Began as a true-crime story of an Alabama minister suspected of causing multiple deaths for insurance payouts in the 1970s, and segued into Harper Lee, her investigation of this trial, and her fraught writing journey. I really enjoyed this book, which did a beautiful job of patiently sketching out the environment and ambience of the small-town South, as well as pulling together an incredibly sympathetic and emotional portrait of Lee.
Category: quick reaction
A Damsel and a Demigod, by Annette Marie, read by Nelson Hobbs
Side novella for the Guild Codex series. Frankly not very good; the supposed master strategist character makes a chain of questionable decisions, and although for this genre I don’t mind love stories that come out of nowhere, I really did hate how poorly the guy used his magical electricity powers. I could have done so much better! Even so, Hobbs did a great job with the audio reading, and Marie’s snarky, snappy dialogue was still a fun time.
The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold, by Sam Knight
Traces the efforts of a psychiatrist who (in cooperation with a journalist) attempted to collect premonitions of disaster, that they might be recorded, verified, and quantified. Of those, the vast majority came to nothing but a couple of “superstar” prophets seemed able to repeatedly foresee accidents like plane crashes. The book spends a lot more time digging into the personalities involved, as well as the science of psychology at the time, than the “bureau” itself… but to be fair the project did eventually fizzle out without causing much lasting change, so without those asides the book would be a lot shorter.
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, by Theodora Goss
Riffs on the fact that a lot of classic monster stories involve the creation, and subsequent destruction / abandonment, of a monstrous woman. After the death of her parents, Mary Jekyll digs into her late father’s affairs and discovers not just a previously unknown sister named Diana Hyde, but other women who were brought into being by famous fictional mad scientists. The women band together to make their way in the world, helping Sherlock Holmes and Watson solve a string of murders along the way. The writing was perfectly decent, but the plot felt really more like a way to string together all these related stories, and there were so many characters that none of them felt particularly fully-realized.
Three Mages and a Margarita, by Annette Marie, read by Cris Dukehart
This is total fluff urban fantasy, and utterly enjoyable. Hot-tempered Tori stumbles upon an ad for a bartending job in a mysterious club; the club a place where magic-users (called “mythics”) meet to hang out and plan adventures. Even though Tori is human, some of the mythics (who are improbably hot*) decide to adopt her, and she deems the paycheck and company worthy of returning to the job. Danger and derring-do ensue; I particularly appreciated that Tori managed to hold her own despite her lack of magic, and that the characters did not spend a lot of energy on love triangle drama. It’s the first of a series so there’s some serious info dump, but the conversation flows easily. Fun, light read.
* the conceit of “one’s magic is only as strong as one’s physical body, and therefore if you want to be a strong mage, you are motivated to work out” is as good a reason as any for the main characters to be extremely fit.
Eyes of the Void, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Sequel to Shards of Earth, though a little less focused and more fragmented in the plot. Here Tchaikovsky, having created a huge host of alien cultures and many worlds, seems to want to dig into them and explore them even as his interdimensional space monsters are tearing everything down around them. His characters are pulled in different directions, running from enemies, chasing various leads, and following shadowy cabals, while the interstellar factions stumble (or are perhaps directed) towards war. The whole thing ends on a cliffhanger promising even more action; there is so much going on that I may have to re-read both books before the third is published next year.
A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir of Lady Trent, by Marie Brennan
This memoir begins with Lady Trent acknowledging her own status as a famous dragon naturalist, but reminding the reader that she was once a girl, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, and as such was expected to forgo unseemly activities like reading science texts and studying natural history, and especially was dissuaded from studying dragons. Because it’s a memoir, you know that Isabella eventually achieves her dream of a life of adventure and scientific study, but in this volume you get to relive her early history of rebellion, her attempts at courtship, and her journeys of discovery. I loved Isabella’s narrative voice and the occasional interjections from the future Lady Trent, putting the tale in perspective.
Babel, by R.F. Kuang
This book is subtitled “or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution,” which clues the reader into the fact that there will be linguistics nerdity, class struggle, and obviously magic. When words are translated between languages, nuance is sometimes lost; in Kuang’s alternate history, this elided nuance becomes actual magic. What follows explores the British Empire’s domination and exploitation of other nations through the lens of language: how those in power try to make it just another tool of oppression, and how native speakers of those languages are forced into choosing between buying into the system and benefiting from the oppression, or rebelling against it, and losing everything. Robin, the narrator, is taken from China to England at a young age, so that the British magicians can train him to use his language to serve the empire. His gradual awakening to how he is being used, and how he can use what was given him to fight back, makes for a gripping and urgent read. This book made me want to flip madly through to follow the action, and at the same time want to linger over each page, savoring the insights and turns of phrase. A fantastic and beautiful read.
The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak
The narration in this book switches constantly, from person to person to fig tree; that last narrator almost made me put down the book, because it felt so contrived and twee. But if you can get over being given occasional ecology lectures from a tree, the story underneath is about immigration and loss, and how people adapt when being transplanted (both literally and figuratively) into a foreign land. In this case it’s about people immigrating to England from Cyprus (or choosing to stay) during the 1960s crisis, and how they deal with the pain that they bring with them.
Blackfish City, by Sam J. Miller
This is a post-apocalyptic (or more accurately, during-apocalyptic) cyberpunk novel, which focuses so much on humanity that as a reader, I almost stopped seeing the cyberpunk altogether. It’s almost the opposite of William Gibson type novels, in which the humans are cyphers and the tech is cool; Miller’s humans’ emotions are deep and raw, and the fact that they live in a futuristic city run by mysterious AIs is just another part of their daily lives (though it’s also a huge part of the story). The geothermal city of Qaanaaq, an arctic refuge for those escaping the wars and chaos of a warming world, is visited by a mysterious woman who may or may not be bonded to an orca through exotic and secret technology; meanwhile, ordinary citizens are afflicted by a disease called “the breaks,” which bombard them with glimpses of strangers’ lives. Miller weaves these disparate threads together in a fast-moving and urgent story that also becomes a commentary on how those in political or economic power can dehumanize others, and the importance of family and community in a world being torn apart by climate change.