lightreads

The Last Hour Between Worlds

4/5. A single mother, just two months post-partum, gets out for one night to attend a ball in her fantasy city. Which gets complicated when the whole ballroom keeps falling through levels of reality each time the clock strikes, and when her former crush turned professional enemy, the hot lady thief, is also on the case.

This is a lot of fun, and very stylish. Visually, I mean – there’s a lot going on here with what people are wearing and carrying, and with the shifting esthetics of each layer of reality. And you know I’m in favor of adventure books about mothers, particularly very new mothers like this one.

If you’re paying even moderate amounts of attention, none of these plot twists will rock you. But they are all pleasing to unwind, as is the whole book.

Content notes: Violence, temporary character death.

A Drop of Corruption

4/5. Sequel in this fantasy biopunk Holmes & Watson universe.

One of the more successful sequels I’ve read in a long time, in the sense that this accomplishes the task of really blowing up and blowing out the world. I continue to be only middling interested in these characters (and also continue to be puzzled about why this series is first person, aside from the obvious stylistic nod). But the construction of this empire, whose people’s bodies and minds are modified in ways beyond our understanding by methods beyond their understanding, all while the leviathans come ever closer to breaking down the sea walls, is incredibly interesting to me.

I think this book is not as successful in its project of talking about kings and power structures by blood in general. It does that, but our protagonist is not really clocking the implications for his own life as an imperial subject, so it doesn’t quite come together the way intended. The first person gets in the way there, specifically, given our protagonist is not, shall we say, a political or philosophical thinker.

Still, I am way more interested in this now than I was after the first book.

Content notes: Body modification and body horror, threats of infection/contamination.

Letters to Half Moon Street

3/5. Short epistolary queer norm historical romance with fantasy elements, about the shy (and possibly demi) younger son in London for the first time catching the eye of a society gentleman.

A charming frip of a book with good epistolary. This has all the trappings of an early nineteenth century historical romance, except it’s queer norm. The worldbuilding is paper thin – that’s not the point, I realize – but I’m the sort of person who asks too many questions of a book like this. Like okay, you’ve replaced heterosexism with a model that relies even more heavily on birth order, and yet that seems to have changed the way that class and inheritance and power work in this setting not at all or very little? How is that possible? Yes, I am interrogating the text from the wrong direction, I acknowledge I am the problem here. The author’s note is like “I wanted to write queer norm historical so I did and I stuck fantasy magic in it, so there,” and like, sure, I respect it. I’m just not the best at reading it.

Bonds of Brass

2/5. Frothy M/M scifi about the kid at military school who discovers his roommate – who he’s in love with – is the heir to the conquering oppressive empire.

A book has not made me this mad in quite a long time.

I picked this up because I have a terrible weakness for space royalty. Queer space royalty? Put it in my face.

But then I started it, and went Wait, what is happening here? And did some googling, and discovered that this book was straight up marketed as “pick this up when you’ve run out of Finn/Po on the AO3.”

Okay.

Look.

Do I love that publishing has been busily co-opting fannish language and customs? I do not. Don’t get me started on how shit terrible they generally are when they try to tag things. But do I acknowledge that the small glut of fannish authors turned pro and serial numbers filed off books has done good things for genre and for me personally? Sure.

But that’s not what this is.

This is a book that could chase a Finn/Po binge in the sense that . . . I mean it has space in it? And – I’m guessing here – the art of the two leads is clearly the actors? Otherwise . . . no. Not the slightest bit of the same thing at all. Which pisses me off because it's a total misunderstanding of why shippers ship. Yes it's because the actors are hot, but fundamentally it's about the character dynamic. So if you market me Finn/Po and then give me two people with a wildly different set of personalities and histories and interactions, well now I know that you really don't get what you're trying to sell at all.

But the thing that really burns my biscuits is how this book starts, on page one, blithely like “so I’m totally in love with him, anyway, here’s our story,” with no grounding as to why or how this alleged love came about. It definitely requires explanation, because the love interest in question is, well, yikes to say the least.

But we don’t get an explanation or any grounding. At all in the whole book, to be clear. We’re just dropped in cold and expected to buy it. Which is 100% a move you can make in a Finn/Po AU on the AO3. It is absolutely not a move you can make in an original fucking novel. Because in fact, co-opting the language and customs and narrative structures of fandom for traditionally published books is, quite often, a terrible idea with terrible results.

Don’t get me started on everything else wrong with this book, like how it’s a first person narrator who withholds a vital and completely relevant piece of information to the end of the book. That is a hard road, and the author does not have those chops. Nor does she have the chops for the delicate and complex story of collaboration and trauma and imperialism and internal conflict she was vaguely gesturing towards. Not even a bit.

Put the AO3 down, publishers.

Shroud

4/5. Our narrator, vassal of a future space exploring hell corporate, tells the story of how she survived many days on the surface of a mysterious and deeply hostile moon, populated by inexplicable and frightening life forms. Then things get weirder.

Good standalone scifi with a long section of survival horror. This makes an interesting companion to Alien Clay, another recent book of his. Both are about humans who are powerless within an oppressive and unfair human system, and how they encounter terrifying alien life, and how those aliens embody another way of being sentient in a radical departure from the human way, and what that illuminates. The two books come at that story from very different angles, but to interesting effect alone and together.

Content notes: Death, corporate dehumanization, the existential horror of alien consciousness

I Who Have Never Known Men

4/5. A short feminist science fiction(?) novel originally written in french in the 90’s, when it acquired a cult following, whereupon it was translated into english a few years ago and acquired a new and different cult following. This is the first person account of a young girl who grew up in a cage with 39 women, all older than her, all of whom remember their former lives, unlike her. They know nothing but each other and the silent guards, until one day everything changes, and they escape to a strange, answerless landscape.

This is good. It manages that trick of being an incredibly bleak story, but told with a lot of tenderness and humanity, so it feels richer and more rewarding than ‘bleak’ implies. This is simply written, yet rewards complex thought. I think the author’s jewishness is important for reading it well, particularly in appreciating why there is never any actual ‘why’ for the atrocities committed here. I also strongly suspect the author had been reading Tiptree, and maybe Le Guin’s “Sur” (very different, and yet related), and maybe Marge Piercy? This feels very much in conversation with a lot of speculative feminist texts of the 80’s in particular, is what I’m saying.

I am less compelled by the reading suggested by the afterword in my english text, which glosses this book as about what a woman might be, should she exist in a world entirely without men. I mean, the title’s right up there, so sure, carry on. I just don’t find that a very rewarding train of thought in this iteration, and think this book is doing a lot of other things that I’d rather pay attention to.

Content notes: Captivity, depictions of mass death aftermath, euthanasia of a sort.

A Ruse of Shadows

4/5. Book 8. Do not start here either.

Sherry Thomas is just really good at this. Even when she’s pulling the same tricks again – having our protagonists enact the whole plot of the book without ever explaining to the reader until the very end, false crime accusations again – I’m mostly happy to go for the ride. Here, that narrative secrecy works to enhance the way this book is also about the central romantic relationship, and how they decide what it’s going to be, and what it’s not, like adults and complicated people do.

Five Broken Blades

3/5. A group of six people come together to murder the unkillable god king, but they’re all liars, it gets complicated.

This is mis-marketed as gritty-ish twisty fantasy when it’s actually most interested in its romances (there are six characters, they enter the arc two-by-two). So just know that going in. Also, I feel I should warn for the thing where this has six points-of-view and they are all written in first person present, which is . . . a choice.

Anyway, this has some amount of intrigue and charm going for it, but I tired of the steep dips in writing quality whenever it came to the romances (and the writing is never good to start with). And also the thing where we get first person POVs of people and everyone is hiding something from the reader, which is hard to pull off and Corland does not have those chops. This is a particular peeve of mine.

I read it, it reads fast and easy, I enjoyed parts of it, but now I have no interest in the sequel, even though it promises to blow the worldbuilding wide open.

Content notes: A lot of violence and murder, references to gory execution methods, child trafficking and child abuse.

Cocaine Blues and 20 more

4/5. Long-running series of historical detective novels about a wealthy woman in 1928/1929 Australia who solves crime, builds an unconventional family, and bangs half the men she meets.

If you’re wondering where I’ve been, here you go.

These are hard to talk about because I read 21 of them (not 22, though there is a 22nd book) and I had a pretty good time for most of them. But the most recent books were such a noticeable decline in quality that it’s left a bad taste in my mouth and now I just keep thinking about what I didn’t like. Let’s see what I can do about that.

Things to like: Phryne’s cheerful and unapologetic sexuality. The ways she is allowed to behave as male detectives do – horny, constantly drinking, etc. Casual poly relationships that suit everyone just fine and work beautifully. Mostly short mysteries with a range of solutions. Strong writing on a craft level, particularly in the middle books. An affection for the detective novels that Phryne herself reads, and a playfulness with their forms (Christie, Sayers, etc.). But with more frankness about the specific sorts of crimes that women and children are vulnerable to – incest and rape, forced relationships, botched abortion, forced childbearing, etc.

What I don’t like: Also Phryne, who is a lot of a lot. The repeated and unmistakable asephobia that emanates from the books themselves, not just Phryne who is the one to voice a lot of it (she’s one of those highly sexual people who thinks there’s something wrong/unnatural about people who aren’t, and the books let her attach these views to villains several times). The way the author just gave completely up on series continuity once the TV show started, to the point of suddenly adding a sexual overtone to a relationship that was previously platonic (and almost familial) in the books because the TV show went a totally different direction with it. It’s extremely disconcerting. The sharp decline in writing quality in the last few books. The extremely weird Sherlock slashfic interlude where Phryne bangs not!John Watson a bunch to make not!Sherlock jealous (ah and it turns out he’s not asexual after all, what a relief for everyone). The later books get real weird, guys.

Content notes: All sorts of crime, including against children. Rape, incest, sexual exploitation, violence, murder, generally as aftermath and not on-page.

3/5. Hard scifi about a couple of functionally immortal galactic citizens travelling to the core to find an unknown civilization sprung from the DNA panspermia; meanwhile members of that civilization work out the newtonian and relativistic principles that describe their extremely weird and risky existence.

Very much of its time (nearly twenty years ago) and just okay. A big idea book where I thought the big idea was only vaguely interesting, but there isn’t really much else to go on here, unless you like over a hundred pages of people talking about physics math. Which is not snide, considering I enjoyed that strand of the book more than the strand about the functionally immortal people, who do things like load up new modules to become experts in various fields in a few seconds, which really enhances their presentation as cardboard cutout post humans. Post humans who have left the constraints of embodiment behind, by the way, and who are nonetheless still deeply invested in the gender binary. Sure, okay.

Read Tchaikovsky’s Children books instead. Some superficial similarities, much more alive.