Reviews and Comments

I am sometimes a grumpus about fairy tale retellings, because it's been done so many times in so many ways that it's hard to find anything fresh.

This book is Cinderella by way of: what if Cinderella dies in the first paragraph, becomes a ghost that is also a haunted house, and goes to the ball mostly to eat food. Honestly, delightful.

The final scenes come a little too quickly for my tastes, but there's only so much space in a novella. (Something something, I guess that's what fanfic is for.)

I quite enjoyed this book.

Was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found – or even founded – in the world because of no words?

Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?

Gliff is a surveillance dystopia novel—thematically about words, borders, and questions about authentic reality.

The point of view in this book is a child being raised on the margins of a system; they're an unreliable narrator who doesn't quite understand everything enough about the world to lay it out explicitly for the reader.

Stylistically, the writing is a stream of consciousness in the narrator's head, relating the past. Sometimes not having quotation marks for speech can feel jarring for me as a reader, but somehow here it lent itself to a feeling in the narrator's head, of a story being told stream of consciousness style. Because this book focuses on words, there's also some fun wordplay.

Despite being a dystopian story, all of this gives it a dreamy quality that I quite enjoyed.

New Murderbot! An action snack, but a bit shallow. It was fine—I will read every Murderbot until the end of time—but also, there just isn't enough here for me.

I said, “We’re not sacrificing anybody.” It just came out, I couldn’t help it.

(Emotion check: Apparently there is an easier way to do things, but I wouldn’t know. I like to do it the hard way, and take as much physical and emotional damage as possible.)

The new shtick this book is that Murderbot has installed a mental health module that checks in with it when its neural tissue generates "weird chemicals or whatever". Murderbot has to explicitly deal more with its feelings that normally it would ignore. Unfortunately, this narrative device doesn't feel like it has the same level of impact on the story as something like the trauma response in System Collapse.

I wish we had gotten more character development or even just character reveals. We get more Farai, but there's not enough ART or Three for my tastes.

This was on the #SFFBookClub poll but never got picked.

The Bewitching is three intertwined stories that all revolve around witchcraft. In 1998, struggling grad student Minerva is researching Beatrice Tremblay who wrote a novel the Vanishing roughly based on the disappearance of her friend Virginia. The second thread is that Minerva gets a chance to read Beatrice's journals, and so we hear Beatrice's perspective of mysterious and traumatic events of 1934. The final thread is Minerva's great-grandmother Alba who tells Minerva a story on her deathbed about events from her childhood in 1908.

At night the three of them talked on ICQ about meaningless and profound topics.

I am a sucker for parallel stories, but I especially love how rooted each of these different narratives are in highly specific times and places.

As a horror story, the pacing reminded me a lot of her previous book Mexican Gothic. There's a slow foreshadowing of creeping horror where things are going slightly awry (or maybe it's coincidence). And then, very late, there is a mask off moment where it's explicit what is happening. Having three intertwined stories that each have their own arc of tension only makes this stronger.

Choppy prose, sloppy plotting, thin worldbuilding, poor pacing. Do not recommend.

If I were just going to write a review, I'd probably just leave it at the above. I don't like to hate read things. If I'm going to spend my time on a book, it's gotta be something I at least think I'm going to enjoy.

Sometimes though, a friend says: I read this book everybody told me was good, and I have a lot of feelings but I can't quite find the words. Maybe you should read this to have some context and we can have a book discussion. A book discussion, you say! I'm in.

And now, because several of my friends have read this for whatever reason and want to talk about it, now I have to think more about this book that wasn't for me. I am told that the later books are more interesting, but I... just don't have it in me with so many things in the to-read pile.

If I was going to steer people towards other books that are adjacent to Red Rising, I'd say:

If you want people acting as gods on Mars presiding over mock warfare, Dan Simmons did a much better job of this in his Ilium and Olympos duology. (Also featuring: literary references and gay robots on a submarine.)

If you want a competitive school environment that transitions into the Hunger Games, also featuring the most special YA protagonist who is secretly there to burn down all of society and can't let anybody know what his true identity is, I think the Will of the Many is a better choice. (I also appreciate the way that book constantly ratchets up the tension on the protagonist's secrets.)

If you just want arbitrary stratified dystopian social classes, might I recommend this classic ghosthoney video: www.tiktok.com/@ghosthoney/video/6884050977389874437

Here's the extended remix of my grumpy feelings.

Catching up on the Hugo noms for this year, I picked up Alix Harrow's The Everlasting, a time loop-esque narrative about empires and the power of stories. Owen Mallory is a historian that has been researching Una the Everlasting who gets sent back to Una's time to write a good story about her to make the future country stronger.

One narrative issue with time loop stories is that they get repetitive in their structure. The reader has already seen the scenes, and something needs to shift to keep them fresh. (Sometimes you can lean into that discomfort for narrative reasons like In Stars and Time, but I think that would work less in a written format.) What works quite well for me in this book, is that the first time we see everything through Owen's perspective, who is coming in with his own biases about who Una is and is trying to learn about the world (along with the reader). The second time through we get Una's perspective, which is much different and delightfully directly refutes a lot of Owen's misperceptions.

As a warning, I will say that this story leans on Arthurian legend—the book Mallory is reading/writing is called The Death of Una Everlasting. It's not a direct retelling (thank goodness), but it does take a number of names, characters, and ideas and kind of smears them around to tell a new story. Personally, I think these direct references aren't necessary as the story stands well enough on its own, but I'm a bit of a hater on the Arthur front. These bits were blurry enough (and the story fresh enough) that I could squint and enjoy it.

Overall, I really liked this novel. There's a lot of good details early on that seem like innocuous character building but are instead well-laid foreshadowing. Love some romantic yearning. Lots of fun, quite grippy, would recommend.

They left even their sexes behind, dressing sometimes as two men or two women, binding or stuffing their chests, lengthening or shortening their stride. This, at least, came easily to them, for neither of them had ever quite been what they were supposed to be, or acted how they ought to act. They were too manly or too womanish, too loud or too soft-spoken, too tall or too slim, too strong or too weak. It was no hardship to trade one disguise for another.

This is a side comment, as this isn't really a story centered on gender, but it does have some interesting things going in that department all the same.

Owen and Una both feel like they are "doing a poor impression of what they are" and live outside gendered expectations. It's a good contrast to Vivian, who feels imprisoned, and whose goals are entirely rooted in gendered reasons (or at least the way other people treat her for it).

There was a certain pleasure, God knew, in following orders, in placing the heavy reins of your life in somebody else's hands. All your sins were not truly yours, then; all your unruly desires were safely curbed.

Also, incredibly minorly, but I appreciated this moment of kink that felt well-earned from a story and character perspective.

Series by James SA Corey really like to have optional novellas in between the longer novels. Livesuit is "book 1.5" in their latest Captive's War series.

It's a short military sf story from the perspective of humans fighting against the Carryx. This novella functions as supplemental worldbuilding for impatient readers, and also brings a different perspective than the one from the captive humans in the novels.

Ultimately, the story is weak and doesn't stand on its own. I would consider this novella strongly optional.

Book two of this series is the expected broadening of worldbuilding and perspectives. It's not that the first book didn't follow multiple characters but they were largely all in the same situation, and this book opens up to parallel stories. From a pacing and tension perspective, this development diffuses the impact of the plot.

This is all less of a critique and more of an observation. There's only so many places a story can go like this, and this is a natural path for an ensemble cast story. That said I enjoyed it a lot, but it's also book two of a trilogy, so from a closure perspective you could sleep on this one until the final one is out.

Other assorted thoughts in no particular order:

I am a sucker for the drip feed of worldbuilding reveals about the Carryx, their war, their opponents. I always always love exploration of wrecked planet and space ship settings. I love the ongoing exploration of captivity sociology and psychology, of the variety of coping mechanisms that characters use to deal with their lives that have irrevocably changed and are much more out of their control.

I like what's going on with the swarm here. I really like its complicated relationship with Dafyd. They have reasons to hate each other, they have reasons to love each other, they are forced together because they both have the same singular secret goal. The swarm does struggle with "should I tell Dafyd these secrets that he will rightfully be angry at", but it is also a spy in enemy territory and managing the emotions of its greatest ally makes sense too. You could argue that this book is an (approximate trans? non-binary?) identity arc for the swarm as well. Despite the fact that Dafyd explicitly gives good reasons why he pushes away the Jellit swarm and is closer to Clae, the dynamics here feel quite heteronormative. Finally, and minorly, the swarm feels a bit like a plural system adjacent story too, but in other ways not.

I love Vaudai the slug's buddy comedy routine with Ghati and Campar. I love Jessyn continuing to be super competent. I laughed at the lamp shading of "we'll do horrific things to prosecute a secret war against the Carryx, but we won't force people to have children". Mostly, I love Dafyd trying to hold everything up and together even as everybody hates him for it.

It's funny synchronicity that both this book and The River Has Roots are up against each other in the same Hugo category, as they are both fairy borderland stories. They feel entwined together in my mind and it's hard to talk about one without the other. The River Has Roots is about riddles, songs, and promises. The Summer War is about curses, revenge, and unbreakable oaths. They're both about the bonds between siblings where one sibling is lost to the faerie equivalent of the book.

What I like most about The Summer War is that despite being a very fairytale story with a pat ending, all of the characters (even their father) get a little bit of an arc and depth to them.

“I was only twelve,” Argent went on. “I barely even knew, yet. I didn’t understand what you were trying to do. All I understood was that there was something wrong with me, the same thing that was wrong with them, and you were showing me what it meant. What you had to do about it. And I didn’t see anything I could do to stop being wrong, because I hadn’t done anything to start. So afterwards, I was only waiting for you to come and take me, to do the same.”

It's a minor point, but an early plot point in the novel is the judgement of a case by Celia and Argent's father. Their father deliberately brings Argent along to court to show him harshly punishing two men who are involved with each other illegally. But the reason he does it is not from overt homophobia of believing this is truly wrong but from the more subtle homophobia of not wanting his son Argent to be judged negatively by others for something similar in the future. This is the plot point which causes Argent to leave, and it more or less breaks his father for the rest of the novel.

I like it because the more nuanced "I have made horrific parenting mistakes" leaves a lot more room for the father to come around. But also, it feels more applicable as a fairy tale for this age. Maybe I have just heard enough thirdhand stories lately of parents and grandparents wanting to shove young queer kids back in the closet to """protect""" them from the bullying of others that this rang particularly true to my ears.

A darkly comedic story about humans being the domesticated pets of large wolf-like Grays that have taken over the world. It's kind of a Planet of the Apes situation, with some Grays treating humans as things and some trying to treat humans as best they can imagine.

The story hook here is that John's owner Martok is perennially skirting poverty (along with John) and has squirrel-esque enthusiasm for shiny new schemes that will surely work this time. He treats John well (as these things go), but his latest scheme puts John's life in the bargain; as John has little leverage or power, he lands himself in increasingly risky situations as he tries to save Martok's financial situation and thus his own life.

After the Fall is written by the same author who wrote Mickey7 if that gives an idea of the dystopian black comedy tone here. Cynical me wishes the ending were a little bit less upbeat, but there's good closure for all the character story threads and enough worldbuilding reveals to satisfy.

I am a huge sucker for Aliette de Bodard's Xuya universe and have enjoyed the books that I've read. This one is a standalone revenge and romance story in that universe.

The big character tension of the novel is Quỳnh being torn between her angry mindship friend Guts of Sea and her new acquaintance Thiên Hoà. Guts of Sea is ready to tear everything down no matter the cost or sacrifice, and has forged a plan for revenge with Quỳnh. Hoà is a cinnamon roll of pragmatic honesty who shows up and gives Quỳnh something to live for.

Just a good solid story all around.

The Navigating Fox is a novella that feels like a piece of a larger novel that's been extracted, loose threads and all. Or, maybe it's just uninterested in filling in all the details and giving explicit answers. I wish this story had been a novel to give it space to stretch its wings.

The best part of this book is all of the worldbuilding details. I love the idea of animals that have been given voices and are now knowledgeable (and self-conscious). I love the various societies and their interactions with an overseas empire that has started extending into the land of this novella. I loved the ideas of how a society that treats animals as people would need to operate. There's just so much going on here in the margins of this book over a core parallel telling of two journeys.

One thing my partner always says about writing is that he doesn't need every detail spelled out, but he has to believe that the author knows these things. This is all to say that this not a book to read for a strong sense of closure, even if you can read between some lines. It feels coherent overall to me, but with a lot more loose threads than I had expected going in.

#SFFBookClub

I quite enjoyed Rules for Ghosting. I cry a lot but I don't normally cry at books--however, this one got me, several times. This is a romance/drama sort of book, if genre is important to you. Despite being about ghosts, they're honestly quite cozy and this isn't a horror book.

The protagonist of this book is Ezra, a Jewish trans man who has left his family's funeral business because he can see ghosts. Quickly on, Ezra develops a thing for his new housemate Jonathan, but unfortunately the ghost of Jonathan's dead husband starts speaking to him.

What's funny to me about this book is that the supernatural elements are not the most plot critical. This book is bursting (almost to its detriment) with family drama and trauma and relationship issues and other plot points. Ezra eventually does come out to his siblings about his psychic nature, and their reaction is (affectionately and realistically) along the lines of "ok thanks for sharing, but let's get back to all the bigger problems".

Rather than taking over the story, the supernatural elements are there like a little sprinkling of ghost drama to exacerbate Ezra's preexisting problem-solving tendencies and give him another secret that he has to come out about. (And, it's thankfully a story with multiple trans people in it that's not about coming about as trans. Just about being psychic.)

It's sweet. It's messy. It's queer. It's a warm hug of community and family. I loved it.

This is my first Natasha Pulley book. I'd describe this one as a scifi romance with some wry comedic tones[1].

If there's a scale of hard scifi, this book is more grounded than Malka Older's Pleiti and Mossa books, but overall the science is very handwavy. The emphasis in this story is on the relationships and the politics (both interplanetary and local); it's set in a partially terraformed Mars (breathable but unliveably cold and dusty) whereas Earth is burning and sinking and many refugees are emigrating to Mars.

The big political issue of the day on Mars is the naturalization of Earthstrong people. Due to gravity differences, folks coming from earth are three times stronger than folks born on Mars and are thus extremely dangerous and must wear a titanium "cage" at all times that renders them much weaker. There is a process to "naturalize" to Mars gravity (whatever that means), but it often leaves people with massive health issues and nerve damage.

Romance-wise, this is an arranged marriage between two people who hate each other. (At some point maybe I should stop saying I don't like this trope generally? I swear I'm not seeking it out, but also I do keep finding it.) January used to be the principal at the Royal Ballet in London but shortly moves to Mars and is doing physical labor. Aubrey Gale is a non-binary (my word) politician whose forced Earthstrong naturalization politics directly conflict with January's needs, and whose previous consort has mysteriously disappeared under suspicious circumstances.

(Perhaps one of my biggest complaints about the novel is that January too quickly gloms onto Aubrey. Sure, there's economic reasons for this. Sure, there's some personal reasons for why he would do this. I think the book deals ~ok with January's fear that the previous consort could have been murdered by Aubrey, but not very well with the political difference? This feels very huge to me. Aubrey is described as a fascist early on, even if this isn't quite true! I needed more acknowledgement of how January feels about the politics, because it feels swept under the rug and was a huge part of the initial setup prior to the marriage.)

The book does have a lot of fun little details. Linguistics nerdery! Mammoths?! Class differences! Internet dependency because it's directly in people's brains! Gender abolition (but only sort of, cf Terra Ignota)! Discussions of power differences across force, gender, and money!

Overall, I think it was fluffier, funnier, and grippier than I expected it to be. I'm not sure I was sold on the core relationship and I think that took it down a few notches for me.

[1] I was not prepared for sarcastic footnotes!

AD Sui's previous book The Dragonfly Gambit was quite good, so I was excited to read this next book by them.

The plot hook: Vessel Iris, a monk that specializes in laying to rest those who have died in space, is assigned to a lost generation ship that has suddenly appeared. Surprisingly, there is a team of researchers there already. And then people start dying. Dun dun dunnn.

Unsurprisingly, this book most reminded me of something like Ghost Station by SA Barnes. The part of Ghost Station that I most enjoyed was the ambiguity in the horror elements. What is actually going on? Who can be trusted? Can the narrator even be trusted? In Iron Garden Sutra, there is a little bit of early misdirection, but I didn't believe it for a second and the larger plot arc truth felt clearly foreshadowed. This knowledge caused it to lose a lot of tension and weakened the horror side of the story.

What I did really like about this book is how the two major characters have slowly revealed backstory and trauma that intertwines with each other and the greater plot going on. It's also got a similar enemies-to-lovers vibe that was in the previous AD Sui book, and the strength of this one too is absolutely in the characters and their relationships.

It is (apparently?) the first book in a series, so I'm quite curious where it will go from here in terms of plot and genre. There's a lot of space (:drum:) for any number of story directions.