lightreads

At Midnight Comes the Cry

3/5. Tenth in this series of mysteries about the episcopal priest and the police chief (they are married with baby at this point).

I’m always happy to spend more time with these characters, but I’m gonna be honest here: I come to this series for small town stuff and mysteries and a light but intense approach to relationships. I do not come for white nationalist terrorism or action movie stuff. And yet, guess what I got here.

This also feels like a final book, with a weirdly pasted on ‘five years later’ epilogue. Which is fine if that’s how it is, but I was disappointed in the treatment that a secondary couple got. She is so good at relationships that shouldn’t work but do. In this case, a divorced woman in her thirties with young kids and a history in the porn industry, and an early twenties rookie on the police force. She does messy but magnetic so well, and she let them develop over many books. So I found the conclusion(?) to their story here, and how little attention was paid to the thorny emotional stuff between them, to be uncharacteristic and disappointing. Same take on the resolution(?) of the addiction plotline.

Content notes: White nationalism of several flavors, violence (domestic and otherwise)

All That We See or Seem

3/5. Marketed as scifi, but it’s actually a near future AI tech thriller about the loner hacker who gets tangled up in the search for a missing woman whose job is weaving AI-enhanced mass dream experiences.

Meh. A lot of the AI speculation here is really interesting. It’s all extremely plausible – the internet mostly just bots shouting at each other, everyone with means having a personal AI assistant who is trained to think specifically like them, what new kinds of art really draw people in as authentic, etc. – but speculates about these things while touching lightly on how they are bad and how they are good. Letting it be complicated with AI, can you imagine? Is that even allowed? In the era where I have been told that I’m a “traitor to humanity” for occasionally finding a particular AI powered accessibility tool to be extremely helpful in ways no prior tool has ever come remotely close to? Oh but surely we can’t have nuance in these conversations, oh no.

Unfortunately, everything else about this book is meh. The villain POV (please stop), the weirdly flat delivery of events that are supposed to be tense or upsetting, the main character and the shallow thriller treatment of her trauma, the “twist” in the epilogue.

This makes me not want to read his fantasy, actually. Does it have the same problems, or is he trying too hard to write like a thriller guy?

Content notes: Violence, slavery.

Brown Girl in the Ring

4/5. A story of family and crime and survival in a sort of post apocalypse Toronto, all flavored with afro-caribbean mythology.

Of course I’d heard about this book for years and years before reading it. What I heard: great writing, rich own voices fantasy, just plain good. Correct, correct, and correct. But I spent most of this book occupied by its exploration of intergenerational trauma. Four generations, from an infant to an old matriarch, and how they fail their children and how they don’t and how useless men are. This book lets it all be terribly messy and textured and real, in that way where mothers are incredibly sympathetic and deeply unsympathetic at the same time. That’s good stuff.

I am worried about the quality of the audiobook narration on other books of hers, though, which I hear lean even more heavily into the dialect.

Content notes: Violence, torture, possession, organ harvesting.

The Impossible Fortune

4/5. Fifth Thursday Murder Club book. Do not start here.

A good romp, with a characteristically absurd premise and various people being variously ridiculous. It’s a bit of an uneven book, though. A few chapters were so piercingly perfect that I couldn’t stand it. He is really good at writing about grief in short but beautiful ways. Also a mother/daughter relationship. Thinking about it, there aren’t that many male authors who do that well and complexly. And this book made me care deeply about Ron in ways I never expected. That’s a real trick, if you can turn a reader around on a main character after four books.

Other parts of this fell completely flat. There is a heel turn by a particular character that I straight up rolled my eyes at, because I didn’t buy it even in the fantasy of this universe. There’s something to that. The fantasy of these books where you know the characters are going to be okay from bombs and hitmen and criminal bosses, but you know they aren’t going to be okay from the other stuff. Age. Time. Loss. He’s reaching for something there that hasn’t connected yet. But in the case of this one particular character, the fantasy of okayness had to reach too far.

Content notes: References to domestic violence. Recollection of police brutality. Grief/mourning.

The Hexologists and A tangle in Time

3.5/5. A pair of fantasy mysteries set in an industrializing city and featuring a married couple detective duo.

These are fun, a little briskly funny, and correctly not pretending to have any real there there. The mysteries are twisty, the world building is interesting, the jokes are decent, and the protagonists have an entertaining dynamic (she does the magic and most of the mystery solving, he does the cooking and carries her bag and occasionally punches someone).

I did get annoyed with the metronomically predictable action scenes, which arrive every few chapters whether they are needed or not. It has that vibe where the author doesn’t trust the reader to stay interested without some running about and shouting and getting into plot-irrelevant peril. I think he would be better served by putting just the tiniest scrap of there in here, problem solved.

Also, I think the villain in the second book is ( spoiler I guess ) but YMMV on that.

Lady Hotspur

3/5. What if Henry IV (loosely) but make it epic fantasy and make most of the major players women, and make most of those women queer.

Yes, there is a prequel book that I did not read, because I do what I want. This would probably be richer if you read in publication order, but it’s one of those situations where the prior book is set several generations before, so, you know.

Anyway, yes, the premise sounds great, and large portions of this book are wonderful. This manages to feel Shakespearean, and I don’t mean that it feels tragic (though it has that mode). It’s bawdy and political and deeply concerned with how history turns upon character, and how people stand or fall on their flaws. It also has a tremendous sense of the numinous and, getting somewhat less Shakespearean here but also not in another realm or anything, a wonderful touch with multiple shades of queerness and how that functions or doesn’t in monarchist systems.

However, while I’ve read books that were too long, I can’t remember the last time I read one that was at least a hundred thousand words too long. Phew. That is truly impressive bloat. I would be rating this higher if it were like 40% shorter (which would still make it a damn long book, to be clear). I lost patience with this multiple times. I always came back and found something to enjoy again, but man.

Read if you really like queer lady knights, women running the world, that Shakespeare feeling, and a book that feels as if it is tremendously slow even as many things are happening.

Content notes: Murder, war, references to child abuse, miscarriage, cancer.

Betrothed to the Emperor and Emperor's Wrath

2/5. M/M fantasy romance about the royal twins raised to kill the emperor of the encroaching empire, except when they are presented, the emperor chooses the brother to marry, not the sister as planned. And then stuff happens.

I got sucked in based on the trope set, even though I knew damn well this was not going to satisfy. And I was right. There’s something extra frustrating about someone doing tropes you’re into, but with such limited skill that nothing really lands. Here, for example – the books are trying to do fake/pretend relationship but whoops it’s also real, but they’re so incoherent about it and so impatient to get to the porn that I couldn’t keep track from one scene to the next whether we were treating it as real or not. These books also do that thing where our first person narrator totally misses that the guy is into him, but it’s done so clumsily here that it just makes him look incredibly, pathologically stupid.

/cranky

Rakesfall

3/5. Chandrasekera’s first book made a splash, but this one really didn’t. I didn’t know why until I read it, and now I’m pretty sure it’s because no one wants to talk about it and demonstrate that they have no freaking clue what it’s about.

I’m . . . sort of . . . kidding. This is a strange passage of a book. It is ostensibly about two people who are instantiated across many lives over huge spans of time, and how they relate to each other, and how they don’t. It’s also about colonialism and modes of resistance and a sort of cosmic war. Probably?

Mostly, it’s a beautifully written piece with extremely clever intertextual stylings that is disorienting (on purpose, but I suspect he thought he was being much clearer than I think he is) and that does the reader only a few very basic favors in trying to figure out what is what. Or who is who, from chapter to chapter. Read if you like that sort of experience of disorienting fragments stitched together into something that, for me, did not resolve much at all.

Content notes: Many kinds of interpersonal and terroristic violence.

Seven Devils by Elizabeth May and Laura Lam

Enemies to lovers sapphic (at least that’s where I assume it’s going, based on the setup) scifi about the heir to the evil galactic empire running away to join the rebellion, and the ship mechanic she is forced to work with despite bad history. Sounds potentially fun, right? It might be, but this was sold as adult and no. Incorrect. This reads so much like YA, I had formed this opinion before even finishing the first page. Not in the mood, particularly for this brand of YA where the main characters are supposed to be in their twenties but are in their feelings – and their feelings about their feelings – as if they are sixteen. Probably reads better if you know what it is going in. Why do publishers mismarket a book like this?

Dragon Prince by Melanie Rawn

Woof. If I’d read this in the 90’s when it came out, I would have eaten it up with a spoon. It’s 90’s romantasy, using that definition of romantasy as ‘reads like YA but with more sex.’ I read 25% of this and came so close to liking it. Young prince who wants to do things smarter not harder, and what’s up with the dragons. But I just cannot with the gender and sexual politics here. There was a lot that was hard to swallow (the dying father advising his son to make sure his wife knows who is the “master” in bed, and the book is like way into that) but I noped out for good when our hero finds out our heroine isn’t a virgin (like he is) and throws a massive tantrum. I suspect he will improve but nope. Out.

The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong

Cozy fantasy about the travelling seer whose lonely existence is disrupted by accidentally acquiring a found family, also various plot things. Lots of people like this one. I have no soul, so was variously bored and annoyed by it, even though it is perfectly competent at what it is doing.

Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

Trans scifi with a literary bent that is supposedly about the trans kid of trans parents discovering that they were revolutionaries after their deaths. I could not pay attention to this to save my life, and I don’t know why, since I gave up so early and have little sense of it. Worth trying again sometime?

The Incandescent

4/5. The Director of Magic at an elite British magical boarding school deals with students, the demon-incursions that come with them, her own history, and the hot lady cop on campus.

I took this book kind of personally because (1) I have had a ‘magic school from the perspective of faculty’ book in the back of my mind for about 15 years; and (2) I literally just this year wrote a book about a wizard who is an unreliable narrator of their own life and who gets their world rocked. Tesh and I are on a wavelength, I guess. Her magic school from the perspective of faculty book is better than mine would be, for the record, since she is an actual teacher, and it really shows. The kids are great (I mean, they’re terrible and terrifying, so great) and the teaching content is great and the demons are great. Yes, sure, the demons are like three different metaphors, but they all work.

I liked this a lot. It’s one of those books that concludes a sort of story by the 50% mark, and you’re left there going ‘hmm, how is she going to undermine everything that has just happened?’ Which she does do, and I liked it. Though personally, I would have liked our protagonist’s worldview to get rocked even harder than it was. I get why this came out the way it did, but our protagonist is coming from a place of enormous privilege, and she is deeply blinkered about a lot of it, and in even deeper trauma emotional lockup, and that is a lot of stuff to unpack in a relatively slim book. And therefore some of it gets pretty short shrift, notably most of the privilege stuff and the cops-on-campus stuff. But I still found it to be satisfying.

Content notes: Demon possession, threats to young people, a past teenager death.