THE PORCELAIN SISTERS, sibling rivalry hurts the very fabric of one's being

THE PORCELAIN SISTERS
DARYL GREGORY
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A shy young woman and her deeply unpleasant—and literally porcelain—sister fight for their inheritance, taking on an impossible array of enemies: a chain-smoking demon crow, an unkillable assassin, and a secret clan of French sorceresses. In his newest adventure, Daryl Gregory (Spoonbenders) takes us on a dizzying romp through the horrors of sisterhood.

Ruth Winslow is trying to save up enough money to finish college while looking after her sister, Isabel—who happens to be a haunted doll. When an accident severely damages Isabel’s porcelain body, the sisters have to find the only woman who can fix her, the fearsome witch known as La Fabricante: the Dollmaker.

The sisters head to Marseille, where they take on Le Clan: Chiffon, a red-headed, unkillable assassin; a collection of angry, haunted dolls; plus a pair of demons—one a cigarette-smoking crow, the other a black cat—and their human familiars.

Along the way, the sisters learn that they’ve been lied to their entire lives. Their mother wasn’t just a homemaker who died in a car accident, she was a legendary enforcer in the Le Clan des Sorcières.

While Ruth has to come out of her shell and deal with her own latent powers, Isabel has to grow up in a body that can’t grow. Together they’ll have to outwit and outfight everyone to claim their birthright.

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My Review: Ruth and Isabel are (unwillingly) close. Their sisterly bond has survived trying, testing circumstances like loss of their mother, growing up isolated, and Isabel being a haunted porcelain doll. Who is broken badly twice, once in a car accident, once in a fall. Now Ruth has to use her college savings to get them to France in order to find and then convince the original maker of Isabel's doll body to mend her. You can read the blurb, you see it as well as I do.

We're going on The Hero's Journey. Only with women at the center, distinctly different from the stereotypical boy/chosen one, since it's about fixing their loved one instead of leading The People, like Arthur. (Men keep doing that. Wonder why.)

It's a fun trip, full of great villains, exciting traps, and the unfolding weirdness of Isabel's...genesis. There's a reason Ruth has a porcelain doll as a sister. It's not a fantasy or a dream or a comforting lie told to a grieving child. Their father finally had had enough of Isabel's cruel words, snarky ways, and abusive personality, which separation is what set the sisters on course to a *real* bust-up. Both behave abominally...siblings often do...so each needs absolution and atonement.

Among the little they know about their vanished mother is that she was French and from Marseilles. It's enough to piece together an answer to what the initials "CdS" on Isabel's back mean...Clan des Sorcières, Witch Clan...mean and thus lead them to a source, an original maker: La Fabricante, the (Doll) Maker. None of this is easy, nor does it take a linear form like I'm telling it to you in. I am, as regular readers will know, a fan of corvids. I liked Shit Turd from The Hollow Kingdom a couple years back, partly for being a crow, mostly for having a "foul" (see the wordplay? hahaha) mouth. But S.T. was a fling compared to my true love, Monsieur Griezzel the chainsmoking music-hall-joking antagonist. Of a sort. He's a delight with a wicked (literally) line of patter.

I confess now to a surprising weakness: Dolls are second only to clowns in my Pantheon of Nightmares. I hate 'em. Why'd I request the story, then...look at the date, being scared's de rigueur. In reading this story of sororital rage and parental neglect, of love looking weird from some angles, of guilt moving mountains that love quails before, I was unable to do more than remember why dolls creep me out. It was not the story, it was me; I became so immersed in the story I absorbed uts frame of reference over my own. I even *got* their mother's actions as genuinely kindly motivated in the moment.

No perfect score for you, Daryl Gregory. Brevity may be the soul of wit and of lingerie, but it's the downfall of a satisfying connection between reader and main character. Ruth and Isavel's trajectories are show very much from the outside, which is part of the point of making one a literal doll, ojay I get it...but move more slowly, please, to tell me more about the titanic impact of this on the women. Bickering, fighting, being jealous are all symptoms...tell me of what in more than labels, please.

It's not a quibble but it's also not what I was promised in a book this short. I wasn't told I'd read Anna Karenina and suddenly got Valley of the Dolls. So a minor ding and only because I liked what I got so much I wanted more.

So: I want some more, please sir. Soon would be good.

WHAT HAPPENED TO CIVILITY: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project, hard disagree with author

WHAT HAPPENED TO CIVILITY: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project
ANN HARTLE
University of Notre Dame Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$26.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 1* of five

What is civility, and why has it disappeared? Ann Hartle analyzes the origins of the modern project and the Essays of Michel de Montaigne to discuss why civility is failing in our own time.

In this bold book, Ann Hartle, one of the most important interpreters of sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, explores the modern notion of civility—the social bond that makes it possible for individuals to live in peace in the political and social structures of the Western world—and asks, why has it disappeared? Concerned with the deepening cultural divisions in our postmodern, post-Christian world, she traces their roots back to the Reformation and Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne’s philosophical project of drawing on ancient philosophy and Christianity to create a new social bond to reform the mores of his culture is perhaps the first act of self-conscious civility. After tracing Montaigne’s thought, Hartle returns to our modern society and argues that this framing of civility is a human, philosophical invention and that civility fails precisely because it is a human, philosophical invention. She concludes with a defense of the central importance of sacred tradition for civility and the need to protect and maintain that social bond by supporting nonpoliticized, nonideological, free institutions, including and especially universities and churches.

What Happened to Civility is written for readers concerned about the deterioration of civility in our public life and the defense of freedom of religion. The book will also interest philosophers who seek a deeper understanding of modernity and its meaning, political scientists interested in the meaning of liberalism and the causes of its failure, and scholars working on Montaigne’s Essays.

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My Review: If I ever needed an inoculation against conservatism, this under-200pp book was the full and complete spectrum version of it.

In looking for reviews of the book to see if I was crazy, reading it wrong, or simply bilious when I was reading it, I found my proof I was not here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/abs/ann-hartle-what-happened-to-civility-the-promise-and-failure-of-montaignes-modern-project-notre-dame-in-university-of-notre-dame-press-2022-pp-ix-178/CE68BDF228EB95F3533F945414C7E785 The Review of Politics is paywalled, as one expects from conservative-leaning publications, but an excerpt is available at the link. It contains the words that "civility is inadequate to replace traditional moral virtues" and "{c}ivility is not self-sustaining: as a merely human invention, it lacks the kind of transcendent support possessed by the traditional moral virtues, which found their grounding and stability in their orientation towards the divine."

Of course the reviewer says a lot more about the book, but for my purposes (trying to see what it is I found appalling about the read) this was a showstopper. The divine is a human invention. My bedrock reality will not accommodate the assertion that y'all's god is real; one of us is wrong, and I'm quite sure it's you.

We're so far apart, Author Hartle, that all I can say is your writing on a sentence level is clear and your arguments to my non-expert mind is completely self-consistent.

And you're wrong.

IN THE WOODS THEY WAIT, #Deathtober goes Gothic

IN THE WOODS THEY WAIT: A Novel
CARRIE LEE SOUTH
Little, Brown and Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A park ranger in Devil’s Den becomes obsessed with the case of a missing child—a case that mirrors the disappearance of her own brother, whom she lost in the woods many years ago—and the possibility that both were taken by something vicious and unnatural that lives deep in the Ozarks.

From a powerful new voice, a story that's at once a haunting southern gothic and a satisfying page-turner, perfect for fans of Stephen King and Liz Moore alike.

Fifteen years ago, Audrey Figg's little brother, Benny, vanished on a family vacation to Devil's Den state park, a day that split her life in two. Now, Audrey is a park ranger in the very same woods with expertise in wilderness search and rescue. Audrey has found a rhythm to her days: training new rangers, tending to injured hikers, protecting the backcountry, and still, searching.

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My Review: Moving between past and present timelines usually feels forced, like the author wants to create psychological tension but erroneously believes the straightforward linear approach can't do that well enough. Debut author Carrie Lee South thought the trauma Audrey, our PoV close-third-person character, is introduced in 2004 as she wander the woods of Devil's Den State Park...a real place, quite beautiful...with some lovely, meditative prose setting a mood that's soon enough shattered along with an essential part of Audrey that can't be fixed: She saw her little brother Benny walking too far away and did nothing, didn't follow him, made no attempt to care for his safety.

He's never been seen since. No body, nothing but absence.

Fifteen years later, Park Ranger Audrey's receiving a trainee, so clearly done the job well for some time now; no lovely meditative prose, though always with Author South's surprisingly assured touch with telling details observed. Audrey is all business because she can't let herself be anything resembling happy. I was here my interest in the story picked up. This is a grief response I've become familiar with. It betrays your loved one for you to feel normal human warmth or closeness or, perish forbid, love.

No wonder religion's tortures and misery disguised as "love" remain in the populace. We're wired for it. How grim a prospect is that.

The 2019 Audrey faces an existential crisis when young Ivy goes missing in an eerie echo of Benny's disappearance. Audrey's faced trouble in her time as a park ranger but this...so intimately familiar a situation, so closely similar people, feelings, circumstances...it's all perfectly designed to hook into Audrey's unfixable breakage as a human being.

And here I come back to my initial alternating-timelines argument from above: In a deft, assured way I associate with authors of considerable age and experience, Carrie Lee South uses the back-and-forth not solely to ratchet up tension (it does, though), but to introduce previously unrevealed details, a steady accumulation of new information surfacing in Audrey's mind that reveals important clues. They lead to major, perhaps incredibly in the original sense, helpful avenues of exploration in 2019 as well as resolutions to 2004's trauma.

So effective. So very convenient. I could've whacked stars off for it, feeling cheated; instead I sat back, impressed at the care and affection Author South lavished on Audrey, her survivor guilt, and the resolutions never available to Audrey before going through the forest fire.

Because it's true, the only way out...ever...is through.

ON RECONCILIATION: What Israelis and Palestinians Can Learn from South Africa and Rwanda

ON RECONCILIATION: What Israelis and Palestinians Can Learn from South Africa and Rwanda
MAYA SAVIR (foreword Aziz Abu Sarah; tr. Todd Hasak-Lowy)
Plough Publishing House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: What Israelis and Palestinians – and everyone else – can learn from South Africans and Rwandans about ending conflict and healing and rebuilding in the aftermath.

All conflicts end. It’s in their nature. The only question is how much time and how many lives will be lost, and when the hard but necessary work of healing begins. Maya Savir, an Israeli professional in humanitarian and development work and peacebuilding, and a mother, spent years working in Rwanda and South Africa, countries that went through successful reconciliation processes many had thought impossible. In this book, she dares to ask whether what she observed and learned there can be applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Reconciliation is an artichoke. It’s not an onion, made up of layer upon layer you peel away until nothing is left. It has layers, yes, but at its center is a heart. This book peels away those characteristics that are not essential for reconciliation until all that is left is the heart. But before examining this heart, we take a close look at the outer layers in specific conflicts, because although they vary with context and may not all be necessary to bring about reconciliation, they are among the most noble and inspiring human expressions and can be part of the dynamics of reconciliation.

Savir invites readers to explore this process of reconciliation candidly and soberly, showing what it takes for peacemaking and restoration to unfold between peoples and within individuals after conflicts. She leads the reader on this journey with compassion, intellectual precision, literary skill, and conviction. Though healing is difficult to imagine in the wake of October 7 and the war in Gaza, On Reconciliation helps us to reconsider the limits of what is possible.

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My Review: Extended in this translated edition by one chapter, "Reconciliation After October Seventh," dealing with the heinous crimes that figleafed the ongoing war against the Palestinians and thus addresses the biggest reason this book is so urgently needed. It is in Africa that Savir finds her models for a better way forward, one that begins the world's healing process by acknowledging harms done, presenting rational means of defining them, and maintaining a focus on achieving peace with ongoing dialogue within structured boundaries of behavior.

It will be a miracle if Savir's excellent words make the world better on their own, a miracle I myownself will herald as an Act of God with joyous tears should it occur. My more modest, more reality-based hope is that people will pick the book up to see what help they themselves can find for conflicts in their own lives. If it worked in South Africa and Rwanda it will work with your MAGAt cousin or your religious homophobe aunt.

This pull-quote is precisely and exactly correct about Maya Savir; it is for this reasn I want all y'all to read the work it's discussing to feel wistfully hopeful as well as to get real-world tested advice on managing conflict resolution.

PHANTOM LIMB, Last Days #2...back to teaching us needed lessons

PHANTOM LIMB (Last Days #2)
BRIAN EVENSON
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: After destroying the headquarters of an underground amputation cult, a burned and battered Kline finds himself in a holding cell. When he enlists the help of an ex-cop to commute his prison sentence, Kline inadvertently tangles with a schism of the very cult he sought to destroy. Can Kline investigate the sect’s ritualistic murder spree without getting lured into their ranks?

Frigid and precise, Phantom Limb interrogates our notions of wholeness, fate, and the lengths we are willing to go to connect with a higher power.

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My Review: Kline's back! Oh joy. The christian lunatics, the "Brotherhood of Mutilation" (follow the link, I'm not going through *that* again), are serious about getting Kline the ex-cop who damn near destroyed the entire cult. And so it goes....

This is barely not a novella. It's short; it's not a "Calgon, take me away" read. Or, if it is, I'm very worried about you. There is a lot of body horror, a lot of symbolic anti-religious messaging in that body horror as well as conceptually anti-religious messaging in the entire witness protection element of the story. As we all know, their gawd, like organized crime, finds everybody in the end.

After five years of relative safety in prison that he serves on bullshit charges under a fake name, Kline isn't out five seconds before the schismatic from the Brotherhood of Mutilation cult who call themselves Paul (that bit of quiet calling-out was *chef's kiss*, Author Brian!) find Kline to finish the destruction he began in Last Days. It was not for nothing he served that sentence and hoped his trail went cold. Yet, like all things religious, you're never ever free of the pollution.

In returning to the mutilates doing their infighting in October 2026, it's my interpretation of Author Brian's purpose in piling up the bodies, causing harm with abandon, enshittifying the world to show the gore-seeking reader the real damage done by True Believers. It's not important what their zeal is directed towards, in support of, because it results in irreparable harms caused—including death—regardless of to whom the harms are caused. Zealotry has this way of overshooting any boundaries one thinks to set.

So here's Kline amid a welter of gore as always, trying to expunge a nightmarish hate group. It works, it doesn't, it causes harm on the way and creates new zealots if not today or tomorrow then soon. People love hate, rage, and being Right about stuff more than food and sex combined. This is human nature, visible in cultures throughout time in archaeology, then in writing, now in images. I see no reason to think there was ever a past of peaceful coexistence after there were enough people alive to form persistent families. It's why our cultural heritage is replete with myths, folktales, parables that show in grim, graphic detail the perils of transgressing The Order of Things℠...the selfish urge to do that is overwhelming at times. We all feel it, but the consequences after are the point of these kins of stories. Is this really the world you want? If yes, be ready for the coalition of the harmed to exact revenge.

And so it goes.

VENUS, VANISHING...queer love in late Weimar-era Berlin

VENUS, VANISHING
REBECCA BIRRELL
Henry Holt & Co. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A blisteringly passionate and page-turning story of desire, art, and the stories lost to the darkness of history—for readers of Sarah Waters, Yael van der Wouden, and Alice Winn

Berlin, 1928. Hannah is new to the pleasures and freedoms of the city. An artist, a runaway, she is building a new life, loving without boundaries and sketching with a cutting edge.

But the party is ending. Hannah begins a recklessly consuming affair with a powerful man’s wife and it soon threatens to do more than ruin both of their reputations. People are disappearing. The shadows of something unspeakable are growing darker. Her art could be the thing that secures her survival – or will deny her any chance of escape.

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My Review: The relationship between a young striving creative and an older patron is fraught with tension. One way that plays out is the power play of status: "you need me to give you work, you pay me in humiliation," as in this story.

Hannah knows she is an artist, knows she has talent, knows she can't keep tailoring forever...knows she can't marry the older man who wants to buy her from her father with her mother's practically minded support or she will vanish to be replaced by no one she recognizes as herself. An age-old dilemma for women, exacerbated by Hannah's Jewishness thus ever-increasing vulnerability in late-Weimar Republic Germany. Elke, an Aryan to her manicured fingertips, takes Hannah under her protection with all the complexity of emotion that entails.

Hannah has a man, Saul, in similar circumstances of economic and social struggle as hers who provides guidance through Berlin's maze of modern art cliques, whose influence sets in train the developments for Elke and her circle to become famous in art circles (how titillating for older, bored wives!) in Hannah's risqué portraits of them...under an unambiguously Aryan male name. Elke sells the idea to Hannah as a way to be seen, and to be sold, in a world of increasing antisemitism as well as entrenched unchallenged misogyny.

History having already happened we know what Hannah and Saul have in store. Author Birrell is an art historian whose interests are in women and/or queer artists and their struggles to make art under the circumstances they find themselves. Hannah, Elke, Saul are all composites of artists and patrons whoes lives Author Birrell came to know in the course of her professional research. It was a surprise to me how deft the prose was for a debut, until I learned the author is not a debut writer but a debut novelist. I was deeply gruntled by Author Birrell's sumptuous and immersive evocations of Elke's world, of Hannah's art and specific paintings; it felt as though I should be able to see them on museum websites, buy a monograph about them, order a biography of her. That's a fantastic ability to have for a writer, that craft trick of making the craft feel as though it's entirely about something else. I was convinced I was reading non-fiction when art was our topic, still enjoying the story at other times. Tough to pull that off.

What I found less convincing was the ending Author Birrell crafted, as it felt to me not in keeping with the looming threats so carefully evoked. It was a niggle only; I was kind of dreading what I was sure was coming. A sentimental chunk of me was pleased she chose to do better by her characters than reality would have but it was a cheat in another sense.

I was repulsed by unworthy-of-her Elke's control of Hannah, and of her revolting freely expressed anti-semitism. Really I just disliked Elke and her ilk; the bored useless privileged "cultured elite." I grow less and less tolerant of bored people. There's a lot of work to do in the world, pick something and just go do it and make some effort to improve life for someone not you.

Ahem. My puritan ancestors speak.

Anyway, now you know why I didn't offer all five stars. On prose alone, it deserved it. Prose is not the sole axis of my own judgment. By every axis of judgment I hope this lovely artwork will land on your TBR.

THE FIST OF MEMORY, first contact in near-future Nigeria

THE FIST OF MEMORY
WOLE TALABI
DAW Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A strange alien spacecraft suddenly appears in the sky in this electrifying, action-packed first contact novel set in near-future Nigeria from award-winning author Wole Talabi

A hard science-fiction novel featuring an assassin-for-hire, a witchdoctor, and an astronomer, this fast-paced thriller is perfect for fans of Arrival.

When a non-communicative alien spacecraft suddenly appears in the sky, global powers are thrown into turmoil.

But for Tope, a principled Nigerian assassin with a talent for lethality in the employ of the mysterious witchdoctor known as "Baba," it’s all just business as usual. At least until a job goes wrong, and Tope is caught in the scramble—a high stakes game of power and politics for the future that is to come. Joined by Itumeleng, a South African astronomer plagued by mysterious dreams, they must find a way to survive, navigate their complicated pasts, and come to understand how they, and all of humanity, are connected to the alien craft before it lands and the world changes forever. But it won’t be easy. There are sinister forces marshalled against them, including a strange assassin obsessed with a single memory.

The Fist Of Memory is a first contact thriller unlike any other; a meditation on the nature of reality, memory and connectedness.

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My Review: I enjoy hearing an author's idea of alienness directly from the aliens, à la Leckie's Radch. I didn't think Leckie's books were worthy of their worshipful hype. Author Wole intruduces his aliens, the Irunmole, as they are in the Kuiper Belt en route to Earth:

The Irunmole awaken to the glorious, manifold touch of the universe.
Rousing, they take stock of themselves; the curve of their stone-skinned cylindrical hull, the emitters and sensors and thrusters, the steady hum of their zero-point engine as it hungrily consumes the vibrational energies from the infinite ocean of fundamental wave fields around them. They are the ship, embodied in its every circuit and panel and processor. A cosmic altar, an interstellar archive, an immortal memory. As responses in the affirmarive come in, myriad signals dancing electric along a variety of signal waveforms, the Irunmole gradually increase the level of their active consciousness, projecting it outward, certain that nothing has been damaged on the long voyage.

It's a terrific way to put me mise-en-scène. I'm fresh to this story, don't know what my PoV voices are about yet, need to be led into this reality before I can feel connected to the story so I get time in the Irunmole ship/being(s) to hear them, to feel their immense difference from monadic me.

What are the Irunmole doing? We only know they're in the Kuiper Belt because the chapter title says so, they could be anywhere, anytime, on their way or arriving to or from any location in the universe. But two words..."Kuiper Belt"...pin us into a place albeit one we humans have never seen, not in any detail, not to need or to generate mental images, like the Irunmole themself we're only oriented because we're aware but not familiar with a space by title.

It's subtle. It fixes the subject of the book. Technology sufficiently advanced, all that jazz, meeting the numinous, the stuff of magic itself, in "consciousness." And so we begin with imaginations tempted, lured into firing our sparkplugs igniting primitive fuel producing power and pollution that obscures the reality of what's occurring. We don't know what that is but feel its immanence.

Now, cruelly, I need to stop telling you about this read because I found it crucial to my experience of this story to enter it only knowing we're going into First Contact territory, we're going into that with an enlightened soul who wants the enlightenment to leave him alone, and it's happening in Africa.

I *hate* when reviewers do that coy thing of "find out for yourself so you'll get the rush, the enlightenment will pound your head on the sands and leave you gasping." If you want to cheat, find out a little too much, here's the author on YouTube so you can click your chance at experiencing the Moment for yourself.

I'll note that I'm disappointed in you for being greedy, and that *I* watched Agranoff's podcast *after* I read the book; you do you, though.

Exploring the spiritual roles of seers and the practical roles of doers, the way that societies apportion attention and what that does to what is and can be seen, what violence used to do something (Ahanna) not simply get something (Tope), is what makes the human parts of the unfolding First Contact so deeply compelling to read for my "colonial empires were still a thing in my teens" self. Even "wrong" serves...the Irunmole, in arriving at Earth and choosing to form contact with a Nigerian sets the culture of SF on its ear...this most resolutely colonizer-centered genre of writing seen in the US as by and for white men follows a Nigerian hitwoman and a Nigerian astrophysicist as well as seer in close third person through a technothriller I crave seeing on a big screen while the Irunmole are...where? how do we know they're there from astronomical data? Because Itumeleng is not only an astrophysicist he's an ancestral line of seers' scion and try as he might he can't unsee.

It's heady philosophical stuff. I think telling the story in alternating third-person PoVs is as good a choice as was available for a story this kinetic, this visual, with a very seriously brain-bending ending. I'm proffering five stars the same way award shows proffer statuettes or bouquets of exquisite color and size.