lightreads

The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels and The League of Gentlewomen Witches

4/5. All vibes, no fucks. (No metaphorical fucks. There are definitely literal fucks). Very Gail Carriager, but less substance. No, really. And it's a good thing.

IDK guys, we moved across many states and it was terrible and cost all of the money and took forever, and – have I talked about this here? Whatever, you guys can roll with no context – I am still failing to adequately recover from that little bout of anaphylaxis I had, and Casterbrook remains beautifully, intensely two. So like. We are having a time right now. Therefore, I read these romance adventures about witches and women sky pirates and the men they bang and, eventually, marry in blurrily historical England. These books are sorta kinda doing a thing about behavior and restraint and societal expectations, except different ones than you think, and okay whatever, that's nice I guess, but pay that no mind, it doesn't hold water anyway. The jokes are brisk, the heroines are blisteringly competent, and the heroes are good in the sack. Done.

The Anatomist's Wife and Mortal Arts

3/5. Historical romance mysteries about a young scandalous* widow and a taciturn detective. I wanted to rate these lower for having clumsily obvious mysteries and paint-by-numbers romance, but I did pick up the second one even through my annoyance, so can I really judge? Also, yes, these are definitely workmanlike at best, but they suffer particularly in comparison to Sherry Thomas's Lady Sherlock books, which I did read recently. So go there first, is what I'm saying.

*Points for a somewhat creative source of scandal, though -- she is considered "unnatural" for (unwillingly) assisting her deceased husband in his dissection work.

Content notes: Violence, murder, institutionalization.

The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics and The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows

3/5. A pair of related early nineteenth century British historical F/F romances. Lovely passages on female desire interspersed with assorted plots that mostly worked for me, but occasionally went too hard into defeating injustice. Like…IDK…there's nothing wrong with historical romances where the protagonists triumph on the personal level over some particular exercise of misogyny or homophobia, and there's a lot right with them, but I think I've just read too many historical romances about that in the past few years. Is anyone even writing romances that aren't about that in the past few years?

Anyway, the first is about a young woman astronomer falling for her older widowed patroness, and the second is about a grumpy widowed printer accidentally making friends and then more with the local beekeeper, if that's your sort of thing. I preferred the second volume – the heroines are older and tireder, and their love blooms more slowly and sweetly for it.

Half a Soul

4/5. Hey, it's drunk reviewing!* This is a "regency" fantasy romance about a girl who lost half her soul to faerie such that she feels emotions and sensations only very distantly, and how she banters her way into the affections of a prominent sorcerer who has a lot of social justice rage.

This is actually really good, which I was not expecting from the shoddy worldbuilding (regency doesn't mean "anytime in Britain before electricity, people) and the anachronisms (she describes emotions as having long tails and short tails, the origins of which I did not dig into, but even if it is somehow historically accurate usage, it sure as hell sounds wrong)). But yeah, actually, this has all sorts of stuff about how the horror of the faerie courts is only outclassed by the horror of British high society and its treatment of the poor and, around the edges, the disabled. And it has one of those great proposals where he spends half the time listing her good qualities in such a way that you know he sees her clearly, like where he says that she is kind but not nice. Correct. Also good banter. Also, it has a version of that thing where the man is famously unpleasant and difficult except this one woman can change him, but here she doesn't really change him, and also his anger is justified and so is hers.

*For values of "drunk" meaning one bourbon since I am just that much of a lightweight now.

A Dead Djinn in Cairo, The Haunting of Tram Car 015, and A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark

3/5. A novelette (link goes to the free text), novella, and novel set in alternate 1912 Egypt which has overthrown British rule after the advent of magic and djinn. Mostly, these are about a dapper lesbian magic cop solving crimes.

Somewhat uneven. The worldbuilding is fun and the characters are engaging (dapper lesbian), but the plotting is obvious and the mysteries heavy-handed. Points for the novel having a subplot about how, even as you are a woman busting through the glass ceiling, you can become complicit in keeping other women down. This is something that the protagonist gets called on, correctly, and she knows it, but she still struggles with it. You don't see stories about that very often, even though it definitely is a real thing.

The Ruin of a Rake

2/5. M/M historical. Because I'm mean, I always think of Cat Sebastian as K.J. Charles but only half as good. This is particularly on display here as this book contains a plot device that Charles also uses (the pseudonymously published scandalous novel) and in Charles hands it is charming and here it is a dumb device to get the couple to fight when, for real, they have way more interesting things to fight about. Like the fact that one of them is insufferable. I mean, I am also an inveterate fixer of other people's problems, so when I say this guy needs to lay the fuck off oh my God, believe me that he is unbearable.

The Angel of the Crows

3/5. Genderqueer Sherlock historical wingfic, subgenre angels, that eventually becomes Holmes canon wingfic, subgenre angels, also werewolves, vampires, hellhounds, and Jack-the-Ripper.

I care very little for Holmes-related everything, but did enjoy this to a point. That point comes when I start asking okay….but why does this cost $28 while nearly everyone else is posting theirs for free on the AO3? It should not be a surprise to anyone that there are multiple kinds of privilege at work in who gets to sell their fanfiction and who doesn't. AT least it’s a woman who gets to do it this time, which makes a nice change. And it's not like – hm. I always twitch a bit through these arguments, because it's not like getting paid is the same as selling out, and it's not like there's some automatic virtue in participating in the fanfic gift community, but it's hard to have these conversations about who gets paid without assigning a lot of moral valence to one path or another. (And don't even get me started on the tumblr contingent who think all art should be free always and being charged ever for anything they enjoy is class warfare. Lol okay, child, you institute a system where no artists get paid and then we can talk about class warfare).

But . . . I'm trying to put my finger on something here. There is something about the wall-to-wall indulgence of this book, how it is clearly stuffed full of all the loosely-related things the author likes at the expense of things like a through line and pacing, which makes it feel particularly like fanfic even when it isn't lifting scenes wholesale from Sherlock. And even when it isn't lifting scenes wholesale and is off sort of doing its own thing – which it does, a bit, with the Sherlock character in particular – it has a density of reference that goes past charming into something else. Like the almost entirely offscreen character named for a Sayers character. And there's something about the fanfictionness of this whole thing and the fact that it is for sale that turns the density of references from charming into . . . cliquish? More like in-jokes than easter eggs. A thing that keeps people out rather than a thing that invites them further in, because it costs $28. IDK.

So does this totally belong on the AO3? Yep. Does the author deserve to get paid for it? Sure. Do I have complicated feelings about the intersection of those facts? Yeah.

The Name of the Rose

TFW you read a work of "great literature" and it is erudite and labyrinthine (literally and metaphorically) and it is about the sequestration of knowledge, among many other things, and you just. Don't. care.

Also, I don't care how good a book is or whether it is specifically about a closed, deeply misogynistic religious community – I am just not hear for books that have one woman in them, and she comes to a very bad end after being used and abused by men.

Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon

3/5. Tale of the search for a changeling fae prince in Elizabethan England.

A book that is doing a lot of things that I can tilt my head at and know are probably lovely, but they aren't for me. Confession time: I do not give a damn about the Elizabethans. Not a dram, not a drop. You cannot interest me with your Kit Marlowe, quite possibly because so, so, so very many have tried. And don't get me started on the intersection of the Elizabethans and the fae.

But Goldstein is good at what she is doing here, and I always appreciate finding women specfic authors from prior decades that I haven't heard of. Particularly when I can get her work in audio, which is not always the case. Sidebar, but I was just griping about who gets left out of the slow backwards march of audio now that audiobooks are a real thing. It seems to me to be a retread of the forces that suppress women's writing when it is print published. Oh, this woman author didn't sell well in 1993, why make an audiobook now? But why didn't she sell well in 1993? And why can I find endless pulpy dude wankfests on Audible but not, say, Rosemary Kirstein?

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

3/5. Cold War British spy . . . hm. It's not a caper. Or a thriller. Let's just say spy novel.

Written in response to James Bond, and I do appreciate how this entire book consists of finding a spy by talking to a lot of people. And how the protagonist is so deliberately desexualized. Oh, and there is a tense scene of library espionage. No, that was sincere, it's tense. But in general, I appreciated this story as an object, but it's not really for me. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to really enjoy a spy novel that isn't also specfic.