wanting to continue the conversation. Mr. Rogers, I think, has become a "golden monster" - someone whose art, whose work, we now appreciate even more because all evidence suggests that he was, in fact, an incredibly good person. I think the Muppets have also grown more shiny because of Jim Henson. But possibly they can only be saints after they are dead. Four and a half stars.

The Deep Sky (by Yume Kitasei)

Like "octopus sentience" I seem to have had a large handful of recent books about one-way deep space voyages, the youngish crew beset by strange problems and possibly murders. This is that, but also about cultural representation and fraught parental relationships. And birds. It's partly set in the now (in space, amidst the strange problems), and partly in flashback, in the training/contest to pick the crew. I mostly did not figure out any of the clues or who was behind what and why, but I did find it interesting. I think I'm kind of lukewarm about this - a lot of it was quite good, and thoughtful, but the "VR goes haywire" bits just got too surreal for me. I highlighted several bits that stuck with me:

A cool evening breeze cut the warm air and made all the hairs on her arms stand up. There was a sapling growing next to the bench. Asuka bent down and scooped some dirt from its pit. She had the thought she might bring some along with her to Planet X. She put a bit in her mouth, to taste it. Tried to store the metallic, gritty flavor somewhere deep in her memory, so that someday when she was old and had forgotten everything else, she would at least remember something of this world that had made her who she was.

Or:

A parent can't write the end of a child's story. If she's lucky, she will never even know it.

Three and a half stars.

Floating Hotel (by Grace Curtis)

An intergalactic grand ship-hotel goes from system to system. It's not quite as grand as it used to be, and the system-spanning empire is a mostly-offscreen dystopia (mostly signaled by the "Lamplighter dispatches" at the start of each chapter), but it's a piece of safety and elegance for those who can afford it (or those who stow away and find their new home). There's a mystery plot woven through, but the shtick is that the chapters do a different viewpoint character each, and often a character is introduced with the first character's take on them, and then when it comes to their turn they get a lot more depth, or turn out to be something entirely different. It's a found-family-in-space that one doesn't normally see centered around something so capitalist as a fancy hotel set in a capitalist dystopia, but it still works, with a bittersweet end-of-an-era feel to it. I found it an interesting easy read. Four stars.

A Lamplighter dispatch:

Thank heavens that authorities have finally quelled the hunger riots in Lundar ... for weeks we have been subject to terrifying reports of property destroyed and monuments defiled, but now the loving boot of the military has come down upon the citizens of our Great Patrician and crushed them back to happy subservience. Small niggling questions do remain in the minds of those who care to ask ... Questions such as, how does a continent primarily known for export of staple grains fall victim to a famine? Only an ecological disaster could account for so much hunger within the borders of our Great and Rational Empire... Or could it be that most of the edible food is being exported to Lundar's wealthy neighbors, leaving the ground-stuck people with only scraps? It is common knowledge among the agricultural officers that the "unthinking workers" are to be last in line for food in times of thrift, even though the food would not exist were it not for their labor ... It is also common knowledge among those same classes that the Duke Lundar keeps a cheese fountain running in the center of her receiving hall at all times, along with a selection of meats and breads, in case a hungry guest should drop by ...
Lamplighter dispatches, #38 (distributor unknown)

Murder your Employer (by Rupert Holmes)

The conceit here is, in the words of Little Shop of Horrors, "a lot of folks deserve to die", and the institution of McMasters teaches aspiring deletists how to remove such people without getting caught. Not as serial killers, just as people getting rid of that one person in their lives who just deserves to die (their blackmailer, the over-the-top abusive boss or spouse, etc). The other conceit is, I suppose: when you read an Agatha Christie puzzlebox that involves a super-convoluted setup, and you think "who would actually go to all that trouble?" - the answer is a graduate of McMasters. It ends up being another variant on Evil Hogwarts (no magic, but enough eccentricities to squeak in anyway) due to the tradition of practicing murder technique on the students.

The dean continued, "Some ingredient in this evening's meal-when administered in enough quantity and lacking any remedy - has the ability to end your life. Bear in mind it is not enough to merely know the name of a poison and how to obtain it. The psychology of its presentation is vital. Be sure you take that into account with this evening's 'oral exam.'" Erma Daimler gave a single snort at Harrow's turn of phrase. "If you feel you have identified the toxic ingredient, stand and call my name. First student to identify the poison will have his lowest exam grade this term raised to one hundred. Quite the prize. Guess incorrectly, though, and your highest exam grade will be lowered to a sixty. Should you fall ill and not recover despite our best efforts, you will be remembered at a touching ceremony this Sunday and entered into the McMasters annals with a citation for valor, despite showing such poor taste." He waited for a laugh but the room was stony silent, it being an axiom of show business that the condemned are an extremely tough crowd.

It's clever (especially once it gets to the part where the PCs each try to carry out their own murder), and it's witty, but its soul is a little hollow. It states four rules:

Is this murder necessary?
Have you given your target every last chance to redeem themselves?
What innocent person might suffer by your actions?
Will this deletion improve the life of others?

but both faculty and students seem to have a lot of line-crossers. (I've decided that smart/clever (makes me think), witty/amusing (makes me smile), and soul/heart (makes me care), are all three necessary for me to love a book, but I can like it well enough with just two. Maybe I'll try rating them this way for a bit.). Oh, and as this was the second time that I encountered the Strid in a book, it turns out to be real!

Babel (by R. F. Kuang)

In long form, the title is BABEL --OR-- THE NECESSITY OF VIOLENCE // An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution. Start with the British Empire, and add magical silver, which gets its effect from the semantic difference between a word and its translation. Many of the translators are acquired from the colonies as children, well paid and "civilized", and expected to be forever grateful to their British betters for their improved situation. Some of them are grateful, or at least thankful to be so much better off, and others chafe a bit more at their the aggressions micro and macro, and at the colonial gunboat diplomacy they are expected to help with. So: rebellion.

Made me think: Yes. I mostly ingest my history in small doses laced liberally with story, and this was no exception. The digressions about the philosophy of translation were fascinating.
Professor Playfair ploughed on. 'There is no right answer, of course. None of the theorists before you have solved it either. This is the ongoing debate of our field. Schleiermacher argued that translations should be sufficiently unnatural that they clearly present themselves as foreign texts. He argued there were two options: either the translator leaves the author in peace and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him. Schleiermacher chose the former. Yet the dominant strain in England now is the latter - to make translations sound so natural to the English reader that they do not read as translations at all.
Made me smile: Mostly yes. The book is a tragedy, not a comedy, but there is humor here and there, wry and dry.
The English made regular use of only two flavours - salty and not salty - and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them.
Made me care: Yes. The characters are real and different and I could sympathize with multiple of them even when they violently disagreed. I am well aware that I am too comfortable and privileged to be truly rebellious, so books like these are also kind of moral homework. Also, I have a very deep soft spot for good descriptions of friendship.
By the time they'd finished their tea, [the four main characters] were almost in love with each other - not quite yet, because true love took time and memories, but as close to love as first impressions could take them. The days had not yet come when Ramy wore Victoire's sloppily knitted scarves with pride, when Robin learned exactly how long Ramy liked his tea steeped so he could have it ready when he inevitably came to the Buttery late from his Arabic tutorial, or when they all knew Letty was about to come to class with a paper bag full of lemon biscuits because it was a Wednesday morning and Taylor's bakery put out lemon biscuits on Wednesdays. But that afternoon they could see with certainty the kind of friends they would be, and loving that vision was close enough.

(Hmm. This three point system makes me prone to overquoting. Four and a half stars by the old system.)

Ten Thousand Stitches and Long Shadow (by Olivia Atwater)

These are the second and third of the Regency Faerie Tales, the first of which was Half a Soul. I continued to find these charming, as well as righteous. (The happy ending for a Cinderella is to marry a prince. The happy ending for a righteous Cinderella is to marry someone who will help her inspire more servant rebellions.) The faerie side of things gets a little less goofy, which was an improvement; still light and fluffy-pleasant but with enough vitamins to not feel like completely empty calories.

Tribute, The Sage Empress, parts I and II (by Sherwood Smith)

These are set in the same "gallant wanderers" setting that The Phoenix Feather was set in. That was Smith's pandemic fun setting, and I adored it; I adored these too. Tribute features a young, nearly-blind musician taken as tribute by the Empire (actually, this happens after enough initial plot in a different direction, and it changes the course of the story so abruptly, that I was a little jarred - I think that was my only quibble). Once at court, things are a balance between art and politics. It's about friendship, and mentorship, and demons, and trying to become more than you are. As the main characters are musicians (one old, one terrible-sighted) rather than gallant wanderers, there are not so many fight scenes, but I wished I could hear the music in the music scenes. There are lots of lovely character bits. I highlighted "He served as my idea of friendship, the other person you were happy to see each new day, who knew you, who trusted you, and whom you could trust." because I always like friendship themes.

The second two books take place many generations later; Granny Zim, the teacher in Tribute shows up as a guardian spirit but otherwise there is not much connection. The story starts in the Imperial Court, with a lot of excruciatingly police backstabbing, huge rank gaps, and then - again, after the plot had gone along quite a ways in one direction, a big upheaval as main character Renti's family is betrayed. (Less surprising than the direction change in the first book, because the court is so razor-edge tense the entire time). Then there are two books of Escapades and Rescuing and Gallant Wandering - but again, not as much violence, this time because the main character is digging in her heels and doing everything she can to keep everyone from just saying "Well, it's a fighting genre, and we're in civil war, so it's time for the army combat mechanic...". Also everyone keeps trying to put Renti back in her proper Imperial Princess box, and she keeps escaping.

Made me smile: Yes. They aren't comedy, but they're written by someone with a sense of humor, who I imagine if I had a conversation with we would do a lot of laughing.
Made me think: Yes. There are a lot of points of view, and places where they overlap some and conflict some, rather than being good guys and bad guys. And, honestly, I kind of kept expecting things to devolve into the army combat mechanic too, so there had to be some rethinking of my own assumptions. It is basically a fun story, but it's still grounded in newer virtues.
Made me care: Yes. Coming of age stories can be iffy - I don't want to spend the entire book waiting for the main character to become worthwhile. But Renti starts on the right side of decent, with some princess privilege and a lot of blind spots, and it's about her coming into better wisdom and power and people skills.

Fathomfolk (by Eliza Chan)

This one is not a "for fun" story. The world has flooded; Tiankaw is a city of humans in buildings above the ocean, and "salties" in the polluted water underneath, or the tidal slums. Salties are all the various supernatural water creatures - sirens, sea-witches, kelpies, kappa, seadragons - but the culture is East/South Asian. Mira is a half-siren, and the only saltie captain in the police. Nami is a young seadragon (saltie deepsea royalty), politically radical but also full of princess privilege, and easily manipulated by her anarchist boyfriend. Cordelia is a sea-witch. Mira is the only one I had much sympathy for; Nami is in the "waiting for her to become decent" category, and I still have no idea what the hell Cordelia's actual goals were, so her being willing to be murderously cut-throat in pursuit of them just put her in the bad guy for the sake of bad guy category. It was interesting, especially the world-building, but I didn't smile much and I only cared a little.

Lux (by Brandon Sanderson)

An audiobook-only followup to the Steelheart trilogy, where getting superpowers turns you evil (the villains are called Epics). It takes place at the same time as the original trilogy, but deals with another group of Reckoners (the anti-Epic group), with some brief appearances by the Professor and Knighthawk from the originals. The fight scenes are, as always, interesting and complicated, and while the genre pretends towards post-apocalyptic, it feels more comic-book than grimdark. But... there's this really big plot annoyance in the main mission (take down the TK-powered flying city). Basically, the two choices are "crash and kill everyone" and "controlled landing", and they start out with a plan for the latter. But it doesn't survive contact with the enemy, and then... even the people who are supposed to be making the plan can't seem to keep it straight whether they need to kill the TK Epic (because crash) or not kill her (because control), and don't seem to realize that there's a conflict between the two. It's just... confusing.

[Re]coding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better (by Jennifer Pahlka)

Another non-fiction book! This is about the troubles with implementing governmental policy via tech; the historical reason it's so bad (the government didn't want to be in the business of "data entry" back in the day, ossification of requirements, lack of connection/communication between the politicians and the contractors who do the building), and some cases where things were improved. Mahk said this book should be mandatory reading if you live in America, so I did his homework. It was fascinating and depressing and maybe also a little optimistic; I feel much better informed but am not as sure how to behave differently.

Who is the author (excerpt from her book page): Jennifer Pahlka is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and the Federation of American Scientists and an advisor to the Abundance Network. She founded Code for America in 2010 and led the organization for ten years. In 2013, she took a leave of absence to serve as U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama and helped found the U.S. Digital Service. She served on the Defense Innovation Board, started by the late Ash Carter, under Presidents Obama and Trump. At the start of the pandemic, she also co-founded U.S. Digital Response, which helps government meet the needs of the public with volunteer tech support.

A Sorceress Comes to Call (by T. Kingfisher)

This says it is a retelling of the "The Goose Girl" but it is a very loose retelling. There's a maid, and a magic horse, and some geese... though I guess "A magic horse named Falada" is a pretty specific point. It's definitely horror-adjacent; the later scenes with Falada are seriously creepy. Cordelia is the daughter of Evangeline, a powerful and vicious sorceress, who is looking to snare a rich man to marry. You can't use actual sorcerous mind control on your betrothed, because a church wedding will break the spell, but she's happy enough to use it on Cordelia. The abusive mother/daughter relationship would definitely be triggering if that's a trigger of yours. The other way in which the story is kind of horror rather than fantasy is that the main characters (Cordelia, and also Hester, the rich man's spinster sister) don't take very much action. Hester's initial plan - bring in her friends for a house party to distract her brother and divert Evangeline - is lovely, and gets us some more active characters, but Cordelia does spend a long time too terrified to put much "agon" in "protagonist".

City of Last Chances and House of Open Wounds (by Adrian Tchaikovsky)

Tchaikovsky has been nominated for the Hugo for both his Children of Time series and The Final Architecture series, and won the former (er, won and declined, because of the disaster that was the 2023 Hugos), but I think this one is even better. I love reading an author who is very good and still getting better. There is a third in the trilogy, due out in December, but I want to write about these before I forget the details.

Ilmar is a city occupied by the Palleseen legions. It's a complex setting, with local workers, the criminal underworld, refugees from other occupied lands, university students and professors, contract demons, neighborhoods fallen to the haunted reminders of the city's deposed lords, bureaucrat-philosophers, soldiers, tavern-keepers... it goes on and on. The construction of the story is fascinatingly suited to the patchworked setting - in the first chapter, we meet Yasnic, last priest of God, who is small and cranky, and his boarding-house breakfast including a university student who also lives there. In the second chapter we're somewhere else - we meet the Palleseen Sage-Archivest Ochelby just in time for his death in The Wood because his protective ward has been stolen. In the third chapter, we're at a card game between players from various city groups and factions. Fleance has put the ward into the pot when someone comes in announcing the death of Ochelby - and someone else escapes with the ward. Then it's a chapter with Ruslav, underworld thug, and his crush on the student from Chapter One. Then we've got an interrogation about where the ward went. And so on. I had been thinking of it as a relay race with the baton being passed between characters and locations, but it's not even that - everyone is running in different directions and the connections aren't that direct. But it's brilliant and mesmerizing and serves to paint a fuller picture of the setting than following any one character would do - we get to have a little bit of exposition about each new set of people we meet by the omniscient narrator as an introduction, so it's like revealing the whole painting one unconnected jigsaw piece at a time. (As I spell-check all of these, I note that I cited Floating Hotel as doing something a little similar; I wonder that I keep being surprised by it. Though City of Last Chances seems to make longer leaps?

The second book follows Yasnic, no longer in Ilmar and now a conscript in the Pallaseen army, as he's dumped into an odds-and-ends medical team made up mostly of foreign conscripts and non-Pallaseen religious flotsam and jetsam, and what happens to them in the Pallaseen's ongoing ever-expanding conquest. It's not a mosaic the way the first book is - Yasnic's part of a tighter ensemble cast, but it's a very varied ensemble, and we still get the trick of getting new exposition for each of them as we jump around between.

If you haven't been reading Tchaikovsky, or fell off of Shadows of the Apt, give these a try (or wait until December). I also very much recommend the audiobook; David Thorpe does a lovely job with the voices and accents.
Made me smile: Yes. Actually made me laugh, multiple times. I particularly love bickering written by a good writer.
Made me think: Yes. It's clever and complex and fits together like a Rube Goldberge clockwork device.
Made me care: Yes. Everyone, even the worst villains or the most naive students, is treated with empathy and affection.
Tchaikovsky insect quotient: There's one very large horrific bug placed on the mantel (and later fired) in book one, and one very small scorpionfly God with a bit part.

Here's our first introduction to Yasnic, and what I mean by exposition in the introduction. It doesn't read like an infodump, but in a brief paragraph you have a sketch of not just Yasnic's life but already some hints about the Ilmaran occupation.:

"It's cold," God said. "It's so cold." The divine presence was curled up on His shelf like an emaciated cat, and about the same size. He had shrunk since the night before, and perhaps that, too, was a blessing. Sometimes Yasnic could do with a little less God in his life, and here he was this morning, and God was smaller by at least a quarter. He gave thanks, his knee-jerk reaction ingrained from long years of good upbringing by Kosha, the previous priest of God. Back when Ilmar had been a more tolerant place, and old Kosha and Yasnic and God had lived in three rooms above a tanner's and had meat at least once a twelveday.

Ten Percent Thief (by Lavanya Lakshminarayan)

This is pure satire - not the funny mocking kind, but the acid razor bitter humor kind. The setting is Apex City, once Bangalore before the Meritocracy took over, now run by the Bell Corp. The top Twenty Percent are the elite (influencers and managers). The seventy-percenters are the workers. The bottom performing ten percent are culled every year, to become Analogs. Twenty versus seventy isn't a fixed caste - oh, no, this is a meritocracy, so any seventy percenter can get to twenty if they just work hard enough (and overcome all the ways the deck is stacked). It's a combination of future dystopia and present dystopia with future paint. It's a lot like City of Last Chances both that the plot is (again!) carried forward by glimpses of various people up and down the social spectrum, and also that the story is about rebellion against the system.

We invest in the wisdom of experience, insofar as that investment continues to yield results.
from the Meritocratic Manifesto, 'Concerning Geriatric Supervision and Ministration, Article III (c)

Also, this bit from a schoolchildren's supervised tour of the Analog:

'To your right, you'll catch a brief glimpse of Bell Corporation's Analog Rehabilitation Centre.
'Here we give the most Productivity-challenged Analogs the chance to fulfil their lives with purpose. Through humane, perfectly sanitised limb- and organ-harvesting techniques, an Analog can finally serve our society in the way it normally fails to. In many cases, it is one last act of redemption for the system's most Unproductive, their greatest service to the wider Bell community!
A squeak. A gasp. Eyes grow wide as saucers.
This is the vegetable farm. This is the home of the VeggieMaker, that urban legend their parents threaten to give them away to when they throw tantrums, stay up past their bedtime and refuse to eat their vegetables.

If it didn't include the bitter humor in spades, I think I would have fled from the razors, and I'm still not sure I enjoyed it exactly - it hits too close to home - but it was really very good, and covered all three of "made me smile / made me think / made me care". It's also a first novel by the author - I'll give it an extra half star for that to push it up to five.

The Witchwood Knot (by Olivia Atwater)

This one is a Victorian Faerie Tale (instead of the Regency Faerie Tales that the previous three Atwater books were), and it is so very Gothic. It has a governess and a curse and a haunted musician and a wicked lord and an elderly invalid in the attic, and a ghost cat, and the plot is an interesting tangle (a knot, in fact). Winnie has been summoned by her old benefactress, Lady Longwood, to protect grandson Robert, from the house's curse. Winnie doesn't like children and doesn't want to be a governess, but she does owe Lady Longfell and also needs the money. There's a nice mystery as far as what/why the curse is, and then some rescuing that needs doing. Very atmospheric, and generally charming. Three and three quarters stars, and here's the quote I highlighted for "made me think":

"Innocence is so offensive, isn't it?" he asked her finally. "It is never content in its existence. It must force itself upon the rest of the world, insisting that true horror is a fiction."