I kind of feel like these would have been better books without all the invented vocabulary, but I did like the quasi-Victorian? Cockneyish? language of the street dwellers. In an alternate future dystopian London, people with extrasensory abilities (clairvoyants, or “voyants”) are hunted down by the government; because their very existence is illegal, voyants band together in street gangs and mobs to survive. Our heroine Paige has powers that put her pretty high up in her gang; however, when she is captured by the government, she finds out that captured voyants actually become enslaved in a crazy medieval prison (it’s the old Oxford campus) run by – wait for it – aliens! The aliens are using the psychic energy of the voyants to fight a war on another plane of existence entirely, with the government’s cooperation. The insanity just keeps ratcheting up. The first book has plenty of action but honestly feels mostly like setup, introducing mad amounts of vocabulary alongside crowds of characters and doing its best to convince you of the multiple layers of weird that comprise this world; the second book was a little more focused. Two books in I’m still honestly not sure I completely buy the premise, but at least Shannon’s writing is smooth and the characters are well-crafted.
Author: librarykat
The Doors of Eden, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Doors of Eden / Adrian Tchaikovsky
I expect this of Tchaikovsky by now, but no one condenses centuries of hypothetical evolutionary development like this guy. Interspersed with totally plausible and yet very different ways life could have evolved and thrived (or not) on Earth, we follow some really well-crafted characters through events that get really strange. Really ambitious book, great journey, though the ending felt weak and didn’t quite live up to the development.
Persephone Station, by Stina Leicht
Perfectly decent SF caper; traumatized ex-space marine teams up with a ragged band of criminals to save a pacifist alien species from uncaring corporate takeover / megalomaniac colonizer. The story got extra spice from the characters, a rainbow cast of representation that I would have loved to see in SF growing up. I really liked the AI character as well; I actually found her the most relatable of the bunch.
Four Hundred Souls, by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
When I picked up this book of four hundred years of Black history in America, I mentally braced for impact, because it’s so painful to even think about: slavery to segregation, Jim Crow to BLM, and still so far from real equality after all this time. And yet this book was a gift. Eighty amazing writers (and ten wonderful poets) came together, each taking on a span of history, to share so many stories of resilience and courage and determination. At every point in history, a racist America was consciously constructed and reinforced to keep Black people contained, and yet at every one of those points, Black people fought stubbornly for their right to exist. This book could have been a litany of sorrow, but instead celebrates how Black resistance grew and strengthened with every obstacle. If it weren’t a library copy I would have left sticky notes on every other page. When we finally settle down where we don’t need to worry about moving weight, I’m buying a copy.
Horse Heaven, by Jane Smiley
Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley (recommended by KS) turned out to be a really leisurely, sprawling epic following a group of racehorses through their various owners and trainers, and incidentally also the lives of said owners and trainers, and I enjoyed it way more than I initially thought I would. Both humans and horses are given depth and personality, and although the cast of characters is big, I was able to follow the action without problems.