lightreads

The Last Contract of Isako

4/5. Scifi about the woman (“corporate samurai,” per the book marketing, but that’s a little silly, as these things often are) on a precarious colony world ruled by a corporation. She takes one last job before “resigning” – ritually committing suicide by walking out beyond the atmosphere dome, as everyone must do if they are not sufficiently employed.

I mostly liked this. Our protagonist is hypercompetent (and 50!) and extremely bought in to this extremely abusive system. She has to be, given all the ugly things she has done to prop it up. That gets questioned and complicated in the course of this book, though if you are looking for rah-rah feel good rebellion stories, this is not that.

I will say, I came away from this feeling a little impatient with the structural trick this book pulls. There is a mid-book bait and switch that, I mean. I can see why Lee thought it was clever. And it’s not not clever. But she also signaled what was going on so strongly that I, at least, dropped into the surprise second POV already knowing 90% of what I was about to be told, which is not how I wanted to experience that. It’s weird, because the signaling is just so very very obvious that it seems she meant the reader to know. Sure, fine, but then what is the point of those hundreds of pages of second POV to explain? It does give another angle on the story, but it’s only different by a few degrees. We’re not talking about contrasting two people who have wildly different relationships with this society. It’s not a bad structure, as I said, I just don’t think it accomplishes anything profound.

Content notes: Ritualized and societally enforced suicide (including of the ill and disabled, though the book is weirdly quiet about that angle), violence, psychological abuse

An Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount

Critical Role campaign book that I did not read cover-to-cover, but I wanted to note it here for one specific reason. Which is that there is no commercial audiobook for this as far as I know. I got the audio produced by the National Library Service, read by one of their in-house narrators. A guy whose voice I know because he’s read various SFF titles for years.

And in the course of narrating this book, he pronounced all of the hundreds upon hundreds of proper nouns perfectly. Every single one.

I see you, National Library Service critter narrator. I appreciate you, but I also see you.

The Ministry of Time

3/5. First person account by a mixed race (this is important) woman who lands a job serving as companion to a man brought forward in time from death in the Franklin arctic expedition.

There was apparently a wild bidding war for this book. I have a strong hunch this was based on the first quarter or so (and the author’s connections in publishing, but, you know). That first quarter is very strong – the relationship building is excellent, the dialogue crisp, the ideas regarding integration of a nineteenth century man into modern society are good and interesting instead of played for laughs, which is the usual mode for this kind of thing.

Then the rest of the book hits. It changes genres multiple times (spy thriller, time travel scifi, fascism memoir, etc.), spends a lot of ink on trying to make something happen thematically with the protagonist’s identity as the mixed race child of a Cambodian immigrant, and lands an ending that I think is quite unearned. It’s a lot. A big big swing. I admire that, conceptually. And her writing is genuinely great in places. But this is also painfully overbaked, occasionally pretentious, and sometimes just nonsensical.

By the way, those multiple genre changes? None of them are time travel romance in the sense that most human beings would understand the phrase. There is time travel in this book, and there is (sort of) a romance, but it’s of the sort that is not designed to give you swoony feelings. Which makes it extra weird that the marketing for this book goes hard on time travel romance. Way to set a book up for failure. It does explain the multiple annoyed/disappointed reviews I saw by people who I think experienced genre disappointment.

Anyway, yeah. Big swing. So much swing it pretty much falls over in the end. I would be curious to read her, like, fifth book, because she is a good writer, I won’t argue about that.

Content notes: Racism, violence, surveillance

The Light Between Worlds by Laura Weymouth

YA historical fantasy about three siblings who are transported from their 1942 London bomb shelter to a fantasy woodland, also at war. The story picks up years later, after their return, when the youngest is away at school and wants only to go back to the woods. This is very good at what it is doing (thinking about Narnia, obviously, but much more than that). It is about grief and longing – this is post war England, so everyone has lost someone. But this book hit me at the wrong time, and it kept doing that optical illusion thing: is it a vase or two faces? Is it a tender portrait of teenaged depression or is it just super emo? That, and the jacket copy promised a plot which had not materialized in any way by over the halfway point, so I bowed out. A good book, I think, but not for me, not today.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

I thought I could read this (copyright 1962) as historical document. But it gave me the ick so powerfully in the first 15% that I just cannot. The sexual politics ick, the racial politics ick, the everything ick honestly.

Flesh and Spirit by Carol Berg

Fantasy from the early 2000’s about a criminal taking shelter in an abbey with his book of magical maps, something something something. Read 20% and was extremely bored. I definitely did not give this enough time to tell me what it is actually about, but I did give it enough time to really notice how there are no women here. At all.

The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

Read exactly one (1) story, said “nope!” out loud, and moved on. I’m a hard sell on short fiction to start with. If you add in the sort of sexual politics I can only describe as “yikes,” I’m out. He might be a genius at this, but there are other geniuses.

Red City by Marie Lu

Urban fantasy romance about two lonely kids (both of color) who grow up together and then end up on opposite sides of something something alchemy gangs. I can tell this is interesting, but I got it out of the library twice and both times was not in the mood for quiet kid misery. Not the book’s fault, they do grow up and I would believe this is very good.

All Hail Chaos

3/5. Sequel. More isekai about the girl dying of cancer going into her favorite grimdark fantasy and fucking it up a lot.

Over it. Too long, and with a bad case of middle book syndrome where everyone is separated from each other, thus removing several central friendships that held the first book up. Also, we experience a dizzying sequence of plot twists and setups. I don’t know, it’s one of those reading experiences that I don’t mind while it’s happening, because this is quippy and fast to read. But then I put it down and I’m like, “okay no actually I’m annoyed to still be reading this? And this is so busy quipping and plot twisting that it forgot to be about anything at all?”

Content notes: A lot of violence. Characters who are walking red flags. Cancer. People being shitty about someone having cancer.

On the Calculation of Volume

3/5. First of seven volumes in translation from the Danish about an antiquarian book dealer who finds herself repeating November 18 over and over again.

I like books that take a cerebral spin on a speculative concept, and this one is that. But I was lukewarm on this book, in which everything is meticulously observed and very little happens. I understand that there is some actual movement in later books in places other than inside the protagonist’s head, but I don’t know if I’ll stick it out. It’s not the literary pretentions that get me; those are generally well done. But the jacket described this as having “the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper,” and man, IDK, that is correct and also not a thing I want.

Nonesuch

4.5/5. A young woman stumbles sideways into a world of the occult and a fascist scheme to alter the course of history in London during the Blitz.

I broke my own rules on this one. I swore off WWII books a few years ago and never looked back. But this one is speculative, and a few people talked about it in glowing terms, and I was feeling experimental.

And this is so good. Good as a story about antifascism and magic and the financial markets, yes. Also good as an intimate, granular portrait of life under the Blitz. Also also good in that it serves up a complicated, thorny, gorgeously specific romance.

But my favorite part is the heroine. She is one of the most electric main characters I’ve encountered in a long time. She is sharp and clever and driven and slutty and prickly and brave, and she absolutely makes this book go.

I will stop gushing now, except to say that also, I was getting confused around the 95% mark of this book, because the thing got resolved? But it’s a duology? So what is going to happ—oh. Oh my god. Wow. Okay. What a fucking ending. What a perfect deployment of that thing where a MC spends an entire book not not not thinking about something, so that you can kind of intuit the shape of it in negative space, but then it actualizes on the page and it all makes perfect sense. It’s a cliffhanger, to be clear.

Content notes: Blitz, WWII, violence.

Children of Strife

3/5. Fourth book in this loose series about uplifted spiders etc. in a spreading galactic civilization that only functions because humans have been infected with an empathy virus. This is the shrimp one, nominally, though that is not terribly important to what is going on aside from on the thematic argument level.

A good if overlong entry. I have the opposite opinion of many, apparently. I thought the last book (Children of Memory) was tight and poignant and layered. And I thought this fourth book was bloated and pretty obvious. Whereas a lot of other people did not like the third book and are calling this a return to form. Shrug.

Anyway, yes, he needed to cut a huge amount of the villain POV here, as he could have done just as much with half as much. I do think this book is making a more nuanced argument about the empathy virus than he’s made before. It’s this weird thing where he pitches a very dystopic idea in utopic terms. I.e. that humans would be incapable of participating peacefully in a multi-species society of explorers without having our brains permanently altered. He’s always been to ‘isn’t that just such a great solution?’ about something that I think is complicated at best. Anyway, this book lets it be more complicated, and lets us live more in the state of being unable to fit in, unable to get along. It's by way of tearing down the idea that only through conflict can we grow, which is fine if obvious, but still.

Content notes: Violence, attempted human sacrifice, alien body horror stuff

City of Others

3/5. Urban fantasy about a middle manager in a government agency in Singapore intended to keep the supernatural elements of society quiet.

Okay. Kind of Rivers of London but with a queer protagonist and far less voicey. Though it turns out the voiciness goes a long way to selling all the infodumping you need to do in a fantasy like this.

A good time, with a particularly interesting set of magical ideas. But I suspect someone made him cut, like, 25% of his manuscript or something, because there’s a lot of jerky pacing and weird gaps where I’m like ‘wait, we just met this person and now she’s a core part of the team and we all care about her? Did I miss something?’ Also, it’s all trying just that bit too hard to tie into a neat thematic bow (grief and letting go). Very debut, is what I mean. Naturally it is going to be a series; I might keep going, I might not.

Wolf Worm

3/5. Historical horror about an illustrator hired to draw insects for a scientist’s book. But something is up in the woods around his North Carolina home.

Me: I’m reading T. Kingfisher’s bug horror.

My wife: I don’t know if I can read that one. Report back.

Me: I’m one-third in. It’s fine. She’s using some of the same moves I’ve seen her use before, gothic overtones, creepy staring animals. Nothing horrible has happened yet.

Her, a day later: How’s the book?

Me: You do not want to read this one under any circumstances.

Her: …Ah.

Yeah, I think I just do not like her horror. This is good at what it’s doing (insect horror, body horror) but it is just so over-the-top gross in a few places in ways that do not work for me. Her sensible spinster heroine is a highlight, as usual.

Content notes: Hoo boy. Insects, torture, captivity, body horror, mind control.