The Pearl Thief by Elizabeth Wein

The Pearl Thief

4/5. Prequel to Code Name Verity. Before the war, before France, before Nazi interrogations, there’s just Julie. She’s turning sixteen, helping dispose of the few remaining assets after her grandfather’s death, and embroiled in a local mystery. But mostly, she’s coming into her (queer) sexuality.

Lovely. This is one of those coming of age stories where you really can see a person becoming themselves. Julie is just beginning to flex her powers of intelligence and interpersonal manipulation. She’s not always good at it yet. And she’s playing with gender, too; she cross-dresses for plot reasons, and plays with her presentation and the various freedoms and constraints it imposes upon her.

Also, and I really just am listing things I like now, but also, this is a book about Julie’s privilege, and how she learns to see it. But how the learning doesn’t just come to her, it has to be called out over and over and over again. That’s how it is.

What breaks my heart is the fact that we’re never going to get the long series of Julie books I want. Julie solving mysteries. Julie politicking for her brother. Julie, after the war, teaching spy craft to women. Julie in the sixties. Just imagine the books.

Content notes: Attempted sexual assault; attempted sexual coercion.

Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee

Raven Strategem

3/5. Sequel to Ninefox Gambit. More military/intrigue scifi set in a really amazing universe where technology runs on exotic effects created by consensus reality and propped up by mass violence.

One of those books I enjoyed while reading, and then less so whenever I put it down. It falls solidly into that ‘horrible people do their best to destroy each other, also horribly’ genre, which is hit-or-miss for me. And I was not very interested in what this book seemed to be interested in, i.e. the rogue (male) genius genocidal maniac that the system created and that might be its downfall. More of that ‘how we become horrible to fight the horrible thing’ stuff. But then spoiler happened and hrm, okay, that is somewhat more interesting than anticipated.

I do blame the narrator of the audio for some of this. She has a particularly bad approach to female characters. A lot of narrators do, men and women both, but she delivers every line of dialogue attributed to a woman in this simpering, affected tone that is just awful.

Mostly, though, I find the worldbuilding intriguing. I would almost rather read a collection of shorts set in this universe.

Content notes: See above re mass violence and genocide. Also torture, but surprisingly little of that.