This was… okay. It’s the kind of book where you get the impression that the author loves their protagonists too much to let anything really bad happen to them, which kind of takes any urgency out of the plot; also, the characters all feel like either wish-fulfillment dreamboats or cardboard cutout villains. The protag in question is Miles Singer, a morally upright doctor who works with injured veterans; he constantly fights an internal battle between hiding his illegal magic gift and the temptation of using magic to heal his patients. Into his life comes a mysterious and handsome gentleman; detective work, light romance, and mortal (but not too mortal!) danger ensue.
Author: librarykat
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, by Saad Z. Hossain
Deceptive little novella, I loved it. Starts out with a djinn waking from an unnaturally long slumber and meeting a human sitting by the road eating pistachios. (The pistachios are a running gag with this guy, kind of like Han from the Fast and Furious franchise and his bag of chips.) Turns out the djinn has woken into a far future world where everyone in Kathmandu is implanted with pollution-fighting nanites, no one starves, and good behavior is rewarded on a point system by a citywide AI named Karma. Hilarity and biting social commentary ensue as the djinn attempts to conquer the futuristic city, a local bureaucrat tries to maintain order, and everyone belatedly finds out that the pistachio eater has an agenda of his own.
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, by Neal Stephenson
This book is classic Stephenson: a firehose of ideas mixed together in a doorstopper of text, geeky theories of near-future technological advancement sharing space with lengthy ruminations on the utterly mundane. Really, I feel like this is three books, clumsily mashed together: 1) ultrarich game developer dies, inadvertently funding the R&D necessary to scan and upload brains; 2) an honestly quite fascinating road trip through an America where people have banded into groups that all embrace different realities based on the news feeds they subscribe to; 3) an actual retelling of the Bible, or at least the Paradise Lost bits, with God and the angels as amnesiac uploaded minds, that ends up positing that the future of humanity will end with souls existing eternally in a self-imposed uploaded afterlife, as long as server farms exist to maintain them. It was probably too much to cram into one book, but hey, I expect nothing less from Stephenson. Personally I think it’s the middle section that will stick with me the longest; the ideas felt the strongest and most germane to current events.
When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut
“This is a work of fiction based on real events,” says the author, and as such it’s weirdly disconcerting; you know the history, but you’re fuzzy on the details, and Labatut takes full advantage of that. The book kicks off with a mostly-factual account tracing the discovery of Prussian Blue to cyanide, poison, and its horrific use in the Holocaust; the author muses on the vibrant beauty of the color, and the stain that it left on history. The following stories go on to profile men of great brilliance, Schwarzschild and Heisenberg and Schrödinger among others, whose discoveries in math and science drive them to madness as they realize the destruction their ideas could wreak upon the world (or maybe, Labatut insinuates, they have to go mad to make these leaps of intuition at all). Their madness and visions are described with such lush prose that the feel of the text touches on gothic horror; fiction is woven so seamlessly into fact that you can’t draw a clear line between real and imaginary. The book swerves to end on a biographical, reflective tone, on which the narrator refuses to cut down a diseased tree; it is dying inside, but still tall and wide and of great sentimental value, and he does not wish to see the rot within. It functions as a kind of allegory: we can see and appreciate the outer structure of things, but if we dig too deeply, we may find ourselves revolted by what lies within, and the mere pursuit of that knowledge may bring it all crashing down around us.
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, by Grady Hendrix
I think Hendrix started out with the concept of “wouldn’t it be cool if a book club of stereotypical housewives dedicated to reading horror novels actually encountered a for-reals vampire, and had to fight it using nothing but their wifely/womanly skills?” The resulting execution is at times hilarious and incisive, which lets you overlook the fact that none of the characters are likable. The women, for all their strength around one another, are terrified of crossing their men; those men are uniformly patronizing, dismissive, or controlling; the children that the women repeatedly say they would die to protect … give the audience zero reasons to care about them either. I did like the nod to the disparity of race outcomes, both in neighborhood development and as vampire pickings, but again it was brought up just for the white women to wring their hands over briefly, and for the men to ignore entirely. It’s kind of like this cider I tried yesterday that hit the palate right off the bat with lovely sweet notes, but then faded to bitter dryness on the tongue: after enjoying this book (and it was extremely enjoyable!), you’re left wondering whether these people should have been saved from vampires at all.
Bee Sting Cake, by Victoria Goddard
Book 2 of Greenwing and Dart; this one delves into Jemis Greenwing’s clouded past and his trauma around it. This is a triumph of unreliable narration; Jemis is so closed off from his emotions that all we have to go by are his detached observations of how his friends are reacting to him. It’s so well done that you’re more concerned about Jemis than about everything else going on around him, which includes dragons, riddles, a haunted wood, an entire cursed village, inheritance shenanigans, and a high stakes county fair. Absolutely loved this one.
The Apollo Murders, by Chris Hadfield
I was looking forward to this because I figured that Hadfield, being an astronaut, would be great at dropping in very technical and accurate details about the mechanics and procedures of spaceflight, and in this I was not at all disappointed. (I love Hadfield, for the record; his nerdiness is infectious, as is his clear enthusiasm for public outreach. I still enjoy rewatching his videos from space.) I also figured that Hadfield’s forte was likely not character development or beautiful prose, and in this I was also correct. This is a Cold War what-if thriller, in which the Americans and Russians jockey for primacy with moon rovers, spy satellites, and competing space missions. Hadfield sprinkles in real people with his fictional characters, and although his characters have no real depth or growth, they serve the purpose of moving the plot along. I loved the very technical descriptions of everything, from helicopter mechanics to how a loose solder blob could cause severe damage (see, this is why you don’t skimp on shock testing) to how communications lags meant that you had to deliver and receive information at a remove; that palpable joy in the details made the overall awkwardness of the story easier to swallow.
The Empire of Gold, by S.A. Chakraborty
Non-stop tension, action, and angst for this conclusion to the Daevabad trilogy. Great character growth with all the main protagonists; Chakraborty did an amazing job painting complementary pictures of their views of themselves versus how others saw them. The environments were crafted beautifully, both in mundane Cairo and in the magical world, and although the carnage was intense, the characters’ outraged reactions meant that the book never quite hit grimdark in tone. The only annoying bit for me was the djinn Dara’s clinging to his old beliefs despite what was by now a GIANT mountain of evidence to the contrary, but even that I could see as a logical outcome of his character. Really nicely done overall.
The Sweetest Remedy, by Jane Igharo
This is a perfectly sweet and romantic story about finding one’s family, except one’s family turns out to be super rich in Nigeria. It actually felt so close to Crazy Rich Asians for me, with its fish-out-of-water American heroine, her total delight in native dishes, the aloof and snobbish natives, and their breathless name-dropping of brands and designers, that I kept imagining it all taking place in Singapore. The main character is a half-white, half-Nigerian girl who grew up with her mother in the US after her Nigerian father left them; when she gets word that he has passed away and has asked for her to be present for the will to be read, she reluctantly travels to Nigeria. There, she meets her ultra-rich, mostly-unimpressed family, falls in love with a super hot family friend, and they all have to learn to accept each other. So yeah, pretty much it’s the plot of Crazy Rich Asians, except with only a fraction of the sniping and backbiting. The characters have no depth; everyone is pretty much exactly who they say they are, and they also say exactly what they think at any given moment. Everyone emotes so much that you feel like you’re reading a telenovela. The writing wasn’t artful by any means, but it was simple and smooth, and there were no surprises.
Rogue Protocol, by Martha Wells
The Murderbot Diaries novellas just get better and better (this one is #3). Murderbot’s narrative voice is a work of art – it feels emotions but doesn’t want to admit to them, or talk about them, so we get beautiful, terse little notes like “I don’t know, everything was annoying right now and I had no idea why.” But we all know why; it’s because someone is trying to treat Murderbot as worthy of friendship and respect, and Murderbot absolutely cannot deal. The characterization was great, especially that of Miki, a friendly little bot whose sweetness would have been saccharine except for how it was presented through Murderbot’s annoyed eyes. Wonderfully condensed piece, where mystery and sci-fi action and those emotions that Murderbot hate so much combine and build towards a beautiful and poignant conclusion, propelling Murderbot unwillingly towards further character growth and plot development.