Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Or as I have been calling it for over a year, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Ivan Vorpatril?.

Which was a little bit snide of me. Apologies to anyone who was there in June when I co-modded a panel and have already heard me going on about Bujold’s tendency to solve people’s lives like equations. Who is your perfect mate, what is your perfect challenge? What is the thing that balances you? How can we write the equals sign, reduce you to a simpler function, and be done with it? Which is both true and unfair to say – most fiction is in this business to some extent or other, and I’ve actually loved the way she does it. I was just a little worried she’d solve Ivan the way she eventually solves pretty much everybody: by pairing him off, marching him onto the arc two-by-two, and tossing some babies at him.

And yep, she pretty much did that. And I’ll shut up (for now), because I loved it.

I didn’t love it centrally as a romance, though I did enjoy that aspect, and the lady in question is great. Marriage of, um, convenience is not quite the right word -- marriage of expediency is not really my kink, but this was charming. (Also, I can’t help noticing Tej is a smirking, tongue-in-cheek, “oh yeah?” response to all those people who wanted to see Ivan paired up with a Haut lady. Heh.) But I really loved the shape of it, how it’s all about being the one person who doesn’t quite fit into an extraordinary family, not because you don’t measure up but just because you’ll have to shout down some of the biggest personalities in a three light-year radius to be noticed, and who wants to do that? It’s about just wanting to live your life, and how that can appear small and unworthy when you’re surrounded by families like Ivan’s and Tej’s, but how really it’s not at all, it’s great, it’s perfect.

And mostly I loved the indulgence of this book. It basically took a big pile of what I love about this universe (Miles and Alys and Gregor and Simon (Simon Simon Simon!) and heaped it up, and flung itself on top. And then delivered a moment of such wry, perfect Bujoldian hilarity that made me snigger so unexpectedly I almost fell over on the train. You'll know it when you see it, trust me.

This is how you solve a problem like Ivan Vorpatril. And it is really, really sad to me that this universe is running out of problems, because no matter what I say, I love watching her solve them.




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Agatha H and the Airship City ...and the Clockwork Princess by Phil and Kaja Foglio

Agatha H and the Airship City by Phil Foglio

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Honestly, I haven’t’ had this much fun in months.

Novelizations of the webcomic, and adorable, absurd, alarming hilarity from start to finish. It’s “gaslamp fantasy” about historical not!Europe. Not about science but instead about mad science, which is a completely different thing. A classic/cliche story about a young orphans adventures on-the-run from the powers chasing her, with all the expected familial entanglements, and also about being dangerously gifted. Except told so freshly and charmingly, it all feels new again.

Sight unseen, I would bet the novels follow the comic frame-by-frame, which I know sounds horrible, but really isn't. There's definitely a . . . visual sensibility here, and a particular timing optimized for moments of frozen physical humor, but they really make it work in another medium.

The two prose novels barely cover the first third of the published comic so far. I await the next book with a lot of stomping and sulking -- no spoilers, please.



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Visibility by Borris Starling

Visibility by Boris Starling

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Police procedural turned spy thriller in the 1952 Great London Fog. This made the rounds of my disabled friends with general approbation for the blind police diver turned love interest for the protagonist. She is, indeed, lively and independent and smart and fierce, and she is allowed to have a sex life without being killed off! And her regular putdowns of the protagonist’s standard-issue ablism are pretty great.

I wish I could have liked this more, but despite her, I found this intensely tedious. I generally have that reaction to spy nonsense, and I also found this thematic London fog/blindness/visibility/seeing with your eyes versus seeing with your mind thing kind of obvious and tiresome. This also took a few . . . odd psychological turns, and when it was all said and done, I just . . . didn’t get it. Not even enough to know whether someone who digs spy nonsense would dig this.




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Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu

Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Finished the morning of my birthday (no felicitation necessary, this was mumblemumble months ago). A dreamy modern fairy tale for the pre-teen set about being the child of divorce and losing your best friend and being the very brave girl who follows him into another world to get him back.

Wonderful in many ways, and I commend it to many of you and to your kids. I loved all of this set in the ‘real” world, but the fairy tale portions were pitched exactly counter to my tastes. Idiosyncratic thing, ignore me.

But the thing I really wanted to talk about is growing up. Why finishing this on my birthday was a lovely bit of serendipity. I have always, always felt ever since I was very small that growing up is a process of accumulating, not losing. I have never understood all those formulations of childhood and adulthood that require the child to lose to grow up. Lose innocence, or capacity for magic, or whatever it is. I think because growing up for me meant gaining freedom and autonomy and community, and lots of other things I was slowly starving for, the idea that growing up means losing something valuable never sat right. (Plus, I think there’s a lot of *gestures* creepy fetishizing of ‘purity’ going on there that I can’t quite articulate).

And I love that this book doesn’t go down that path. It easily could, and it is working in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood. Right where relationships begin to become a little bit fraught, even if no one is quite clocking sexuality yet. Right where things are a little hard at home, and mom needs you to step up and pull your weight, even if your weight isn’t all that much yet. And that liminal space between fantasy and reality where everyone is telling the protagonist to “grow up” and be present in this world, but all she can do is see her way into the fairy tale.

So this book is right there in those spaces, but it’s absolutely not about losing access to magic because of feelings for boys, or even about magic and adulthood as antithetical. Hazel (a mixed-state name for a transracial adopted girl stuck between worlds, it really is that kind of book) does have a flexibility of mind that lets her do what she has to do, but I feel like that’s because she is who she is, not because she’s nine. This kid is going to grow up scared but brave, and she’s going to read fantasy books and smile secretly to herself, because these are not the childish things that one must put away.




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