Jul 31 2022

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Earth has a problem. But as Project Hail Mary begins, the protagonist and first-person narrator has no idea what the problem is. He knows a lot less than that, in fact. He doesn’t know where he is, doesn’t know how he got there, doesn’t even know his own name. Why is the room round? Why are there two dead and desiccated bodies strapped onto things like medical beds next to him? Why is he strapped down, for that matter?

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Andy Weir has taken the opening to The Martian and amped it up by taking away any of the protagonist’s knowledge of where he is or what he is doing there, along with most of the skills he needs to do whatever he is supposed to be doing. Before long, the protagonist has to contend with a not-very-bright AI that controls his immediate environment, and the whole thing reads for a while like a novelization of an Infocom game, where only exactly the right verbal response will get the computer to do what one wants it to do. I guess the approach is supposed to increase dramatic tension, but I found it only aggravating. Memories return to the narrator in large chunks, and that is how Weir gradually reveals the backstory.

Earth’s problem is a neat one, from the perspective of a science fiction story, rather less so for anyone who happens to be living through it. Astronomers discover a funny line going from the sun’s north polar regions to Venus. Simultaneously, they discover that the sun’s luminosity is measurably dropping. The energy is going into the link. At the detected rate of decrease, earth’s ecosystems will be in grave danger in a matter of decades no matter what terrestrial actions are taken. The protagonist — who eventually remembers his name is Ryland Grace, Dr. Ryland Grace, former academic speculator about extraterrestrial metabolisms and current teacher of middle school chemistry — is pretty bummed to remember that.

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Jul 29 2022

Zatanna: The Jewel of Gravesend by Alys Arden & Jacquelin De Leon

I was so thrilled to pick up a copy of this and have it signed by Alys Arden at the recent American Library Association’s Annual Conference 2022! I’d never read any Zatanna before, despite being both fascinated by the character and curiously reluctant to read any of her solo books. I figured that a modern YA retelling of her origin story might be the best way to ease me into learning more about a character who seems ripe for misogynistic exploitation and, frankly, whose idea of spellcasting always seemed vaguely clever-for-the-early-1900s-but-otherwise-extremely-obvious for me.

Ofc, YA retellings of iconic characters are not without their pitfalls. I have spent far too much of my reading life quietly seething at what well-meaning authors have done to (ruin) the origins of Wonder Woman and Catwoman, so I figured that not knowing anything about Zatanna’s background would actually serve me well here. So while I can’t speak to how closely this book hews to the accepted canon — in deed or even, and perhaps more importantly, in spirit; see the first X-Men movie for an excellent example of capturing the spirit of a story without necessarily keeping to the often tricky and contradictory minutiae of decades of background detail — I can say that it was a very entertaining graphic novel that perfectly introduces a rebellious, stage-shy Zatanna who will eventually grow up to be the confident mystic and magician long-time readers are more familiar with.

Zatanna Starr is looking forward to spending a summer away from the snooty kids at the school her wealthy parents insist she attends. While her snobby classmates talk about traveling to Europe and the Hamptons, Zatanna is more than content to lounge on the beach of her Coney Island home, hanging out with her real friends and, especially, with the boy she’s been inseparable from for almost a decade now, Alexei Volkov. Sure, it’s a little weird that his dad is the Russian mobster in charge of running the casinos in the basement of her own family’s legendary hotel, but their parents are mostly cool with them being together, even if Alexei’s mom is constantly fussing at him to work out with a slew of personal trainers she brings in from all over the world.

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Jul 28 2022

Zara’s Rules for Record-Breaking Fun by Hena Khan

with the loveliest illustrations by Wastana Haikal. Like, I’m not joking, the pictures add so much to an already really terrific story. Bapak Wastana really captures all the different multicultural generations in his line drawings, and I’m wholly in love with them.

The story itself far exceeded my expectations from reading just the blurb. Zara Saleem is the Queen of the Neighborhood: she’s always making up the rules for the games that the kids in her neighborhood play. When a new family moves in on their street, new girl Naomi proves a threat to Zara’s position. Zara decides that the best way to reclaim being the center of attention is to get into the Guinness Book Of World Records. Unsurprisingly, this does not go to plan. Will Zara learn that being Queen is nowhere near as fun as being friends?

So here’s the deal. As a bit of a bossy boots myself, I’m always wary of books that portray being an assertive female negatively. If no one takes charge and shapes the discourse, everyone just stands around being grumpy that no one is taking charge and shaping the discourse. Then there are the passive-aggressive people who expect you to read their minds when trying to come to a group consensus, or say one thing when really meaning another. Leadership is a difficult skill, and female leadership is too often portrayed negatively. Like, when was the last time you read a book about a boy being ostracized for being bossy?

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Jul 27 2022

A Psalm For The Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Ayfkm with this Eat, Pray, Love but make it sci-fi bullshit?!

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky ChambersI saved the Becky Chambers novella for last on my Hugo nominations reading slate because I deeply love her full-length novels, even tho I was not a fan of her last novella, To Be Taught, If Fortunate. I found that effort too serious, too earnest, but even that was better than this truly bizarre story about first world problems in space/the future/porque no los dos.

The worldbuilding was admittedly pretty great. On the planet Panga, humans worship six gods, and have evolved to the point where, when their robots achieved sentience, they simply let them go. The robots went into the wilds, asking not to be contacted unless they asked for contact first. Humanity carries on, embracing an enlightened view of existence which eradicates need and enacts a virtuous custodianship of the planet.

So far, so good. Sibling Dex wakes up one day and decides that, tho they enjoy their life at the monastery, they need to get the fuck out. As such, they take on the role of tea monk, eschewing training in favor of hitting the road as expeditiously as possible. Unsurprisingly given their utter lack of experience, they completely suck at their job when they first start out. It takes several months of research and several years of travel before they finally become good at it, even earning a reputation as being the best tea monk on Panga (because ofc they are.)

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Jul 26 2022

The Loud House Back To School Special by The Loud House Creative Team

The Loud Family is back… and back to school! If you need a fun way to help ease your kids into the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year, then there are certainly worse ways than to hand them this collection of short comics inspired by the Nickelodeon series, revolving around the titular theme.

Which theme has the kids going back to school or, like eldest child Lori, enrolling in Fairway University. My personal favorite vignettes were the ones that followed her as she got familiar with her new campus and its emphasis on golf. I really enjoyed watching her introduce Lincoln and friends to the cafeteria, and empathized with her later panic over getting the perfect gifts for everyone. Gosh, how long has it been since I’ve read another book set in college? Was it Vera Kurian’s Never Saw Me Coming from last September? Regardless, I’m a little taken aback at my own enthusiasm over the very relatable setting.

Kids who haven’t yet been to college will also find plenty to relate to as Lincoln attempts to dodge his hall monitor sister Lynn, and winds up getting involved in several special projects courtesy of both his teachers and his friends. Said teachers also get their time in the spotlight, as do the kids in pre-K, including Lincoln’s littlest sister Lily. Meanwhile, Ronnie Anne and Sid find themselves trying to figure out how to pass gym class’ final and biggest test under the curmudgeonly eye of returning Coach Crawford. There’s also a funny little diversion into the history of clowns with the Morticians Club: I was genuinely surprised to learn something new in their vignette.

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Jul 24 2022

On the Field of Glory by Henryk Sienkiewicz

Henryk Sienkiewicz, an early Nobel laureate, wrote historical novels set mostly in the days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that, like Shakespeare’s history plays, have a resonance well beyond their initial audiences and historical settings. Sienkiewicz lived and wrote at a time when Poland’s imperial neighbors had erased it from the map of Europe, and yet Poland stubbornly refused to disappear. Polish rebellions, particularly against the Russian Empire, kept the hope of independence alive. Polish Legions, under banners that read Za naszą i waszą wolność (“For our freedom and yours”) fought across Europe in places where revolutionary freedom struggled against old empires, establishing a tradition that has continued down through the centuries. Poles cracked the Enigma machine, enabling the World War II Allies to read German communications; Polish airmen formed 16 squadrons in the RAF, including one that shot down the most enemy aircraft during the Battle of Britain. It’s no coincidence that during Russia’s current aggressive war against Ukraine, Poland has been called the world’s largest humanitarian NGO.

On the Field of Glory by Henryk Sienkiewicz

Sienkiewicz’s books both draw on and contribute to these traditions. His second-most famous work is a trilogy of novels — With Sword and Fire, The Deluge, Fire on the Steppe — set around the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s wars with Sweden. (His most famous is Quo Vadis, which I have not read.) The trilogy was written, as many editions say on the frontispiece, “to lift up the hearts.” He wrote to bolster Polish patriotism, but the exact content of that patriotism was very much up for grabs. One of the protagonists of the trilogy is Lithuanian. Other key characters came from the Commonwealth’s eastern border regions and would probably be Ukrainian today; still other characters have Tartar ancestry, as in fact numerous Polish nobles did.

I gather that within modern Polish literary circles, liking Sienkiewicz is a rather retrograde position: he is a writer who was old-fashioned before 1900, his characters loudly proclaim their Catholic faith, he writes sympathetically of the glory of battle. That’s all true, but I think it’s a bit like criticizing Shakespeare for being a Tudor partisan who cast other dynasties in a negative light. Siekiewicz also writes movingly about the pity of war, his main characters are unforgettable, and the sweep of his epic puts much of modern fantasy to shame. In this case, I am glad to be a foreigner and not have to worry that liking Sienkiewicz puts me at odds with my peers.

On the Field of Glory was published in 1906, Sienkiewicz’s third-to-last book, written when he was nearly 60. It is set in 1682–83, when Poland is on the verge of going to war with the Ottoman Empire to lift the siege of Vienna, a turning point in European history. I had expected that the book would be mostly set during the campaign, but nearly all of the action happens before the Polish army has begun to gather, and Vienna itself is only mentioned in an epilogue that the translator put together from contemporary Polish sources. (Sienkiewicz did not write the other two parts of a planned trilogy that would presumably have carried the tale through to the great battle.) This expectation threw me a little bit, and I spent a fair part of the novel’s early chapters wondering when Sienkiewicz would get on with it.

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Jul 23 2022

How to Raise an Elephant by Alexander McCall Smith

The long-running No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series relies on a careful balance between new stories — usually cases that the agency is called on to solve — and deeper development of its continuing characters. Too much of the former, and it runs the danger of reading like an episode of old-style television: dramatic events that leave the main characters exactly as they were at the beginning of the story. Too much of the latter and it runs the risk of reading like the latest installment of a soap opera. As much as I have written that I like stories that arise from the nature of the characters, I think How to Raise an Elephant tipped a bit toward the soap operatic. The beloved characters — Mma Ramotswe, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, Fanwell, Charlie, Mma Potokwani and more — are all present in this book, and are as charming as ever, but I found it a little light on detecting.

How to Raise an Elephant by Alexander McCall Smih

If a series has reached its twenty-first volume and the main complaint that I have is that the recurring characters recur a little too much, then that is definitely praising with faint damnation. There are many joys in How to Raise an Elephant from pithy but contrasting observations of the same scene by different characters to subtle communications between long-time friends and colleagues, from homespun meditations by Mma Ramotswe to antics of the children at the orphanage that Mma Potokwani runs. On the other hand, these hallmarks of familiarity make the book a less than ideal entry point to the series. Long-time readers will be pleased, newer readers may be baffled.

The story that gives the novel its title begins when Charlie, the remaining apprentice mechanic at the garage that shares premises with the detective agency, borrows Mma Ramotswe’s little white van but it cagey about the reason. She remains a trusting soul, despite many years as a detective, and allows him to use her beloved vehicle. Charlie has spent the last few volumes in the series growing out of his past as a footloose and fancy-free young man, but this latest escapade threatens to set him back in the eyes of the people at the garage and the agency, where he now works part-time as an assistant detective. He brings the van back with a little damage and neglects to tell Mma Ramotswe. Charlie may have matured a bit, but he still hasn’t realized that leaving a mystery lying around a detective agency might not be the best idea.

The other major storyline concerns a distant cousin of Mma Ramotswe who has in a roundabout way asked for money. Mma Ramotswe is torn between the Botswana tradition of helping family, no matter how distant the relation, and the feeling that all is not well with the story that her cousin has told. She investigates, and things are not as they seem, though as the novel progresses, the things that were not what they seemed turn out to be yet different. All of the turns show more about Botswana and its neighbors, about the old ways and the new days, and human nature of a more general sort.

The series remains a delight, a world I am happy to enter for a few pleasant hours to have some tea and find out what has happened in a particular corner of Botswana.

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Jul 22 2022

Seeing Things by Seamus Heaney

Seeing Things returns to a greater length, though many of its poems — particularly the 48 in Part II, “Squarings” — are short; the squarings are all twelve lines each. “Glanmore Revisited” offers seven sonnets in its short sequence. “The Schoolbag” is also sonnet length, while “1.1.1987” and “An August Night” are three lines each. Compact Heaney is by no means confined. The brevity in some sense gives him license to be more expansive. As he says in Stepping Stones, “You could think of every poem in ‘Squarings’ as the peg at the end of a tent-rope reaching up into the airy structure, but still with purchase on something earthier and more obscure.” (p. 320)

Seeing Things by Seamus Heaney

As bookends of the two parts of Seeing Things, Heaney places two translations: one from the Aeneid, the other from Dante’s Inferno. From the Aeneid, he has selected “The Golden Bough,” which is mostly a dialogue between Aeneas and a Sibyl. He implores her for “one look, one face-to-face meeting with my dear father.” Heaney’s own father passed away between the publication of The Haw Lantern (which itself contains a sonnet sequence prompted by his mother’s passing) and that of Seeing Things. The Sibyl replies that though Aeneas be of the highest birth, “But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air./This is the real task and the real undertaking./A few have been able to do it…” She reminds him, “…if you will go beyond the limit,/Understand what you must do beforehand.” Engaging with the newly dead is no task for the faint of heart. “No one is ever permitted/To go down to earth’s hidden places unless he has first/Plucked this golden-fledged growth out of its tree…” In this volume, Heaney is reaching for the golden bough, he is seeing things, and working to come back.

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Jul 21 2022

Across The Green Grass Fields (Wayward Children #6) by Seanan McGuire

with Rovina Cai’s amazing illustrations.

Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuireOne thing I love about the books in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series is how they’re all so readable. Even if I don’t like her protagonists or think characters are being daft or soapboxy, her pacing is usually so well done that I’m never bored with what’s happening, and keep turning the pages to see what comes next. Across The Green Grass Fields is no different.

In an overarching setting where doorways suddenly open to allow troubled children to escape from our mundane world to a different reality, this installment of the series finds an 11 year-old girl named Regan walking through a portal to a realm where all the hoofed creatures of mythology are real. In the Hooflands, our heroine falls in with a family of centaurs who intend to present her to the Queen, eventually. You see, whenever a human appears in their kingdom, it’s the harbinger of turmoil. Whether that turns out to be for good or evil is another question entirely. Some humans make their way directly to the royal castle. Regan chooses to stay with her foster family and hang out for a while, which turns into years, until a trip to the Fair puts their entire group in danger.

Fleeing to the Northlands, Regan and her family make a new life for themselves, but Regan knows she’s living on borrowed time. When traders venture far enough north that rumors of the human living there begin spreading, she gathers up her courage in her hands and sets off to the castle to confront her “destiny.” Only nothing is as it seems, as she quickly discovers even before reaching her destination and uncovering its awful secret.

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Jul 19 2022

Gail Gibbons’ From Seed To Plant Workbook and Monarch Butterfly Workbook by Gail Gibbons

Oh, summertime, when the kids are in my hair 24/7. At least my eldest child has neighborhood friends to play with: my two youngest, being shyer and on the autism spectrum, have a harder time finding safe things they want to do. Fortunately, Gail Gibbons has a wonderful solution to help parents entertain their kids while reinforcing scientific concepts and allowing kids and parents alike to explore the great outdoors.

Going over much of the same basic information that kids (at least in my home state of Maryland) learn in their elementary education, both the Monarch Butterfly and From Seed To Plant workbooks serve to discuss insect and plant life cycles in an engaging manner that appeals to the artist in every kid. They also sneakily include exercises to work on skills that may need strengthening, whether in handwriting or in math. The books are written in a lively manner that doesn’t talk down to the reader, with every page or two-page spread having some new activity that, while targeted at children, are also interesting for anyone older with a lay interest in science.

Joseph having a slightly more pronounced green thumb than Theo, I gave him the From Seed To Plant Workbook, while handing the Monarch Butterfly book to his brother. Both children immediately enjoyed going through the books, which are brightly illustrated but leave plenty of room for coloring. Theo and I actually quite liked the feel of colored pencils on the not-too-smooth texture of his workbook’s paper. In fact, much of the simple coloring blends in smoothly with the art throughout, done in Ms Gibbons’ trademark style.

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