Nominally a take on the Sherlock story: under pressure to behave as a young woman of society, brilliant Charlotte Holmes uses the persona of Sherlock to solve mysteries and investigate suspicious deaths. I liked the pointed critique of the gender imbalance of the era, and how a woman would have had to jump through many more hoops to get the same kind of automatic respect and freedom that Holmes and Watson had; however, I found the rest of the plot rather contrived and thought it was unfortunate that for all her brilliance, Charlotte’s intuition was not essential to the resolution of the conflict.
Category: quick reaction
Counting Descent, by Clint Smith
The poems in this collection are beautiful and sharp, reflecting Smith’s experience as a black man growing up in a society determined to distrust black men. It’s a sober topic but he also brings beauty and joy into the poems, and also defiant pride in his heritage and his home town of New Orleans. Favorites included what the cicada said to the black boy, about survival and hiding, and the titular Counting Descent, which encapsulates his family history in numbers.
Siren Queen, by Nghi Vo
In the gilded age of cinema, as beautiful men and women make sacrifices to the occult powers that control Hollywood in a bid for literal stardom, a young Chinese-American girl yearns for fame… but she knows the kinds of roles that Hollywood has in mind for people who look like her, and the extra problems that face people who are queer like her, and she is determined to find her own way through. It’s old conflicts dressed up in magic, racism and sexism and the powerlessness of young women amplified by blood sacrifice and hungry monsters and the addictive, dangerous thrall of the Wild Hunt. Readers who love beautiful language and exotic magics will love this book; readers who want their magic to be logical, and their characters to be transparent about their motives, may be disappointed.
Stay and Fight, by Madeline ffitch
A modern, queer take on an unconventional Appalachian family. Touches on politics, pipelines, class tensions, materialism, and how the government punishes poverty… but never loses the essential story of how very different characters form a bond between one another, uniting against the world. Each chapter shifts you into a different POV, which adds extra dimension to their often-barbed exchanges with one another. The theme really drives home the title (as does a brief conversation between two children about the difference between trust and loyalty): the only way to demonstrate commitment to one’s family is to stay and fight.
Love-in-a-Mist, by Victoria Goddard
Book 5 of the Greenwing and Dart series finds our heroes forced to take shelter from the storm in a creepy old mansion, where the family of the local lord have gathered to compete for the inheritance, excuse me, I mean demonstrate their love and respect for their aging relative. Polite, barbed discussion of class and noblesse oblige ensue, and the reader will not be surprised when a dead body appears…. but there is also magic, mischief, young love, family secrets, and a baby unicorn. There’s one more in the series (so far), and Goddard has set up plot points so beautifully that someday I will have to go back and read them all again.
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers
Sequel to A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, but only insofar as one of the characters is reused, and the other characters are briefly referenced. A cascading failure of orbiting satellites leaves a motley group of characters stranded at a remote waypoint, in the care of a solicitous host and her moody teen. This is purely a character study; there are no bad guys, and no conflict save the fact that they are all on their own schedules and have their own reasons to get off-planet as quickly as possible. Gradually, their backgrounds and conflicts are revealed; equally gradually, a companionable friendship grows between them. Chambers dresses old conflicts up as alien cultures, and then finds a way for her characters to come together anyway. It’s like a warm sci-fi hug.
The King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner
The most amazing thing about the way Turner writes about Eugenides, former Queen’s Thief and newly crowned King, is how he constantly fools everyone into underestimating him, including readers who should know better, given that this is the third book. The writing is excellent; Turner is a master of conversations that convey a lot about the characters while they are actually saying very little. I was definitely a little unsure about the overall story arc going into this book, but now I’m firmly on board. The very complex and layered relationship between the Queen and King of Attolia, as well as between the rulers and their subjects, is very unique and extremely addictive to read.
Golden Age and Other Stories, by Naomi Novik
Essentially this is Temeraire fan fiction, except it’s by the author, so it’s naturally very good and possibly even canon. I suppose you can read it without having read the Temeraire series, but you’ll likely just get confused without the background. There are several stories of varying lengths, followed by a bunch of drabbles (100-word pieces) at the end, each inspired by a piece of fanart. As with any collection, some are better than others. I loved “Dawn of Battle,” the origin story for young Jane Roland and one which gave insight into the choices faced by young female captains; “Succession,” told by Temeraire’s mother as she broods over her eggs, was also poignant. The star of the collection though was definitely “Dragons and Decorum,” a touching and hilarious take on Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth Bennett is the captain for her dragon Wollstonecraft. Worth it just for that one alone.
The Siren Depths, by Martha Wells
Book 3 of the Raksura novels would not have been able to hit its emotional notes so perfectly without the grounding of the first 2 books. Everything that main character Moon learns about his people only serves to increase his self-doubt; being Moon, he hides it under reticence and panicked aggression. All the things I loved from the first two books came back super extra in the third: utterly fantastic alien morphologies, creepy attacks from the psychotic Fell, super tense Raksura politics, terrifyingly fierce Raksura matriarchs, everyone’s favorite no-nonsense grumpy Raksura grandpa, and of course Moon, the emo taloned beast who would rather pick fights than talk about his feelings. The last paragraph of the novel completely stuck the landing for the entire trilogy. Masterfully done.
The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
This was listed as the founding novel of the “dark academia” genre so it’s been on my list for a while. The writing is gorgeous, the kind of lush gothic creepiness that I associate with du Maurier; the content is also delightfully nerdy, full of references to literature and the classics. The narrator comes from a lower-class background, which allows him to view his high society classmates through a critical lens, even as he idolizes them and aspires to join their ranks. Meanwhile said classmates, who have no obvious grasp of how things work in the real world, drag the narrator into their obsession with the ancient Greeks, as well as their complicated interpersonal dynamics. The characters are a little too odd and unlikeable to be truly sympathetic, but the beautiful writing and the tense plot will carry you through.