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firstfrost) wrote2026-02-16 12:05 am
Twenty books
- The Witches of Lychford (by Paul Cornell)
It was perfectly fine - decent character, a bit of spooky mystery, some poignant bits, some decent political commentary - but I was surprised at how fast it went. I am a bit cross that Amazon makes it look like a book series at book prices, when they are novellas. This is probably a "fool me once, shame on me" case; they do also have a version of the first five for a less pricey price.
- Katabasis (by R. F. Kuang)
In brief: two grad students embark on a Dante's Inferno quest to get their advisor back from Hell. Much more literally religious than Babel, the previous book of Kuang's that I read. Mmm, maybe not "religious". Hell and the afterlife are a fact of magic, but which god(s) are in charge is quite flexible. It's not about faith or worship, it's about magic/metaphysics. Which segues nicely into my very long quote.
Babel had a brilliant magic system, which was honed to a sharp silver spike to drive through colonialism. Katabasis also has a brilliant magic system: here is where it is explained.
Magick, the most mysterious and capricious of disciplines, admired for its power, derided for its frivolity, is in brief the act of telling lies about the world.
What magicians of ancient civilizations discovered through accident and ingenuity, and what the English philosopher-magicians of the eighteenth century onward codified into the Euro-American received canon, was that the natural laws of the world were set but fragile. You could cleverly reinterpret them. For brief periods of time one could even bewilder and suspend them, so long as you spun the right web of untruths. Linguistic trickery, logical conundrums, it all worked. All you had to do was find a set of premises that, even if just for a split second, made the world seem other than what it really was. The chalk, and whatever remnants of living-dead magical energy lay in the pulverized shells of those sea creatures that perished millions of years ago, did the rest.
Now, magick had progressed a lot since, say, the primitive rituals suggested by the Uffington chalk inscriptions, and there had since been a proliferation of flashy subfields that in fact had nothing to do with chalk, but rather all sorts of arcane objects, enchanted music, and visual illusions. One could now study the archaeology of magick, the history of magick, the music of magick, and on and on. Over in America, visual illusions and flashy showmanship were all the rage. In Europe they were going on about things called postmodernist and poststructuralist magick, which seemed to involve lots of spells doing the opposite of what their inventors wanted, and spells that did nothing at all, which everyone claimed was very profound. But all the best magick was still done at Cambridge, and good, traditionalist Cambridge was dedicated to the bare bones of the art. Analytic magick. Chalk, surface, paradox.
The paradox -- the crucial element. The word paradox comes from two Greek roots: para, meaning "against," and doxa, meaning "belief." The trick of magick is to defy, trouble, or, at the very least, dislodge belief. Magick succeeds by casting confusion and doubt. Magick taunts physics and makes her cry.
Take, for instance, the Sorites Paradox. Imagine a heap of sand. Very simple. To remove one grain of sand from the heap does not make it any less a heap. Neither does removing two. You could sit there with tweezers for hours, but you would not have diminished the heap. What if you remove a thousand grains? A million? Precisely how many grains of sand must you remove before it is no longer a heap? If you sit cross-legged with a pair of tweezers, plucking out the sand one grain at a time, what is the precise moment when you will succeed in your demolition of the heap? No one can name this moment. But if the difference between the heap and the heap-minus-one is minuscule, how can you ever transform a heap into a not-heap?
Come on. You know very well what a heap is. You know it when you see it. It is like porn. And you know that if you shovel giant piles of sand out of the heap, there will come a moment when you can definitely call it not-a-heap.
But just for that moment, when the paradox is laid out to you in that precise wording, you don't know. For a moment, you think it is true -- that it is impossible, indeed, to turn a heap into a not-heap. In fact you are probably so exhausted from hearing the word heap that the very concept is a blank to you.
Confusion, doubt. And with that, for just a moment, the world blinks. The heap does not run out.
It was this blink that had seduced Alice to her field. In her freshman year of college she took an Introduction to Logic class. In their second week, they were treated to a magick demonstration. A visiting postdoc stood before the lecture hall and drew a chalk circle around a small pile of sand on a table. "Watch," he said, and reached in to scoop a handful away. He did this again, and again, and again. He invited the class to line up and, one by one, try to empty the pile with their hands. They tried; they couldn't. Each time their hands left the circle, the space around the pile blurred, and the sand did not diminish.
Alice watched the sand spill from her fingers, and something knocked over in her chest.
She could not breathe. Now, here was a miracle. Here was Jesus, turning five loaves and two fish into an endless supply. All the fields she had considered for her major -- maths, physics, medicine, history -- they all fell away, they seemed so irrelevant, for why would you study static truths when truth had just exited left? She felt it then. She felt it every time. The stomach-dropping awe, the wondrous delight of a child at a circus who'd just seen a rabbit disappear. Through all her years of study, this feeling never went away. You thought the world was one way and then it wasn't. One could become zero. One could become two. A blink of an eye, and the fact of the matter was not. If the world could be fluid for you once, how many more times could you make it dance according to your whims?
Everyone else lived in such an ossified world. They simply took the rules given to them. They were interested only in articulating their own limits; they moved about as if in stone. But magicians lived in air, dancing on a tentative staircase of ideas, and it was a source of endless delirium, to know that the instant the world began to bore you, you could snap your fingers, and you'd be in free fall once again.
All it took was to tell a lie -- and to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that all the rules could be suspended. You held a conclusion in your head and believed, through sheer force of will, that everything else was wrong. You had to see the world as it was not.
And here, I thought to myself "This is an interesting mechanic. Less political than Babel, but I like it." Swear to God, I did, and then kept reading.
Now Alice, as she proceeded through her coursework, got very good at this. All skilled magicians were. Success in this field demanded a forceful, single-minded capacity for self-delusion. Alice could tip over her world and construct planks of belief from nothing. She believed that finite quantities would never run out, that time could loop back on itself, and that any damage could be repaired. She believed that academia was a meritocracy, that hard work was its own reward. She believed that department pettiness could not touch you, so long as you kept your head down and did not complain. She believed that when professors snapped at you, when they belittled and misused you, it was because they cared. And she believed, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that she was all right, that everything was all right, that she did not need help, that she could just stiffen her upper lip and keep on going.
She believed these things with all her might, with the same delirium it took to keep a heap of sand from ever running out. She had no choice. It was essential practice for everything that came
I have never been sucker punched quite so absolutely and unsuspectingly, by a book. Made me think, made me care, made me smile - did not quite make me cry, but it was close. All that said, though, when the emotional effect has faded, I think I liked Babel better. Dante's Inferno, for all that it is interesting, does not have that much plot, and Katabasis is a similar sort of travelogue, and also one that made me a little unsure about size. If you're just being shown around Hell by Virgil, then it might not matter which sinners you see and which ones you miss. But if you're looking for one specific guy... I'm not sure their searching was up to it. But on the other hand, it's Hell. The power of narrative is probably pretty strong.
- Moonflower Murders (by Anthony Horowitz)
I've also been watching Foyle's War, which Jennifer hooked me on, so I seem to be on a fairly serious Anthony Horowitz kick with this set of books (two more below). He has two novel serieses running now, both of them extra meta (previously mentioned here). Moonflower Murders is the sequel to Magpie Murders - in the first, we have book editor Susan Ryeland, whose mystery author Alan Conway has just died, and she is trying to find the final chapter of his book about detective Atticus Pünd, and in the process of hunting for it is perforce kind of investigating Conway's death. So there's a mystery novel inside a mystery novel, which is fun. The series continues on like this - Alan Conway is still dead, but Susan Ryeland has been hired to look into a missing daughter, on the theory that another of Conway's novels contains hints about what happened, as Conway was staying in the Moonflower hotel when there was a murder, which kind of sort of turned into another Pünd novel, which daughter Cecily just read and... okay, you don't need the whole convoluted setup, we can just say that again there is a novel(ette) within the novel, and clues hidden in one plot for the other plot. Susan, who has been running a hotel in Crete with her boyfriend since the last book, is kind of itching to get back to London, and takes the job. There's also a lot of introspection and angst about whether she wants to spend the rest of her life in Crete or with said boyfriend. Like the previous book, this one is nicely twisty and fun to follow along - I caught some of the clues (and did predict the boyfriend plot twist), but didn't guess very much of the solution. (I personally find villains who are well-loved by everyone who knows them, for years and years, but are secretly awful and evil all the time, to be implausible - but there are a lot of serial killers who that was apparently quite true of, so I think this is just a blind spot of mine. (Narrows eyes, looking at Jerry suspiciously...).
- Marble Hall Murders
Sequel to Moonflower Murders. This time, Susan Ryeland has been hired to shepherd a new author to write a new Atticus Pünd novel. And again there are clues to another mystery hidden in it, because the new author is imitating the old one. However. The thing that I objected to most was the anti-resolution of the boyfriend plot from the previous book. (Spoilers here). Susan spends all last book fussing about whether to leave boyfriend Andreas, because she misses London. Andreas makes a helpfully heroic entrance towards the end of the book, and basically says if Susan wants to go back to London, they can go back to London. She's more important to him than running the damn hotel. Yay Andreas! Susan decides to go back to Crete because Andreas is more important to her than her derailed-due-to-murder book editing career, or London. But then Marble Hall Murders opens with Susan, having broken up with Andreas and returned to London because she didn't want to run a hotel in Crete. For crying out lound, what a waste of an entire subplot. Obviously Susan has more relationship problems than just the hotel, and I'm not going to tell anyone, fictional or no, to stay in a relationship they don't want to be in, but I was quite cross with her for such fickleness in her character growth arc. Also, she continues in making Sulky Relationship Choices by being pissy at the detective investigating her when she is framed quite well for murder, even though it's pretty clear he doesn't think she did it. The actual mystery was fine, as was the embedded mystery-ette, but the main character is in the doghouse with me. Maybe not as much as Fictional Anthony Horowitz was for not telling his wife he had been arrested for murder because he didn't want to worry her, though.
- Close to Death
And this has Fictional Anthony Horowitz in it, from the other series, but he's making better life choices this time. Hawthorne, the series detective (I feel oddly compelled to refer to him as Fictional Hawthorne, in that he is fictional, but he's neither as doubly fictional as Pünd nor as pretending-to-be-real fictional as Horowitz, he's just normally fictional. Or... is he? Fictional Horowitz is writing about Hawthorne, who is real to him. Real Horowitz is also writing about Hawthorne, who is fictional to him! It's turtles all the way down!)
Ahem. Okay, I have pulled myself together.
I think this is one of my favorites so far. Traditionally the victim should be so saintly that no one could want to kill them, or so fiendish that everyone does. This book really leans in to the "everyone would want to kill him" side of things - he's the worst neighbor ever, in a close little gated community. It does a lovely job of Motives for Everyone, and also Red Herrings for Everyone, and some extra lampshades for "surely it's not going to be Murder on the Orient Express?" and while I didn't really need the subplot of "Horowitz investigates Hawthorne", it appars to be the running C plot in this series so I shouldn't quibble too much.
- The Killer Question (by Janice Hallett)
Hallet continues to be brilliant in whatever this is she's doing. Like her other books, this one is written as a series of transcripts and text conversations and such. Mal and Sue run a pub called The Case Is Altered - referring to a new piece of evidence or something else that makes you have to re-evaluate the whole case. The body of a cheater-at-pub-trivia-night is found dead in a nearby river. Then a mysteriouly good (and also mysteriously mysterious) pub trivia team shows up, irritating the next-best team. Much texting ensues.
The frame story is Mal and Sue's nephew trying to sell the story of what happened to a TV producer, and so he has carefully curated the narrative line, and the flashback line, in a way that each chapter ends with a surprise or a revelation, leading the whole case to be altered. It's really well done. It does mean that I didn't even try to solve the whodunit part, since "what is actually going on in this book?" kept starting over, but I was hooked the whole way through. (I don't think the mysteries I read lend themselves as well to "made me think / made me care / made me smile" ratings; they are more about "amused me / intrigued me / surprised me". Maybe it's similar, but surprise instead of caring. I'm more okay not liking any of the characters in a mystery, and less okay with there being no plot twists.). Amused me, intrigued me, and surprised me. (Close to Death also pulled off all three, but Marble Hall added "annoyed me" which kind of overshadowed everything else). Five stars.
- The Malevolent Seven (by Sebastian de Castell)
I do like the genre of "rogues forced to save the world", and this does a good job of making the angels pretty terrible and the devils a little bit nice while also being terrible. And it does a nice job of putting the band together, one mismatched rogue at a time. I'm less sure of how well it hooks them on the plot (other than "there's some guy who wants to hire seven war mages" - lampshading The Magnificent Seven is not actually the same thing as motivation!), or how well the final choices are justified, but it wasn't bad. I should stop reading books that claim to be like Terry Pratchett, though - this might well have been as good as early Pratchett, but by the time anyone is good enough to be as good as late Pratchett, they don't have to resort to name-dropping on the cover.
- Bury Your Gays (by Chuck Tingle)
I keep reading a lot of appreciation for Chuck Tingle as a good writer, but I am just too easily embarassed to review something like My Handsome Sentient Face Mask Protects Me Despite The Ridiculous Conspiracy Theories That He Won't Also He Pounds My Butt, and probably too easily embarassed to even read it unless I am sure there is not only no one in the house but no one in any of the neighboring houses. But okay, that's my problem, not yours or his. Bury Your Gays is a good horror novel, and Tingle is a good writer. (His style reminds me a lot of Scalzi on a good day). Misha is a closeted Hollywood screenwriter; he's being pressured by the studio to have a dramatic death in the season finale of his X-Files equivalent, and he's also starting to be stalked by characters from some of his horror movies. Making the horror thingies be quotes from in-world-fictional horror works nicely; it means the book can fill in a bit of backstory about why the black lamb (for example) is terrifying when it's making its first appearance, but Misha can still be wondering why he has a stalker who's really good at cosplay and take some time to realize things are getting bad. It ramps up well, ties in enough real world to ground the scary things in real life being scary, and then closes it out with a more-positive-than-most-horror-manages ending. Plus, as a horror screenwriter, Misha makes a nicely genre-savvy character to listen to. Four and a half stars.
Whether or not I understand the technical mechanics of my situation, it's my problem to fix. I don't know if I'm a hero who can save the day, but at the very least I'm a protagonist. I've gotta do something.
- The Hexologists: A Tangle of Time (by Josiah Bancroft)
Nearly forgot this one! It's the sequel to The Hexologists, if you couldn't guess. Isolde and Warren are investigating the death of an artist, except that each time they get close, they get rebooted into a slightly worse version of their world, and don't really remember. It's like Groundhog Day, but only the reader really sees it clearly, and halfway through the book, cities have always been plagued by carnivorous birds. You have to wear an umbrella with dangly chains to be safe, that's just how it is. Like the previous book, I liked it quite a lot, but didn't love it. Enough to enjoy and keep reading them, but not enough to insist that other people read them too. I find that I highlight a lot of funny bits to quote later - here's two, they're short.
"She was acquainted with the trauma of being shot, which she compared to being hit by a very sharp train."
* * * "If one were to pass her on the street, one might mistake her for a woman in mourning, such was the conspicuous bleakness of her attire. Though famously unwed, she seemed a widow in need of a dead husband."- The Impossible Fortune (by Richard Osman)
Book N in the Thursday Murder series. This one seems less sprawly than some of them, which is to the good, but it's not like I don't love the whole set. Joyce's daughter Joanna gets married; someone tries to kill the best man, who is partial owner of a security company with with whole lot of bitcoin in a vault. Also someone else is trying to kill Ron's kids, and Connie Lewis has a protege. It mostly all comes together, even! But the best is, as always, the gentle warmth in the spaces between the plot points. The gang is pleased and relieved that Elizabeth is starting to come back to herself. Ron realizing that his son is protecting him from knowing dangerous things, instead of the other way around. Joanna sitting with some new understanding of why she keeps her mother at arms' length. This bit struck home hard enough that I stopped the audiobook to get it down.
Why does she always push her mum away? There something about that relationship, something about being a child, and the need of a child to be an individual, to be something more than the things she's been taught and the way shes been raised. The need to somehow teach a lesson to the person who has taught her so many lessons? Joyce's love for her is unconditional, Joanna knows that, but, really, unconditional love has a huge flaw. If you love me no matter what, who I actually am doesn't matter. If someone loves your essence, your very being, what can you do to make them love you more or love you less? Nothing: there is no space. So the only option left to you is to continually prod at that unconditional love, to test it and stretch it, to mock it, even.
And it's not just that. There is a further problem with unconditional love, isn't there? Because what if you don't love yourself? What if, like Joanna, you obsess over your flaws and weaknesses, you constantly update the balance sheet of your own personality and find it wanting? Well, then the unconditional love of a parent is a sign that they simply don't know you. If they truly knew you, their love would be peppered with caveats. "I love you, but..."
- The Nameless Land (by Kate Elliot)
This is the sequel to The Witch Roads. The two books are definitely a tightly coupled duology; the previous book ends at a stopping place but not a conclusion, and things quickly go sideways and there is a lot of escaping and regrouping. The annoying entitled (in the divine-right-of-kings sort of way) prince improves a bit but only a plausible amount rather than the amount he would improve if he were the actual protagonist. Elen and her nephew manage to sort out their troubles, the haunt makes an unexpected new appearance and confuses everyone except Elen, and the plot finally manages to give pretty much everyone the ending they deserve - or let them grow into deserving a slightly better ending. Some of Kate Elliot's books are too large to hold in my head - these two were just the right size for me. The world is complicated, but the cast of characters is manageable and while there is clearly a ton of politics going on, it's mostly offstage except when it sends agents into the countryside where the story is taking place. Like the first book, it succeeds in all three of make me care, make me think, and make me smile.
All the bits I highlighted require explanation; here's one. (Prince Gevulin has a list of titles, all of which are accomplishments, one of which is "Eloquent Grace of the Wind Dance". This is after a battle in which some of our comrades have been killed).
"Just two cycles of the Wind Dance," said the prince, handing Kem the roster. "Then we depart."
The Wind Dance! Elen had thought it a boastful display of endurance and fast footwork, not a memorial. As Ipis began to clap out a steady and rather plain rhythm, the prince took a position with his arms outstretched and his palms open to the sky. He met Xilsi's eyes. She began to sing, not with words but in a mournful melody that flowed up and down like a searching wind across a wide and empty land, seeking a soul that no longer walked in the world. Her singing voice was light, higher than Elen expected from all her tough talk, but her tones rang true.
Even that didn't matter once the prince began to dance, for he spoke with his precise gestures and graceful movements.
The wind is a ceaseless voice, here a whisper and there a howl. So does grief accompany our lives as the wind blows in the land, never quite gone even when it is still. His gestures were gentle but the unfolding of the dance was implacable. We lose those we love, or we are lost to those we love. The world fades, or memory fades. Death comes to all things.
Elen's heart ached for Ao, for Sara'ala, for the intendant's wife and older daughter and for the younger daughter's lost husband, for Simo, and for the garrison killed by a sarpa's acid who she'd never known but who surely had kin and friends who would mourn them. For all those she had known and cared for, who had passed from this world as all must do in the full- ness of time.
The prince's elegant dancing wound the burden of mourning through the air, speaking for all.
At the appropriate place, Kem sang the descant, a recitation of the names of those being honored. Surely it was the highest honor to receive an elegy from a prince. According to the implacable hierarchy of the empire, all their lives were his to burn on the fire of his ambition. Yet had he never traveled north, they'd almost certainly still be alive. Perhaps this was Gevulin's way of acknowledging that they had died because they'd become inadvertently involved in his deadly duel for the throne.
- The White Octopus Hotel (by Alexandra Bell)
When Eve was a child, she left the front gate open and her younger sister was hit by a car. Her family was shattered, and Eve has been haunted ever since. Decades later, she mysteriously gets a key to the White Octopus, an opulent hotel in Switzerland which was destroyed in an avalanche decades before she was born. Apparently one of the treasures of the hotel is a set of notepaper that will let you write to a younger version of yourself - so Eve could prevent the accident. There are a lot of time traveling shenanigans, but it's all written in a lush slightly surreal-dreamy way that fits the extravagant poshness of the hotel. It's a little bit like the hotel from The Shining if it were a good guy, and a little bit from the time-traveling hotel with the Fifteenth Doctor and a bit like the Blue Prince mansion and also a bit like a dream sequence. (A lot of the confusing surreal things get tied up in a timey-wimey way at the end, but I don't count on that from dream sequences.) It was interesting but puzzling; I think the imagined visuals will stick with me more than the story.
- The Fourth Consort (by Edward Ashton)
I've been trying to read more books by people who aren't all-my-usual-favorite-authors. Sometimes they're hits and sometimes they're misses; other times they're perfectly fine. That third category is the hardest to write about. Dalton, and fellow human Neera, have been hired by Boreau, a giant crab alien who is part of one big stellar alliance. They're doing first contact with other planets; Boreau's alliance is competing with a different stellar alliance to pick up new planets. (Earth is one such new planet now part of Boreau's team.) Both groups have contact teams on this planet, to bring the minarchs (described as tarantula/velociraptors, but I basically thought of them as praying mantises) in on one side or the other. Dalton isn't a diplomat or xeno-anything; he's apparently the "ground pounder", kind of a bodyguard for Neera, but more like the guy they brouhght to lift the heavy boxes. When things go awry, Dalton is in way over his head; it kind of frustrated me that he didn't decide that that meant he needed to think harder or be more careful, he just kind of shrugs and makes his best guess as he goes along. It's interesting, and short, and I have no big complaints, but it didn't push any of the think/care/smile buttons very strongly.
- A Philosophy of Thieves (by Fran Wilde)
In the future, global warming has driven the super-rich into walled cities and everyone else is in company towns and caravaning around the dusty Skirts. A status symbol for rich parties is to hire a gang of professional thieves (part of the entertainer class) to pull of dramatic heists, that the guests get to try to thwart / catch, or else the host has to ransom the loot back. The Canarviers are one of the most well-known family thief gangs. It's an interesting premise for the heist genre, but it gets kind of muddly in the middle, as the thieves get caught or caught up in corporate politics. There's also some excerpts of chat groups that follow and discuss the rich families, which was amusing and apropos. The underclass and the heisting is fun, but we spend too much time on the machinations of the rich corporate types, who I had little sympathy for, even the nice ones. One description called it "The Great Gatsby meets Cirque du Soleil" which seems about right.
- Snake-Eater (by T. Kingfisher)
I thought this was going to be one of T Kingfisher's contemporary horror novels, but it's not quite scary enough to be horror, and it's also not quite contemporary, it's near-future in a barely noticable way. The lines are pretty blurry here, and all of Kingfisher's fantasy has an undercurrent of horror anyway, so let's just gesture vaguely at the genre and call it done. Selena is getting out of a junky (the demoralizing patronizing flavor of abusive) relationship and goes to visit her aunt in a small town in the Arizona desert. It turns out her aunt has died, but Selena temporarily stays to put things in order. It turns out that there are old gods out there in the high desert, including Snake-Eater, the more sinister name for a roadrunner. Peril ensues. Selena has some Issues to work through ("Selena believed, with every fiber of her being, that a person's worth was not defined by how hard they worked or how productive they managed to be. She also believed just as strongly that this did not apply to her.") and I can sympathize with all of them. I really liked this one - there's a nice cast of characters who Selena makes friends with, the setting is solid and interesting, and Selena is unfamiliar enough with the mysterious doings of local gods that what could be fantasy can ratchet up the tension. There's an afterword, in which the author explains that she spent a lot of her childhood in the Sonoran Desert and has recently moved back to Albequerque from North Carolina. This explains the deserty feel of her last two books. Also, I liked this bit also from the afterword:
If your only exposure to roadrunners is through Warner Bros., you may not be aware of this, but a roadrunner is somewhere between a velociraptor and a chicken with a shiv, and if this doesn't sound alarming to you, you have probably never been attacked by a rooster.
- God's Junk Drawer (by Peter Cline)
As a little kid, Peter Clines got nightmares from, and was also enthralled by Land of the Lost. Eventually, that turned into this book. Billy Gather, his dad, and his sister, fall through a wormhole to a valley with dinosaurs and a robot butler. Five years later, Billy falls back out, and spends some years with therapists who try to treat him for whatever "made up this story about dinosaurs to cover over his actual traumatic experiences" is. Post-flashback, he's an astrophysicist and he's figured out how to track the wormhole enough to get back to rescue his sister. Unfortunately, he accidentally brings his grad students. From that point on, the plot does what Cline does best, which is a plot twist in which you have to re-examine what's actually going on every five or so chapters. And a lot of people are eaten by dinosaurs or killed by Neanderthals. It's generally a lot of fun, though the students' hinted-at backstories suggest more mysterious subplots there than actually manifest. It's more of a fun romp and a puzzle box than think/care/laugh, but it's four star popcorn.
- Cry, Voidbringer (by Elaine Ho)
The Kingdom of Ashvi, as do many of its enemies, has an army (the masked Faceless) made up of stolen/tribute children raised as warriors. The wars are fought mostly by soldiers fighting against their kin, for their kidnappers - but they have nowhere else to go, if they escaped their original people would kill them for traitors. There are also the rare god-touched children, more powerful but still pawns in the wars. The new Queen of Ashvi is young and inexperienced, and makes bad choices out of fear and duty. Her advisor makes different bad choices, for more complicated reasons - more about protecting her people, but she has to preserve and increase her own power to have any chance of doing so. Hammer and Crescent are Faceless, tasked to steal and then guard and babysit Viridian - probably god-touched - until she develops her powers (after which she will be promoted to war-slave if she has a useful power, or else killed). Everyone does terrible things, out of fear and duty and pain, and because terrible things have been done to them first, but also - and more wrenchingly - out of love, This is not a happy book, but it is painfully compelling, and seriously impressive for a first novel. I cared too much about Hammer / Crescent / Viri and their terrible tragic spiral, and it did make me think about systems of power, and Hammer has enough bitter self-aware snark to add enough humor to tick all three boxes. Four and a half searing stars.
- Slayers of Old (by Jim C. Hines)
Jenny is a former Hunter of Artemis (like a Buffyverse Slayer or an InCryptid Price); Annette is a half-demon PI, and Temple is a wizard whose bloodline is tied to his house. All three are retired and run a semi-fake occult bookstore in Salem on the ground floor of Temple's house. Except now there are signs of another apocalypse in the making, possibly tied to someone from Jenny's old Scooby Gang. Three part spooky weird shit popcorn, one part Thursday Murder musings about age and mortality and friendship. I feel a little guilty for making this all references to other things, but even Hines called it "Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets the Golden Girls." Also, I realized I'm older than most of the Golden Girls characters (though not only older than one of their actresses at the time). That's kind of distressing.
- Doctor Who: The Ruby's Curse (by Alex Kingston)
This was an interesting experience. I haven't read any Doctor Who novels before, just watched the show, and I listened to this on audiobook read by the author, so it was really like reading fanfiction written by the characters themselves. It starts with River Song breaking into a high-security space jail to find somewhere quiet to work on writing her novel about Melody Malone, hard boiled gumshoe searching for the Eye of Horus. It switches back and forth beetween the outer plot and the inner one, until it goes all City of Angels (the musical, not the movie). It ended up feeling a little overcomplicated, but maybe that's because the pacing of a 45-minute TV episode and an 8-hour audiobook are very different.
- Star Trek: Lower Decks - Warp Your Own Way (by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio)
I loved Lower Decks a lot once it hit its stride, the same way Galaxy Quest was my favorite Star Trek movie, and the way Pratchett was my favorite author. It's funny, but it has actual emotional weight to it as well. Also, I loved choose-your-own adventures as a kid - I used to construct carefully plotted flowcharts to make sure I didn't miss anything. Warp Your Own Way is a perfect Lower Decks story, and a brilliant use of choose-your-own-adventure that builds the mechanic back into the fiction. Plus, it won the Hugo! It made me laugh out loud, it made me tear up a little, and technically it even required me to think because of the puzzle.
Yay, book reviews!
Also, I can't get over the fact that a) his tenses wander all over the place, and b) he THANKS HIS COPYEDITORS EVERY TIME! :)
Re: Yay, book reviews!
But yeah, I agree that the tone is different between the plot silliness and the serious parts; I don't find it jarring so much as... hmm... they live in a more silly version of the world, and the plots (and the interpersonal stuff that is plot-related, like how they interact with mafiosi and assassins sent to kill them) are sillier, but the emotional beats between the PCs can still be serious. The mix feels kind of RPG-ish, or comedies like Pushing Daisies or Lower Decks where the plots can be completely over the top silly but the relationships have real emotions. (Hmm. Maybe that's just how I think of good comedy; the plots are silly but the emotions aren't?)