Author: librarykat

book collage, February 2022

End of month book collage! There are still a few EST hours left in February, but I’m not going to finish any of the books I’m currently reading by tomorrow.

book collage, February 2022

A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar
Aru Shah and the End of Time, by Roshani Chokshi
Razorblade Tears, by S.A. Cosby
All Systems Red, by Martha Wells
Dark Rise, by C.S. Pacat
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
Driftwood, by Marie Brennan
The Ghost Bride, by Yangsze Choo
Crosshairs, by Catherine Hernandez
Secret Daughter, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda
No Gods, No Monsters, by Cadwell Turnbull
Six of Crows, by Leigh Bardugo
Sinopticon 2021: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction, edited by Xueting Christine Ni
Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki

Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki

This book is so many things: a love story to the food and immigrant culture of LA, an adoring paean to videogame and classical music, a coming-of-age rescue of a trans girl escaping abuse, a Faustian bargain involving cursed violins, and also aliens who have disguised their stargate inside a donut shop. Quite often the prose is beautiful, lyrical, evocative… and yet the writing is super choppy, the first person perspective comes across as awkward, and the POV switches so rapidly between characters that it’s honestly really annoying. I liked this book anyway, but I liked it despite the writing style.

Sinopticon 2021: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction, edited by Xueting Christine Ni

A good anthology, no duds, smooth and lyrical translation. The editor did a great job writing afterwords that gave insight into each author’s life and tied it to the story; for instance, Ma Boyong’s amazing “The Great Migration,” about how hordes of Martian immigrants crowd onto the space shuttles to visit Earth every time the planets approached one another, was inspired by his experience with the annual travel crush during Chinese New Year. Other stories look back at traumatic events in Chinese history, like Zhao HaiHong’s “Rendezvous: 1937,” which had time travelers reacting to the Nanjing Holocaust; or reference folklore like Regina Kanyu Wang’s “The Tide of Moon City,” which jumps off the legend of the cowherd and the weaver girl to explore political and personal tensions between binary planets in a shared star system. I think my favorite was “The Last Save” by Gu Shi, which allowed people to go back to previous save points and reload events and try again after they’ve messed things up, and then pivoted to inspect the impact such actions would have on their loved ones.

Six of Crows, by Leigh Bardugo

Oh man this was such an awesome read, way better than Shadow and Bone (though I’m glad I read that one first, if only so that I knew some of the Grishaverse terminology). In this heist novel, the action comes first, and characters are built alongside the action, which moves everything along much more smoothly. The conflicted rogue is also one of my favorite character archetypes, and there are TONS of them in this one. Each character in the squad has backstory that is explored gradually throughout the book, which builds on their awesome dynamics. The tension is kept at great levels; the heist is complicated and full of twists, but not so much that the book lost momentum explaining it. And even though the ending is cliffhanger-y, I can’t be disappointed; it was such a fun ride to get there. (Six weeks for the next one to come off the hold list? Noooooo)

No Gods, No Monsters, by Cadwell Turnbull

I really wanted to like this but it was so difficult; of the unnecessarily bloated cast, the POV characters that know things don’t let any information out, and the POV characters that don’t know anything… keep not knowing anything. The action starts with what seems like a fairly standard case of police brutality, but then it turns out that the young man who was shot was actually a werewolf… except then all the video footage and the official record is doctored to remove evidence of anything supernatural… and then more people begin revealing themselves as monsters, or are outed against their will, igniting pro- and anti- monster sentiment worldwide… but then the monsters themselves seem to be pawns in a complicated battle between even more higher powers, one or more of whom are running some kind of cult? The writing itself is great but the plot is really complicated and poorly communicated; I don’t think I’ll be pursuing the sequel.

Secret Daughter, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

A poor woman in 1980s India is forced to give up her daughter (because they need sons, obv); a pair of California doctors struggling with infertility adopts that baby girl from the husband’s native Mumbai. The story follows both families as the girl grows; the Indian family struggles to make a living in Mumbai; the California couple deals with internal stress caused by culture clash and teen rebellion. The Indian culture and food, from the point of view of the expat doctor dad and the teenage American girl, were lovingly portrayed; the white mom’s horror of spicy food was a little stereotypical, but whatever. Easy writing with moments of genuine feeling, especially around parenthood, but mostly the story felt very staged and superficial throughout, the characters more paper cutouts than real people.

The Ghost Bride, by Yangsze Choo

Paints a lovely picture of life in colonial Malaya, gorgeous illustrations of the people and the society; I love the way she wrapped in ghosts and spirits from folklore. The main character is a drip, though, which is a bit of a letdown since her circumstances are so very interesting: a rich family is trying to marry her off to their extremely dead son, who is creepily courting her in her dreams and is not taking no for an answer. 

Crosshairs, by Catherine Hernandez

A near-future dystopia in which a racist, ultraconservative government in Canada (working with a similar government in the US, we’re told, but this story is set in Toronto) rounds up basically anyone who isn’t white, straight, or able-bodied, cuts off access to their financial accounts and transportation, and either straight-out executes them or stuffs them into concentration camps and workhouses. The narrator, a queer femme drag performer, is writing letters to his lost love while on the run and getting involved in the rebellion. It should have been exciting stuff, but the writing is super heavy-handed and the characters often pause in the middle of tense moments to deliver long-winded monologues about intersectionality and allyship. In general I found this really clumsily done, from the unlikely setup, to the extremely flat characters, to a really forced ending.

Driftwood, by Marie Brennan

A dreamy and thoughtful collection of interconnected short stories, told to one another by lost souls. Basically Driftwood is a place where worlds go to die: after some kind of cataclysm, people find that their world is now a fragment of itself, smashed up against other dying worlds, each world gradually diminishing until they disappear in the crush of other worlds. In such a place, you cannot hang on to your past life; if you do not wish to disappear with your world, you must become a drifter, homeless until death. Without permanence, the only foundation that the drifters are able to build are the stories they tell one another. 

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

I learned so much from this book. I knew that there was a migration of black people northward from the Jim Crow south but I had no idea of the vast scale of the migration, and only a vague sense of the challenges the migrants faced along the way. Wilkerson follows three real-life people, who made the journey at different times and to different places; she illustrates the challenges that they face and show evidence of how others faced similar trials. I particularly liked her assertion that these migrants were similar to first-generation immigrants to the country from other countries, in their drive to sacrifice and succeed despite all odds, in marked contrast to how they were depicted in society at the time.