Mar 09 2021

Perfect on Paper by Sophie Gonzales

This might be one of my favorite romance novels ever, never mind a YA romance. And that’s even with hating the guy around the beginning: he gets (a lot) better, and I’m really hoping the devil’s advocate nonsense is something he grows out of because, you know, he’s a teenager and it’s understandable, if certainly still annoying, at that age.

The guy is Alexander Brougham, who totally busts our heroine Darcy Phillips as she’s retrieving letters from school locker 49, out of which she runs an anonymous relationship advice business. He wants to hire her to help him get his ex-girlfriend back. Afraid that he’ll expose her, Darcy reluctantly agrees. It isn’t just that she doesn’t want their fellow students to know that they’ve been taking love advice from a high school junior whose own love life is practically nonexistent. She’s worried that if the truth ever got out, it would seriously jeopardize her relationship with her best friend and long-term crush, Brooke Nguyen, because she once did something seriously unethical to Brooke under the guise of dispensing advice. She’s striven to make up for that ever since, making sure to dole out solid, thoughtful responses to the many people paying her to email them with solutions to their woes.

Darcy is eager to get Brougham, as he prefers to be called, and Winona back together again so she doesn’t have to worry about him ratting her out, but Brougham is surprisingly close-mouthed about his relationship issues, given that he hired her to help him in the first place. An exasperated Darcy has to figure out not only how to fix his love life, but also what makes this infuriating weirdo tick. What follows is one of the most delightful takes on so many of the overworked (and in lesser hands, excruciatingly tiresome) tropes in romance today: miscommunications, matchmaker falling in love with her client, dislike-to-love. It’s all So Good and So Sweet, with characters who have real problems and who sometimes communicate poorly but never stupidly.

And there is so much representation! Darcy is bisexual and worried that dating a straight guy will jeopardize her ability to be accepted as part of her school’s small but close-knit queer community. Her older sister Ainsley is trans, and there’s a healthy amount of racial rep among the school’s student body and faculty as well. None of it feels forced, and all of it is so loving and accepting and kind that I burst into happy, relieved tears at one point while reading.

This is such a wonderfully compassionate novel, depicting the lives of flawed, lovable characters as they seek to navigate the vagaries of love. It is the Young Adult romance every bisexual person — and the people who love them — should read. Smart, funny and deeply touching, it’s a wholly lovely book, and one I’ll be coming back to whenever I need a fix of realistic sweetness (should there ever be a break in my reading schedule, that is.)

Perfect On Paper by Sophie Gonzales was published today March 9, 2021 by Wednesday Books and is available from all good booksellers, including

Want it now? For the Kindle version, click here.

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Mar 07 2021

Wintering Out by Seamus Heaney

Wintering Out struck me as even more oblique than Door into the Dark, and I often struggled to see and hear what Heaney was connecting with. Not that they have to be something that I can find on first reading, or even second or third. Wintering Out has the first appearance of Tollund Man, a figure that Heaney says in Stepping Stones appears in or influences numerous later poems in his career. The book was published in 1972, three years after his previous collection, and shortly before its publication he taught for a year at the University of California, Berkeley, a time most clearly reflected in the book’s final poem, “Westering.” It was a time that changed Heaney, too.

He tells Dennis O’Driscoll, “Something changed, all right. It was the first time we’d lived for any length of time outside Northern Ireland. The first time we lived in the sun. The first time when the pay was enough for us not to be always thinking about money. I was taller and freer in myself at the end of the year than at the beginning. And it wasn’t just the waft of the climate or the waiving of economic anxieties. It had to do with the intellectual distinction of the people around us, the nurture that came from new friendships and a vivid environment.” (Stepping Stones, pp. 136–37)

Wintering Out by Seamus Heaney

Later, O’Driscoll asks him, “The general assumption, then that the short line of Wintering Out is in the American, W[illiam] C[arlos] Williams grain is correct?” Heaney answers, “I believe it to be so, although there was already a drift in that direction in the landscape poems at the end of Door into the Dark. If I couldn’t altogether escape an Irishy/Britishy formality, I had an inclination from the start to dishevel it. I’ve always been subject to a perverse urge to galumph rather than glide.” (Stepping Stones, p. 146)

Wintering Out opens with the very short lines of “Fodder”:

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Mar 05 2021

Forget Me Not by Alexandra Oliva

A genre-bending novel, when done right, can really reshape the way we think about what’s possible both in fiction and in real life. Much like Sara Faring’s The Tenth Girl, this layered blend of literary genres has the reader reconsidering the processes of our everyday existence, what it takes to live in (or buck) the societies around us, and what we owe our parents in addition to ourselves (tho unlike in Ms Faring’s excellent debut novel, the parents of our protagonist here are unfortunately varying shades of awful.)

Linda Russell was born to fill a hole left in the lives of her parents with the death of her older sister, Maddy. As is sadly the case with too many deaths of children, her parents’ marriage did not survive for very long after Maddy passed away. Lorelei, her mother, grew more and more obsessed with rebirthing her beloved girl. And so Linda was born, to be raised on a remote, walled-off estate, her only companions her mother and her twin sister, Emmer. One day, an incident occurs that has Linda fleeing the estate in a panic: when she returns to an empty house, she decides to strike out for help. Her arrival in the nearby town of Cedar Lake causes a hubbub, drawing unwanted media attention as questions swirl around who, and what, she really is.

Fast-forward almost two decades and Linda is living alone in a Seattle apartment building, listlessly following the health-maintaining instructions sent to her via her Sheath, the wearable smart device that’s a logical extrapolation from modern technology to a reasonable near-future conclusion. The media firestorm that surrounded her emergence into the modern world has left her shy of other people in general and of strangers in particular. So when a friendly extrovert moves in on her floor, Linda’s first instinct is to avoid her.

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Mar 04 2021

Down Comes the Night by Allison Saft

To give you an idea of how much I hated the heroine, the first time she’s in mortal peril, I was hoping she wouldn’t survive. When she unfortunately does escape the potentially fatal consequences of the (self-inflicted) accident only to be later gravely wounded by a villain, I literally shouted with laughter because I was so over her nonsense and wanted her to die.

Honestly, I can put up with a lot from my reading, but to have a heroine — in this case Wren Southerland, a healer for the Danubian army — start out stupid and just keep doing stupid things while holding on to the bizarre idea that her stubbornness and selfishness come from being emotional instead of being a moron was almost too much for me to handle. I had to put the book away at the 92% mark when the heroine does something so idiotic that I needed to just sit by myself and take deep breaths in order to handle the swelling in my breast of rage, both at the author and at my need to persevere to the end of this deeply ludicrous book.

I mean, any sympathy I might have had with this protagonist was strained very early on in the book. Wren and her hardass commanding officer, Major Una Dryden, are out on patrol when they scare a spy right out of a tree. The spy breaks his arm rather grotesquely and Una makes the questionable, on many levels, decision to shackle him to the tree by his broken wrist. Wren wants to heal the boy, protesting sepsis and the need to interrogate a living subject, but Una tells her not to be so soft-hearted (!) and to guard him while she goes off to scout.

At this point, I was all “only assholes torture prisoners” and I was super glad Wren disobeyed orders and went to magically heal him anyway… except that the only way this complete numpty could think of to do so was to free him altogether from his shackles, NOT restrain him in any manner whatsoever, and then be terribly, horribly surprised when he runs away as soon as she heals him. I was aghast at how this allegedly seasoned military veteran could make such a rookie mistake but thought to myself, well, her heart’s in the right place, and surely the author is only having her start out daft only to redeem herself by learning to make good choices by the end…

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Mar 02 2021

The Conductors (Murder and Magic #1) by Nicole Glover

Such an excellent premise, such an underwhelming execution!

Hetty Rhodes was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, helping other enslaved people escape slavery as she once had, using the magical abilities she was gifted with. Once the Civil War ended, she settled in Philadelphia with her husband and co-conductor Benjy Rhodes, but never gave up looking for her younger sister Esther, from whom she’d been separated on their flight to freedom. Now she works as a seamstress by day and, with Benjy, an investigator by night, solving the cases the local police won’t touch, whether out of fear or, more usually, prejudice.

When the body of a friend of the Rhodes’ is found with a cursed sigil carved into his skin, it’s only natural that they’re the first (and unsurprisingly only) people called in to investigate. Charlie Richardson was a man constantly on the make, who downplayed his own history in order to better mingle with the elites of Black Philadelphia. Hetty had once been bosom friends with his wife Marianne but the two had grown distant, and the fact that Hetty and Benjy had been less than enthusiastic about responding to Charlie’s recent worries increases their guilt at not having been able to prevent his murder. With the help of friends such as mortician Oliver and herbalist Penelope, the Rhodes are determined to find justice for their dead friend, even it means explosive consequences.

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Mar 01 2021

Machinehood by S. B. Divya

Set at the end of the 21st century, this sci-fi novel follows the stories of two sisters-in-law who will both prove pivotal in the fight against the terrorist organization known as the Machinehood.

Eighty years from now, people are heavily reliant on technology and weak artificial intelligences (known as WAIs) to perform the most mundane tasks, leading to increased joblessness as humans need to dose themselves with all manner of performance-enhancing pills, often mini-machines that work inside the body, in order to keep up with the Joneses, human or AI. American Welga Ramirez is the daughter of a bioengineer who died a painful death due to her genetic code’s incompatibility with flow, a common mind/focus enhancer: on her deathbed, she made her kids foreswear the drug, leading to Welga washing out of college. So Welga enlisted in the US Armed Forces instead, eventually retiring as a result of her disgust at a botched operation in the Maghreb. Now she works as a Shield, essentially a telegenic bodyguard for the rich capitalist class or funders, as they’re known, to differentiate them from giggers, the majority of the world labor force who must rely on the gig economy to make ends meet.

Her brother Luis is married to Nithya Balachandran and lives in Chennai with his wife and their daughter Carma. Nithya is a biogeneticist, and the first person Welga turns to when she starts to suffer from tremors, likely caused by the constant pill usage required in her line of work. But all personal issues take a back seat when a shadowy organization proclaiming the equality of humanity with AI targets the funders of several successful pharmaceutical companies simultaneously, resulting in death, destruction and mass panic as the terrorists’ demands make their way to the global populace. Soon, Welga will have to question her own beliefs and boundaries as she embarks on a desperate hunt to stop the organization calling itself the Machinehood from killing again.

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Feb 27 2021

The Swimmers by Marian Womack

It’s kind of hilarious how the back cover of this volume calls it a reimagining of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea even as Marian Womack’s afterword candidly discusses how she doesn’t want to compare The Swimmers to what was for her a seminal text. And I can see for both arguments: the comparison is a huge hook in getting readers to pick this up, but the story itself, while having many parallels to that reimagining of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, is really quite different from both novels.

Which isn’t to say that I didn’t spend the first few chapters trying to get the two plots to sync together better in my brain. Pearl is a young surface-dweller who lives with her loving, if distant, mother and ill younger brother on a rambling estate almost wholly given over to the encroaching wilderness. Her memories of her father are fragmented and unreliable, but she knows scandal followed his death by suicide in a military base. Growing up nearly feral, socializing mostly with those of the beanie and shuvani classes considered lower in status than her own, she’s in for a surprise when her mother suddenly remarries.

Anton VanLow is kind but also obviously in need of Urania’s fortune. He moves their family to Old Town while he remodels the estate, gradually introducing them to modern civilization as he wheels and deals with their fellow techie caste members and the higher-status ringers who live in orbit over earth. Tragedy strikes when they move back to the estate, tearing their family apart and causing Pearl to eventually seek refuge in an Academy that trains her for work in the Ring, or so she hopes.

Years later, a ringer named Arlo comes down to Old Town to marry the stepdaughter of an industrialist his father means to court. Arlo is attracted to Pearl but doesn’t understand her life or her world, and she will soon leave him in an attempt to make sense of her place on this planet… or above it, no matter the consequence to her or to the baby she reluctantly carries.

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Feb 25 2021

The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley

I first read this novella over two years ago, courtesy of the lovely people at Unsung Stories, one of the finest British independent purveyors of weird fiction today. I very much enjoyed it at the time, so when Titan Books told me they were publishing it for the first time in America, I leapt at the chance to revisit the work of one of my favorite little-known (for now) speculative fiction authors, Aliya Whiteley.

And it’s really weird with a re-read seeing what you focused on the last time compared to what you elided, and how things hit you differently after a span of time and experiences. In The Loosening Skin’s alternate universe, humanity moults every seven years or so, shedding with each worn skin the attachments — primarily romantic, but often to their surroundings and modes of life — they’d accumulated while wearing it. For most people, this means a redirection of purpose and often a reevaluation of their lives to date; for a smaller number, this means a dramatic shift in lifestyle. It’s almost universally acknowledged that couples will split up when one moults: there may be a lingering friendship or sense of companionship, but most find the thought of staying with a pre-moult partner physically revolting. All the feelings of love are gone with the moulting, oddly enough staying in the shed skin and accessible for anyone to touch. Most people burn their moultings because of this. Unsurprisingly, there’s also a thriving, quasi-legal market in discarded skins.

Rose Allington has an even more extreme reaction than most to shedding her skin, which she does more often than the average person and usually in times of great stress. After landing a dream job as bodyguard to superstar actor and aspiring director Max Black, she’s amazed to find herself falling in love with him, and he with her. Max is determined to keep their love going despite the odds, and resorts to all sorts of dubious medications to keep them both from moulting. Rose plays along until the night she splits her skin and abruptly leaves a devastated Max behind.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/25/the-loosening-skin-by-aliya-whiteley-2/

Feb 23 2021

The Russian Cage (Gunnie Rose #3) by Charlaine Harris

Hurray, Lizbeth Rose is finally on her way west! Unfortunately, she’s going after receiving news that her one-time partner Eli — or Prince Ilya Savarov to the rest of the denizens of the Holy Russian Empire — has been thrown into jail for reasons unknown. The news has been conveyed to her via a coded letter from her younger half-sister Felicia, who’s being trained as a wizard in exchange for providing the occasional life-saving blood transfusion for Emperor Alexei. Lizbeth hops on board a train, unsure of what she’ll meet on the western seaboard of what was once the United States, as she seeks to uncover the truth and free the man she still loves.

This third book in the alternate history Western series starring the gun-slinging Lizbeth Rose features all the rough and tumble shootouts and brawls of the other books but amps up the court intrigue, as Lizbeth has to not only go undercover but also endear herself to the most powerful people in the HRE. I finally got to see my Asian people, even if they don’t figure largely in the narrative; still, representation matters. You probably could enjoy this book without reading the first two in the series, but I don’t particularly recommend it. Book I: An Easy Death sets up not only a 1930s where the assassination of President Roosevelt meant the splintering of a nation unable to recover from economic collapse and widespread influenza, but also filled us in on the background of our heroine. Book II: A Longer Fall explored the era’s version of the Deep South, the virulently racist and sexist Dixie. Now Lizbeth is on Eli’s home territory, looking to bust him out of jail and, perhaps more dauntingly, meet his mother and sisters for the first time.

The Russian Cage is a very fun, fast-paced novel, tho I didn’t think it was as much a page-turner as ALF. It’s really nice to have Lizbeth be the one who has to come in guns blazing to save the man she loves, aided by the people who love him, even tho some of them could take or leave her. Lizbeth figures Eli has been thrown in jail due to political intrigue, so the real reason is an unpleasant surprise. Worse, it doesn’t allow her to escape the machinations of the imperial court. On the plus side, it does give her the chance to get to know the surprising Felicia better, and to realize that shunting her little sister off to the HRE maybe wasn’t the kindest choice she had had available to them.

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Feb 22 2021

The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Poisoner of Underpants, Autocrat of Some of the Russias, in Gessen’s reckoning probably the son of a secret policeman, was born in Leningrad in 1952. Like any proper villain — but also like anyone born in that place in that year — he has a tragic backstory. Hitler’s army completed its encirclement of Leningrad on September 8, 1941, and the siege continued for 872 days. More than a million civilians died during the blockade of the city, vast numbers from disease and starvation. Putin’s parents’ first child was one of them; a second son had died in infancy before the war. Putin’s father was seriously wounded and discharged from the army. His mother nearly died of starvation during the siege.

The Man Without a Face by Masha Gessen

People who grow up in the shadow of great trauma react in many different ways. Putin, even according to authorized biographies, grew up a wild fighter with barely contained anger and a determination never to be humiliated. He didn’t grow out of it. “Putin, it would appear, reacted to the barest provocation by getting into a street brawl—risking his KGB career, which would have been derailed had he been detained for the fight or even so much as noticed by the police. Whether or not the stories are exactly true, it is notable that Putin has painted himself—and allowed himself to be painted by others—as a consistently rash, physically violent man with a barely containable temper.” (p. 51)

Putin grew up in the era of cosmonauts and decided he wanted to be a KGB man. Gessen details why it’s likely that Putin cam from a spy family, and his eventual application of self-discipline to make it into that organization. In the waning years of the Soviet Union, that organization also grew bloated and less effective, with many in its ranks looking for the main chance. Putin was no stranger to this competition, and he finally achieved a prized opportunity: posting abroad. Unfortunately for his ambition, he landed in East Germany, in Dresden. He was still there in 1989 as protests swelled into revolution, with East Germans no longer cowed by the Stasi or their KGB masters. As protesters moved to take over the Stasi offices, Putin made the easy deduction. Geert Mak, a Dutch journalist, writes “Meanwhile, an unknown KGB agent in Dresden, Vladimir Putin, had tried to pile so many documents into a burning stove that the thing exploded.” (In Europe, p. 718)

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