I enjoyed this so much. I’d only read Zen Cho’s Malaysian fairytales before so I was completely unprepared for this extremely Jane Austen-esque treatment of magical England, with bonus characters of color who were looked down on by society, but grudgingly tolerated because they were incredible magicians. (And they were adorable! For any fans of Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, I really feel like Prunella is Iskierka in human form.) The prose and dialogue are florid but also delightfully deadpan; the plot was slow to get started but finished so delightfully that I was sad to get to the end. I already have the sequel on hold at the library.
Author: librarykat
All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft, by Geraldine DeRuiter
The author is a travel blogger, and I picked her book up because of her hilarious viral pan of a fancy Italian restaurant. The writing style throughout is entertaining, light, and incredibly self-deprecating; she paints lovely portraits of her friends and family, including her quirky parents and her husband who she clearly adores, whose globetrotting job has enabled her to tag along and explore the world despite her self-acknowledged insecurities and lack of directional sense. Her tone throughout is of bemused gratitude at her own good fortune, which I appreciated.
Red Rising, by Pierce Brown
The writing style didn’t really work for me at the beginning, lots of sentence fragments and testosterone, but it grew on me until I found myself paging fluidly through to the end. Incredibly dystopian from top to bottom: the futuristic society’s caste structure is reinforced by bioengineering so that the top castes are literally superhuman compared to the poor workers at the bottom, but even the highest caste children have to go through a Hunger Games type culling to come out on the very top. It’s nuts and weirdly compelling. There’s definitely a lot of casual violence but it’s all presented as mind games, so it doesn’t feel unnecessarily excessive.
A Master of Djinn, by P. Djèlí Clark
This was adorable. It’s a standard setup: a tough, experienced detective has a murder mystery to solve, except in this case the tough detective is the youngest woman working at the Ministry of Alchemy in a magical version of historic Cairo; the murder is of an entire secretive brotherhood; oh, and the repercussions of her investigation threaten to tear down the thin barrier protecting the physical world from the magical realm. Great cast of characters, great progression of plot, really enjoyable read.
Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The subtitle of this book is Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, which pretty much sums it up. I really loved reading this book, which married the nerdy enthusiasm of a trained botanist with the quiet wonder of one who was raised from childhood to regard plants as teachers. Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and throughout the book tries to harmonize the surviving wisdom passed down from tribal elders with the strict scientific discipline that she was taught in her Western education. She also ties plants into the threads of her life, finding in them reflections of her experience as a mother. Beautiful and thoughtful writing.
Jade Legacy, by Fonda Lee
An absolutely phenomenal conclusion to the Green Bone trilogy. The books started out all gangsters and power struggles, and it would have been a perfectly good ride to keep it at that level, but Lee fearlessly developed it into a story of opposing dynasties trying to outmaneuver one another on an international scale, while keeping her characters grounded in the constant struggle to balance their independence with the family honor. I’ll miss the Kaul family, with their strengths and their stubbornness, and I think the ending was bittersweet and perfect.
The City of Brass, by S.A. Chakraborty
A Cairo thief and con artist meets a djinn and is transported to a city out of legend, populated with tribes of magic-users with deep and complicated histories, and thick with tribal tension and layered political infighting. Chakraborty is really good at giving each character a coherent set of motivations, and making them incredibly sympathetic besides; as the reader I found myself pulling for characters with hopes and needs that directly conflicted with one another, and got totally stressed about how all of them could possibly find happy endings. Even the unlikeable characters’ actions come from a logically sound place. On top of that the surroundings are beautifully drawn, really gorgeous imagery. Amazing stuff. So many questions left for the next volume, argh.
In the Watchful City, by S. Qiouyi Lu
A dreamy, nonlinear novella in which a mysterious visitor with a box full of stories gets the unwilling attention of a spirit-caretaker for a city. The spirit-caretaker is innocent and empathic; the stories open ær eyes (yep, this is one of those stories with extremely nonstandard pronouns) to the moral gray area æ inhabits as æ tries to uphold the city’s isolationist standards. The overarching plot is a bit thin, but the interstitial stories are poignant and pretty.
The Jasmine Throne, by Tasha Suri
Absolutely loved the beginning of this book, which kicks off with a princess refusing to die on her brother’s funeral pyre. Exiled to a distant tower, she meets a chambermaid (with a mysterious past, of course) and their growing relationship is so well done, all tension and suspicion and reluctant respect. Meanwhile, a growing rebellion in the kingdom is complicating things for both of them (to say the least). I also liked the magic system, very much one in which you can’t get something for nothing.
book collage for December 2021
It feels a bit anticlimactic to post an end-of-month book collage when everyone else is doing year-end wrap ups, but here we go… Some really great reads this month.
Best wishes for 2022, everyone.
Aurora Rising, by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao
The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik
Declare, by Tim Powers
Hummingbird Salamander, by Jeff VanderMeer
Nightbitch, by Rachel Yoder
A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
Trickster Drift / Return of the Trickster, by Eden Robinson
Skyward Inn, by Aliya Whiteley
Composite Creatures, by Caroline Hardaker
The Actual Star, by Monica Byrne
Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson
The Red Threads of Fortune, by Neon Yang
Cooking at Home, by David Chang and Priya Krishna