A warmhearted fable of love, acceptance and found family for our time. Review first posted on www.FantasyLiterature.com:
You’re a second-class citizen,A warmhearted fable of love, acceptance and found family for our time. Review first posted on www.FantasyLiterature.com:
You’re a second-class citizen, viewed with suspicion if you have magical powers in TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea. Magical children are confined to orphanages that are overseen by the rigid bureaucracy of the Department in Charge of Magical Youth (DICOMY). One of DICOMY’s most diligent, rule-abiding caseworkers is 40-year-old Linus Baker, a pudgy and — though he barely admits it to himself — deeply unhappy gay caseworker who lives in a lonely apartment in a city where it’s always raining and overcast.
One day Linus receives a special, top secret assignment from DICOMY’s Extremely Upper Management: travel to an island orphanage for a month to investigate an orphanage of six children who are particularly uncommon in their magical aspects, as well as the orphanage’s master, Arthur Parnassus, who is viewed as problematic by Extremely Upper Management for reasons they are (at least at first) unwilling to share with Linus. And they want detailed, thorough weekly reports from Linus while he’s there.
So Linus packs up his cantankerous cat Calliope, farewells his nosy neighbor, and travels by train from the gloomy city to the sunny seashore, and then to Marsyas Island. At first he’s overwhelmed by the extremely unusual and even dangerous children in the orphanage on the island. They include six-year-old Lucifer (“Lucy”) whose father is the devil himself, an intelligent wyvern, a grumpy and bearded young female gnome, a painfully shy shapeshifting boy, a winged forest sprite, and an amorphous green blob with black teeth named Chauncey. They’re overseen by their mysterious but charming guardian Arthur, to whom Linus finds himself reluctantly attracted.
Linus tries hard to stick with his objectivity and his hefty book of rules and regulations, but it’s difficult when he realizes that Lucy has a good heart despite his inherited affinity for evil, and the gnome Talia adores gardening and has a soft core under her extremely crusty exterior, and Chauncey’s earnest goal in life is to be the best bellhop ever (somewhat difficult for a blob, but he manages to practice on Linus). And when Arthur is so charming. But there are still things that Arthur and DICOMY haven’t told Linus yet.
The House in the Cerulean Sea is a sweet, heartwarming story that focuses on diversity, acceptance and love. It’s marketed as adult fantasy, and the main character and his love interest are both middle-aged. But it’s written on a middle-grade level: simplistic and straightforward writing, obvious symbolism, no adult/R-rated language or content, and overt moralizing.
Hate is loud, but I think you’ll learn it’s because it’s only a few people shouting, desperate to be heard. You might not ever be able to change their minds, but so long as you remember you’re not alone, you will overcome.
Affirmative messages in literature are nice, but I enjoy them a lot more when they’re subtle. The House in the Cerulean Sea is the fantasy counterpart to the SF novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet: short on plot tension and complexity (especially considering it’s an adult novel); long on positive feelings and inclusiveness. But the characters are charming and the children have an engaging quirkiness. Lucy in particular is an interesting character; he wants to be loved, adores old-fashioned records, and struggles with terrible nightmares, but has a penchant for terrifying people and saying truly awful things. It’s amusing when the hippie employee of the record store in the Marsyas village treats Lucy with equanimity.
“Who’s the square?” J-Bone whispered.
“Mr. Baker,” Lucy whispered back. “He’s here to make sure I don’t burn anyone alive with the power of my mind and then consume their souls from their smoking carcass.”
“Rock on, little dude,” J-Bone said, offering a high five which Lucy gladly accepted. “I mean, I hope that doesn’t happen to me, but you do you.”
Seeing Arthur’s dedication to helping Lucy find and accept the good in himself, and to creating a family with all of these difficult and unusual children — and with Linus as well, if he’ll let go of some of his rigid ideas — is at the heart of The House in the Cerulean Sea. It’s a warmhearted, straightforward fable of love, acceptance and found family for our time....more
4.5 stars. Elegantly written Asian-inspired fantasy novella, nominated for a Hugo award, that was far, far better than I expected.
A traveling NB cleri4.5 stars. Elegantly written Asian-inspired fantasy novella, nominated for a Hugo award, that was far, far better than I expected.
A traveling NB cleric, Chih, makes their way to an isolated villa where the empress In-Yo, who recently died, once lived in exile. Now, many years later, it's inhabited only by the empress's now-elderly servant, called Rabbit. While Chih examines the old records and artifacts, Rabbit gradually unfolds the story of In-Yo to Chih and their talking hoopoe bird companion. She was a princess from a northern kingdom that lost a war, and was given away in marriage (read: hostage) to the southern empire, one of the many wives of the emperor. But In-Yo isn't quite as helpless and accepting of her fate as she might at first seem.
I have to admit I got an ARC of this book last year and it joined the stack of "maybe-read" unrequested ARCs, partly because — true confessions here — I'm getting a little tired of the endless focus on angry-feminist/queer-character fantasy. Some of it's good, but a lot of it is message fiction and I'm not into being preached at in my fictional reading. But when it made the list of Hugo nominees, I dusted off my copy and jumped into it. And ended up seriously enjoying it! Nghi Vo's writing is lovely and evocative, and there's a lot going on under the surface with both the characters and the plot. It's like a delightful puzzle box.
Full review to come. Thanks to Tor for the ARC!...more
... or, well, maybe not so small after all. :) Final review for this Nebula-award nominated novella, first posted oIt's a LitenVärld after all! [image]
... or, well, maybe not so small after all. :) Final review for this Nebula-award nominated novella, first posted on FantasyLiterature.com:
If you’ve ever gotten frustrated wandering through the endless maze of rooms that is IKEA, it’s not hard to imagine that there are hidden passages that lead, not to a secret shortcut to an exit, but to another world entirely. Nino Cipri’s novella Finna takes that concept and adds to it a timely set of social concerns, ranging from gender identity to the evils of capitalism generally and low-wage retail jobs in particular.
Ava is a sales associate at LitenVärld (Swedish for “small world”), the fictional equivalent of IKEA, down to the gigantic parking lot and blue-and-yellow box-shaped exterior, not to mention the labyrinthine interior layout. Ava is disgruntled because she’s been called in to work on her day off, when her only desire is to stay home, binge on Netflix and Florence and the Machine, and try to recuperate from her breakup with Jules (black and nonbinary) three days before. Ava’s workday goes from bad — colliding with Jules by the break room — to worse: a customer has lost her grandmother in the store. And she and Jules discover an odd-looking passageway in the Nihilist Bachelor Cube that’s not supposed to be there. (The creative names of the various store rooms, like Pastel Goth Hideaway and Parental Basement Dweller, are one of the humorous delights of Finna.)
Their manager Tricia calls an emergency meeting of all employees, and discloses that this appearance of a “maskhål,” or wormhole, in LitenVärld has happened before, often enough that the company actually has an instructional video and a piece of equipment called a FINNA (Swedish: “find”) to track down missing customers if you feed it one of their personal belongings. What the company doesn’t have any more is a team of employees trained to navigate the wormholes with the FINNA — cost-cutting measures, you know — so Jules volunteers to search for the missing woman and Ava, as the next-most-junior employee, is voluntold to go with them.
The linked worlds they find when they enter the portal are nightmarish echoes of LitenVärld: an orchard of carnivorous plants shaped like furniture, a food court that takes payment in blood, and more. But somewhere in this crazy multiverse Ava and Jules hope to find the missing grandmother … or at least an appropriate replacement for her from another universe.
The maze-like LitenVärld being a prime location for portals to alternative fantasy worlds is an unusual concept for SF/F, if not entirely unique; for example, somewhat similarly, Grady Hendrix also explored the nightmarish aspects of an IKEA-type store in his 2014 horror novel Horrorstör. Cipri carries this concept through into the finer details, like the company having a patented mechanical device as part of its standard equipment to locate missing customers, but having laid off the teams who specialized in these searches; and sending instead the two most junior retail employees working that day. And somehow the company has managed to keep this all secret since at least 1989 (apparently no one outside the company has ever taken a close look at that FINNA patent). Cipri also has a keen eye for the soul-killing details of low-end retail jobs, and their effect on the people stuck in those thankless jobs. Jules in particular is so downtrodden by their job that it’s clear that their volunteering to explore the wormholes is, at least in part, motivated by the hope of finding a better world to live in.
For my taste, Finna spends not enough time exploring these fantasy worlds and too much time focusing on the more mundane dysfunctional relationship of Jules and Ava, who are (understandably) dealing with depression and anxiety. It’s clear that the two of them still love each other and want to be together, but their personal issues have created seemingly insurmountable roadblocks to their finding happiness together. The science fictional aspects of Finna are very soft; Cipri is far more focused on their characters’ relationship and on current social issues.
Finna isn’t shy in the slightest about these social and political messages. It takes rather a sledgehammer approach to that messaging, with repeated anti-capitalistic jabs and main characters who are both diverse and queer. The only noteworthy characters who are signaled as being white are the villains, like LitenVärld manager Tricia, who has a “Midwestern manager-class haircut” with blond highlights (could anything indicate a “Karen” more clearly?), practiced plastic facial expressions, and an utter disregard for the wellbeing of the workers she manages. There’s also Mark and Dana, the obnoxious actors in the LitenVärld training video who later morph into a nightmarish horde of clones in one of the alternative worlds that Ava and Jules stumble into.
The messaging is so heavy-handed that it tends to overwhelm the plot at times. I think it’s fair to say that the appeal of Finna will vary for readers based to a great extent on both how appealing they find these messages and how much they enjoy reading explicitly message-driven fiction. If you think capitalism sucks and IKEA is a house of horrors, and you can get into the drama of queer exes chasing through the multiverse in search of a lost customer while dealing ineptly with the aftermath of their breakup … then I’d recommend Finna to you.
Feminism crashes into Sleeping Beauty, and Sleeping Beauty will never be quite the same. And that's not a bad thing. Also, Alix Harrow's writing is amFeminism crashes into Sleeping Beauty, and Sleeping Beauty will never be quite the same. And that's not a bad thing. Also, Alix Harrow's writing is amazingly good. I wish I could put together a sentence like that.
I love fairy-tale themed stories AND multiverse fiction, and this is such a fun combination of the two! Plus I've gained a new appreciation for novellas after reading so many doorstoppers in the last few years. So I started looking at this last night and somehow ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting.
RTC. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC!...more
3.5 stars. This fantasy novella is a lushly-told tale set in an ancient Vietnamese type of kingdom that's under the colonizing eye of a northern kingd3.5 stars. This fantasy novella is a lushly-told tale set in an ancient Vietnamese type of kingdom that's under the colonizing eye of a northern kingdom. Final review, first posted on FantasyLiterature.com:
Princess Thanh was a royal hostage for many years in the northern country of Ephteria before being sent back to her home country of Bình Hải. Two years after her return, she’s a disappointment to her mother, the empress, who hoped that Thanh’s time in Ephteria would give her insights into that country’s government and culture, making her more useful as a diplomat. It’s especially important now that an Ephterian delegation is arriving, certain to make demands and threats that will encroach on Bình Hải’s independence. But Thanh is a quiet, somewhat uncertain person — too thoughtful and discreet, according to her mother — rather than a power player. Thanh is also hiding a secret: since a disastrous fire in the Ephterian palace, small items in her vicinity have a mysterious habit of catching on fire. And the only real relationship she had in Ephteria was a clandestine love affair with Princess Eldris, the heir to the throne.
So Thanh is startled, and not entirely sure whether to be pleased, when Eldris shows up in the throne room as part of the Ephterian delegation. Eldris is confident and proud, the kind of princess who rescues herself rather than needing to be rescued. Her blue eyes still make Thanh’s heart skip a beat, and when Eldris follows Thanh out of the throne room, it’s clear that she still wants a relationship with Thanh. But political pressures, along with a blackmailing third party, threaten this sapphic connection between the princesses as well as Thanh’s position in her mother’s court. When the magical cause of the fires reveals itself to Thanh, it complicates her life even more, but offers Thanh some new choices and options when walls close in around her.
In Fireheart Tiger, Aliette de Bodard spins a lushly-told tale set in an ancient Vietnamese type of kingdom, where a more powerful northern country of white people send their youth on Grand Tours to southern countries and have aims of colonizing those countries, extending their influence and power to other parts of the world. The power of Ephteria is echoed in the character of Princess Eldris, who sees what she wants and pushes to obtain it. Eldris makes a tempting offer to Thanh, but Thanh has some hesitations. While Thanh “knows” her mother won’t approve, the problems with their romance aren’t due to prejudice —homophobia seems to be completely absent from this world, unlike colonialism. So it’s never entirely clear why the Bình Hải empress wouldn’t jump at the chance to have one of her younger daughters married to the future ruler of Ephteria.
Eldris is a potent symbol of a colonizing power, but it struck me that she could have just as easily have been a male character by simply swapping out the pronouns, and the paternalistic aspects of the story and her character would have even made more sense if that had been been the case. I almost wonder if she was a man in an early draft of this novella, because there’s so very little about Eldris’s character that seems innately female. It left me a little dissatisfied with Eldris as a character. The third part of the love triangle was intriguing, but not convincing to me as a love interest for Thanh, because her actual character — equal parts vulnerable child and threatening monster — simply didn’t strike me at all as one to inspire romantic feelings.
So in the end, the political negotiations and conspiring were much more interesting to me than the romance(s) in Fireheart Tiger. If you're excited about the lesbian love triangle, it's pretty tame from a heat point of view. If you're not excited about it, well, it's a pretty minor part of the plot in one sense, but it does echo the larger themes of this novella in a very interesting way. In either case, there’s much to recommend about Fireheart Tiger, between the lovely, evocative writing and the layered description of a more vulnerable country (and person) being simultaneously seduced and threatened by a more powerful one.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC!
Initial post: “A post-colonial Goblin Emperor meets Howl's Moving Castle” — SOLD. I am reading this as soon as I can get my hands on a copy....more
4.5 stars. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature (along with my co-reviewer and GR friend Kelly's enthusiastic review):
This lushly-told nov4.5 stars. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature (along with my co-reviewer and GR friend Kelly's enthusiastic review):
This lushly-told novella, a Locus award nominee, is set in an alternative, fantastical version of our world, with strong 1920s vibes to it. There are hidden portals to different realms below our world where magic rules, along with goblins and demons. Desdemona, the goodhearted but initially spoiled and thoughtless daughter of an immensely wealthy coal magnate, overhears her father making a bargain with a goblin or “Kobold” from one of the kingdoms below, for oil to be found on a piece of land he owns. In return, her father will pay a “tithe” of men to the Kobold king, who will be taken to the Kobold’s kingdom for the rest of their lives, to be slaves or whatever the king chooses. Worse yet, her heartless father plans a mining disaster to kill the men not taken by the Kobolds, to hide the disappearance of the others.
Jolted into action, Desdemona figures out a way to get to the kingdoms below to try to retrieve these men. She grabs her cross-dressing (and perhaps more than that … ) friend Chaz to join her on her adventure, opens a portal to the kingdoms below, and promptly gets separated from Chaz.
It’s a wild quest, dark yet hopeful, and filled with danger and mystery, shapeshifting (including gender), and fascinating beasts and creatures of every kind. The world-building is comprehensive, giving the indelible impression that there is much more in these worlds to explore, and many more tales to come. In fact, this is the third novella Cooney has written in this world; she’s currently withdrawn the first two from publication and is reworking them, with the intention of republishing them in autumn 2021. However, Desdemona and the Deep easily stands on its own … though I’m anxious to read the first two works when they become available again.
Cooney’s writing is truly lovely and engaging, with dark undertones throughout.
Objects rocketed overhead and splatted down … Mostly they were soft, rotted things like the faceted fruit of the orchard, jewels melting to slime; a spotted salmon wheezing dire prophecies as it drowned in air; wailing mandrake rootlings, bleeding from mouths and eyes; small winged bodies, limp and broken; more, so much more, all dead or dying, evidence of the Valwode failing, of the senescing dream.
Both Desdemona and Chaz find themselves profoundly changed in the course of their quest. Cooney melds modern sensibilities (gender identity and sexual orientation) with traditional folktale concepts. At one point, a goblin guide named Farklewhit comments to Desdemona: “Now, a Tattercoats is a species of the Nine-Tails genus, from the Thousandfurs family” — evoking and combining two related fairy tales in one character.
There were a few unconventional and even grotesque elements that pulled me out of the story temporarily (for example, Desdemona’s arousal by the rank smell of Farklewhit’s wooly body), but those may be a matter of taste, and I can’t say they didn’t fit with the ambiance of this tale.
I highly recommend Desdemona and the Deep to readers who like evocative, queer fantasy....more
Four fantasy novellas, including Every Heart a Doorway, available for free through Tor's ebook of the month club. Download before midnight, June 5, atFour fantasy novellas, including Every Heart a Doorway, available for free through Tor's ebook of the month club. Download before midnight, June 5, at https://ebookclub.tor.com/...more
In this recent novella sequel to Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero's daughter Miranda travels back to Milan with him and finds life a lot more unpleIn this recent novella sequel to Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero's daughter Miranda travels back to Milan with him and finds life a lot more unpleasant than she expected. Everyone treats her like some kind of monster, she's confined to her rooms and only allowed out with a heavy veil, her fiance Ferdinand has disappeared, and her father is distant and uninterested in her welfare. The only bright spot in Miranda's life is one of the maids, Dorothea. Maybe she can help Miranda figure out what's gone wrong?
It's a warmhearted and well-intentioned novella that puts a very different twist on Shakespeare's story, with distinctly modern social views and occasionally veering into preachiness. It got a little too clunky for me and the plot didn't always flow smoothly or make total sense, but it had its moments. If a queer, feminist fantasy take on Renaissance Italy sounds like your cuppa tea, I'd recommend it.
Available for free right now as part of a set of four Tor LGBTQ+ novellas, with Tor's ebook of the month club....more
2.5 stars - just okay. A spaceship lands on a new world, but the captain and crew find to their dismay that the planet is already inhabited. They're s2.5 stars - just okay. A spaceship lands on a new world, but the captain and crew find to their dismay that the planet is already inhabited. They're stuck - the ship hasn't got enough fuel to go anywhere else. So the ship's navigator takes off to explore this world and see if there's an empty place they can fit in and be hidden to the rest of the world's inhabitants, while the ship shrinks down to the size of a rock, and the crew goes into some kind of sleep and awaits the navigator's return.
It's a murky story plot-wise, though there are some lovely descriptions of strange and creative ways of mapping that the people on this world use. That’s the best part of this story, frankly. I'm extremely unclear on what the point was. Life goes on and you do your best?...more
The Witness for the Dead is the long-hoped-for sequel to Katherine Addison’s marvelous and unusual 2014 fantasy, The Goblin Emperor, in which we met Maia, a half-goblin, half-elf young man who unexpectedly inherited the throne of the elf kingdom when his father, the emperor, was killed along with his brothers in an airship explosion. Thara Celehar, an elven prelate and a Witness for the Dead, was a minor character in that novel who investigated the airship accident at Maia’s request and eventually was able to unearth the truth of why it occurred.
The Witness for the Dead is more of a companion novel set in the same world, rather than a direct sequel, so it can be read as a stand-alone book, but it’ll give you a better grounding in this world if you read The Goblin Emperor first. This book picks up with Thara’s life some time after he has left the elven court, leaving behind a slight cloud of scandal — Thara is gay, and his married lover was executed for murdering his own wife. Thara has now moved to the city of Amalo and taken up his calling again as a Witness for the Dead.
A Witness for the Dead wears several hats, including murder investigator, priest and funeral director, but Thara also has the unusual magical ability to touch a dead body and sense memories and impressions from the spirit of the person who died. When a woman’s body is pulled out of the canal in Amalo, Celehar is asked to investigate to find out who she is — which doesn’t take too long — and who killed her and why, which is far more difficult to determine. For one thing, her bones aren’t telling Thara anything really useful, so he has to rely on other, more mundane investigative methods. For another, the woman was an opera singer who had an unfortunate habit of making an enemy of nearly everyone around her. One of her enemies is the in-house composer for the Vermilion Opera, Mer Pel-Thenhior, to whom Celehar is rather reluctantly attracted.
There are a couple of other interesting subplots that help to liven up this murder mystery novel. One involves a missing pregnant woman whose family believes that her husband killed her, eventually leading to a trail of questionable deaths. The other subplot concerns the wealthy Duhalin family whose patriarch has died, leaving behind some greedy heirs who are disputing which of two wills is the real one and which is the forgery. When Celehar announces his finding, based on touching the grandfather’s cremated ashes, it has repercussions for him as well as for the Duhalin family members.
To try to avoid the resulting trouble, Celehar is packed out of town and told to take care of a ghoul problem in a small mining town two days’ journey away. Ghouls start out eating dead meat but sooner or later switch to killing and eating the living. Celehar’s talents include the ability to quiet and rebury ghouls (more permanently the second time around), but the journey turns out far more exciting and dangerous than he expected.
Actually I found both of these subplots more intriguing than the main plotline. The opera singer’s scandalous ways couldn’t quite make up for the plodding nature of Celahar’s investigation. The main beauty of The Witness for the Dead isn’t in the main murder mystery plot, which is serviceable but not particularly memorable, but in Addison’s extraordinarily fine world- and character-building.
Like The Goblin Emperor, The Witness for the Dead is somewhat slow-paced but lovely in its detailed world-building. Addison has created a richly-imagined, steampunk-flavored fantasy world, slightly touched by magic, and brimful with vivid, realistic details, like stray cats that impatiently wait for handouts and teahouses with fragrant, exotic offerings. There’s a wide variety of skin tones and eye colors, especially due to the mixing between goblins and elves, which is far more prevalent here than in Maia’s court.
Addison’s characters are well-rounded and realistic. Thara Celehar is a particularly complex soul: he’s humble and shy, tending toward melancholy and isolation, and on the edge of poverty. At the same time, he’s a decent, kindhearted man who’s resolutely determined to be honest and to do his duty, even in the face of daunting opposition. He’s also rather awkward and ill-at-ease with others, even with the charming part-goblin Pel-Thenhior … who is, unfortunately for Thara, one of the chief suspects in the opera singer’s murder.
The Witness for the Dead isn’t as brilliant or delightful as The Goblin Emperor (few books are), but it’s still well worth reading if you were a fan of that book and have been longing to return to that world. If Addison writes more stories or novels set in this world, I’ll definitely be there for them.
Catfish Lullaby, a 2019 Nebula Award-nominated novella, might be described as Louisiana swamp monster Full review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Catfish Lullaby, a 2019 Nebula Award-nominated novella, might be described as Louisiana swamp monster folklore colliding with eldritch Lovecraftian horror. Author A.C. Wise (who also has a second Nebula nomination this year, for her short story “How the Trick is Done”) visits Caleb, the biracial, queer son of the local sheriff, at three key points in his life. We follow Caleb from childhood to adulthood as he navigates his friendship with Cere Royce, the daughter of a once-prominent and depraved local family, and they try to conquer the black magic that haunts her and has destroyed her family.
When Caleb is about twelve, the Royce home mysteriously burns to the ground, killing Cere’s father and two older brothers. Caleb’s single father takes Cere into their home. Cere manages to freak out the schoolboys who have been bullying Caleb for years (“Sometimes you have to be scarier than the monsters,” she comments). The two children begin to cautiously develop a friendship, although Caleb is himself a little freaked out by the strange colors he sometimes sees in Cere’s eyes, the terrible dreams he has about her, and the chilling things she sometimes says, like, say, “I was born to end the world.” When a woman is murdered, Cere begins to suspect that someone in her family has survived and is planning to use their dark magic — and Cere herself — to end the world in flames.
Woven through Caleb’s story are the tales of Catfish John, a legendary half-man, half-catfish creature that hides in the swamp and may be devilish or good (the stories disagree). Cere believes in the helpful version of Catfish John. As terrible events build on each other, Caleb can only hope that Cere is right.
Each chapter begins with a quote from a scholarly book called Myths, History and Legends from the Delta to the Bayou, most of them about Catfish John. The book doesn’t actually exist outside of the pages of this novella, but the quotes add a sense of realism to the legend of Catfish John, grounding the story in our world.
In the South, we have our own blood and pain, and time moves different here. People from elsewhere say folks talk slower down here. We’re slower to forget too and slower to forgive. Even the land holds onto its scars… See, there are two Souths: one on the surface, one underneath. Underneath is where we keep our angels and demons both.
It was difficult for me to believe that Catfish John isn’t a pre-existing myth that A.C. Wise wove into Catfish Lullaby, but as far as I can determine it all came from her fertile imagination.
The jumps in time make Catfish Lullaby feel a little disjointed, but the clash between Catfish John’s magical swamp song and the otherworldly cosmic horrors called down by the Royces makes for a compelling story. The theme of otherness is echoed in Caleb’s racial and sexual identity and in Catfish John’s lonely existence, but there’s a countervailing theme of friendship and family, including found family, that adds a note of hope to the song of Catfish Lullaby....more
3.5 stars. Now on sale! Full review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water is a surprisingly warmhearted fa3.5 stars. Now on sale! Full review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water is a surprisingly warmhearted fantasy novella set in a war-torn Asian country. It’s a queer take on wuxia, a time-honored genre of Chinese fiction based on heroes skilled in the martial arts, frequently in superhuman, fantastical ways (think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or even Kung Fu Panda).
One day, in a small coffeehouse, a customer angrily accuses his waitress of using jampi witchcraft on him. The quarrel degenerates, a handsome bandit intervenes, dishes fly, daggers are pulled. In the aftermath, the waitress, Guet Imm, gets fired from her job and tracks down the bandit’s gang in their camp outside of town, and somehow convinces the bandits’ leader to let her join their group, promising help with cooking and cleaning. Guet Imm is a former nun with a shaved head from a burnt-out tokong. She’s not much of a cook … in fact, she can’t cook at all, nor will she sleep with the men (it would require a cleansing sacrifice to her goddess, in the form of chopping off their dicks). She does, however, manage to “part the men from their filthy clothes and launder them, in the teeth of the men’s appalled resistance.”
After a somewhat rocky start, Guet Imm becomes friends with one of the bandits, Tet Sang, who is the right-hand man of the handsome leader of the bandits. But trouble is brewing, and it has to do with something secret that the roving bandits are planning to sell, as well as personal secrets that some of the characters are keeping.
The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water is set in the pre-industrial era, in a period called the Protectorate, in an mythical Asian country that, according to Cho’s website, “draws on both the semi-mythic China of wuxia and the Malaya of the Emergency.” Zen Cho, a Chinese Malaysian author, frequently uses Malay names and words in this novella, like tokong (a Malay temple), jampi (incantation or spell) and pahala (reward). Though the setting is a mix of cultures, it feels cohesive and organic to the plot.
The story focuses on Guet Imm and Tet Sang. While Tet Sang may be concealing the bigger secrets, Guet Imm is, I think, the heart of the tale. She combines wide-eyed earnestness with a sarcastic sense of humor, and a serene and profound faith in her deity with a canny understanding of human nature. Cho’s dryly humorous prose lends itself well to the affectionate bickering between the characters.
The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water is a pleasant read, more understated and tranquil than one might expect from a story about a group of bandits and stolen treasure that’s set in the midst of political turmoil. It’s more about interpersonal relationships and finding oneself and one’s family, than heart-pounding adventure and martial arts fighting, although there’s some of that as well. Zen Cho knows both wuxia traditions and Asian history and culture, and that shines through. I’d recommend it if you’re a fan of either wuxia or queer fantasy.
Tor free ebook of the month, if you join their book club. https://www.tor.com/2021/10/05/downlo... Sale ends midnight E.T., Friday Oct. 8, 2021. This Tor free ebook of the month, if you join their book club. https://www.tor.com/2021/10/05/downlo... Sale ends midnight E.T., Friday Oct. 8, 2021. This one won't be every reader's cuppa tea - read the reviews and decide for yourself - but those who like it tend to REALLY like it.
4.5 stars, rounding up. This is one of those books that gets better the more I think about it! Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Necromancers and their sword-fighting cavaliers star in Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir’s radically original debut novel, which has been nominated for the 2019 Nebula Award. This science fantasy novel, steeped in an atmosphere of decay and decrepitude, is a mix of space opera and a gruesome treasure hunt that takes place in a spooky, crumbling castle. At the same time, it’s set in an interstellar empire consisting of nine planets, each one ruled by a different House of necromancers.
Eighteen-year-old Gideon Nav is trying to escape her forced servitude in the particularly moribund Ninth House, where she’s surrounded by living skeletons and corpses and near-dead nobles and nuns who pray on knucklebones. Gideon’s escape plan involves sneaking off the entire Ninth planet in a space shuttle that she secretly ordered to come pick her up. Her flight is foiled at the last moment by Harrowhark, a young woman who is the powerful heir of the Ninth House, able to animate skeletons and corpses with a gesture … and Gideon’s lifelong enemy and nemesis. But Harrow offers Gideon a possible alternative way out of her miserable life.
The Emperor has summoned the heirs of the other eight Houses and their prime cavaliers (noble courtiers trained in rapier fighting) to come to the planet of the First House to compete to become the Emperor’s new Lyctors, semi-immortal elite necromancer knights. If Gideon will act as Harrow’s prime cavalier — the actual cavalier of the Ninth House being unable and unwilling to take on the obligation — Harrow promises that she will give Gideon her freedom afterwards. Gideon is an indentured servant, not a courtier, and she’s trained in fighting with a two-handed infantry sword, not a rapier, so it will be a massive challenge. Still, the emperor’s contest presents a life-changing opportunity for both Gideon and Harrow … if they survive.
Gideon the Ninth starts off a little slow but picks up steam steadily, becoming increasingly multi-layered and compelling as it propels the reader toward an intense, heart-pounding ending. The turning point for me was about a third of the way in, when it began to be clear how brilliantly Muir has woven science and future technology into a plot that initially seemed overwhelmingly fantasy. The worldbuilding is stellar, a gore-soaked, moldering edifice that’s eminently suited to the necromancy that is its center.
At the same time, it also became apparent that both the characters and the torturous challenges they were facing were far more complex than they at first appeared. The various ordeals that the necromancers and their cavaliers have to go through to earn certain keys actually have substantive significance. Gideon and Harrow have a complicated relationship built on mutual hatred and snarky insults, but there are guilty feelings and more hiding beneath the skull paint they put on their faces every day.
The secondary characters were so numerous – fifteen other heir/necromancers and cavaliers for the other seven competing Houses — that I was having difficulty keeping them all straight, though they each specialize in a different aspect of necromancy and there are several vividly drawn characters among them. (Protip: there’s an enormously helpful list of the Nine Houses and the characters that belong to each of the Houses at the beginning of the book, that I somehow managed to overlook until I was finished with the book.) This is the type of book where a second reading would be really enjoyable and illuminating, where you catch a lot of significant details and nuances that you overlooked on first read.
Gideon the Ninth combines unique worldbuilding, some fascinating twists and turns in the plot, intriguing and unique main characters, and an engaging writing style. I’m excited to dive into the sequel, Harrow the Ninth, which will be published in June 2020.
Initial post: This one just landed on my doorstep! Actually I asked the publicist for it since (a) it's a Nebula nominee, and (b) they'd already sent me the sequel, Harrow the Ninth (unasked for), and I've got this general rule about not reading sequels if I haven't read the first book. So here we go!
Content notes: quite a few F-bombs, lots of gore. The main character is lesbian, but there are no explicit sex scenes....more
3.75 stars. A short, heartwarming tale, free on Tor.com. A man on a space ship is injured in an accident that should have killed him ... which is goin3.75 stars. A short, heartwarming tale, free on Tor.com. A man on a space ship is injured in an accident that should have killed him ... which is going to blow some deeply-held secrets wide open. When Graff is rescued by his shipmates, he's got a LOT of explaining to do, and no guarantees that they'll believe or forgive him.
Carrie Vaughn writes well, and I like her unexpected take on the issues here, and on Graff's hidden society. I read it twice today and liked it even more the second time around, but then I'm kind of a sucker for heartwarming stories (unlike karen). :)
Recommended if you like SF and M/M romance.
Content notes: No explicit content; a few F-bombs....more
The Wayward Children books have turned into such a great series ... and here's #5! Full review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Eleanor West’s H
The Wayward Children books have turned into such a great series ... and here's #5! Full review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children was an island of misfit toys, a place to put the unfinished stories and the broken wanderers who could butcher a deer and string a bow but no longer remembered what to do with indoor plumbing. It was also, more importantly, a holding pen for heroes. Whatever they might have become when they’d been cast out of their chosen homes, they’d been heroes once, each in their own ways. And they did not forget.
Come Tumbling Down, the fifth installment in Seanan McGuire’s WAYWARD CHILDREN YA fantasy series, returns to the conflicted relationship between twins Jack (Jacqueline) and Jill Wolcott, in a some-months-later sequel to where we left them at the end of Every Heart a Doorway. (Down Among the Sticks and Bones is a prequel that tells their story in much more detail, though it’s the second book published in the series.) To recap — spoiler alert for the first and second books here — as children Jack and Jill had found their way to a portal world called the Moors, where Jack was raised by a … if not mad, at least highly peculiar … scientist, and Jill was raised by a master vampire to be his daughter and heir, before they returned to our world and spent some time turning the Home for Wayward Children upside down. When they returned to the Moors at the end of Every Heart a Doorway, Jill was dead at Jack’s hand, but Jack was confident that she could resurrect her sister once they returned to the Moors and, perhaps more important, that because Jill had died and been brought back to life, she would no longer be able to be turned into a vampire.
But Jill is not in the least repentant of her lethal lifestyle, and she and her adoptive vampire father have thought of an ingenious way to get around this limitation. What she’s now done is beyond the pale — not only is it ruining Jack’s life, pushing her to the edge of a mental breakdown, but it’s likely to lead to an imbalance of power and deadly warfare in the Moors world. So Jack, with her girlfriend Alexis, returns to the Wayward Children home to get help from her old friends. Did Eleanor say “no quests”? Oh well!
Come Tumbling Down didn’t quite reach the heights of my favorite books in the series, Down Among the Sticks and Bones and In an Absent Dream, but it comes quite close. McGuire does a great job examining Jack and Jill’s deeply troubled hearts. Jack, brilliant but burdened with OCD, has found joy in the mad scientist lifestyle, at least until the most recent troubles. She calls herself a monster, and in some ways that’s true, but she’s more or less a good-hearted person, if obsessive and demanding. Jill, though, is on a whole different level.
Jill had always been the more dangerous, less predictable Wolcott, for all that she was the one who dressed in pastel colors and lace and sometimes remembered that people liked it when you smiled. Something about the way she’d wrapped her horror movie heart in ribbons and bows had reminded him of a corpse that hadn’t been properly embalmed, like she was pretty on the outside and rotten on the inside. Terrifying and subtly wrong.
Joining Jack on her quest to set things right again in Jack’s life and in the Moors world are several familiar faces, including Kade (the one-time goblin prince), Christopher (who longs for the magical skeleton world of Mariposa), Cora (the former mermaid with the blue-green hair) and Sumi. They all bring their unique characters and talents to the story. The most delightful was Sumi, whose flighty behavior and off-the-wall comments conceal a sharp mind. She calls the crimson moon in the Moors “the sugared cherry on the biggest murder sundae in the whole world” and is serenely confident that one day she’ll find her way back to the world called Confection, where the gummy worms will eat her body when she dies.
Come Tumbling Down is a quest type of adventure novel, mixing together friendship and horror. It’s lifted above the norm by the quirkiness of the characters, by the tragedy of the broken relationship between twin sisters Jack and Jill, and by Seanan McGuire’s insightful commentary. She muses on what would have happened if Jack had become the vampire’s protégé rather than Jill, and the ruthless business tycoon Sumi would have become if she hadn’t found the door to Confection as a young girl. And she shows us how wayward children can be heroes. Sometimes, even, the monsters are the heroes.
I received a free ebook for review from the publisher and NetGalley. Thanks so much!
Initial post: I HAVE THE ARC! *does happy dance* *throws confetti in air* Update: And I read the whole thing in one evening. #noregrets...more
This pleasant novelette won the 2019 Hugo Award, and it’s free online. An imugi (a magical serpent that’s an earlier stage of a dragon, at least in thThis pleasant novelette won the 2019 Hugo Award, and it’s free online. An imugi (a magical serpent that’s an earlier stage of a dragon, at least in this world’s mythology) wants nothing more than to become a full-fledged dragon and live in the heavens. Every thousand years the imugi, Byam, gets a chance to fly up into the sky and try to achieve its transformation, but something always goes wrong.
The third time, when Byam’s transformation is interrupted by someone taking a selfie, Byam decides to give up. Or eat the person who so rudely interrupted it. Maybe both. But something goes wrong with that plan too...
It’s a soft 4 stars for me (I tend to think it won the Hugo for its queer representation as much as anything else), but it has a good message. Which ... I mean, it’s right there in the title. :) But it’s not as simplistic as it might sound.
Chaos, death by the magical Ash Blood plague and by monstrous beasts have consumed the country of YstFinal review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Chaos, death by the magical Ash Blood plague and by monstrous beasts have consumed the country of Ystara, killing all who remain within its borders. The last survivors, holed up in a cathedral, speculate that this disaster must have been caused by a “ferociously single-minded” young mage, Liliath, whose unprecedented power to call on angels, particularly the archangel Palleniel, has somehow led to things going catastrophically awry.
One hundred thirty-seven years later, Liliath awakes from her magical sleep in the temple of Saint Marguerite, in the neighboring country of Sarance. The weakened angel who awakened her informs Lilith that there are now suitable candidates for her plan — though only four rather than the hundreds she envisioned. But four will do.
Liliath’s targets are four young people who have met in Lutace, the capital of Sarance:
۩ Simeon, a very large black young man who is an intelligent and dedicated doctor-in-training; ۩ Agnez, a brand-new Musketeer cadet whose talent with the sword is equaled by her reckless courage; ۩ Henri, a lowly redheaded clerk with a talent for numbers and a hope for finding his fortune; ۩ Dorotea, a gifted icon-maker whose unusual ability to quickly sketch icons that angels will answer to leads to her imprisonment in the Tower of the Star Fortress at the hands of Captain Camille Rochefort.
Still beautiful, still age nineteen to all appearances, Liliath renews her quest to be physically united with Palleniel, the angel she loves. She gathers new followers from the Ystaran refugees living in Sarance, but they are weakened by their inability to tolerate the touch of angelic magic, which turns their blood to ash or even turns them into one of the feared beastlings. The Ystarans or “Refusers” are treated as untouchables. Liliath’s leadership offers them new hope … but where is she leading them, and why?
Garth Nix’s latest fantasy novel Angel Mage is a four Musketeers type of tale set in a somewhat gritty fantasy world, an analogue of seventeenth century western Europe. In the map that appears at the beginning of the book, Spain is called Ystara and France is Sarance, with Lutace taking the place of Paris. The name changes and physical differences between Angel Mage’s map and the real western Europe drive home the point that one shouldn’t expect simply a retelling of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Angel Mage has its own unique plot, focused on Liliath’s stunningly self-centered scheme.
Although Simeon, Agnez, Henri and Dorotea all become Queen’s Musketeers, for three of them it’s mostly just a courtesy title. Their characters don’t really track the original four Musketeers in any meaningful way, except that a deep friendship and loyalty develops between them, despite their differences. Several characters from The Three Musketeers do appear in Angel Mage, although they are generally older and play supporting roles. Dartagnan, for example, is a 40-year-old woman who’s now the captain of the Musketeers (and yes, it’s Dartagnan without an apostrophe here).
Angel Mage is loaded with racial and sexual diversity; society in this world is fully and unquestioningly accepting of different races (of our four heroes, three are darker-skinned), genders, and sexual orientations. Most of the powerful characters are female, including the Queen of Sarance, Dartagnan, Cardinal Duplessis (which was the real-life name of Cardinal Richelieu), and Captain Rochefort. Two of the four musketeer friends are female, including Agnez, by far the best fighter. Not to mention the arch-villain and “Angel Mage” of the title, Liliath, who (in a move that will tickle Musketeers fans) is occasionally called Milady. Certainly Liliath is the kindred spirit of Dumas’ Milady, though their motivations and schemes are entirely different. At the same time, her name Liliath also evokes Lilith, the mythical femme fatale.
Nix’s magical system in Angel Mage is pleasingly complex. The angels in this novel are more secular than religious in nature, essentially winged spirits from another dimension. Angels are summoned by icons (usually in the form of rings or other jewelry) to exercise their magic for the benefit of the person holding the icon. Interestingly, calling on angels carries an often-steep price: you lose days, months or even years of your life, physically aging your body each time you use the icon, depending on the power and standing of the angel and the scope of the request. Liliath, however, has found a highly dubious way to avoid the aging effect, making her even more dangerous.
Angel Mage is more deliberately-paced than quick moving, but I enjoyed the world-building, the intriguing details relating to angelic magic, and the appealing characters. Nix’s unusual take on the legendary Musketeers and their encounters with the lethally dangerous Liliath is worth taking the time to savor.
P.S. This book has one of my favorite covers of the year.
Initial post: A hardback copy of this book just unexpectedly landed on my doorstep today, courtesy of the publicist, Wunderkind PR. Garth Nix's latest! How cool is that? And it's a fantasy inspired by the Three Musketeers!...more
A strong 4 stars for this SF novella that examines the issues with AI. Full review first posted on FantasyLiterature.com:
A woman steals a Maserati andA strong 4 stars for this SF novella that examines the issues with AI. Full review first posted on FantasyLiterature.com:
A woman steals a Maserati and takes off for a mansion north of San Francisco, on a remote stretch of Highway 1 on the coast of California. Another person, Riley, follows her into the home and up to a bathroom, where a man in the tub is dying of knife wounds. As Riley pursues the woman, the tension is offset somewhat by feeling that something about the scene is off. A smell is described as “almost right.” The woman that Riley is chasing, Maxine or “Max,” speaks in toddler-like language.
Riley, the VP of Non-Player Character (NPC) Development for a video game developer, realizes that Max, a minor video character in a virtual reality game, isn’t accepting the role of murder victim to her occult-obsessed husband within the game. Instead, after being murdered 2,039 times by her husband during the development of the Lost Coast game, Max has decided to resist her fate and is trying to escape the confines of the VR game’s map. Somehow Max has developed self-awareness. The question is, what to do about it?
Summer Frost is an intriguing novella about the development of artificial intelligence by Blake Crouch, author of the WAYWARD PINES trilogy and Recursion. It’s a speedy read, about 75 pages, that kept me glued to my chair as I read it in a single sitting. Riley and the principal of WorldPlay, Brian Brite, agree that Max needs to be digitally contained so as not to escape their control. But within those confines, there’s a lot of room for Max to develop their intelligence and capabilities (Max chooses the singular “they” pronoun, rejecting a gendered identity), and an overarching concern about whether Max’s values will align with humanity’s.
Riley is a sympathetic, workaholic main character who becomes overly attached to the AI Max. It has a realistic effect on Riley and her family: her wife Meredith feels jealous of Max, and Riley and Meredith are growing more distant as Riley pours her heart, time and mind into her work and relationship with Max.
I … turn onto my side with my back to Meredith’s back, three feet of demilitarized space between us in the bed, but our hearts infinitely further apart.
The handling of some of the gender-related issues felt a bit clunky; though it’s a highly timely topic, there’s more discussion of what Max is and is not from a gender point of view than seemed really relevant to the plot and Max’s nature as an AI. On the other hand, there’s a vaguely foreboding feeling to the whole story that did work well: can a human trust an AI that’s rapidly becoming more powerful and knowledgeable? And what can you do to make sure humans are safe if the AI escapes its artificial confines?
These are questions worth examining, and Crouch handles it deftly and in a way that surprised me in the end. I love the evocative title of this novella, and how Crouch also introduces the thought experiment Roko’s basilisk into Summer Frost, which lends itself well to the plot. Summer Frost is part of the FORWARD collection proposed and curated by Crouch. It’s a set of six stand-alone novellas, each by a different author, that explore the “effects of a pivotal technological moment.” The authors are Crouch, N.K. Jemisin, Veronica Roth, Amor Towles, Paul Tremblay and Andy Weir. The individual novellas are reasonably priced and available in ebook and audio form individually or as a set.
Content notes: a handful of scattered F-bombs....more
Aliette de Bodard’s UNIVERSE OF XUYA series of novellas and short stories has been nominated for Best SerieReview first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Aliette de Bodard’s UNIVERSE OF XUYA series of novellas and short stories has been nominated for Best Series in the 2019 Hugo awards, for very good reason. The detailed worldbuilding and thoughtful writing pull the reader into a world with an alternative history, where Chinese ships were the first to discover the Americas, drastically changing our history and leading to a space age future where Chinese and Vietnamese galactic empires hold great power and intelligent mindships interact with humans outside of the ship through projected avatars. De Bodard’s website has an extremely useful page that includes a brief description of the Xuya (“Dawn Shore”) universe and a handy chronology listing all of her XUYA tales.
The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, one of the novellas in this series, takes place in the Dai Viet Empire. Thirty years before this story begins, the Citadel, a space station headed up by the Bright Princess Ngoc Minh, Empress’s oldest and favorite daughter and her heir, was a place of technological wonders: tiny but immensely powerful weapons, teleporting inhabitants, and more. The Empress, furious at her daughter’s ongoing defiance (including not sharing these weapons), had sent her ships to destroy the Citadel, but when they arrived the Citadel and all of its inhabitants had mysteriously vanished.
Now the Empire is threatened by an invading fleet of ships from the Nam Federation, which appears to have discovered a way to hijack the brains of the Empire’s mindships, their biggest advantage in war. The Empress is in more need of the Citadel’s weapons than ever before, and the Empire’s scientists may have found a way to use the mysterious aspects of deep space to revisit the past.
The focus of The Citadel of Weeping Pearls is as much on interpersonal relationships as it is the mystery of the Citadel’s disappearance and the search for a method to find it again. De Bodard examines the sometimes difficult bonds and relationships between mothers and daughters and sisters: the Empress regrets her falling out with her eldest daughter Ngoc Minh; the Empress’s youngest daughter, Ngoc Ha, tries to come to terms with her tense relationship with her own daughter, the mindship The Turtle’s Golden Claw, and her lingering jealousy of her older sister Ncog Minh. The Turtle’s Golden Claw is helping with the search for the Citadel and the newly vanished Grand Master Bach Cuc, the mindship’s paternal grandmother, who was one of those searching for the Citadel’s trail. Meanwhile, engineer Diem Huong, whose mother vanished with the Citadel when Diem Huong was six years old, is part of a team working on an experimental time machine, and she desperately hopes to use it to find her mother again.
The Citadel of Weeping Pearls is a slower-paced and somewhat opaque novella, with a large and sometimes confusing array of characters (all of the Vietnamese names were, I’m afraid, a slight challenge for me to keep straight). But it’s also a beautifully written, bittersweet mystery in a wonderfully imaginative space setting. Readers who are patient and attentive will be amply rewarded by reading this novella....more
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