lightreads

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.

Neuromancer

3/5. Do I need to say what this is? Look at me reading this, only twenty mumble years after multiple boys informed me, explicitly or implicitly, that my opinions on all literature known to man were irrelevant unless and until I read this book (and liked it, one presumes). You’ll note that this directly resulted in me not reading this for multiple decades.

I do not like it very much, for the record. It is what it is, and it suffers hugely from me having previously read many of the books that it engendered, such that I finally get back to this and find it reads as derivative rather than what it is. It also suffers from the racism, I should mention. Oh, and the thing where the male protagonist is a total loser and yet we have to spend all this time with him while a much more interesting woman does stuff that actually makes the story go. At least Gibson was apparently aware of that; he just didn’t do anything about it (in this book, anyway – I have the impression she gets better billing later).

What no one told me, however, is that Gibson can really write. I may not be interested in a lot of the stuff he’s interested in, he may have been baked out of his mind while writing most of this, I may find this tired and silly, but god damn if I didn’t reread certain passages of this multiple times just to figure out how he just did that. If I’d known he was writing like that, I would have read him twenty years ago. Though then again, I probably wouldn’t have known how to read a writer like that twenty years ago, so okay.

Also, I’ll say this for him, that is still a banger of a title.

Content notes: Fridging. Racist stereotypes in multiple directions.

The Obsidian Tower

3/5. Fantasy about the woman who is the one with apparently necromantic magic in a family of vivomancers, and what happens when the door her family has guarded for thousands of years (they have a stupid rhyme about it and everything) is opened.

I picked this up because I liked her more recent release. This has many of the same good elements: bisexual heroine, complex webs of relationships, actual politics, and interest in friendship and teamwork. But I did not like this one nearly so much. I am generally in a bad mood right now, so take this as you will, but the protag’s repeated emotional victimization by two-thirds of the people in the book (including herself), and how she takes on guilt for basically everything, and her self-sacrificing tendencies really irritated me. I imagine the arc of this trilogy will be towards better relationships and some actual self-worth but meh, I’m not along for the ride.

Content notes: Torture.

.The Mimicking of Known Successes and two more

4/5. A series (two novellas and a short novel) about an investigator on Jupiter who reconnects with her old girlfriend, a professor, to solve crime.

Ignore that this is Holmes/Watson. I sure did. Making them lesbians does not suddenly make me care.

Also ignore the summary above which makes these sound like mysteries. I mean, they are. That is what is going on here. And the mysteries are fine, whatever.

No, I read these for the worldbuilding, which got more and more interesting the deeper we go. Our narrator – the professor – is a “classicist,” meaning someone who studies old Earth ecology pre climate collapse in the theoretical hope of one day rebuilding that ecosystem. As opposed to the “modern” faculty, who study life as lived on Jupiter, can you imagine, what a waste. It starts out reading like a bit of a joke, sometimes lightly funny, sometimes scathing, at the expense of academia. And then it gets more and more nuanced, and our narrator starts to untangle ever deepening layers of her biases, and questioning the project of her university and her life. And she has to ask genuine questions about whether she was, in a particular instance, the villain. And I have almost never seen that done like this, where it is a real question for the character and for the narrative, not just some stupid character self-indulgent sob fest. No, there’s a real and complex question there, and these books let it breathe.

Content notes: Toxic academic politics, futuristic racism, violence, depressive episodes.

Where the Axe Is Buried

4/5. A near future scifi thriller about the violently authoritarian surveillance state (it’s Russia) where the president is downloaded into successive bodies which the population steadfastly pretends not to notice, and the western european powers that have “rationalized,” i.e., installed AI prime ministers. A book about regime destabilization, and surveillance shadows, and thought control, and inception.

I was reading perfectly acceptable books, and then I picked this up and was like oh damn. Now this is good writing. This is tight (less than 100,000 words, probably) and intense and strange and bleak and hopeful. It stradles several genres and as such I suspect will not satisfy a lot of people: too literary and ambiguous for some, too much thriller for others. But this really landed for me.

Dense, chewy, controlled, beautifully written. Terribly sad on the costs of defying authoritarianism. Hopeful, in a complicated way.

Content notes: State violence Disappearances, camps, etc.

The Shots You Take

3/5. Another one of these M/M hockey romances. This one is even less about hockey than usual – old estranged teammates reconnect post retirement when one’s father dies. They have a lot of baggage having to do with how they used to sleep together, and one of them was in love and one of them had a lot of internalized homophobia.

I mean, I suppose someone did have to title a hockey romance that at some point.

Anyway, this one is nice, particularly for having actual adults in it. It also successfully walks that tough line where one half of the pairing treated the other half very poorly in the past, and there’s a lot of justifiable anger, but it is a romance after all so we have to retain some sympathy for both sides. So yeah, I liked this one fine. I’m not liking any romance more than fine at the moment, though, so who even knows what’s good anymore.

Content notes: Parental death and the raw aftermath.

A more Beautiful and Terrible History

3/5. A fascinating look at the way civil rights history is used and abused and retold, most often to serve current racial status quo.

I liked this and found it helpful, but hesitate to casually recommend it to people. The problem is that the author occasionally drops a comment that is squarely in my expertise and that she is dead wrong about. Which, people are allowed to be wrong about things not in their wheelhouse, but it makes one wonder about the rest of their thinking.

An example: I don’t have the exact passage bookmarked, but she says something super casual early on about how the 2016 election was stolen and then moves on without addressing that at all. I suspect this is an artifact of that particular 2017 twitter brain rot that infected many people on the left. My problems with this are many. There has been extensive legal and factual investigation of this, and it simply isn’t true. Did we know that in 2017? No, but speaking for myself, I was pretty sure of it at the time and was validated by all the evidence subsequently gathered. Second, gosh, where have we heard this particular bit of red pill thinking before? Or since, I should say? “My guy lost so it had to be illegitimate?” Hmm. This is where all the Jan. 6 defendants started out, mentally. It’s

Look, she could have been saying something more fundamental about the nature of U.S. elections – how structural racism has permeated them to the point that they are not legitimate. I have heard these arguments and yeah, you can get me there. But if so, why is 2016 the one we point to? And why doesn’t she unpack that? Saying an election was “stolen” can mean approximately ten thousand different things, be precise, people! Here, it’s just leftie red pill stuff. And if her thinking is that messed up on that, boy, I don’t know. I don’t love marking a book down hard for throwaway comments, but then again, it’s the throwaways that really tell you how someone thinks, isn’t it?

Content notes: Racism, structural and personal. Historical accounts of civil rights history which, of course, include much racial violence.