THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT, The Masquerade series #1, a powerful story of becoming what you fight hardest

THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT (The Masquerade #1)
SETH DICKINSON
Tor Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Baru Cormorant will pay any price to liberate her world — even if it makes her a monster.

When the Empire of Masks conquers her island home and murders one of her fathers, Baru makes a vow: I will never be powerless again. She'll swallow her hate, join the Empire’s civil service, and claw her way high enough to set her people free.

Suspicious of her loyalty, the Masquerade exiles her to an accountant's post in distant Aurdwynn, a snakepit of informants and seditious dukes. Targeted for death by the uncomfortably intriguing rebel duchess Tain Hu, Baru fears a more intimate disaster — if her colleagues discover her homosexuality, she’ll be jailed and mutilated.

But Baru is a savant in games of power, ruthless enough to make herself sick. Armed with ink, lies, and one dubiously loyal secretary, she arranges a sweeping power play — a win–or–die double–cross gambit with empire as the prize. Survive it, and she'll save her home...but the cost will be appalling. Her dream of liberation might make her a tyrant. And if she's so very clever — why was she fool enough to fall in love?

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My Review: Part of the olden-days Tor.com book-club giveaways. Author Dickinson pointed the way that the forces of reaction are doing their damnedest to reshape US society into more of a hellscape than they already have...take over the bureaucracy and you harm more people for longer than if you just militarily abuse 'em for a while.

This lesson needs to be heeded.

The lesbian anti-hero of this anti-colonialist fable of destruction is perfectly rendered for her grimdark purpose. She's coldly calculating (accountant joke)...“Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent”...emotionally reserved due to the damage inflicted by her conquerors, and driven by her hatred of them. One I share, incidentally.

In many ways this unsettling, unpleasant, perfectly realized character reminds me of Stalin. She laser-focuses on legitimate grievances...“I am a part of this, but I do not have to love it. I only have to play my role. Survive long enough to gather power. Gather enough power to make a difference”...and uses them to power her revenge on those who have aggrieved her. This is a perfect way to drive a story, but not so perfect a way to allow the reader to invest in her. In this first-of-series novel, we're investing in The Struggle&8480; not in Baru Cormorant per se. It's all going to change, I assume, as she loses the laser focus on hatred to her new luuuv the Duchess.

The reason I feel safe recommending this story to straight readers is its absence of sex. Seth Dickinson, a man, was wise enough not to go peeping into any women's bedrooms. Same-sex love is unremarkable in this story of the world Baru has lost, but it's also not closely observed. Her drive to restore the lost paradise is, for this old cisqueer gent, deeply compelling reading.

I keep meaning to get to the other books in the series, but y'all know how that goes in a biblioholic's life....

THE DEVILS (The Devils #1) opens a fun alternate-Europe fantasy series...optioned by James Cameron!

THE DEVILS (The Devils #1)
JOE ABERCROMBIE (illus. John Anthony di Giovanni)
Tor Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

FINALIST for the 2026 Locus Award for FANTASY NOVEL!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Holy work sometimes requires unholy deeds.

Brother Diaz has been summoned to the Sacred City, where he is certain a commendation and grand holy assignment awaits him. But his new flock is made up of unrepentant murderers, practitioners of ghastly magic, and outright monsters, and the mission he is tasked with will require bloody measures from them all in order to achieve its righteous ends.

Elves lurk at our borders and hunger for our flesh, while greedy princes care for nothing but their own ambitions and comfort. With a hellish journey before him, it's a good thing Brother Diaz has the devils on his side.

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My Review: Lord Grimdark retunes his scabbard to launch a new fantasy series. It's one helluva ride, rising six hundred pages of scatology, dirty deeds, and mayhem. In short, Joe Abercrombie/Lord Grimdark at his grimdark best.

The Suicide Squad vibe, the gallows humor and banter between the villainous, heroic, and amoral-sexpot elements of the dramatis personae, and the hectic pace of the action all conspire to keep the pages flipping. The alternate-history vibes...there's a Troy but not a Rome?...make each characters' accustomed place in The Gang just that little bit off from here your experienced readers' radar says it ought to be. You'll know inside fifty pages if the tone works for you. What's likely to drive most of y'all off is the relentless onslaught of poo references. That wore my nerve one whole stars'-worth.

What I loved was Brother Diaz whose position as the vicar of the Chapel of the Holy Expediency, a secret society within the church that answers only to her holiness the pope (all of ten years old!) set to deliver the (unwilling) heiress to the imperial throne to take up her mantle (off the shoulders of the current occupant and her four sons, who have opinions about the effort), and if possible keep her extremely base origins from leaking out, as they scraped her literally out of a gutter. Keeping their Viking warrior comadre (not comrade; look it up) from shagging everything/one on the way there, and arriving before her monthly curse arrives. Werewolves don't tend to be good guardians of empresses. (Nor do anthropophagic elves, another gang member who's not intuitively part of the party but serves a function I won't spoil.)

For me, the battle scenes aren't as much fun as they are for Author Grimdark's more committed fans. This is an across-the-board observation appertaining to the gentleman's œuvre entire, so is not grounds for destarring this story. He is delivering the goods as demanded here, though I suspect even his most self-gratifying fans will be hard (!)-pressed to get all the way through the sea battle in the middle.

I enjoyed the trip to Troy a butt-hair less than the story after they reached Troy, when either Author Grimdark reached optimal operating temperature for his story engine or I just finally developed my poo-shedding coating. Whatever it was, that last fifth of the story was more fun than the rest for me. It was at this juncture I finally got the why of the very recent news that James Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment production house has optioned film rights. The current plan calls for Cameron, busy making Avatar content for December 2025 release just now, to co-develop the screenplay with Author Grimdark.

I spent big parts of the read wondering how Cameron could do this with the swearing and the absolute mountains of poo...the Troy happened, and yeah, I see it.

I do not think the, um, the sensitive reader will disfruit this lectorial exercise. I do not recommend it for those who do not resonate like banged gongs to irreverence toward authority temporal and/or spiritual. If a happy day's reading is spoiled for you by the sudden, ghastly death of some character you enjoyed following, avoid all Abercrombie work and start with this one.

If you cannot read the death scene of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop without laughing à la Oscar Wilde, OTOH, this book has a very good chance of keeping you amused and entertained.

I laughed.

EXORDIA, rich, immersive story to block out the world's noise

EXORDIA
SETH DICKINSON
Tor Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: “Anna, I came to Earth tracking a very old story, a story that goes back to the dawn of time. it’s very unlikely that you’ll die right now. It wouldn’t be narratively complete.”

Anna Sinjari―refugee, survivor of genocide, disaffected office worker―has a close encounter that reveals universe-threatening stakes. While humanity reels from disaster, she must join a small team of civilians, soldiers, and scientists to investigate a mysterious broadcast and unknowable horror. If they can manage to face their own demons, they just might save the world.

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My Review: A species (!) of hard sci fi from a writer previously celebrated in the fantasy field for The Traitor Baru Cormorant, here blending queer representation with cosmic horror via military sci-fi in the paranoid Cold-War mode, heavily Cthulhu-ized.

That sounds like something I'd hate. Why didn't I?

Seth Dickinson. He has a deft touch with humor to lighten the darkness, irony to show the urgency of perspective, and unflinching realism to get the reader's investment in the stakes. Which are, I know this will surprise you, existential for Humanity.

On the nose, in our present political and environmental climate? I thought so going in. I think so now. However, there's a reason I recommend this story for your immersion and entertainment anyway. It is about the ways and means used to accomplish political goals while using people's fears and anxieties to motivate them into actions that are genuinely necessary. It takes us into the labyrinth of tech-dominated institutions of force apllication, and shows us the internal conflicts that impact everything done or not done in these institutions. The stakes are often secondary to the purposes of the instituion's inmates.

Yet...in the end, after much troubling back-and-forth...the people are clearly all working for something they see as Right and Good. No matter what outcome eventuates, someone's plans will fail, and someone else's will sorta-kinda work. Will anyone be fully happy? No. The way the book's structured, the changing PoVs are the way to keep this story from devolving into Us-v-Them predictability. Whose ideas and goals you empathize with really isn't the point. It's recognizing the goals and ideas matter TO THEM, and using that knowledge to get what *you* want.

A hard leap to make, as witness the fact that so few ever make it. Author Seth shows the reader the idea of it with startling clarity and not a little dark humor. The results...you'll discover the specifics...are exactly and precisely what the actions of all the characters add up to. There is no deus ex machina here. There is, in the second half, a lot of science to go with your fiction, mostly physics.

I typed that sentence with a sinking heart. I know some significant fraction of my readers just went *click* into the off position. It is, of course, entirely y'all's privilege...but please hear me out. Your prior knowledge of physics would enrich the uses of it. Your entire ignorance of it will not in any way diminish the force of its uses in the story. You read about magic without understanding how it works, this is essentially the same thing. The scientists are casting spells on ushabtis, not writing code to make drones work in concert...it's all a matter of looking at the technology talk in the proper storytelling spirit.

Appeal made. You decide. What you'll miss, if you ignore my recommendation of this read, is a cracking good story about how people, real people with needs and wants and ideals, get together to accomplish goals in the real world. That story will, I wager, appeal to readers of technothrillers, geopolitical spy stories, and SF gulpers as we head into the season where a big, immersive read will keep you from needing to pay attention to Aunt Lurlene's stories about her neighbors you've never met and couldn't care less about, or your nephew's reprehensible politics.

2024 NEBULA FINALISTS: A SORCERESS COMES TO CALL, a book you might misunderstand as bleak...it's hopeful

A SORCERESS COMES TO CALL
T. KINGFISHER
Tor Books
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

FINALIST for the 2024 Nebula Award! Winner announced at the 2025 Nebula Conference, 5 through 8 June 2025.

The Publisher Says: A dark retelling of the Brothers Grimm's "Goose Girl", rife with secrets, murder, and forbidden magic

Cordelia knows her mother is unusual. Their house doesn’t have any doors between rooms, and her mother doesn't allow Cordelia to have a single friend—unless you count Falada, her mother's beautiful white horse. The only time Cordelia feels truly free is on her daily rides with him. But more than simple eccentricity sets her mother apart. Other mothers don’t force their daughters to be silent and motionless for hours, sometimes days, on end. Other mothers aren’t sorcerers.

After a suspicious death in their small town, Cordelia’s mother insists they leave in the middle of the night, riding away on Falada’s sturdy back, leaving behind all Cordelia has ever known. They arrive at the remote country manor of a wealthy older man, the Squire, and his unwed sister, Hester. Cordelia’s mother intends to lure the Squire into marriage, and Cordelia knows this can only be bad news for the bumbling gentleman and his kind, intelligent sister.

Hester sees the way Cordelia shrinks away from her mother, how the young girl sits eerily still at dinner every night. Hester knows that to save her brother from bewitchment and to rescue the terrified Cordelia, she will have to face down a wicked witch of the worst kind.

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My Review: Dark it is. A dark retelling of a fairy tale I myownself think is entirely too dark anyway. A deeply unhappy story that centers on the evil deeds and wicked heart of Evangeline (follow the link for the roots of this name) as a sorceress, "one who influences fate or fortune," in its original meaning; the sense is always pejorative. It certainly needs to be in this case, as Evangeline (I don't trust y'all to go look it up: the mother's name Evangeline is a diminutive of Latin "evangelium" ("gospel", itself from Greek Ευαγγέλιο "gospel", meaning "good news"...the christian gospels, in other words, those horrifying fonts of millennia of misogyny and detrimental social control, applied to an appalling, cruel, controlling mother) is following the Grimm plot closely in her actions.

I don't know what to think of the inspiration of the story. I'm positive Author Vernon (real name) did not know the results of the 2024 US election as a matter of fact before this book came out in that August. I am a bir chilled by its timeliness, a story of an evil old sorcerous person manipulating a good, innocent girl to her detriment. I wish I was writing this in a spirit of "how did she know we'd defeat the evil old sorcerous party" instead of "if only we'd defeated the evil old sorcerous party" but here we are.

It felt to me, all the way through the read, as though I was being Entertained, that the trademark Vernon wittiness was deployed not organic to the story. It isn't a story where wit, comedy, humor in general, sit naturally. I was abused by a mother much like Evangeline: cold, manipulative, withholding, but always hiding behind a good god-fearing front. For me the read was a return to the times of my life where my anxiety issues were installed. It's a testament to how very effective Author Vernon's skill at storytelling is that I finished and rated the read almost five stars! It's a deeply anxious story, a mother who is not a nurturer or a caregiver in the good sense but rather one who gives her child victim cares that will last a lifetime of therapy. (Why has no fantasy novelist given their MC a therapist?)

My anxiety attacks aside, the story is true to its source material in its claustrophobia, its sense of physical as well as emotional deprivation of freedom. Cordelia's enforced motionlessness probably triggered more awful memories for me than anything else, and made me long for my Falada: The 1968 Bonneville belonging to my mother that I used to escape the misery of my "life" with her. I'm glad I don't have to re-read the book!

It sounds like I should be zero-stars-do-not-recommending it, doesn't it? So look at those almost-five stars and ask what the hell happened here.

Stories are the way people make sense of Life with the big "L" so they are good at their job when experiencing them is a powerful, bone-rattling experience. I think you can see this read rattled me! It shook my angry absorption in the horrendous return to 2016 into a new shape. It reminded me, by evoking feelings from the childhood I endured, that all things end. That even after they end, the consequences carry on...for good or ill, as we ourownselves choose to use them. That even in the midst of misery, someone we do not expect it of is aware of our problems and willing to help.

Rays of hope like this story represents are never more welcome than they are right now.

RED RIGHT HAND, Lovecraftian urban-fantasy violence by one pissed-off woman & TRAMPLING IN THE LAND OF WOE, Alexander + Hephaestion in the Underworld

TRAMPLING IN THE LAND OF WOE
WILLIAM L.J. GALAINI (The Patron Saints of Hell #1)
Evolved Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle original, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: While the First World War rages on Earth's surface, Hephaestion discovers the ideal opportunity to rescue his general, king, and soulmate Alexander the Great from the lowest ring of Hell. The problem? No one’s ever dared such a feat before, and only a madman would try.

As Hephaestion descends into the pit of eternal torment, he discovers unlikely accomplices willing to assist his impossible plan…but complications and subterfuge leave Hephaestion and his allies scrambling for footholds in a world governed by demons, devils, and opportunists. Soon the fires of Hades are the least of his worries as he must outrun, outgun, and outmaneuver beasts and monsters hell-bent on his destruction.

With a cast of unexpected characters from civilizations long buried and historical figures you only thought you knew, Hephaestion must answer the true question of his quest: What does it mean to be known, to be remembered...and perhaps, to be human?

Loyalty, commitment, and love ignore the bounds of death and time in an adventure that explores culture, history, and obsession through the lens of a man who defies reason.

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My Review: Spooktober starts with a crashing, steam-billowing bittersweet battle-heavy CRASH. Hell, where Alexander of Macedon, genocidal psychopathic horndog, has been spending his afterlife, is gonna have to give him up...Hephaestion, Alexander's earthly lover, best friend, confidant, and now rescuer, has had entirely enough of hanging around in Purgatory waiting for Alexander's sins to be expiated and for him to join up with the patient, still-loving man whose death precipitated Alexander's own.

But you, O Reader, already know...be careful what you wish for, lest the answer be "Yes."

Hephaestion's decision, now that the whole planet's gone mental and tossed itself a mechanized slaughter in the form of the Great War (as WWI was known then...really, it's obvious that our name for it is a retronym if one gives it even a minute's actual thought), is worthy of some demented I Love Lucy-in-Hell weirdness...dead bodies as disguises, inevitable exposure, meeting a new, improved Scooby-group. But it takes us quite a while to get to this point...we're in Hell, not Purgatory, but nowhere near finding Alexander.

The action is, while magisterially slow, quite well-thought-out, and Hephaestion's motives for his quest elicit a lot of push-back from many sources both helping and hindering him. (All the Jesuits in History ending up in Hell was one of my happiest reading-life moments. I love, love, love the little easter-egg moments Author Galaini chucks into this stew!) One character in particular, Yitz the Jew, was perilously close to a stereotype. I got the impression, fortunately, that the author was actually aiming for archetype and, being in Purgatory, then Hell, wasn't saying this is how Jews are but this is how Jews are seen as part of the horribleness of Hell.

The truly delightful conception of the Afterlife as a place where there are all periods of History and all levels of technology intermingling, to be like Doctor Who's episode where Winston Churchill is Caesar and Morris Minors fly through the air under giant balloons was designed: Wrongness, but playfully presented, is still wrongness and still evokes unease. As the struggle to reach his belovèd Alexander continues, Hephaestion remains obsessed with achieving his millennia-held goal of reuniting with him. All around him are people warning, hinting, offering other views. Blinders on, Hephaestion pursues his goal.

And achieves it.

This is not The Song of Achilles. There is no beautiful ending for anyone in Hell. And, as Hephaestion finally achieves his reunion, the full and terrible truth of the answer to a prayer being "Yes" is, at last, borne in upon him.

That is why I gave the story four stars in spite of its too-slow-for-me pace, in spite of its occasionally unpleasant characterizations, in spite of its flaws whatever they might be to you or me. The love one bears for the heart's own darling is not always the feeling the heart's own darling deserves.

A bitter dreg to drink. A truly powerfully importantly real, urgent Truth. Falling in love is not always, or even all that often, the happy end.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

RED RIGHT HAND
LEVI BLACK (Mythos War #1)
Tor Books
$21.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Charlie Tristan Moore isn’t a hero. She’s a survivor. Already wrestling with the demons of her past, she finds herself tested as never before when she arrives home one night to find herself under attack by three monstrous skinhounds straight out of a nightmare. Just as hope seems lost, she is saved by a sinister Man in Black, dressed in a long, dark coat that seems to possess a life of its own and wielding a black-bladed sword in his grisly red right hand.

But her rescue comes at a cost. The Man in Black, a diabolical Elder God, demands she become his Acolyte and embrace a dark magick she never knew she possessed. To ensure her obedience, he takes her friend and possible love, Daniel, in thrall as a hostage. Now she must join The Man in Black in his crusade to track down and destroy his fellow Elder Gods, supposedly to save humanity from being devoured for all eternity.

But is The Man in Black truly the lesser of two evils–or a menace far more treacherous than the eldritch horrors she’s battling in his name?
Red Right Hand is the first book in the fantastically creepy Mythos War series by Levi Black.

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My Review: Nyarlathotep! The Crawling Chaos!! I am so so sold on this read. People using ol' H.P.'s stuff in ways that'd probably make him scowl and whine? Bonus points! And Charlie Tristan Moore is someone who would make ol' H.P.'s hackles rise. A woman, a mutt, a person without a pedigree? *gasp* Bring it, say I, and fling it on his grave.

So in this trilogy-starting story, Charlie (our narrator) meets with some really scary, very weird...dog-things...inside her front door as she stumbles in drunk from a binge trying to drink a boy she liked off her mind. The action, in other words, is reported in first person and starts from the get-go, never slacks, and keeps getting higher and higher stakes riveted to it.

What works best about this is that Charlie (Charlotte, really) Tristan Moore's learning what the ruddy hell's going on at the same time we are. She's not narrating from either the Afterlife or a cozy chair in front of a fire, a brandy balloon a-swirl in her hands, relating her youthful wild adventures.

What slightly less impressed me was Charlie Tristan Moore's gradually revealed psych history...it was all a bit too pat, and too obviously engineered to make her the proper tool for Nyarlathotep. It led to the feeling that she was a created tool instead of what I understood her to be, a fortuitously shaped stick that Nyarlathotep found here in ordinary reality and co-opted for his use. If the former is the case, then what the heck would an entity that could exert its will so powerfully *need* with a hench-rat?

Well, no matter, what kept me happily reading was the pace of events once the Man in Black gets his hooks into her and sets her her tasks. I was in the mood for horror, it's Spooktober, we've got truly awful people trying to screw up reality even more than they've managed to do in the past six years...gimme the fake kind, with excitement but no danger, please. This first-of-three violent, gory supernatural-horror-defeating stories filled the bill admirably, used the Lovecraft Universe very creditably while still ringing changes on the themes so they didn't feel leaden and overburdened with MEANING. This is never easy. Author Levi did it well. I know I've slammed those dragon-tattoo books for their repugnant sexual violence against women before. It's not a subject I invite into my entertainment these days.

What made me respond differently to this story is that the violence of Charlie Tristan Moore's past is not presented pruriently, is not downplayed in its effects on her and her life as I felt was the case in those Swedish stories. As she puts herself into terrible situations to serve a man and his needs in this story, Charlie's furiously ragingly hating him, and expressly making herself remember why what happened to her is making Nyarlathotep's abuse of her worse.

It felt, then, for once like her pain was her enemy not her secret power.

And she still succeeds, she still lives, she still has Love to save. It worked for me. If Spooktober's going to mean something to you, try slotting this read into it.

EVEN GREATER MISTAKES: Stories, Charlie Jane Anders does the "doesn't get better than this" victory lap

EVEN GREATER MISTAKES: Stories
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
Tor Books
$27.99 hardcover, available now

WINNER OF THE 2022 LOCUS AWARD—BEST COLLECTION! Watch the entire ceremony here.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In her short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders upends genre cliches and revitalizes classic tropes with heartfelt and pants-wettingly funny social commentary....

The woman who can see all possible futures is dating the man who can see the one and only foreordained future.

A wildly popular slapstick filmmaker is drawn, against his better judgment, into working with a fascist militia, against a background of social collapse.

Two friends must embark on an Epic Quest To Capture The Weapon That Threatens The Galaxy, or else they’ll never achieve their dream of opening a restaurant.

The stories in this collection, by their very outrageousness, achieve a heightened realism unlike any other. Anders once again proves she is one of the strongest voices in modern science fiction, the writer called by Andrew Sean Greer, “this generation’s Le Guin.”

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My Review: This is a collection to dip into not slurp down greedily. I mean, where else do you find, "A whole book of short stories can be overwhelming, like imaginative speed dating." This isn't even in a story! It's in the opening act, the Introduction! She's not keepin' her powder dry, unlikely for a seasoned campaigner who's founded geeky websites; or she's just got that immense an arsenal and knows she doesn't need to pace herself.

The best thing I can say of this epitome of Author Charlie Jane Anders's career is that you are unlikely to become bored. A story about time travel that includes, as I've never seen any other place, the fact that the Earth is moving in space; the Sun is moving in space; and not one bit of that enables a careless time-traveler to land where they began. Another story about time travel, but for an extremely specific time, and how that affects a love affair. Love, in every guise you can imagine, underpins every story. Love unspoken, love requited, love rejected...love all over the shop. Seriously. Get some towels.

You'll note that I'm using the venerable tool called the Bryce Method to bring you the flavor of the tales.

As Good As New elicits one of Author Anders's fun personal revelations in its intro...LeVar Burton read this story aloud! I can see why...it's a deceptively simple story about a deceptively simple solution to world peace placed in the executive power of a decidedly not simple heroine. One who does not hesitate to think and plot and carefully consider where others have already gone wrong. A writer, in other words, who loves the craft more than the plaudits.

Marisol had...gone back to the pre-med books, staring at the exposed musculature and blood vessels as if they were costume designs for a skeleton theatre troupe.
–and–
Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than a doctor, after all—clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged our sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn't have ended.

4.5 stars

Rat Catcher's Yellows runs the reader smack into the wall of early-life dementia. A mutated virus does it in her story—cytomegalovirus did it in mine. It was so awful reliving those dark, hopeless almost-the-end days thirty years gone that this is where I stopped reading the book my first trip through.

...Shary is forming relationships with these cats in their puffy-sleeve court outfits and lacy ruffs. In the real world, she can't remember where she lives, what year it is, who the president is, or how long she and I have been married.

But Shary wanted me back, and kept nudging me to man up and finish her life with her...because it really was, like my man's ending, a beginning for something new. 4.5 stars

If You Take My Meaning is, per Author Anders's explanatory note, a giant ball of spoilers for The City in the Middle of the Night, which I haven't read yet, so this is me skippity-skip-skipping to the next read! I'm sure I can swing back around to it after I've done the necessary reading.

The Time Travel Club confirms what I've always believed: the only way anything at all ever gets done is the desperation of belonging, of making one's own space in a crowded, empty cosmos, meeting social isolation in a group of one's fellows. It lifted my sadness into a higher orbit to read Lydia's group's happiness-building involvement in a fantasy world that barely approached reality until it became reality. Plus now I know the word "fauxropean" really exists. My joy is unbridled. 4.5 stars

Six Months, Three Days got an entire review to itself in 2013. Go look.

Love Might Be Too Strong a Word has such a great backstory...maybe threatening the story itself for pre-eminence in my heart. And getting a seven-fingered hand on your four-fingered knuckles does a completely scary number on my head.

Until, of course, the true alienness...the multimorphic species with complex reproductive anatomies and even more baroque sexual ethics...hit me. And the pronouns...! Gadzooks! The pronouns make "they/she/he" a doddle! The beautiful weirdness of the alien city, its voyage across space, the fanciful glories of forbidden romance between...castes? morphs?...in defiance of carefully engineered plans, then the Big Reveal gives the intended perspective and, well.... 5 stars

Fairy Werewolf vs Vampire Zombie brings one into range of one w-bomb and what I'd have to call a w-grenade. (Mostly because it makes sense in context to drop the w...but it's still That Unnatural Ocular Act.) Zombies, Fae, vampires, werefolk...all real. And all ready for a drink at the bar where the wolf-bit Faerie princess chooses the most creepy of Cabaret's creepy numbers, "Don't Tell Mama", to settle a magical duel. A magical karaoke duel. There's also brains for a hungry zombie, in a lovely balsamic vinaigrette. That's the kind of world we're in when Author Charlie Jane is at the helm. We're in Weirdsville, sure, but that does not mean we can't have nice things. 4 stars

Ghost Champagne is the weirdest story yet...a comedian with a seriously fucked-up life (not narrowing that down much, am I?) has a strange variation on Cotard's syndrome that helps (?) her cope with crippling depression. Her Evangelical mother's midlife crisis is recognizing she's a lesbian and marrying a woman her daughter's age. And that's where the normal part ends. While Cotard's gets its act together, she's got her groove as a drunken vomiting ghost whose body's now inhabited by the ghost that's been haunting her. Who happens to be the woman who's being haunted, only older. And dead. 4 stars

My Breath is a Rudder is as plain as the nose on your face: Getting older in a city full of Peter Pans is a bear. Not one soul knows or cares about the city you fell in love with and there's no one left to be yourself with. You're as creative as you ever were but that's now the fantasy you're creating for sale. Wonder why no one's biting....

San Francisco, land of my birth, holds little appeal for me. This story brilliantly encapsulates why: Even in the near future, the city believes its own hype. 3 stars

Power Couple has my very favorite Charlie Jane line of all time in it:

Much later, I discovered that his butt fit perfectly inside my cupped hands, the curve of his undercheek resting just right against my crinkled life lines, as if copping a feel was the whole reason I had palms in the first place.

Too much? Not enough! And then there's the story itself, how the World is not designed for people which is deliberate since people designed the World...so why isn't it better?

Because somebody likes the way it is, and that somebody ain't interested in what works for you. Which is why kludges seem like good ideas. 4 stars

Rock Manning Goes for Broke is the longest piece in the book, the revenant of a novel from the early 1990s that had story-stuff in it that was not about to let the eyelashes of its creator go...you'll see why, or possibly have seen why if you've read it in some anthology from the past. I understand...there's a lot in here...but I did not enjoy the violence. It starts from Rock getting slung off the roof by his daddy in the first paragraph. I get the joke...violence ramped up isn't violence anymore, it's a joke...but I'm past the point of my life where I think that joke's funny. In fact, I'm a little bit embarrassed I used to think it was. 3 stars

Because Change Was the Ocean is what will really happen after The Apocalypse. People left will have babies, grandkids, whatever their hard work and their fates allow; these will be the natives of a new normal; they'll decide what to do, how to do it, what happens next, and you know what? San Francisco will still summon the misfits, the wannabes, and the loudly Othered to its sacred hills.

After a few days on Bernal, I stopped even noticing the other islands on our horizon, let alone paying attention to my friends on social media talking about all the fancy new restaurants Fairbanks was getting. I was constantly having these intense, heartfelt moments with people in the Wrong Headed crew.

It still, after decades and centuries, calls its own home to be weird together. 4 stars

Captain Roger in Heaven made me squirm as a monster grew before my eyes.

That was the thing {he} had left art school understanding: people make complicated pieces of art to explain human behavior, when the real explanation is almost always stupidity.

It is. And stupidity alone, among all that the Universe contains, has no beginning and no end...we surrender ourselves to it in order to make something, some lack or some surfeit, make ourselves whole with/out that. Like that can ever come from outside. 5 STARS

Clover builds on a dangling thread of All the Birds in the Sky which I've read...and liked...so I read this with a little shiver of anticipation.

Forgetting that it's about a c-a-t. My most beloathèd mammal next to Humanity. I finished it without feeling anything I think a cat-lover would except maybe relieved. But for different reasons. 3 stars all of which are grudgingly granted.

This is Why We Can't Have Nasty Things made me cry like a baby without his bottle. It's "I Love This Bar" only queer. And about an entire city. My Manhattan...the 70s, the 80s...gone forever. And I still love it. 5 stars

A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime is silly comedic space-opera joyfulness.

"See what I mean? I may have only one cell, but it's a brain cell!" He whooped and did an impromptu dance in his seat. "Like I said: you're the stealthy one, I'm the flashy one."

You are everything, Author Charlie Jane. You can give me more, and I wants it, preciousssss. 5 stars

Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue is the nightmare/fever dream/body horror of what 45 and the clowncar of deplorables who rode his back to more power than they ever should've had want to do to Others. It's body horror, so be aware of that. It's also nauseating and claustrophobic and just when you thought it couldn't get worse, it does: Your ex-best friend, the one you had to leave behind with your deadname, is the one doing the awfulness to you. Because it's a job. Not rage, not revenge.

Because. It's. A. Job. 4.5 stars

The Bookstore at the End of America proves that the best people on the planet are book people. Bar none. 5 stars

The Visitmothers is proof that, in the end, asking from the heart gets you nothing. Unless you're open to the newfangled idea that your happiness is achievable by making others happier and better and new all over again. Sweet, touching, and delightful. 4 stars

DESTROYER OF LIGHT, second novel from Afrofuturist monadnock Brissett & SORROWLAND, sad, powerful, painful read

DESTROYER OF LIGHT
JENNIFER MARIE BRISSETT
Tor Books
$25.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Matrix meets an Afro-futuristic retelling of Persephone set in a science fiction underworld of aliens, refugees, and genetic engineering in Jennifer Marie Brissett's Destroyer of Light

20 Must Read Space Fantasy Books for 2021—BookRiot
Most Anticipated Fall 2021 Sci-fi, Fantasy & Horror—BiblioLifestyle

Having destroyed Earth, the alien conquerors resettle the remains of humanity on the planet of Eleusis. In the four habitable areas of the planet—Day, Dusk, Dawn, and Night—the haves and have nots, criminals and dissidents, and former alien conquerors irrevocably bind three stories:

*A violent warlord abducts a young girl from the agrarian outskirts of Dusk leaving her mother searching and grieving.
*Genetically modified twin brothers desperately search for the lost son of a human/alien couple in a criminal underground trafficking children for unknown purposes.
*A young woman with inhuman powers rises through the insurgent ranks of soldiers in the borderlands of Night.

Their stories, often containing disturbing physical and sexual violence, skate across years, building to a single confrontation when the fate of all—human and alien—balances upon a knife’s-edge.

I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: ↡↡↡ HEED. THE. CONTENT. WARNINGS. BELOW. ↡↡↡

Humanity is clinging to existence on the tidally locked planet called "Eleusis." Their enemies, the krestge, have destroyed Earth (no one knows why) and evacuated them to Eleusis without doing anything more to complete the extermination (no one knows why). But life must go on. Being humanity, you know what this means: infighting, resource grabs, atrocities, all the usual stuff.

We follow the entire nightmarish fight between people, used in the sense of "humans," who would do better to question the hows and whys of the aliens who exist among them, as the entire planet careens towards some climactic cathartic cleansing of...of...of what, exactly? Is it time for Humanity to finish its extinction at the hands of its squabbling selves? Or is it just barely possible that this awful mirror is held up to make Humanity confront its worst and most enraging aspects?

You don't know Author Brissett's work if you think she provides an answer to that question.

Intricately interconnected strands of Eleusis's enhanced and unenhanced human remnants, violently abusing themselves and each other, aliens with the demonstrated capacity to end the entire human lineage sitting still and doing nothing are some of the mainstays of this book's architecture. The manner in which Author Brissett makes one care about the architecture is, in common with the subtle and unjustly undercelebrated Elysium, left for you to discern. The clues are there. The point of the read is to get out of it what you put into it. While I myownself am indifferent to spoilers, having watched The Crying Game decades ago and thinking The Big Reveal was...kinda obvious...but in any event anticlimactic, I still think you'll enjoy the read more if you're left to mull over the roles of the krestge, the enhanced humans, the nature of the need for child soldiers, and the book's title. Hang on until the ending, and you will feel so very rewarded for your efforts.

There is MUCH to unearth. The pleasures in these words are very significant.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SORROWLAND
RIVERS SOLOMON
MCDxFSG
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

A 2021 NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 LOCUS AWARD—BEST HORROR NOVEL! Winners announced 25 June 2022.

The Publisher Says: Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.

But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future - outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.

I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: ↡↡↡ HEED. THE. CONTENT. WARNINGS. BELOW. ↡↡↡

There are almost no good people in this world, and Vern meets the worst of them. What makes this a deeply satisfying read is that teenaged Vern, in their unbelievable indomitable drive to thrive not just survive, manages to do exactly that. Overcoming all-too-real obstacles? Check. Guiding new lives through a terrible world, explaining how to be better? Check. Vern raising their children is the single brightest take-away I have from this unhappy story.

Loving, worshipping, and bowing down to folks who harmed you was written into the genes of all animal creatures. To be alive meant to lust after connection, and better to have one with the enemy than with no one at all. A baby's fingers and mouth grasp on instinct.

If I were to seek my mental filing system's catalog for closest comparables, I'd have to go with Toni Morrison's deathless Beloved admixed with Octavia E. Butler's more trenchant Kindred, as written for Quentin Tarantino to film. Yes...violence and menace are imbued in every scene. No, it isn't a splatterfest. Yes, every single thing that happens evokes an emotional response. No, there are no "answers" or fancy nostrums to help us deal with the underlying hate, like the lava in a volcano, erupting for as long as it erupts.

Going against tended to end more rightly, more justly, than going with. People were wrong. Rules, most of the time, favored not what was right, but what was convenient or preferable to those in charge.

If you've read 2017's An Unkindness of Ghosts or 2019's Blood is Another Word for Hunger, you're ahead of me in this realization. If you haven't, read this book. You will not regret your introduction to the magical prose that Author Solomon uses being this story. I'm willing to bet you'll get on to their back catalog after finishing the read. If not, if this is just all too much for your sensibilities at the present, read their free online short work that's part of The Verge's "Better Worlds" project: St. Juju.

This writer is a Talent in a world that needs more of them.

WHEN THE SPARROW FALLS, a debut SF novel with

WHEN THE SPARROW FALLS
NEIL SHARPSON
Tor Books
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.1* of five

The Publisher Says: Life in the Caspian Republic has taught Agent Nikolai South two rules. Trust No One. And work just hard enough not to make enemies.

Here, in the last sanctuary for the dying embers of the human race in a world run by artificial intelligence, if you stray from the path - your life is forfeit. But when a Party propagandist is killed - and is discovered as a "machine" - he's given a new mission: chaperone the widow, Lily, who has arrived to claim her husband's remains.

But when South sees that she, the first "machine" ever allowed into the country, bears an uncanny resemblance to his late wife, he's thrown into a maelstrom of betrayal, murder, and conspiracy that may bring down the Republic for good.

WHEN THE SPARROW FALLS illuminates authoritarianism, complicity, and identity in the digital age, in a page turning, darkly-funny, frightening and touching story that recalls Philip K. Dick, John le Carré and Kurt Vonnegut in equal measure.

I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

Nominally, the currency of the Caspian Republic is the moneta, but in truth the coin of the nation was fear. Whoever could inspire fear was rich, whoever lived in fear was poor.
–and–
For a writer's work to be circulated amongst the upper levels of the party was usually the precursor to them coming down with a rather permanent case of writer's block, but not this time. {He} was offered a position in The Truth (then viewed as a rather out of touch and elitist organ), and asked to bring his rough, authentic, working-class voice to the paper's readers, who were left with nothing to do but wonder what they had done to deserve it.

You know already where you are. You'd be stupid or frankly insentient if you didn't recognize the various totalitarian régimes of our present century. Here's what you don't know in the first few chapters of this extraordinarily exciting tale: You will not be leaving the Caspian Republic until events have reached their logical limits. Until then, settle in and surrender your schedule and your other plans.

I would love to spoil the bejabbers out of this read. It is almost painful not to. I want someone to kvell over the ending with; I want someone to be full of the rat's-nest of emotions with me...and not one soul I know can be!

I understand the feelings expressed at the ending of the book so very much better now.

When you send your request in to the bookery of your choice for this story, I think you should know that the author's purpose in writing it was to rob you of any sense of actual control over your life and the world around you. But it will, in fact, be okay. I can't tell you why but let's just say Epicurus's famous formulation of the Problem of Evil:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

Well-trodden tracks lead through this thicket. The response from the god-addled is, "She has Her Reasons, which Reason knoweth not," or something similar to that. In fact the story contains that very argument, put in the mouth of a deeply important figure. (It is only resolvable for the goddists by their huffy assumption that you, o skeptic, are nowhere near as smart as you think you are; and for the bare-faced atheists by using the same argument in reverse.) But what if there *is* a solution....

It was the face beneath mine on the beach when she had been pulled from the ocean and my breath had not been enough.

What, indeed.

Spending a day immersed in the Caspian Republic is a pleasure I'm deeply glad to inform you is exactly what this rather somber, for me at least, holiday required. I needed morally complex characters, ones whose simplest expressions of self are free of embarrassing innocence and unmarred by mawkish candor. I needed to be with my fellow hideously betrayed and painfully reassembled, then betrayed again...and again...and again...bitter, disappointed, unable to imagine what trust would even look like, romantics. They teem in the totalitarian terrors of the Caspian Republic. I needed to feel that my brain's energy was fully and unremittingly drawn down to understand the convolutions of the story's moral landscape.

"Everyone's soul is unique...{a}nd just as your body is built with the protein and calcium and iron you consume every day, your soul is built with words. The words you read, and the words you hear. The soul consumes words, and then it expresses itself through them in a way that is unique to that soul."

Success!

Love will always fuck you up; and the ways in which love fucks you up are truly epic in this story. Thee and me, fellow QUILTBAGgers, are presented on these pages as people of complexity and subtlety. There's really no sex of any sort; it's alluded to and it's very much part of the proceedings, but nobody gets down to business. In exchange, lesbians' love is utterly unremarkable. Men's love is less present; but it does come, when it shows up, as a moment of bathos and facetious secretiveness ("...what did he do?" Your husband, unless I completely misread the subtext, isn't particularly respectful from a cishet man no matter that it's amusingly phrased). Oh well...can't really expect otherwise, given the two men involved. There was absolutely no way on Earth I'd've picked those guys out as my fellows, gotta hand that to Author Sharpson!

So half-a-star gone for the three w-bombs dropped on my innocent, unsuspecting head; another half-star for being sniggeringly dismissive of the only gay male couple in the entire book.

But leaving the read, the ending, well...that has to put some luster back on the read...it's a delight, if a marred and flawed delight, of a read. It gives a reader a rare treat: Reading about grown people, the adult end of the room, is a rapturous and infrequently encountered pleasure in the YA-heavy lists of SF/F publishers. A novel of ideas, one that examines the cracks and the broken places in Love and Trust, one that asks you to spend more than just the usual amount of energy on the read deserves a warm and delighted welcome, louder and stronger for the fact that it's the first...hopefully in a long line.

But seriously. No more w-verbing. It's gross.

ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY, my vote for Goodreads Choice Awards Fantasy category

ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
Tor Books
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead didn't expect to see each other again, after parting ways under mysterious circumstances during high school. After all, the development of magical powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one's peers and families.

But now they're both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Laurence is an engineering genius who's working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic breakdown through technological intervention into the changing global climate. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the world's magically gifted, and works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world's ever-growing ailments. Little do they realize that something bigger than either of them, something begun years ago in their youth, is determined to bring them together--to either save the world, or plunge it into a new dark ages.

A deeply magical, darkly funny examination of life, love, and the apocalypse.

My Review: I voted for this book in the 2016 Goodreads Readers' Choice Awards. As you'd expect from Anders, it's a well-crafted novel. As you'd hope for from any author of SF/F, it's a layered and nuanced exploration of the tense spots the abound in the rough edges of magic and technology.

A modern fairy tale of man-power versus woman-power that fails of imagination only in that gendered dichotomy. That aside, the tale explores that clash really well. The idea that the main characters are outcasts because they're smart is, of course, spot on; the book takes on the rottenness of bullying as a subtle (as a plane crash) understory to the main tree of Otherness as Gift.

Charlie Jane Anders is not a close personal friend, so I get to say this without anybody making knowing moues at me: The lady writes the best funny dialogue in the biz. From chuckle to guffaw, it's all here. Do not wait, procure and devour soonest.

THE MACHINE AWAKES, Adam Christopher's scary-shivery-good second Spider Wars novel

THE MACHINE AWAKES
ADAM CHRISTOPHER The Spider Wars #2
Tor Books
$9.99 ereader platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the decades since the human race first made contact with the Spiders—a machine race capable of tearing planets apart—the two groups have fought over interstellar territory. But the war has not been going well for humankind, and with the failure of the Fleet Admiral’s secret plan in the Shadow system, the commander is overthrown by a group of hardliners determined to get the war back on track.

When the deposed Fleet Admiral is assassinated, Special Agent Von Kodiak suspects the new guard is eliminating the old. But when the Admiral’s replacement is likewise murdered, all bets are off as Kodiak discovers the prime suspect is one of the Fleet’s own, a psi-marine and decorated hero—a hero killed in action, months ago, at the same time his twin sister vanished from the Fleet Academy, where she was training to join her brother on the front.

As Kodiak investigates, he uncovers a conspiracy that stretches from the slums of Salt City to the floating gas mines of Jupiter. There, deep in the roiling clouds of the planet, the Jovian Mining Corporation is hiding something, a secret that will tear the Fleet apart and that the Morning Star, a group of militarized pilgrims searching for their lost god, is determined to uncover.

But there is something else hiding in Jovian system. Something insidious and intelligent, machine-like and hungry.

The Spiders are near.

My Review: This is book two. I have only one question: WHERE THE HELL IS BOOK THREE?!

Exciting intrigue, insane religious nutballs trying to bring Lucifer "back," twisty and unexpected politico-personal betrayals...IN SPACE! ON JUPITER!! Add in some vile, evil corporate chicanery, some love and some heartbreak...well, what are you waiting for? Go forth and buy from your favorite bookery.

Leave the lights on.

THE BURNING DARK, Adam Christopher's scary space opera with **shudder** Spiders!

THE BURNING DARK
ADAM CHRISTOPHER The Spider Wars #1
Tor Books
$9.99 ereader platforms, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Back in the day, Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland had led the Fleet into battle against an implacable machine intelligence capable of devouring entire worlds. But after saving a planet, and getting a bum robot knee in the process, he finds himself relegated to one of the most remote backwaters in Fleetspace to oversee the decommissioning of a semi-deserted space station well past its use-by date.

But all is not well aboard the U-Star Coast City. The station’s reclusive Commandant is nowhere to be seen, leaving Cleveland to deal with a hostile crew on his own. Persistent malfunctions plague the station’s systems while interference from a toxic purple star makes even ordinary communications problematic. Alien shadows and whispers seem to haunt the lonely corridors and airlocks, fraying the nerves of everyone aboard.

Isolated and friendless, Cleveland reaches out to the universe via an old-fashioned space radio, only to tune in to a strange, enigmatic signal: a woman’s voice that seems to echo across a thousand light-years of space. But is the transmission just a random bit of static from the past—or a warning of an undying menace beyond mortal comprehension?

My Review: Compulsively readable, like all of Christopher's work appears to be. I was up until 12:45a as the pages, it seemed, turned themselves.

I loved Ida (our captain and PoV character is so yclept) for his square-jawed, straight-shootin' inability to lie, tolerate lies, or accept anything less than the facts in any arena. I know him, of course, from a squazillion other books, movies, and TV shows. He's surrounded by snakes and fools, and he's one man against the Universe.

Except he doesn't exist. All the computer records and Flyeyes (combination secretary, file clerk, and cyborg) who run the world's electronic memories agree that Ida isn't. His great military victory against the Spiders (more cyborgs, this time *really* scary) also isn't. And it's one of the very few victories in the war.

This does not sit well with Ida, whose medal for the matter means a lot to him. He can't investigate effectively in the Coast City's orbit around one of the weirdest energy masses in Fleetspace. That's what we call the equivalent of the Free World from the Cold War years.

Ghostly happenings, a lot of fist-fights, a few really really handy coincidences, and the story gets its deeper tale all nice and set up. That's not a knock on the book, by the way. This is a fully realized story on its own, and its resolution is such that the lukewarm responder wouldn't feel the lack of an ending as in so many other series books.

There are a lot of in-jokes (a starship called the Bloom County, for a wonderful example, and a starship called the Carcona captained by a man named Manutius for an Italian flavored other) and a bunch of ideas that suggest, to me at least, that Christopher has read Rupert Sheldrake's books. This is a darn good entertainment with a serious and still shivery point to it. Jeff, Roni: Go now and procure. Everyone else, at least flip through it and see what grabs ya.

CALIFORNIA BONES: Unsettling, exciting beginning to a series

CALIFORNIA BONES Daniel Blackland #1
GREG VAN EEKHOUT
Tor Books
$14.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When Daniel Blackland was six, he ingested his first bone fragment, a bit of kraken spine plucked out of the sand during a visit with his demanding, brilliant, and powerful magician father, Sebastian.

When Daniel was twelve, he watched Sebastian die at the hands of the Hierarch of Southern California, devoured for the heightened magic layered deep within his bones.

Now, years later, Daniel is a petty thief with a forged identity. Hiding amid the crowds in Los Angeles—the capital of the Kingdom of Southern California—Daniel is trying to go straight. But his crime-boss uncle has a heist he wants Daniel to perform: break into the Hierarch's storehouse of magical artifacts and retrieve Sebastian's sword, an object of untold power.

For this dangerous mission, Daniel will need a team he can rely on, so he brings in his closest friends from his years in the criminal world. There's Moth, who can take a bullet and heal in mere minutes. Jo Alverado, illusionist. The multitalented Cassandra, Daniel's ex. And, new to them all, the enigmatic, knowledgeable Emma, with her British accent and her own grudge against the powers-that-be. The stakes are high, and the stage is set for a showdown that might just break the magic that protects a long-corrupt regime.

Extravagant and yet moving, Greg van Eekhout's California Bones is an epic adventure set in a city of canals and secrets and casual brutality--different from the world we know, yet familiar and true.

My Review: Want to know something amazing? My assisted-living facility's library, which I created from my own library, cannot keep this book on the shelves.

So what, I hear you think really loudly. So this: I'm in a place where I'm young at 55...most of these eager readers are over 70.

This gives me the happy. It proves to me that, if you tell a good story well, people it with easy-to-relate-to characters, and pull no punches, any and all ages will grab and snatch and fight to get their shot to read it.

I'm no fan of teen heroes, get highly irked by teen angst, and never want to hear the phrase "coming-of-age" again; I am usually bored into a coma by magic; altogether this book should have made me sleepily grouchy. Instead, I was flipping pages and holding my breath, and so are all the library users I've spoken to.

For me at least, one of the main appeals is the future L.A. van Eekhout posits, a place turned into a quasi-Amsterdam by the devouring sea. I love that idea mostly because I don't like California despite being born there. But also and more positively, I got the image fixed in my head immediately, enjoyably, and permanently. Now I see photos of the real L.A. and feel confused...where's the sea?

Greg van Eekhout changed my image of a place I've been to a zillion times. He's that much of a wizard with his words. I can't wait to be able to afford the next two books! C'mon February, Daddy needs new books!

DEATHLESS, Catherynne Valente's Leningrad Diptych #1 7 October 2013

DEATHLESS
CATHERYNNE VALENTE (Leningrad Diptych #1)
Tor Books
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

2 JUNE 2021 KINDLE EDITION ON SALE FOR $2.99

The Publisher Says: Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories which have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the twentieth century.

Deathless, however, is no dry, historical tome: it lights up like fire as the young Marya Morevna transforms from a clever child of the revolution, to Koschei’s beautiful bride, to his eventual undoing. Along the way there are Stalinist house elves, magical quests, secrecy and bureaucracy, and games of lust and power. All told, Deathless is a collision of magical history and actual history, of revolution and mythology, of love and death, which will bring Russian myth back to life in a stunning new incarnation.

My Review: Remember how I said I didn't like books with majgickq and elves and stuff, and how very resistant I'd be so such stories?

Ha.

Magical to a fault, mystical and full of eyerollingly silly things like big black cars with chicken's feet instead of tires, and factories where soldiers are hand-loomed by the Tsar of Life's cast-off mistresses under the supervision of Baba Yaga.

And what can I say? Like every hard and fast rule, this rule went flooey in no time at all, thanks to some ecstatic carolings and appreciative lowings from some very talented reviewers. You terrible people know who you are. I don't love you for causing me to eat my words so publicly.

Russia is a strange, strange place to me. During some really vicious pogroms they tossed in the 19th century, a Polish Jewish ancestress of mine...great-grandmother...walked away from her shtetl, her family, and her identity, got to Bavaria and married an old Catholic man with no living children but who had a shop, and started again. He died, she sold up, she moved on to the USA via Paris, two kids and an American lover in tow. So thanks Russians for being murderously anti-Semitic or I wouldn't be alive today! But the culture that gave rise to the anti-Semitic stuff has always filled me with disgust and not a little horror at the christian hate and apostolic misery doled out on all the people. The myths of the peasantry seem so unforgiving and tricksy and just plain vicious. Then I contemplate the way the country was run (being polite, not well, not ever)...it makes sense...but it still always made me feel icky to read about it.

Then comes this melding of myth and materialsm, supernatural and Supreme Soviet...and I fell head first into love with the package.

Valente's use of language is exemplary. She never stints or holds back. Descriptions are abundant yet they are never obfuscatory; the idea is to create a 3-D experience in the reader's mind and by GUM (old Cold War humor, sorry) she does just exactly that. She never reaches beyond her grasp or talks down to her audience. If only a Russian word will do, there it is, and the nuances are not Spelled Out For You and neither must you resort to Google and Good Luck to find out what the hell this woman's on about.

This (revoltingly) young writer has the temerity and the confidence and the chops to pull off this melding of modernity and medievalism without breaking a (visible) sweat. That's one sweet achievement. This is a book that's as Russian as hot tea with sour cherry preserves and as American as serving it in a Starbucks cup.

And it's beautiful. And it's moving. And it's graceful and lovely and possessed of the most marvelous ability to switch from tango to waltz to jitterbug. Dance with her. This opportunity doesn't come every day.

Ninth Jay Lake Pre-Mortem Read-a-thon Review Up

After causing myself needless terror and pain by losing the post, and some of the review, I've got the last novel that's likely to be published by Jay Lake before his demise reviewed and appreciated at Shelf Inflicted, a group blog.

His own blog, Jay Lake, Writer, has a post today about "Special Dying Person Wisdom." He says something the Buddha said, in a different way. That so many teachers say, and so many students nod at, but still it remains something we all need to hear again, and again, and again: "But in any case, be kind. It costs you nothing and makes the world around you a better place."

Well, that's it, really. That's the whole deal in a nutshell. Even if my take-away from the entire experience of encountering Lake and his fiction was that, it was a transformative one. Reading these nine novels, reviewing them, and making the reviews as much about the experience as the book and saying thank you to the creator of the books pre-mortem, remind me to be kinder so I can make my corner of the world a bit better than it is now.

KALIMPURA brings Green's saga to its stopping place. In the end is the beginning; in the beginning is the end. It's a hard thing to do, to read a novel of maturing that comes from a person whose perspective is The End. But then again, if he's got time to tell the story, who am I to ignore it because I feel sad about how it's coming about?