Ahhh, Goddammit

Fuck 2020, and fuck cancer.  😭

Review: The Year of the Witching

The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a bit of a hard book to review. I liked it, but it was frustrating at times. The characters, especially the protagonist Immanuelle Moore, had a nice arc, the pacing was good, and the prose overall had good quality. But there were definite flaws in the worldbuilding, and while I was able to more or less overlook them in the end, those flaws remained.

At the same time, given the initial setup, those flaws were just about unavoidable. This is a book with a tight, claustrophobic focus on a religious cult, the surrounding community, and the Darkwood, where the antagonist Lilith's witch coven resides. The followers of the Prophet have nothing to do with the outside world, by design. There are hints that this is possibly a post-apocalyptic or post-climate-change future, and Bethel is established as being a thousand years old. "Heathen cities" are named and mentioned, but none of our characters go there. (Although the levels of technology are inconsistent and erratic and make me wonder if they have, or have had, trade with said cities in the recent past--where'd they get all the paper for the hundreds of books in the Prophet's library, for example?) The story has supernatural elements, which come slashing their way to the fore in the bloody climax. But the book as a whole has a decided contemporary tone, even with the witches and Immanuelle's display of supernatural power at the end. The cult of the Prophet borrows from Puritanism, the Salem witch trials, and the early history of the LDS church, given the polygamy and abuse of women and girls.

This vague, inconsistent worldbuilding was rather frustrating to me, but at the same time I saw how the story demanded it. This is a book about a patriarchal, misogynistic cult and the deconstruction thereof, exploring the mentality of the men who rule in said cult and the women who are prisoners of it. No one comes to rescue these women: our protagonist must learn to deprogram herself and save her family and love, as well as the community of Bethel. This is definitely a part of her character arc, her refusal to run and leave her community to its fate, no matter how much some of the characters (and even the reader, on occasion) may think Bethel deserves it. Looking at it from that standpoint, the "outside world" is irrelevant. If I want to know more about the overall society...well, that will just have to wait, I suppose, for the sequel. (Although this is a fairly self-contained story; a sequel doesn't really seem necessary.)

Having said all this, the reader's mileage will definitely vary. For the most part, I was able to put this aside and it bugged me less the further I got into the book. This is the author's first book, and I think she's a writer to watch. If she does better with the worldbuilding next time around, her stories will be forces to be reckoned with.

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Review: The Relentless Moon

The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the third book in the Lady Astronaut series, which proposes an alternate history of the 20th century: a meteor strikes the East Coast of the US in 1952, wiping out Washington DC and many other cities and setting the planet down a path to an extinction level event. In response, the world comes together to send humans to the Moon and Mars decades before it happens in our reality, in preparation for getting as many people as possible off Earth before it becomes uninhabitable. Echoing the "Mercury Thirteen," women who met the same qualifications as male astronauts in our timeline but weren't allowed into space, Kowal's series focuses on the Lady Astronauts. Elma York was the protagonist of the first two books in the series, The Calculating Stars (which won the 2019 Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel) and The Fated Sky, the story of this universe's First Mars Expedition. In this third volume, running concurrently with the events of Sky, Nicole Wargin, her friend and fellow astronette, steps front and center.

One of the highlights of this book is the protagonist: Nicole is over fifty, with a mature, stable marriage (the latter being a running theme throughout this series). She is a pilot and an astronaut, and as we learn from this narrative, she served as a spy during World War II, getting her training at a "Swiss finishing school." This comes in very handy to solve the central mystery of this book, namely who is trying to sabotage the Moon colony. In the series, Earth First terrorists resent the money being thrown into the space program (never mind that the IAC, this series' equivalent of NASA, is trying to get as many people as possible off Earth before the planet heats up and the oceans boil away), and their attempts to slow it down or throw it off track altogether become more and more violent. This comes to a head in a shocking plot twist in this book.

This story is over 500 pages, and a lot of that is due to the level of technical detail needed to depict a 60's-era space program. I cannot imagine the amount of research that went into this. Even at that, this alt-universe's technology is based on but still comparatively more advanced than the technology in our timeline, which makes me wonder how in the hell our astronauts made it to the Moon at all. Mary Robinette Kowal's Moon is eerie and beautiful, but it can still kill you in a heartbeat (see chapters 14 and 15, the nail-biting narrative of a Moon landing rocket crash, for a prime example).

This would seem to result in a book that is all specs and no heart, but the author's characterizations are on a par with her technical prowess. The protagonist is a prime example of this: Nicole is a complex character struggling with her role as a politician's wife--during the course of this book, her husband announces a run for President--and a history of anorexia nervosa. This is depicted straightforwardly and manner-of-factly, as something she will have to cope with for the rest of her life.

This book, due to the events of the plot, is the darkest of the three, so far. I didn't get such an immediate surge of sensawunda from this one--it's a story that takes its time for its twists and turns to unfold, and one you have to think about longer than the first two--but it's a story, and characters, that will stick with you for just as long.

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Review: Crush the King

Crush the King by Jennifer Estep
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is the third book in the Crown of Shards trilogy, the story of Everleigh Saffira Winter Blair, the only royal of the kingdom of Bellona left standing after a massacre. In the first book, Evie gains the throne; in the second; she learns how hard it is to keep in the midst of dealing with court politics and backstabbing nobles; and in this final volume, she finally exacts her revenge on one of the villains who murdered her family.

This sounds like an exciting storyline, but unfortunately, this book...really isn't. I thought about why it disappointed me for a while, and eventually came to the conclusion that in this book, especially compared to the first two, the characterization suffers. This is a more plot-heavy book--probably a necessity to tie up all the threads--but the characters feel shallow and underdeveloped as a result. (Particularly short-shrifted is Evie's lover, the bastard prince Lucas Sullivan, who comes off as bland and uncompelling and fading into the background. And what's the deal with Serilda, the leader of the Black Swan gladiator troupe, and Cho, the dragon morph? Those two deserve a book of their own.)

The villain, King Maximus of the neighboring kingdom of Morta, is little more than a cartoon caricature (but the author has always had difficulty fleshing out her villains) with no motivation beyond invade/conquer/murder. Which, granted, may be adequate, but given the amount of time he spent center stage, I expected something a little deeper. There was also an extended flashback to when a twelve-year-old Evie's family was murdered that I couldn't really figure out the reason for. It seemed superfluous, especially with the number of pages it took up.

In fact, the most interesting parts of this book were the magical animals: the Mortan strixes, giant warrior birds similar to gryphons their soldiers ride into battle, and the tiny owl-like caladrius. Both animals seemed to have a humanlike intelligence. I would have loved more time spent on them.

All in all, this book was rather meh and disappointing. Too bad.


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Review: Deathless Divide

Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read the first book in this series, Dread Nation, two years ago, and gave it five stars. For good reason: it was a tightly constructed, scathing depiction of racism and white supremacy, in the alternate-history setting of a Civil War-era zombie apocalypse.

Unfortunately, while this book has the same setting and characters, it's simply not as good. The social and political commentary is muted, the pace is uneven and meandering, and the story is not as well plotted. Our two most interesting characters, co-narrators Jane and Katherine, are caught up in a kinda-mad-scientist chase story that doesn't have the same emotional resonance. (Yeah, the kinda mad scientist does have a point. Unless someone finds a cure for the "shamblers," the human race is on the road to extinction. But damn, Jane and Katherine go round and round before finally plugging his worthless ass.)

I understand the author's decision to send both girls further out West after their escape from the shambler-overrun town of Summerland. As she explains in her afterward, the history of the American West has erased black people, and she wanted to show that "Black Americans were everywhere in the American West: herding cattle and plying their trade as ranch hands, establishing homesteads and trying their hand at farming, and, yes, fighting against Native Americans." To be sure, this is a laudable goal, but that does not a story--or at least a memorable story, along the lines of the first book--make.

On the good side, I did quite enjoy the introduction of Katherine Devereaux as a POV character. The author was spot-on in her portrayal of both Katherine and Jane's voices, and the up and down story of their friendship is well told. Jane is even more ruthless and murderous this time around, for good reason, and Katherine spends a good portion of the book trying to save her from herself. They are the most important people in each other's lives (although their relationship is platonic; if I'm reading Katherine correctly, she's asexual--she has no interest in a physical or romantic relationship with anyone). At the end, after they have struggled against the living and the dead, they arrive in the town of Haven, California. Jane finally finds her mother, only to discover her mother has another life with her new husband and family and has no real interest in her daughter. Jane, a restless killer ever on the hunt for the restless dead, realizes she cannot stay in this oasis of peace.

I want something more.

I want the purpose I had when we went searching for the Spencers in Baltimore or struggled to escape Summerland. I want the freedom I had when Callie and I made our own way across the continent. I want the sense of justice I felt when I lived by my wits and hunted the men and women who plagued civilized society. Less killing would be nice, I don't miss that, but if killing is the price of freedom then I'm willing to pay it.

I just wish Jane and Katherine had a more tightly written book this time around. Hopefully, if there's a third volume, that will be rectified.

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Review: Hella

Hella by David Gerrold
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book has a bit of an odd structure. There's a pivotal moment halfway through that changes its trajectory completely. Up till then, it's a dense, slow-moving exploration of the alien planet the author has created, with meticulous descriptions of the planetary ecology and biology. Now, for the most part, at least to me, this is all pretty interesting; David Gerrold has clearly thought long and hard about his setting and world, and his focus on ecological/biological minutiae is a quirk of long standing (see: The War Against the Chtorr). The way this is presented is also consistent with the main character's methodical, hyperfocused temperament. As a layperson I don't know if the science is plausible or a bunch of hooey, but it certainly sounds reasonable enough, and doesn't have the appearance of handwaving.

However, for while there I wondered if I was reading a book with an actual story or an alien textbook/travelogue: Hella: Pleasures and Perils, by Kyle Martin (the protagonist). This would not have been entirely unreadable, I suppose, but it would have required a bit of slogging. But the aforementioned plot point hits with a literal bang, and the story skids to a frantic halt and takes off in an entirely new direction, morphing into a political thriller.

Your mileage will definitely vary on this. For me, the mashup was a bit awkward, although the story mostly gets past it. However, the second half of the book doesn't really pick up the pace until the final chapters, because now that the conflicting factions have been set in motion, we have to have lengthy conversations about just what political worldviews are fighting each other here. (To be fair, this is due to the main character and narrator, Kyle, who is neurodivergent--he has some kind of "syndrome," perhaps autism, although it's not defined--never having paid attention to or understood politics until his friends and family are caught up in it.) Through Kyle's incomprehension and questioning, we learn what the themes of the book are: capitalism vs. socialism, selfish, greedy individualism vs. collectivism (one of the villains complains, "I came here to be rich, not a workhorse!"), corporations vs. community, and dominating/conquering vs. cooperation/coexistence.

To be sure, the author--and the winning faction--comes down solidly on the latter half of all these opposing formulas. The settlers are attempting to live, and thrive, on a planet that's described thusly:

Hella is nine percent bigger than Earth, but it doesn't have as big an iron-nickel core, so it only has ninety-one percent of Earth's gravity. That means the magnetic field is weaker too, so it can't deflect as much radiation from the primary star. But because the Goldilocks zone is a lot further out, about 250 million klicks, it sort of balances; and that's why Hella has an eighteen-month year. But the lesser gravity and the greater oxygen levels make it possible for everything to grow a lot bigger. Hella bigger. Even people.

This leads to dinosaur-like creatures like walking mountains, with necks and tails longer than football fields, and their carnosaur-like predators with twelve-foot teeth. The Earth vegetables planted in the greenhouses grow tomatoes the size of basketballs. The planet generates winter storms with wind velocities of six hundred kilometers an hour, and winter snowfalls of between ten and thirty meters. And in describing the extreme challenge of living on this planet, I'm thinking: You idiots (meaning the dominance faction) want to conquer it and exploit its resources? Are you kidding me?

This is the central conflict, and the author builds it well, although it's too bad we have to have pages upon pages of conversations to set it up. I would say this book is mainly concerned with its world and its ideas, not so much the plot and characters, although Kyle has a well-developed arc. He's on the young side--five Hella years, not quite fourteen Earth years--so this book has a definite YA feel to it. It's also a bit of an old-fashioned SF adventure story. I liked it, and I don't regret buying it...but I suspect if I had to choose between this book and Vol. 5 of The War Against the Chtorr (David Gerrold's famously unfinished thirty-five-year-old series) the ferocious fuzzy Chtorran worms would have Hella's lumbering leviathans for lunch.

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Review: A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking

A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In the Afterward to this book, the author recounts the tale of how it was published. Apparently it was edited, re-edited, bought, unbought, and passed back and forth for years by editors who couldn't figure it out and had no idea how to market it, until the author finally decided to publish it herself.

To which I say: SHAME on you, editors, for passing on this wonderful story. And THANK YOU, T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon, for putting it out into the world. I loved every whimsical, funny, dark, absorbing, amazing page of it.

This may start out sounding like a bog-standard fantasy world, with Mona the fourteen-year-old baker...discovering a dead girl in her aunt's bakery? This is rather a departure from the norm, isn't it? And the thoughtful, droll, pragmatic voice of the protagonist is set right on the first page:

I could tell right away that she was dead. I haven't seen a lot of dead bodies in my life--I'm only fourteen and baking's not exactly a high-mortality profession--but the red stuff oozing out from under her head definitely wasn't raspberry filling.

Mona may be a young teenager, but she's a sensible one. There is no angst or hormonally-driven antics in our protagonist (indeed, thankfully, there's no romance at all, hinted or implied or otherwise). It doesn't fit Mona's character, and she doesn't have time for it anyway, because she is dragged into the effort to save her city from mercenary hordes after the adults can't seem to get their act together to do it themselves.

(Which she comments on, at length. She knows she has no business being the one to save her city, and she resents the fact that she is forced to do so. But after working through her anxieties and her fears, she steps up and does it anyway.)

Mona is a baker, but she is also a minor wizard...whose talent is manipulating dough and bringing it to life. She can soften brick-hard loaves by simply touching them and make gingerbread men dance. Over the course of the book she creates "bad cookies" with cayenne pepper and rat poison that proceed to lay waste to the enemy camp, twelve-foot baked golem dough warriors that hold the gates against the mercenary hordes long enough for the final showdown, and uses her familiar, Bob the carnivorous sourdough starter, to sling hungry, furious, acidic blobs of fizzing dough at the enemy.

That they noticed. Part of it was the simple fact that if you get clocked over the head with a jar, you tend to pay attention. But Bob was angry this morning, and he'd had all night to stew in his own juices, both literally and metaphorically. The Carex who got hit by jars found themselves with a furious slimy mass that burned like acid and which was trying to crawl under their armor.

Then when the dough golems are brought into the battle:

Their archers reached the front lines, knelt, and began shooting at the golems.

I started laughing. I couldn't help it. Stab a bunch of toothpicks into a loaf of bread and you've got...I don't know, an appetizer or something. Not a dead golem, anyhow. Clearly the Carex still had no idea what they were dealing with.

Yes, this book is dark, and people die (although the blood and gore is kept to a minimum). But Mona's character and voice shine throughout, and I laughed out loud many times. She is not some super teen wizard--she gets hungry and exhausted and on one occasion wets herself, but she keeps pressing on to the very end, when she is prepared to sacrifice herself to save her city. At the final showdown, another character steps up, destroying the mercenary army in a terrific scene that is just crying out to be filmed (although the CGI for it would be horrifically expensive). If the room doesn't get dusty when you read that scene, you are a far more hard-hearted reader than I.

The characters are expertly drawn, from Mona to Spindle, the ten-year-old street rat and thief she falls in with, to her Aunt Tabitha, to the ruler of the city, the Duchess, who realizes what a fool she has been in trusting a close advisor who betrayed her and is determined to do everything she can to make it right. (And of course there's Bob the carnivorous sourdough starter, who greets Mona with a yeasty glorp and pats her with an equally endearing and creepy tentacle of dough, and the nameless gingerbread man who is her second familiar and sits on her shoulder everywhere she goes, and on one occasion runs interference with the "bad cookies.") This book is a delight from beginning to end, and I will shout it from the rooftops. Please buy this, so T. Kingfisher will write more uncategorizable, unmarketable, twisty, wonderful books like this one.

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Review: Made to Order: Robots and Revolution

Made to Order: Robots and Revolution by Jonathan Strahan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Anthologies can be pretty hit and miss for me. A lot depends on the theme, and even more on the editor selecting stories that properly fit the theme. Jonathan Strahan has won multiple editing awards, and this collection of stories hits the bulls-eye more often than not. There aren't any typical AI rebellions or Terminator-style apocalypses to be found here--like the good editor he is, Strahan has picked stories that go in different directions.

The highlights:

“Test 4 Echo,” Peter Watts. This has Watts’ trademark hard science, a sympathetic central character, and a bleak, depressing ending. The ending is a little more bleak and depressing than usual, even for him.

“Bigger Fish,” Sarah Pinsker. This has a (slightly abrupt) twist ending that is a very literal, very robotic and more than a little frightening–once you think about it–interpretation of Asimov’s First Law.

“Dancing With Death,” John Chu. The author is clearly a figure skating fan, which tickled me to no end, combining robots with ice dancing (as well as a minor Chinese god).

“Chiaroscuro in Red,” Suzanne Palmer. One of the longer stories in the book, this is a down to earth, Everyman sort of tale about a college kid whose parents buy him an aging factory robot, and he ends up rescuing said robot.

“A Glossary of Radicalization,” Brooke Bolander. The final story in the book, this has Bolander’s usual gritty setting, themes of social justice, and undercurrents of seething rage.

Even the one or two stories I didn't care for I could see someone else loving. That's the mark of a good anthology. This collection is well-balanced and well-edited, and you should add it to your reading list.

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