Games Wizards Play by Diane Duane

Games Wizards Play

3/5. Most recent Young Wizards book. Kit and Nita are working on this dating thing, and also mentoring a personally unpleasant competitor in a wizarding competition.

I feel kind of grumpy about this book and I’m not sure why? Like, I can manufacture reasons, but none are quite right. E.g., the wizard technology with the not!Apple logo on it was cute in the 80’s, but now seems desperate and grasping after relevance. Or e.g., for a book about how some people are just difficult sometimes, and how wizards are also people who need to grow and learn and change, this book sure did excuse a lot of sexist shit in an extremely convenient way that had nothing to do with anyone actually rethinking their beliefs.

IDK. Ultimately, this book is about the lacuna. The empty space at the center. And I’m starting to feel that the series has a lacuna where it used to have something warm and delightful. I can see where that was, but now everything moves around that space.

Three stars for nostalgia and for little bits, here and there, that almost made me feel it again.

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

River of Teeth

2/5. I swear I am not being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, but here we go with another novella everyone raves about and that I don’t particularly like.

On the plus side: A great concept (hippos imported to the U.S. as a meat source, with consequent huge changes on the ecology of the Mississippi). Also, I appreciate Gailey’s approach to representation here. I’m not talking about the presence of the variously queer and brown people, but specifically the presentation of the nonbinary character, whose preferred pronoun is used unfailingly by absolutely everyone, even people they haven’t met. Realistic or remotely explicable? Nope. But there are criminals riding fucking hippos, so why the hell not. It’s a nice reversal of the usual “we can have dragons but we can’t have queer people because it would be unrealistic in this setting” thing.

On the minus side: Um. I hated 90% of the characters? And also I hate westerns. Even, it turns out, westerns with hippo. And this is a pointless bloodbath from start to finish in the name of some ridiculous tiresome revenge quest and ugh. Everything about this was so not for me.