User Profile

I enjoy a good mystery novel on its own, but when one brings in enough worldbuilding that can stand on its own, it makes the mystery so much sweeter. Tainted Cup is one book I read earlier this year that did this to great effect, and The Last Murder at the End of the World strikes a different blend that kept me engaged the whole way through. Unlike Stuart Turton's previous time loop-esque murder mystery, I found this one to be temporally more straightforward and the worldbuilding to be much stronger and more intriguing. There's still plenty of red herrings, questions, and multilayered deceptions.

The premise is delightful. The first quarter of the book is an intriguing worldbuilding and character introduction. The earth is covered in a deadly fog and a single Greek island is the only part free from the apocalypse. The villagers and elders who live on this island have some peculiar routines and customs. Finally, and most importantly, Abi (the first person perspective of this book) is able to read everybody's thoughts and can speak to them internally.

Then, the hook. Everybody wakes up. There's a fire. Everybody's memories of the past night have been forcibly wiped by Abi. There's been several murders, people have injuries and blood on their clothes. The murderers could be anybody, even the person investigating it, as nobody has any memory of that night. As a bonus wrinkle, there's time pressure that these murders must be solved in two days or everybody will die.

"The key is never to forget. Memory must be kept alive. It helps us understand our past, situate ourselves in the present, and position ourselves for the future."

This new novel by Suyi Davies Okungbowa was on my list to read even before we read David Mogo for hashtag SFFBookClub two months ago. Perhaps understandably, post-apocalyptic climate disaster fiction seems to strike a real chord these days. Compared to his debut novel, I enjoyed this more recent novella quite a bit more.

This story takes place set in a set of skyscrapers off the coast of what used to be Lagos, after the Atlantic Ocean has risen. Its three point of view characters come from different levels of this stratified society and quite literally cross class boundaries to investigate a disturbance that turns out to have much larger implications for their whole society.

If I had any complaints about this book is that its novella length doesn't give a lot of room for any of the characters or the world to truly stretch their legs. The story even fades to black right after the climax--although there's a satisfying echo of the opening dream, it leaves plenty of unanswered questions about the world and the future.

That said, I love the interstitial poetry and redacted historical reports between chapters that add such color to this world. They carried metaphorical heft in terms of layers of ark mythology, exploitative capitalism both historical and contemporary, and the power of memory and stories.

I didn't think we were getting another Fergus Ferguson book, as the last one ended in a way that felt much more conclusively than the others. It turns out this is due to the first three being a book deal with uncertainty around future books, and this one ends with an easy hook for the next one, so I'm crossing my fingers for more.

If you haven't read any of these books, I feel like Fergus fills a similar role to Miles Vorkosigan. He exists as an element of chaos. You add him into a small trap for a few people and ten minutes later he's finagled his way into capturing a starship. They're not the same characters at all--Fergus is definitely angrier, less gregarious, and more space MacGyver than Miles is--but there's a similar delightful escalation to everything they both get involved with.

This book was a lot of fun. The vast majority of this book is spent with new characters among a pirate crew; I am a huge sucker for spaceship crew dynamic stories and so I ate this up. Also, I forgot just how funny Suzanne Palmer's writing is and there were quite a few lines that made me laugh. If I had any complaints, it's that I'm generally less excited about deus ex Asiig and would really just prefer more localized Fergus shenanigans, but their intervention here also answers a lot of questions.

In general, these books feel like one off action adventures (and this one especially feels like a side adventure) with enough worldbuilding depth to keep me intrigued; and, this one manages to bring back touchpoints from all of the previous books in ways that felt really satisfying too.

Hopefully, some day Fergus can figure out where home is.

Goblins and Greatcoats was a cute short story murder mystery. I'd imagine it's tough to do a mystery in a limited space. Mechanically, there's barely enough space to even name the suspects, let alone drop enough clues for the reader--so, the thrust of the story is largely unexpected reveals from an expert investigator.

This is a pretty minor detail, but one thing that rubbed me a little bit the wrong way was the playing up of Zyll's foreignness as an additional bit of humor and strangeness about her. Other characters talk with informal contractions, but only Zyll's language is explicitly marked by the narrator. It's done in a way that is hard for me not to read as English as a second language by way of eastern Europe or Russia. To be blunt, it feels awkward at best to have that in a fantasy world that (as far as I can remember) hasn't really explored linguistics in any way, and so it feels like a missed opportunity for better worldbuilding.

For a moment only she allowed herself to be irritated that the woods could take as much of her blood as they liked, while she was not permitted to take even a drop of theirs; it wasn’t fair, nothing in here was fair. That was how it worked. No different without than within.

Forced into a second journey into a magic forest that nobody has ever gotten out (but her), Veris is tasked with going back and retrieving a tyrant's two children before the day is done and they are lost forever. It opens strong, with Veris being kidnapped from her home and forced into this very unwanted task. The forest is deeply creepy in a way that manages to feel fresh--there's dead sentinel deer corpses; a floating "cloth" manages to be one of the most terrifying monsters; there's also bargains, games, and tricks galore. I quite enjoyed this novella.

“In exchange? You dare, you worm, filth, you ask anything of me? If you do not recover my children your village will be razed to the ground and burnt, and we will roast your people alive upon it and eat them.”

Many pieces of fiction also have fey creatures ask "are we truly the cruel ones, given the action of humans", but I quite enjoyed the parallel that this book makes about the unfairness of power dynamics within and without the magical realm. Veris must play the games and take the deals of the fey creatures, but she also is forced into taking whatever deal the Tyrant forces upon her too. When the reader discovers later that one of the rules of the forest is to never try to negotiate deals, it echoes the way the book opens with Veris's attempt at negotiating with the tyrant.

Moon of the Crusted Snow is a story about a small, remote Anishinaabe community surviving through the beginning of an apocalypse. Power goes out, communication is down, and they turn inward to try to take care of their community, through leadership struggles, limited food, and the chaos of taking in strangers. I read this as a part of July's #SFFBookClub book.

I quite enjoyed the smaller focused story of survival here, where the outside world is at the margins. It centers a small Anishinaabe community, and about its dread and uncertainty and adaptation as everything starts to slowly unravel when winter sets in.

For me, the part that set the tone of the entire story was the conversation that Evan Whitesky has with the elder Aileen Jones, about halfway through the book. She says that there's no word for apocalypse in Ojibwe. But more than that, she says that their world already ended much earlier when they were forced out of their original land, and ended again when their children were stolen. That they've seen disaster over and over and have always been resilient and survived.

To me, that conversation feels directly juxtaposed with Evan's musing a few pages later about the phrase the moon of the crusted snow--he remembers teachers having a disagreement about whether that phrase referred to the month at the peak of winter or a month where it alternated between freezing and mild temperatures. In the context of Aileen's conversation, it feels like the title itself is about ambivalent ways of looking at disaster--one perception of it being the worst thing that's ever happened, and another saying that this is not the first time this has happened, and providing some future-looking hope for milder times.

Fathomfolk is the first book in a fantasy politics duology, set in a partially flooded city where humans and magical sea creatures called fathomfolk (sirens and sea witches and kelpies) try to live together in the city of Tiankawi. It's a story about rebellion, power dynamics, and exploitation.

I quite enjoyed all the various perspectives in this book. There's Mira the half-siren captain of the guard, who is trying to make it in the human world but gets disdained as the airquotes diversity candidate. There's Nami the rebellious dragon child who gets exiled to Tiankawi and gets caught up in the currents of rebellion there. Finally, there's Cordelia the sea witch who is mostly out for herself, making bargains and pulling strings.

The ending sets up quite a bit for the final book in terms of large scale changes and future plot hooks that will need to be dealt with, and I'm very curious to see how everything will shake out.

I have some more spoilerly rambling thoughts in this post.

Rebecca Thorne's Can't Spell Treason Without Tea is a cozy sapphic romance fantasy, explicitly in the vein of Travis Baldree's work. The book focuses on the (prexisting, and secret) relationship between a palace guard and a powerful mage. When the queen pushes too far, they treasonously abandon responsibility to set up a combination teashop/bookshop in a small town, like you do. It feels like there's larger stakes here than in similar books, but they're still personal and local ones. I'd also argue that these two are so competent in their own domains that any conflict feels much more about the potential emotional impact than a true worrisome threat.

I appreciated the amount of worldbuilding heft here. I am always a sucker for anything that opens with a fantasy map, and I felt like small bordertown Tawney was interestingly situated both geographically and politically. It's caught between three countries, and has two local governers who butt heads over who actually is in charge. It's just got the sense of place that I want out of a fantasy book. The book also has some magic system details that had more depth than I was expecting from this sort of book.

Overall, this was quite the cozy read, and it's definitely the kind of treat my brain needed right now. I'm looking forward to more novels in this series, as it felt like there were quite a few hooks for future complications. I laughed at the in-world explanation for why the biggest of these hooks lands itself in the "quite important but not at all urgent" category, which seems perfect for ongoing fantasy hijinks.

I wanted Archangels of Funk to work for me, but I struggled with its prose. Some of it was the rhythm of short choppy sentences; however, a lot of it was that it felt "no show" and all "third person omniscient tell" that provided details in a jarring manner.

It's got a really unique style (and I truly mean that positively) and I enjoyed the way that it gets into resisting capitalism and post-apocalyptic despair through theater and magical technology, but this book just wasn't for me.

(Also, this is on me, but I only realized belatedly that this is a sequel to Will Do Magic for Small Change and not a standalone book, and maybe this would have stood better for me if it had? To my credit, this is not mentioned anywhere on either side of the dust jacket or in any of the copy, and I think it's mostly intended to stand alone.)