The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

Witness for the Dead

3/5. Offshoot of the widely beloved The Goblin Emperor, featuring a minor character from that book off in a distant city going about his business speaking to the newly dead and, consequently, solving a series of mysteries.

Pleasant but restrained. Our narrator is suffering – grief and old pain and guilt and related self-doubt – but he doesn't want to tell us about it, so much of this book occurs by way of mystery solving in the foreground and a rather sparse background in which blips of feeling occasionally fuzz like static. A lot of people have said that this book does not resemble Goblin Emperor; it doesn't, except in that they are both about people who have been hurt to the point where they can no longer value themselves, but how there are some fundamentally good people around them who can do the valuing for them. That can be a satisfying story, and this one mostly is, but it doesn't go anywhere near the emotional places that Goblin Emperor does – our narrator has a sort of abortive crisis in his way, but he remains fundamentally very solitary and within himself and his pain, even as he makes incremental steps towards having a community.

So I enjoyed it, but the interpersonal story didn't knock my socks off, and, well. She's just not that good at mysteries? I mean, they're perfectly competent, but there's nothing particularly creative or interesting about them, so they don't sustain the book for me.

Content notes: Death, serial murder, ghouls and associated horror.

Abandoned books roundup

Gateway by Sharon Shinn

One of her slight YA fantasy romances, this one about a Chinese-American girl who is nudged across a gateway to an alternate St. Louis populated largely by alternate Chinese people where she is supposed to remove a dangerous politician. Dropped partly because it was too simplistic for my mood, but mostly because it features a lot of exploitation that Shinn seems entirely unaware of. The protagonist's father is supposed to be a good guy, which we are to infer from the fact that he picks up homeless people off the side of the road, works them for a full day on his construction projects, then doesn't pay them for labor, oh no no no, he sends them off with a meal. What a prince, you guys. You see, when someone is starving, it's cool to extract $60+ worth of labor from them and then give them a $3 plate of spaghetti because hey, you helped, right. It's incredible the mental gymnastics people go through to justify this. Compounded in the text by our protagonist, who is supposed to take down a dangerous man that no one else can for mumble mumble reasons and then get her memory wiped because . . . IDK, when you have a dangerous job, you should definitely arrange to get a teenager from another dimension to do it for free?

There's an interesting point in here somewhere about fantasy narratives and chosen ones and doing the labor of saving everybody for free, but this book showed no signs of even noticing the issue, and I'm not interested enough to continue.

The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt

Scifi about archaeologists trying to fully record the remains of an extinct alien civilization before it is destroyed by terraforming. Interesting premise, but I quit at the 1/5 mark because the gender stuff was really getting out of hand. Just a tiny sampling: a statue of an alien about which they know absolutely nothing is "clearly" female (what? Why? You don't even know they have sexes!) and a later larger example is obviously male (because larger, apparently). A later alien writing sample is bold, and therefore declared "masculine." It really should not be a surprise that an author who would indulge in that sort of crap would also write a sentence like "people liked him, women loved him." Women, you understand, not being people. Yes, thank you for putting a bow on it, I got it.

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

YA about a freshman at UNC who gets mixed up in an Arthurian secret society in attempts to find out why she can see magic she shouldn't. This is doing interesting stuff with the black protagonist and her view of the overwhelmingly white arthurians and their creepy obsession with their ancestry. It's about who owns the legend and who really doesn't. But it's just so extremely YA – there's a romance that does everything you expect it to, down to the last beat, and the protagonist talks to herself in that particularly YA way – and I'm not in the mood.