Feb 12 2023

The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard

The Red Scholar’s Wake is, by turns, a romance, a meditation on loss, a political intrigue, a story of starfaring pirates, an examination of parenthood, and a tale of interplanetary adventure. That sounds like a lot, maybe too much for fewer than 300 pages, so let me look at it from a slightly different angle. The Red Scholar’s Wake is the story of Xích Si, initially a captive of the Red Banner pirates, and Rice Fish (more fully, The Rice Fish, Resting, but the two-word form of her name is what de Bodard uses throughout the novel), a mindship. In the Xuya universe, a larger body of de Bodard’s work in which The Red Scholar’s Wake takes place, mindships are unions of humans with starfaring ships, mostly machine but with an organic person at the ship’s heart. Rice Fish and Xích Si (de Bodard uses both parts of her name throughout the novel) both use she/her pronouns.

The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard

Huân had been the Red Scholar, the leader of the Red Banner, and Rice Fish had been her wife. The very first sentence of the novel announces her death, making the rest of it both her wake in the sense of a mourning event and also the waves that her passing leave behind. Huân and Rice Fish had forged an alliance of five pirate banners, creating a sanctuary they call the Citadel, and enabling a certain amount of order and security for a people caught between two empires. The price of that security, though, has been curtailing some of their raiding and agreeing to live by rules internally. Not everyone is on board with that program, most notably Huân’s son Hố, who has risen to become leader of the Purple Banner. Rice Fish had been consort and aims to become leader of the Red Banner in her own right, but that is not guaranteed. She wants to secure her position and continue to build on Huân’s legacy.

Xích Si begins the story as a captive of the Red Banner, taken in a pirate raid, most of her shipmates killed, all of the other survivors prisoners likely to be sold into indenture. She has come to the attention of Rice Fish because she apparently has considerable skill with bots and her ship and, by extension, with other key technologies. Rice Fish needs those skills to discover who betrayed Huân and take that information to the banners’ council to secure her position as leader of the Red Banner. So Rice Fish offers Xích Si a marriage contract. I know. I nearly bounced out of the book at that point, which was the end of the first chapter.

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Feb 10 2023

River Of Wrath (St Benedict #2) by Alexandrea Weis & Lucas Astor

Oh man, I absolutely loved this bananas sequel to River Of Ashes! A large part of this is probably due to the fact that we don’t have to live in the viewpoint of a psychopath, as we did in this novel’s precursor, but instead experience events from the perspectives of people struggling to come to terms with the terrible deaths that have only recently befallen their town.

***SPOILERS FOR RIVER OF ASHES BELOW***

As the book opens, Leslie is still grappling with the senseless murder of her sister Dawn, and the steps she herself took to avenge her fallen twin. In her guilt, she’s dumped her boyfriend Derek out of fear that he’ll figure out what she did and revile her. Her closest friends now are three other victims of the monstrous Beau Devereaux: Kelly, Sara and Taylor. All four of them have been paid off by Gage Devereaux, the town patriarch, to keep quiet about what happened, a bargain they’re happy enough to stomach now that Beau is gone.

But the dead of St Benedict refuse to stay buried. When yet another corpse is found on the banks of the Bogue Falaya river on which their Louisiana town stands, the residents can’t help but wonder if they are indeed cursed. The skeleton has lain hidden for around twenty-five years tho, so Leslie figures that this crime, at least, has nothing to do with her.

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Feb 09 2023

River Of Ashes (St Benedict #1) by Alexandrea Weis and Lucas Astor

First, I have to say that I’m really glad that this is being marketed as horror and not Young Adult, despite the main cast all being teenagers. There’s quite a bit of graphic stuff in here that probably isn’t suitable for the fade-to-black nature of the YA genre, and the last thing anyone needs is for readers to feel betrayed by reasonably expecting one thing and getting another instead.

That said, this is classic horror a la Psycho or American Psycho (which always amuses me as a title because it’s not like Alfred Hitchcock’s version was German or something.) You have a terrible person at its heart, with supernatural elements adorning the story. But really the book is about our heroine Leslie Moore and the villain set on claiming her for himself, her twin sister’s boyfriend Beau Devereaux.

The Devereaux family essentially owns the small Louisiana town of St Benedict, located on the banks of the Bogue Falaya River. Beau, the high school quarterback, straight-A student and all-around golden boy, is basically their town’s crown prince. Dawn Moore has been in love with him since ninth grade, and leaps at the chance to be his girlfriend. As the pretty, popular captain of the cheerleading squad, she seems like the perfect match for Beau.

Trouble is, he really wants her quiet, serious sister Leslie, and is only putting up with Dawn because being with her helps burnish his unassailable reputation. This would be awkward enough even if Beau weren’t a straight-up psychopath. He uses every opportunity he can to get close to Leslie and say awful, degrading things to her, then turns around and tells Dawn that Leslie is coming on to him. This naturally creates a rift between the sisters.

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Feb 06 2023

Paris Versus New York: A Tally of Two Cities by Vahram Muratyan

I was looking for a book of Bach cello music when I unearthed this gem from one of the many piles of To-Be Reads squirreled away in my house. I’d gotten it as part of a subscription box devoted to French products and lifestyle, and put it away to enjoy at “another time”. Well, that other time was definitely this weekend, as I took a much-needed brain break between heavy crime novels.

And I’m actually pretty glad I waited, as my French has improved drastically this past year, eliminating the need for me to look up most of the captions on the Paris side of the book. This is actually a great way for learners to ease into French-language books, as Paris/French are on one page while New York and the American equivalent are on the facing (for the most part.) Haha, it’s almost like a board book for adults, deceptively simple while introducing sophisticated concepts to the reader. To be clear, this is not a book for kids, not because of any controversial content but because some of the references may go well over their heads unless they’ve been lucky enough to be raised in both cities.

But I’m being remiss in not properly describing the book itself. In bright colors and elegant linework, Vahram Muratyan, a Frenchman, compares and contrasts the features of two cities he adores. From geography to architecture to culture, he deftly draws out the similarities and differences with a wry sense of humor and a keen eye for detail. It’s a startlingly clever, beautiful book that can be paged through quickly but deserves to be savored.

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Feb 04 2023

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

Just write the fun parts. Take a science fiction premise — that evolution ran differently on an alternate earth giving rise to kaiju (Godzilla and company, I didn’t know the term before I had heard of this book) — and just write the fun parts. That’s The Kaiju Preservation Society.

Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

The parallel earths, two among presumably many, went along their merrily separate ways until nuclear explosions on human earth weakened the interdimensional barrier between the two. Godzilla came through, in part because nuclear power means food for full-grown kaiju. Soon thereafter, various powers-that-be on human earth figured out how to go to and from kaiju earth. Since that time, they’ve cooperated on keeping the kaiju there and the humans here for the benefit of all concerned. They’ve also cooperated on keeping all of this secret, and set up an organization to reach all of these goals: the Kaiju Preservation Society. There’s a fair amount of handwavium, but it works because it’s internally consistent, because Scalzi doesn’t lean too hard on the science, and because the book is all about the fun parts.

Jamie Gray, first-person narrator of The Kaiju Preservation Society, knows not a bit of this at the start of the novel. It’s early in 2020, just before the covid-19 lockdowns began. Jamie’s a marketing guy for a food delivery app company in New York and goes in to the boss’ office for a performance review. Instead he gets fired. Then one of his roommates leaves, and the other two work in theater so they know a lockdown will evaporate their jobs. This is not a book about scraping by amid a pandemic, so Scalzi skips ahead to when Jamie’s luck changes, although it takes several scenes of snappy dialogue for the change to fully materialize.

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Feb 02 2023

The Girl Who Married A Skull and other African Stories edited by C. Spike Trotman, Kate Ashwin, Kel McDonald & Taneka Stotts

Happy Black History Month! I’ve been so backlogged with work that the only volume I knew I could do justice to with regard to the occasion this week is this graphic novel, a part of the Cautionary Fables & Fairytales Book series printed by Iron Circus. I got the entire collection several crowdfunds ago (and recently completed the set) but had never had the right time or occasion to dive in. Happily, I now have a reason to read at least one.

And what a delightful way to start, especially since this is, I believe, the first in the series? The fifteen black and white tales collected here were written and illustrated by seventeen different creators, with a terrific spread across all sorts of folk tales. From humor to horror, from creation myths to tales transposed to a far future, this variety pleases the folklore completist in me. While I’d heard of some of these stories in different incarnations — the title story is fairly widespread, at least to those with an interest in pan-African culture — I was absolutely struck by the whimsy imbued in each interpretation presented here. Perhaps it’s my current state of mind, too, that has me embracing these light-hearted and overall generous takes. The classic story of the girl who married a skull does not usually end as charmingly as it does in these pages, after all.

Of course, this is ostensibly a collection for children, which might explain the lack of grimness. Regardless of why, I’m here for it, as we read of daring protagonists who use their ingenuity for good (tho sometimes for bad — and believe me, that never ends well.) Aside from Nicole Chartrand’s The Disobedient Daughter Who Married A Skull, I especially loved Katie & Steven Shanahan’s Demane And Demazana; Carla Speed McNeil’s Snake And Frog Never Play Together; Kate Ashwin’s The Story Of The Thunder And The Lightning; D Shazzbaa Bennett’s Gratitude; Mary Cagle’s The Lion’s Whiskers; Ma’at Crook’s Queen Hyena’s Funeral, and Meredith McLaren’s Concerning The Hawk And The Owl. The stories are almost all outstanding, but these are the ones that really grabbed me, and married their words particularly well with their illustrations.

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Jan 29 2023

District and Circle by Seamus Heaney

Things, moments, people, poems. Heaney finds inspiration for the poems in District and Circle in things that he encounters or imagines, moments he hopes to preserve or evoke in others, people he remembers, and poems he either recalls or translates. Places, which loomed larger in other collections, are less present here, though of course they are not wholly absent as springs of inspiration. He opens with a thing, a very palpable thing, “The Turnip-Snedder.” I expect that upon reading the title only a minuscule slice of Heaney’s audience would know what a snedder is, but 20 lines later readers will not only have a very clear idea of a snedder, but also a sense of its physicality, the sounds it makes, and its metaphysical role in turning one form of life into another. He follows with “A Shiver,” a sonnet describing and meditating on swinging a sledgehammer. Like the first poem in his first collection, “Digging,” this poem links the physical aspects of work with the internal, the spiritual aspects of creating. Heaney has often spoken of the ways that poems should move or shift as they progress, a movement the swinger of the sledge needs too: “spine and waist/A pivot for the tight-braced, tilting rib-cage.” Poets and poems have this as well, “gathered force like a long-nursed rage/About to be let fly.” The mature Heaney is less certain than his younger self. Where the younger man wrote “Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests./I’ll dig with it.” the older one asks

District and Circle by Seamus Heaney

…does it do you good
To have known it in your bones, directable,
Withholdable at will,
A first blow that could make air of a wall,
A last one so unanswerably landed
The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle?

As in Electric Light, Heaney engages in considerable dialogue with other poets through translations, dedications and other forms of conversation. “Anything Can Happen” is styled “after Horace, Odes, I, 34.” Rilke gets a translation with “Rilke, After the Fire.” Heaney wonders about Greece and Ireland, about life and death, about poetry and political engagement all in the page and a half of “To George Seferis in the Underworld.” And then there’s the short delight of “Wordsworth’s Skates,” clearly inspired by a museum exhibit, but refusing to be bound to it, as the poet cannot be wholly bound by the material.
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Jan 28 2023

Cold Water by Dave Hutchinson

Dave Hutchinson, like William Gibson, is an artiste of the slightly funny deal. They run all through Cold Water, and trying to figure out just who is running a caper on whom is one of the pleasures of the novel. Carey Tews, the novel’s main protagonist, is a Texan who’s been in Europe for decades as a journalist and also one of the Coureurs des Bois. The Coureurs are a shadowy network of people who are adept at moving things, or people, across Europe without bothering with pesky things like fixed identities or border regulations, or really any regulations at all. Between her two professions, Carey has become a connoisseur of the slightly funny deal.

Cold Water by Dave Hutchinson

Which is why she nearly walks away from the proposition that is offered to her in the municipal palm house in Gliwice, Poland. For reasons that are (mostly) explained over the course of Cold Water, she’s no longer an active Coureur. Yet a man who is one of the network’s central nodes has sent her an urgent message that draws her from her home in Catalunya to Gliwice in southwest Poland.

“Are you offering me my job back?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” he said. “No, I wouldn’t dream of being so insulting, unless you wanted it back; you seem to be doing very well on your own. No, we’d like to engage you as a consultant. How do your people put it? A visiting fireman.”
“Why me? Is everyone else busy or something?”
“We think you have a certain … perspective which would be useful.” (pp. 12–13)

The person making the offer, Kaunus, (“That’s a place, not a name,” [said Carey]. He heaved a sigh. “Yes,” he said wearily.) shows her a picture.

She looked down at the photograph … In it, a young man and woman were leaning together into the shot, arms around each other’s shoulders. They were laughing. In the background was a wall of bodies, the occasional hand gripping a beer glass. In the foreground was a table almost entirely covered in empty bottles and glasses and plates. The look on the woman’s face broke Carey’s heart. She looked so young and trusting and happy. The man was blond and handsome and she had never quite got over the suspicion that he looked like the Devil.
“What’s he got himself mixed up in now?” she asked.
“We were rather hoping you’d agree to find out for us,” he said. “On the face of it, he mostly seems to have got himself dead.” (pp. 13–14)

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Jan 26 2023

Come Away From Her by Samuel W. Gailey

Cover art lately has been impressive all across the industry but y’all, look at this gorgeous thing. It’s even prettier than the Kiki Smith etching that inspired the book, in my opinion anyway.

And in my opinion? Come Away From Her reads like Marilynne Robinson deciding to turn her hand at commercial fiction a la Liane Moriarty, with strong Grace Metalious overtones (in case it wasn’t clear, this is a compliment, and a pretty darned lavish one at that.) Set in the 1980s in small town Pennsylvania, this is a book about secrets, violence and redemption, and I was straight up crying through the end of it. I did not manage to finish this in a single sitting as Julia, the publicist who pressed this on me (for which I’m forever grateful!) did, but I’ve also had to contend with poor health and even needier than usual children this past week. Reading and writing have been a bit of a struggle, but this book was absolutely worth fighting through the fog to finish.

As our story opens, Pastor Cap is hungover after yet another bender. He exits his church to find a murder of crows just outside. Trying to shoo them away, he finally sees what they’re obscuring: the bloody corpse of a very murdered person.

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Jan 24 2023

The Moon Tonight: Our Moon’s Journey Around Earth by Jung Chang-hoon & Jang Ho

Happy Lunar New Year, readers! What more serendipitous opportunity for us to talk about the moon than in the first days of this auspicious time?

This wonderful picture book details the way the moon orbits around the earth and how we experience it, both visually and via the tides. In prose that’s as carefully chosen for precision as for beauty, astronomer and science editor Jung Chang-hoon discusses how we observe the moon and why it appears the way it does at different points in the calendar. The text is definitely suited for the scientifically-minded child. I have to admit that there were parts that felt a little over my head even. My planet-loving middle child loves this, however, particularly the flashlight experiment that’s included here to help understand the process of waxing and waning better.

My favorite parts — the terrific anecdotes on Korean culture in relation to the moon aside — were the gorgeous illustrations by award-winning illustrator Jang Ho. The depictions of heavenly bodies are as exquisite as expected, if not outright demanded, by children’s books on the subject.

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