I’ve reread this multiple times. I still love it. It is the most rollicking crazy amazing book you’ll ever read about lesbian necromancer/warriors trapped in a deadly scavenger hunt through a haunted gothic mansion on a mysterious planet. (It’s also the first book of an ongoing series and it does end on an argh note, but it’s totally worth the ride to read standalone.) The narrative voice of Gideon, which manages to be simultaneously irreverent, oblivious, and incredibly evocative, is everything I ever wanted.
Tag: genre-fantasy
Black Water Sister, by Zen Cho
This phrase is overused, but: I felt seen. Narrator Jess, getting ready to move back to Malaysia with her parents, begins to hear a voice in her head. She chalks it up to the multiple stresses in her life: moving back to a country she barely remembers; feeling like a failure for being unemployed after graduating from Harvard; being afraid to come out to her parents, and having to constantly hide the existence of her long-distance girlfriend. But when the voice keeps feeding her facts that actually turn out to be true, Jess eventually finds to her dismay that she is a medium, and that the ghost of her grandmother Ah Ma has her own reasons for wanting to drag her Americanized granddaughter into the world of spirits and gangsters that she’d left behind. I loved Jess’s relationship to her parents and extended family, which reflected my experience of being mostly familiar with your birth culture, but occasionally encountering unexpected pitfalls that remind you that you didn’t really grow up immersed in the culture the way the previous generation did… though of course my pitfalls didn’t involve demons or a powerful crime boss. The book manages to cover a ton of ground, touching on various conflicts from homophobia and sexism to the tension between capitalist development and the respect due tradition and nature, while never losing track of the personal and familial relationships that drive the story. Jess is a strong character who tries her best to take control of her own story, even as the plot events yank her around (often literally). I actually loved most of the characters, and their conversations and interactions were delightful. If I had a criticism of this book, it would be that I felt it moved a bit too fast, without giving Jess (and therefore me) time to process what was happening. Still, I really liked it and will definitely be reading anything else the I can find from the author.
Shadow and Bone, by Leigh Bardugo
It finally came off the hold list and… I waited sixteen weeks for this? It was perfectly okay, but oh so tropey: a combination of country bumpkin magic user goes to school (cue the usual leveling-up montage of exposition-filled classes, professor stereotypes – I think one of them is even Kung Fu Man!, fish-out-of-water insecurity, and petty student feuding), Sailormoon heroine (with great power comes great naivete), and inevitable teen drama love triangle (I continue to be uncomfortable with books that posit that jealousy and possessiveness are hallmarks of epic romance, instead of being creepy and borderline abusive). Oh and the obsession with beauty = power comes across as super shallow and unfortunate. There is some legitimately cool worldbuilding potential (a literal void filled with monsters, blocking trade and travel? Think of the possibilities!) and a plot twist midway through the book that honestly took me by surprise… but mostly, meh. I have heard though that the duology is better, so maybe once Bardugo worked all of the tropes out of her system, she did a better job with this honestly cool world concept? I put Six of Crows on hold, we’ll see what I think of it in [checks library prediction] four months.
Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Take all the artfulness and creeping wrongness of DuMaurier’s Rebecca, but make the heroine an actual fierce and feisty 1950s debutante who can dress fabulously while also holding forth on philosophy and the chemical properties of paint… throw in references to racism, sexism, colonial plunder, and a great nod to The Yellow Wallpaper… and you have this amazing book. In response to a desperate appeal from her newlywed cousin, Noemí ventures into the in-laws’ mold-infested Gothic mansion, and meets a creepy old British patriarch and his weirdly subservient family. Reading this was extra creepy for me because I’d just read about the possibilities of fungal networks, which this book uses to good effect.
The Dawn Chorus, by Samantha Shannon
A little novella that deals patiently and unsparingly with the main character’s PTSD from being held and tortured; it makes a realistic bridge between the books where she engineers her release and when she plunges into action again. Does not stand alone well, relying as it does so heavily on preceding events, but I can see why it would have been cut from the main series – it’s much more slow and contemplative than the tense pacing of the main books.
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, by Nghi Vo
It’s One Thousand and One Nights, except Scheherazade is Chih the nonbinary story-gathering cleric, King Shahryar is a trio of hungry tigers, and as long as Chih keeps telling a sufficiently interesting story, the tigers will not eat them or their mammoth-riding companion. The story that Chih tells is a historical one where a scholar and a tiger fall in love, except that the story as Chih knows it is not the one that the tigers tell to one another; the tension between the narratives that the different cultures tell each other, alongside the very different tension of whether or not Chih’s version will annoy the tiger enough that the tigers will finally just eat them, moved the story along really well.
The City Born Great, by N.K. Jemisin
I listened to the audiobook of the short story that grew into the novel The City We Became. The reading is amazing; Landon Woodson did a great job with the audio. I enjoyed the book but I really love the compact focus and punch of the short story.
Minor Mage, by T. Kingfisher
A really tight little novella, about a very minor mage and his very major quest. Great characters (especially the armadillo familiar), and a realistic nod to the kind of mob mentality that can turn a kid into a target.
Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado
I should have saved this for October. I’d read the first story in this collection, “The Husband Stitch,” before, and it was even more beautiful and creepy than I’d remembered. The rest of the stories don’t let up: women encounter horrors but maybe it’s in their heads; women focus on relationships even as the world is ending; women try to cling to reality as it dissolves around them; women carve their bodies into ideals and are haunted by what they’ve cut away. The more you read, the more ghosts seem to gather softly around you until you have to put the book down, before you get too deep in your head and start doubting yourself and what’s around you.
On Fragile Waves, by E. Lily Yu
I had gotten on the wait list for this a while back and had completely forgotten what it was about, so it was a poignant surprise to find myself reading a book about Afghan refugees during the crisis in Kabul. Firuzeh and her family suffer terror, loss, and indignity trying to find asylum in Australia. Yu does an amazing job depicting their heartbreaking trials and small victories, their desperate love and petty cruelties, and reaches out to also occasionally share the viewpoints of those around them, with the emotions hinted at in conversation instead of sketched outright. I also liked the magical realism aspect, how Firuzeh’s losses turned into things that literally haunted her, but not in ways that you’d expect. Really beautiful book.