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The Mighty Nein - Stories Untold

3/5. Tie-in short story collection. If you’ve thought to yourself, ‘gosh I wonder what this Critical Role thing is about,’ this is not the book for you. You will be confused in a not fun way. And I say this as a person who enjoys reading things out of order (partly because of how much it upsets people but shh).

This is uneven and ultimately manages to be just okay. A few story notes:

“Dreams of Drowning” by Nino Cipri: Quite good dive into Avantika’s backstory that gets compressed towards the end by what is clearly a word count limit.

“Worthy” by Rin Chupeco: I wanted more from this Astrid story, but it is giving some good stuff. I just think her dynamic with Wulf and with herself needs to be way way more thorny and electric and complex.

“The Fall Will Kill You” by Dani Carr: The Essek story. Sorry, Dani is great, but this is not good, guys. Overbaked creative writing workshop stuff that is trying so hard and saying so little. Also, where the hell were the editors to catch everything from basic word misusage to DND canon mistakes about elf sleep?

“Respectfully” by Mike Chen: This Pumat story is all right, but I just never like Chen’s stuff that much.

Etc. They got a good crew of authors here, but where oh where were the editors?

The Thirteenth House

3/5. Let’s fucking go with spoiler cutting this extended discussion of a romantasy published in 2005.

Right, so this is technically the second book, and I read the first book more than a decade ago, but whatever, it’s one of those a-couple-per-book-with-an-overarching-plot situations. Here, our fantasy realm teeters on the brink of war amongst its noble houses while hatred is stoked against the magically gifted. Thematically, all the romances here are forbidden in some way, generally because of class prejudice. Except in this one, it’s that he is married. Which is a big swing; most romance authors do not go there.

I should say, as a side bar, that this is romantasy in the sense of a fantasy that structurally centers a romance. People were definitely writing those twenty years ago, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It’s not a romantasy in the sense that it does not share a tone or a trope set with a lot of romantasy of the 2020’s, much of which reads to me like YA with added sex scenes. This does not read like YA and fades to black.

Anyway, Shinn goes there. And I kind of did not respect it because there were no real consequences for 90% of the book. I mean, the wife literally appeared in 1.5 scenes. But then Shinn surprised me and, in fact, by some definitions ( ”spoilers ). I mean, that was earned and appropriate. But the thing I should clarify is that ( ”more ). Woof. So then I didn’t respect that, because the real problem is that it's tonally pitched as a tragic but noble sacrifice on her part, not, you know, a hideous power trip and violation. So that was a ride. A big swing, a big WTF.

I still like this series, is the thing. The group dynamics in the found family are terrific, and it has flashes of complexity. But man. That’s a whole mood.

The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

3/5. Two timelines: in one, a young woman travels to a remote house to do archival work during the Blitz. In the other, Nimue becomes Merlin’s student in King Arthur’s court.

Yet another book in the recent sub-sub-genre of fantasy about how myths create national identity. This one did not annoy me nearly as much as Alix Harrow’s, mostly because this book has the wisdom to do less, and Alix Harrow books never, ever, ever do less. Specifically, this book digs into the whole thing with Merlin living backwards, which is an interesting mechanism to talk about mythmaking and personal storytelling and the construction of history in multiple directions. Anyway, this perfectly filled the niche of pleasant, unchallenging diversion that I intended it for.

I will say I’m marking it down a star for petty personal reasons, specifically that I thought I had figured out where this was going, and I was half right. And my point of annoyance is that what I thought was going on was far more queer than what actually emerged. My version was more interesting, kay? Kay.

The Vanished Sister

4/5. Ninth book in this genderbent Sherlock with a lot of other things going on. Do not start here.

I really liked this one. Mrs. Watson’s estranged sister comes back into her life, launching a twisty, dark psychological ride. This one is about family secrets, and sisters of blood and sisters of the heart. And the mystery is done so skillfully; you can’t actually figure out some parts of it until Charlotte tells you, but some parts you delightfully can, and anyway that’s not the point. The point is the pastiche, and the puzzle is actually ‘wait, why is Charlotte asking that, what is she thinking.’ Sherry Thomas is so good at this, it’s honestly unfair.

A Trade of Blood

4/5. Third biopunk fantasy mystery loose Holmes/Watson pastiche.

I keep rating these four stars, and yet I don’t seem to like them as much as everyone else does. They read super fast and easy, and that definitely counts for a lot with me these days. But our narrator continues to be unappealing to me. He’s a great example of how making a character queer does not make them interesting. His female boss is far more interesting, obviously, but this is not a case of ‘get this man out of the way,’ either. These books could not be told from her POV for a whole bunch of reasons: she is withholding vital information throughout, she rarely goes anywhere or does anything, it would be extremely hard to write her well on a technical level.

Anyway, I don’t know. This volume is not subtle in its themes. The “mystery” (it’s not a very good one, compared to the others in the series) regards two rival families in the cattle business. Meanwhile, our inexplicably boring protagonist is having angst about the development of his biopunk alterations that will likely kill him young. Cows to the slaughter for empire etc. Yet for all that, there’s something a little slack and disengaged in how these books handle the themes of serving such an empire. I certainly don’t require all of my imperial fantasy to have a revolutionary plotline, and yet. I want something a bit more complex than vague angst about the state of things, ah well it’s better than the alternative, next case.

Content notes: Murder, references to child abuse, animal harm, mind control.

The Final Target

3/5. Typical standalone suspense, this one about a writer moving to Oregon after assault by a stalker, and the ex-cop she meets at the hardware store. Hits all the expected beats – at this point I would be confused if there wasn’t home renovation. But the villain POV in this one was particularly awful. I will admit I often skim the opening few chapters of these books where the requisite violent/traumatic thing happens. You don’t need to read it, the dust jacket copy tells you everything about it. So in this case I was put off and annoyed when I did that, then had a graphic rape/murder dropped in my lap late in the book. Why, Nora? Why?

Content notes: Stalking, sexual assault, rape, murder.

Fury in Death

3/5. One of the more thriller-adjacent ones. Notable for kind of glancingly grappling with this series very long history of disdain for the idea that an offender might be mentally ill, and deeper disdain for the idea that might matter. I’ll believe she’s turning over a new leaf in another 50 books. But also, this one is notable for having a childbirth scene in it which is, incredibly, about as unrealistic as the sex scenes in similar ways. Babies, like orgasms, being produced almost instantaneously. Points for consistency, you know?

Yes, I’m bitching a lot about books that kept my mind functional during a very hard week, so shrug.

Content notes: Mass murder, loss of children, grief, mental illness.

Green City Wars

3/5. On a future climate-ravaged Earth, a green city operates on the labor of genetically modified animals who must have access to a particular drug to keep their sentience. One such raccoon gets tangled up in the search for a mouse scientist, which leads him through animal gang wars, revolutionary movements, etc.

This is okay, but could have been a novella. It’s about the invisible costs of human comfort, and how the establishment of human peace just means shifting the burden of conflict and struggle downward to someone else. A perfectly fine theme, but around the fourth time our omniscient narrator started explaining it to me I was like yes, okay, I got it, thanks. Also, this is noir-adjacent (the raccoon is our PI, if that was unclear) and I don’t care about that sort of thing.

Content notes: Animal on animal violence. Slave labor.

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

America and Iran

3/5. What it says on the tin. I read this months ago. The first two-thirds were extremely informative on parts of history I knew little about. But once we got to the twenty-first century portions, where I know a lot more about relevant geopolitical history, I became more skeptical. Two or three of his takes seemed facially wrong to me. I think the root of it is that his absolute seething disdain for the Shahs leads him directly to crediting the subsequent revolutionary ayatollahs with virtues they really and obviously did not have. I mean, fair to loathe the shahs, but you have to keep your head on straight.

Also, it would be great if he didn’t repeatedly express his loathing for various people through fatphobia. He had this whole extended metaphor about the fatness of a particular person being an expression for the depravity and terribleness of the entire regime and just, come on.

Still, if you want an orientation to this very specific and relevant geopolitical relationship, this book is extremely illuminating, and I don’t think there is another quite like it.

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.

Villain

4/5. Sequel to Hench. More supervillain monsterfucking bisexual maelstrom (IYKYK).

It took five plus years for this sequel to come out, which the author says is because she completely rewrote it multiple times. I have a guess that she was rewriting as part of the process of deciding how hard to go. She goes pretty hard, in the end. Not so much on the monsterfucking itself, but on the implications of becoming involved with a supervillain who thinks surveillance is a form of affection. This book lives a lot in some deeply uncomfortable spaces, very much on purpose. This is not a romantasy, and one comp I saw to such is absolutely unhinged.

Oh I mean she also goes pretty hard on the villainy, but you know, good for her. My wife and I were discussing this book in front of our six-year-old, which triggered a conversation with him in which he had a hard time grasping how the villain can be the main character of a book. This is a really interesting example of that; it is doing the usual thing of showing her reasons, all of which make sense, but it’s not particularly interested in justifying anything. She’s a villain. She does terrible things. The book has bigger fish to fry.

Content notes: The book has a good thorough note up front, actually.

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

Trouble the Saints

3/5. Historical fantasy about a black woman who uses her magically gifted hands as a killer in service to the mob, until she has a crisis of conscience.

A very good, very difficult book. Hard to describe what it is doing, aside from saying that it is about love and racism and curses and the legacies of slavery. This book is structurally odd; the event which would be the climax in most other novels occurs at the one-third mark, because Johnson thinks (correctly) that what’s interesting is what follows. Something of that unusual structure permeates everything about this book. It is constantly presenting ideas I wasn’t anticipating.

That said, it’s a hard read about hard people. That’s part of the point. A compelling, unusual novel. The more I think about it, the more layered it gets, particularly the last quarter. Don’t think I’ll ever want to reread it, though.

Content notes: Racism of many sorts including lynching; many forms of violence (mob); serial killers; difficult pregnancy; discussions of maternal mortality

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.

Chasing Cassandra

2/5. Victorian romance about the self-made railway magnate who claims to have only five emotions falling for a lady who has few distinguishing characteristics other than big boobs.

Boring, saccharine. She teaches him what love is. In addition to the above judgments, this is also eyebrow raising because the hero is heavily coded as on the spectrum, and the book has a definite tone of “fixing” him.

Content notes: Sexual assault as plot device.

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.

Darksight Dare

4/5. New Penric novella. I keep complaining these are slight and boring, but this one turns it up a notch. And alert! Alert! We have demon POV! Is it the demon we all want POV from? No. But it’s one of the things that makes this one more interesting, so I’ll take it.

I will also say that this book sets up a magical disability cure situation that actually landed more or less okay with me. Partly it’s not really a cure, it’s replacing sight with a kind of magical perception that is markedly different from human in both directions, less and more useful. And also because she challenged the overtly stated position that the disabled person had to have this, life was not worth living, etc. Did she challenge it with particular depth? No. But again, I’ll take it.

I did think for a hot second that this one would also complicate the role providence plays in these books. Penric does that thing he does where he has problem A, and unrelated person B comes along at exactly the right time, and Pen goes, “Oh, well, you must be the solution to this problem because that’s how ~~narrative~~ providence works,” and he jams them together and it all works out beautifully. Providence, in this world, being something of a fig leaf for wild degrees of coincidence and narrative convenience. Here, Pen does that with even more slapdashery than usual, and it gets much messier before it gets better. I thought maybe, maybe she was finally ready to engage with the whole mechanism of these books, but no, not really.

Content notes: References to suicidal ideation, mutilation

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.

Lone Women

3/5. Historical horror about a black woman in the early twentieth century leaving the burned out remains of her family home in California to homestead in Montana, dragging with her a terribly heavy trunk that must never be opened.

Not for me. I should just give up on historical horror. It’s having a moment, but I’m not into it. This has spare, interesting omniscient writing, and it’s doing all sorts of stuff with race and gender and privilege. But I think its ending is unearned and it didn’t really bake the metaphors about family secrets and disability in ways that worked for me.

Content notes: Graphic violence, mob violence, an implicit threat of corrective rape that does not appear, transphobia, bigotry of many sorts, reference to infanticide, child abuse.

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.