Jul 19 2021

Disney’s Beauty And The Beast by Teddy Slater, Ron Dias & Ric González

When my middle child brought me this book to read aloud, no doubt gifted to my kids in a grab bag of books from my mother-in-law, I was pretty excited to do it. I grew up obsessed with my hardcover copy of Disney’s Cinderella, and Beauty And The Beast was one of my favorite Disney movies. So Joseph and his older brother Jms cuddled up to me while I read them the Golden Book Disney version of the classic fairy tale.

And oh wow, were there lots of things here that I remembered quite differently! Granted, it’s been decades since I’ve watched the movie, and I certainly did not bother to watch the live-action version, cute as Dan Stevens is. And media novelizations, as it were, always have a habit of flattening the nuance of the stories they’re retelling. Not having the terrific tunes to sing along to certainly doesn’t help either! So I was surprised by how little I remembered of the animated movie’s actual plot, even as I questioned whether the things the book was choosing to emphasize were as egregiously told in the movie. Perhaps my hazy recollection softened the bad parts, but had I truly swallowed down misogyny so easily as a child?

Only one way to solve this conundrum: by putting on the movie once more. Even from watching the opening bit explaining the curse on the Prince who became a Beast, it’s clear that a lot of nuance has been removed from the book adaptation. The words mean the same thing but they carry different inflections. In the book, it seems that the Prince is cursed because he’s shallow, but in the movie, it’s clear that he is being cursed for the cruelty that comes from his shallowness. And omg, the book’s insistence that Belle is “not like other girls” made me question my entire liking for this movie: fortunately, my re-watch makes it clear that in the movie, she’s not like anyone else in their small provincial town. It’s weirdly reductive to limit the uniqueness of Belle’s personality to a phrase that reeks of internalized misogyny, and frankly a bad lesson to teach young readers.

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Jul 13 2021

Sweet Tea by Piper Huguley

This is a sheer delight of a clean romance novel, one that touches on getting comfortable with your roots but still being open to love when it shows up to surprise you. Althea Dailey has finally made partner at her intellectual property law firm in New York City but, now that she’s achieved her life goal at the ripe old age of thirty-two, is starting to wonder whether there’s more to life than money and career success. Being sent south to North Carolina on her first big case as partner also has her feeling guilty about not doing more to stay in touch with her beloved Granda down in Milford, Georgia. But when Granda starts enthusing over the young man who’s been such a help to her with her cooking, who wants to make a documentary and cookbook of her recipes, Althea finally has an excuse to overcome her reluctance to head home, booking the first plane back to make sure her Granda isn’t being scammed by some crook.

Jack Darwent is a trust fund baby who found himself chafing at the life that his father, a civil rights lawyer, had mapped out for him. Eschewing law school for culinary school, he now travels the country gathering material for a documentary he wants to make celebrating the too-swiftly vanishing art of authentic Southern cooking. One of his subjects is the legendary Ada Dailey, whose endearing manner is at stark odds with the attitude of her high-powered attorney granddaughter who suddenly shows up in Milford with an entirely skeptical view of Jack’s efforts and intentions.

The way that Althea and Jack eventually come to understand and fall for each other while making peace with their own pasts and present is charmingly depicted in this low-heat, almost-Christian romance. I say almost-Christian because while the AME church plays a significant part in the proceedings, it’s clear that religion is seen as an intensely personal matter — while Piper Huguley clearly has a lot of Christian faith, she’s not about to force it on her readers. As a Muslim, I felt very comfortable reading this book, which gives a joyful impression of a Christianity that accepts and heals, but also makes it clear that you don’t have to go to church every Sunday to be considered a good person. I do wish that the book had been a little less heteronormative but that is an extremely minor quibble in an otherwise affirming, modern tale of interracial romance.

What I do really wish this book had done better was put the same amount of care it had used in the first three-quarters or so into building out the last quarter of the story. Things went by way too quickly after the May dinner. How exactly had Althea discerned the connection between Sherri’s grandma and Cassie? What is she planning to do to rescue Milford College beyond funding one scholarship? What’s up with Jack showing up at her office? I also didn’t really understand what was happening on Decoration Day — I get the basics, but the attitude of the other ladies is still unclear to me. I felt that there was so much story still to build out there in the last quarter, instead of the brief series of sketches that it felt like the narrative had dwindled down to post-May-dinner. I know that Ms Huguley is capable of telling a terrific tale, so it was mystifying why the last part felt so rushed and underdone.

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Jul 12 2021

The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

I wrote in 2015, “One last thing that I liked about The Goblin Emperor is that it didn’t end with an obvious sequel on its way. There are many stories that Addison could set in this world, and they would be a pleasure to read…” The Witness for the Dead is one of those stories, and it is indeed a great pleasure to read.

Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

Thara Celehar is a Witness for the Dead, a cleric of Ulis with the unusual ability to contact people newly dead and return with limited information from the remains of the person’s consciousness. Usually, it’s something immediately pertaining to the person’s death, but it can be other strongly held beliefs. Celehar appeared briefly but decisively in The Goblin Emperor, using his ability to reveal crucial information about the airship explosion that set the previous book into motion. That gave him connections at the very highest level, but it also made him inconvenient to a number of powerful factions. As a result, The Witness for the Dead finds him in the large provincial city of Amalo, not quite in exile but out of the way.

Celehar prefers that situation, to be honest. He’s a member of the clergy with a true vocation and a stubborn streak of honesty that the powerful and the ambitious occasionally find inconvenient. He believes in the usefulness of his role as a Witness, someone able to bring compassion and relief to the dead, and truth to their survivors. Truth, though, is not always a relief. About a third of the way through the book, he receives a petitioner from a wealthy family who asks him to Witness for the recently departed patriarch. There are competing wills, and the uncertainty is threatening the family’s ongoing business. Not to mention that dissent strong enough to cause someone to bring forth a forged will is a sign of deeper divisions within the family. Will Celehar be able to discern the patriarch’s desired heir? What will happen to the family in either event?

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Jul 09 2021

The Wicked King (The Folk Of The Air #2) by Holly Black

Haha, what the hell, NetGalley only sent me the first three quarters of this novel for review? Good thing I looked up the next book in the series and realized from the blurb that I had no idea how the events described there led from this one, and so discovered that I was missing an entire section of The Wicked King! I was all ready to excuse TWK’s abrupt ending with a diagnosis of middle-book syndrome (no thanks to whomever posted this version on NG) but am now pleased to report that Holly Black’s gangbusters The Cruel Prince does, indeed, get the excellent continuation it deserves. With thanks to my local library for having the novel on hand so I could speed read my way through the actual ending!

Jude Duarte is now the power behind King Cardan’s throne, but one of the many things she’s learned from her adoptive father, Grand General Madoc, is that power is much easier to obtain than to keep. Uncovering a plot against the king whom she both hates and desires, she works overtime with her own Court Of Shadows, a team of spies and subversives, to protect Cardan and, by so doing, protect her beloved little brother Oak, who’s also in the line of succession. But an almost off-hand remark from a nemesis causes her to worry. “Someone you trust has already betrayed you,” Undersea Princess Nicasia tells her. Since the fae are incapable of lying, Jude knows it must be true. But who could it be, and what kind of betrayal, and how deeply will this latest one hurt?

Jude’s life is one of pressure and paranoia as she strives to safeguard Cardan and Oak, often without their cooperation, while figuring out a way to extend her hold on Cardan and repair her relationship with her twin sister Taryn. Events come to a head around Taryn’s wedding, when disaster strikes despite Jude’s best laid plans. Can our arch-schemer think her way out of this latest bind, or will love blind her to the machinations of others?

So this book won’t make a lick of sense to anyone who hasn’t read the brilliant TCP, which is frankly one of the best novels of courtly intrigue I’ve ever read. TWK feels somewhat slighter in comparison, if only because Jude is at a distinct disadvantage in not being the usurper, as it were, but the defender of power. Enemies amass at every front, and no matter what she does, she can’t fight them all off. But some enemies are less serious than others, at least for now, and some problems come less from power struggles than from how difficult it is to learn how to trust and open up. There are definite communication problems in this book but, unlike in other YA novels I’ve had to struggle through, these communication issues aren’t stupid. Jude understandably has a hard time trusting Cardan because they’ve always been at odds. She has an even more understandably hard time trusting Taryn or Madoc after what happened in TCP.

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Jul 07 2021

City Of Iron And Dust by J.P. Oakes

I don’t know how to properly express the depth of my love for this extraordinary, brilliant book. It’s a book of revolutions and subversions, of challenging the status quo and thinking, really thinking about who gets to be a hero, and who deserves our sympathy and, most of all, who we should strive to be. Which last, in the hands of any other writer, would veer on the edge of moralizing claptrap. But J. P. Oakes gets to the heart of it here, telling us to try our hardest even if we can be

not satisfied, but at peace with the little [we have] done, with the knowledge that others will still be able to carry on the fight.

God, this book made me cry and laugh and upended all my expectations of what fantasy fiction can do. Because, in addition to being a really terrific industrial fantasy novel, set on a single night of upheaval and rebellion, it’s also a clever as hell tale of a drug heist gone awry and how that winds up signifying politically, as various factions chase down what the author slyly implies in the beginning is a mere McGuffin (mild spoiler: it’s not.)

But let’s begin with the setting. Decades past, the goblin tribes united under the banner of Mab and swept south from their ancestral lands, subjugating the various fae in their path. Triumphant, they built the Iron City, a vast metropolis ruled by the five Goblin Houses and encircled entirely by an iron wall that not only cuts their subject fae off from magic but also infects the fae with sickness. The underclass has tried to rebel but each uprising has been quashed. Many fae turn to Dust, a drug that evokes just a little bit of their gone-away magic, in order to escape their increasingly nightmarish reality. But hope is not an ember easily extinguished, and on this one night, various goblins and fae from all strata of society will be drawn together in a web of magic and mayhem to fight, for the city or for themselves and sometimes for both at once.

Our point-of-view characters include Jag, a young goblin heiress fascinated with the fae and their artistry; her half-sister and bodyguard Sil; Edwyll, an idealistic fae artist searching for a patron; Knull, his cynical drug-dealing older brother; Bee, the thoughtful young member of the Fae Liberation Front; Skart, the de facto leader of the revolution, and Granny Spregg, the scheming former head of the goblin House Spreggan. As alliances form and shift, as betrayals and reversals rend and kill, these seven show us the full picture of a night that will change them all and the Iron City forever.

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Jul 06 2021

Amok by Anna Tan

The world-building of this Nusantara-set novel is exemplary, seamlessly incorporating elements of all the cultures that meld and mingle in Malaysia and its neighbors to present a truly fascinating fantasy world. The main nation is Terang, a collection of three city-states, each with its own mystical focus. Suci, the holy city, is known for a priesthood that not only heads the worship of Kudus but is also gifted with the ability to instantly communicate over long distances. Impian is a town of lawmakers and historians, where the blessed have the ability to read the thoughts of others. And Maha, the capital, is headed by a Sultan who’s gifted with the divine Amok Strength which overflows from him to his people, granting them supernatural might to back their military prowess.

The Sultan as this book opens is a widower named Simson, whose courting of the neighboring kingdom of Bayangan’s Permaisuri is causing considerable consternation among the religious. Bayangan is a state of breakaway Terangans who refused to worship Kudus. Sultan Simson put them down some decades ago, taking hostages from their royalty and upper classes to ensure their fealty. His son Mikal is fifteen and has yet to come into his own Amok strength despite fervent prayers to Kudus and lengthy martial training sessions. As a result, Mikal spends most of his time outside the gelanggang sulking about not having the mystical powers to back up his training. He’s caught off-guard by what seems to him his father’s sudden interest in remarriage, and by the suddenly cagey behavior of his own body servant Yosua, a boy his own age who was born of Bayangan hostages in Maha.

When Permaisuri Layla finally puts into motion her long-simmering plan for revenge on Terang, Mikal finds himself taken prisoner and shipped across the straits to Bayangan. There, he’s left to the care and mercies of Yosua, who turns out to be far more than a simple serving boy. The friends will have to do everything in their power to reverse the acts of the cruel Permaisuri Layla, while trying to find a way to preserve their friendship and break the murderous cycle of vengeance between the nations that claim them.

Anna Tan has put a lot of thought into creating an entirely original fantasy world that incorporates the values, beliefs and cultures of Malaysia (I laughed when I figured out what “ayell” stands for.) The amount of flavor available to those who speak Malay a/o are already familiar with the area is extremely rich, tho sometimes a little too on-the-nose: by the time we get to the woman named Bintang being called a guiding star by one of the characters, I was like OKAY, this is less sly than verging on the painfully literal. Otherwise, I loved this setting so much, with its rich overtones of current societal norms blended with the distinctive flavor of historical tales.

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Jul 01 2021

The Case Of The Lonely One (Bad Machinery #4) by John Allison

Oh gosh, for Mother’s Day, my husband got me the first of John Allison’s new series Wicked Things, featuring a 19 year-old Charlotte Grote. Since I’m still working my way through my backlog of the Bad Machinery comics where she and her friends originally appear, I’ve been keeping that as a reward for when I finally have time to catch up on the series (which I don’t even own all of yet, ha. Sooon!) I actually accidentally read Book 5 before this one but have finally found a moment to catch up, at least to my current Bad Machinery reading timeline.

As The Case Of The Lonely One begins, our intrepid heroes discover that Lottie, with her bad grades and her inability to get her parent’s signature on the right form, won’t be in the same class as everyone else now that second form has begun. At least Lottie will have Little Claire to hang out with, as they wait for their form teacher, the mysterious Mrs Lord, to finally arrive. Our other five student sleuths are at the mercy of wound-tight Mr Sprink, who terrorizes them in the traditional manner of British schoolmasters since time immemorial.

When the kids notice a new student, Lem, they’re initially put off by his partiality towards eating raw onions. He lives on a nearby onion farm, but still! However, each of the friends slowly falls under his spell, which completely bewilders Shauna, the only one of the group who doesn’t automatically say “he’s a right good laugh once you get to know him” whenever the subject of him is raised. Convinced that something is amiss, Shauna recruits the only other unaffected students, the members of the RPG Club, to help her. But working together won’t be as easy as Shauna imagines, as Blossom, till then the undisputed head of the club, feels threatened not only by Shauna’s presence but by the attention she’s getting from Corky, another group member. Will Shauna be able to overcome the mystifying loss of her fast friends and her new lack of trustworthy allies in her quest to expose Lem for who, or perhaps what, he truly is?

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Jun 29 2021

When The Sparrow Falls by Neil Sharpson

This brilliant novel is as if you took the best parts of Blade Runner and Gorky Park and Vertigo and mashed them all together with the most tender empathy and an eye to not only singularity but also the meaning of godhood. My only complaint with this book is that I’d freaking love it if the showdown between Natasha and Sally had been expanded into an entire book of its own instead of being limited to a chapter and a half. I do hope Neil Sharpson considers doing that: even tho readers of this book will know how it ends, I think it would still be an utterly fascinating read, especially if it’s written with the same verve and heart as this book was.

When The Sparrow Falls is the story of State Security Agent Nikolai South, a man whose career and involvement in Party politics has been so perfunctory as to be almost suspicious in a country where ambition and paranoia are the norm. South lives in the Caspian Republic, the last bastion of unadulterated humanity, free of the corrupting influence of Artificial Intelligence. AI not only advises the rest of the world’s governments but also offers people an extension on their lifespans, allowing their personalities to be uploaded from their dying bodies into dataspace, then downloaded from dataspace into clone bodies. The Caspian Republic was formed on a revulsion at the idea of this, but the passing decades have moved it from an enclave of dreamers and philosophers (who casually ignore the genocide that allowed them to set up their nation) to a police state whose people are afraid to speak aloud their hopes and dreams.

When South is summoned to meet the acting head of State Security, he immediately fears that one of his indiscretions — warning a witness to hide before the thugs of Party Security can find him, not reporting graffiti or other petty crimes, being a less than enthusiastic Party member — is going to cost him his freedom, if not his life. Instead, Deputy Director Augusta Niemann has a job for him. The recent death of firebrand journalist Paulo Xirao was shocking less for how it happened than for the revelation that Xirao, whose stock in trade was unimaginative if fervent polemics against technology, was actually an AI himself, with registered citizenships in both America and Europe. His widow Lily wants to fly into the Caspian Republic to identify him. Feeling pressure from the outside world, Niemann is inclined to allow it.

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Jun 26 2021

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

Let me just say up front that I loved all four main characters in Utopia Avenue and didn’t want anything bad to happen to them ever. It’s a good thing I wasn’t in charge, then, as that would have made for a dull novel. David Mitchell not only had the skill to create people who would tug so effectively at my heart-strings, but also the temerity to put them through bad things and the forbearance to let them make bad choices.

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

Mitchell first introduces Dean Moss, bassist, late of Battleship Potemkin though the band threw him out for “revisionism.” It’s mid-1960s London, and Dean is chasing his musical dreams. Unfortunately, he has a bad day. He’s pickpocketed between the bank and paying his rent. His landlady throws him out on the spot (“Take your ‘gear’ with you … Anything still in your room at two o’clock will be in the Salvation Army store at three.” (p. 7)) and keeps his deposit. Dean tries to get his employer to advance him some pay, seeing as how he isn’t working between that day and payday anyway. The employer fires him on the spot and keep five days’ wages just because he can. Within a dozen pages, Mitchell has Dean well and truly down and out. He even loses what is probably his last sixpence in a gutter.

But his luck has already turned, though he does not yet realize it. The stranger whose question startled Dean enough to turn a coin toss into a coin loss is Levon Frankland, a talent manager currently looking for a new band, following “artistic differences” with an outfit called Great Apes. Levon says he wants Dean to see a band and give him his opinion about their potential. He’ll give Dean a place to crash for the weekend.

The band is Archie Kinnock’s Blues Cadillac. “Within moments, Dean can see that not one but two of the Blues Cadillac’s wheels are coming loose. Archie Kinnock is drunk, stoned or both. … [The bassist, meanwhile, is lagging behind the beat. His backing vocals … are off-key, not in a good way. He barks at the drummer, ‘Too bleedin’ slow!’ in mid-song. The drummer scowls.” (p. 15) But those are not the two Levon has brought Dean to see. “The second [lead guitar] solo impresses Dean even more than the first. People crane their necks to watch the guitarist’s fingers fly, pick, clamp, pull, slide and hammer up and down the fretboard. How’s he even doing that?” (pp. 15–16)

During the break, Levon asks Dean’s opinion.

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Jun 25 2021

Life And Other Shortcomings by Corie Adjmi

This slim volume of short stories punches far above its weight class as it examines the lives of loosely connected characters in and around the turn of 21st century America. The opening story Dinner Conversation is one of the strongest, revolving around three couples out to dinner and the weight of expectations felt by the narrator Callie, who feels the pressure from all sides to look and act a certain way in order to be the perfect wife and mother. Tho it’s set in 1998, it feels deeply contemporary, a microcosm of all the brewing emotions that would set off a more mainstream female anger decades later.

The next few stories travel back to the 70s, to examine the childhoods and adolescences of young girls and their difficult, damaged parents. This part felt a little less successful, if only because it covers well-trod territory without adding anything particularly new to the conversation. The collection picks up again with Happily Ever After, which modernizes the fairy tale and recasts the would-be heroine as the villain in a refreshing take on the genre. Shadows And Partially Lit Faces continues this theme of subversion by centering Callie’s dire husband: he still sucks, but it’s hard not to empathize with his longing for space and something more, even if he’s satisfying both desires in the most obnoxious ways possible. Lucky, the examination of a couple trying to keep their marriage alive while caring for a terminally ill child, is both deeply empathetic and highly unusual in its depiction of flawed people falling apart over one of our society’s most difficult subjects to discuss.

Another of my favorite stories here comes next in the form of The Devil Makes Three (which, imo, is an unfortunate title for a really great story.) Revolving around Iris, a strictly observant Jewish woman in the 1990s who sneaks onto her son’s PC to use AOL, it’s a fascinating portrait of both a woman and her marriage as she and her husband try to reconcile their religious faith with modern life. I honestly hadn’t known about mikvehs or the extent of niddah before this story, and was thoroughly engrossed both by the subject and by Corie Adjmi’s luminous prose describing both Iris’ feelings and circumstances.

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