AFTER THE FALL, latest Edward Ashton outing

AFTER THE FALL
EDWARD ASHTON
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Would humans really make great pets?

Humans must be silent.
Humans must be obedient.
Humans must be good.

All his life, John has tried to live by those rules. Most days, it’s not too difficult. A hundred and twenty years after The Fall, and a hundred years after the grays swept in to pick the last dregs of humanity out of the wreckage of a ruined world, John has found himself bonded to Martok Barden nee Black Hand, one of the "good" grays. Sure, Martok is broke, homeless, and borderline manic, but he’s always treated John like an actual person, and sometimes like a friend. It’s a better deal than most humans get.

But when Martok puts John’s bond up as collateral against an abandoned house in the woods that he hopes to turn into a wilderness retreat for wealthy grays, John learns that there are limits to Martok’s friendship. Soon he finds himself caught between an underworld boss who thinks Martok is something that he very much is not, a girl who was raised by feral humans and has nothing but contempt for pets like John, and Martok himself, whose delusions of grandeur seem to be finally catching up with him.

Also, not for nothing, something in the woods has been killing people.

John has sixty days before Martok’s loan comes due to unravel the mystery of how humans wound up holding the wrong end of the domestication stick and find a way to turn Martok’s half-baked plans into profit enough to buy back his life, all while avoiding getting butchered by feral humans or having his head crushed by an angry gray. Easy peasy, right?

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

My Review: I really hope y'all're catching on to Author Ashton. I confess I don't *get* why people weren't excited by Mickey17, because I thought it was a decent adaptation of Mickey7 as well as a good movie on its own; but mostly I'm a bit bumfuzzled as to how all Author Ashton's books aren't on the bestseller list. Every one I've read has been good-plus. I enjoy them, I spend time after reading them pondering about this bit that's really made me think, or that character who's so awful it must've been a big hoot to write them (specifically thinking of the one in The Fourth Consort of whom I said "'kindness and acceptance' sounds better than 'craven lickspittle sycophancy' doesn't it.") In a lot of ways this novel feels like Author Ashton taking a crack at some of the ideas not fully explored in that story.

I'm really thinking mostly of the ownership angle we delve into in this story, the ethics of cannibalism are unambiguous in The Fourth Consort whereas the Grays in this book are arguably the more vicious in their treatment of humans because they see us, say "aww how cute" and then go right on looking at us like there is nothing else to say or think. Someone who slaughters and eats you regards you as valuable; someone who views you as fungible, as a pet, does not. In a lot of ways it feels like the plays from the Roman Republic and early empire where the clever slave runs master's business better than master, saving the day and earning master's gratitude but never respect.

Like all Author Ashton's work, you're going to get some funny lines, and you'll never have any trouble remembering who said what to whom...I think that's why I like the Mickey series and why I think Director Bong did too, there's such a clear sense of the main characters' identity. What there isn't is a clear path towards resolving the conundrum the story orbits around: Is the condition of the humans going to change for the better? John and Martok are coming out of these events in a different state than they entered them but...well...is there a larger point to this larger story? If not, why bear down on it?

I enjoyed this stand-alone read, I thought it raised interesting points and gave me some good pondering to do. I was not convinced this was the best place to end the story, but it wasn't like it was poor on a craft level. It just could've leveled the read up, but chose not to.

Not the worst, or least forgivable, authorial peccadillo. I'll definitely await the next Ashton book with attentive eagerness.

LIES WE TELL ABOUT THE STARS, good YA treatment of grief's realities

LIES WE TELL ABOUT THE STARS
SUSIE NADLER
Dutton Books for Young Readers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A gorgeous debut about friendship, grief, and new beginnings set in near-future San Francisco in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake and on the cusp of the first human mission to Mars.

Celeste Muldoon is alone when the Big One finally hits, because, for the first time ever, her best friend stood her up after school. Nicky and Celeste share a birthday, matching tattoos, an obsession with the upcoming Mars mission, and pretty much everything else. So why did he ghost her on the day she needed him most?

As the quake’s death toll rises and days pass, Nicky and Celeste’s parents fear the worst. But Celeste doesn’t buy it. He couldn’t be dead. Nicky’d spent their senior year selling essays to rich kids and was about to get caught. He’d told Celeste about his plan to vanish, to reinvent himself and escape the disaster he’d created. The quake would be perfect cover.

But she can’t convince anyone that he could still be alive. Only Meo, a mysterious stranger who was somehow mixed up with Nicky, seems to believe, but Celeste has every reason to distrust him—even if her heart races whenever Meo shows up.

When Celeste finds Nicky’s notebook, it sends her and Meo on a quest across the broken city, up the coast through towns sheltering quake refugees, and eventually all the way to Florida, where the mission to Mars is about to lift off.

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

My Review: Celeste is a spoiled, solipsistic brat, the kind of kid my mother called a typical teenager...utterly sure she is the center, the reason, the ultimate source of others' feelings and actions. How dreary, right parents? Here we go again.

Only partially true. We do spend a bit more time with Celeste taking a widespread tragedy more personally than is ever justified. What drags Celeste into the larger world of adulthood is her determination to make the world give her a reason that she has to experience the horror that is loss and grief. There is, in other words, hope for her yet.

That's the adult reward for reading the story. I put on my YA hat for the rest of the review.

Structurally it's a quest novel that follows the hero's journey, so it taps into the pull this story always exerts. Celeste is shown as the hero to some advantage because she has strong self-confidence, and learns through adversity to trust that she is able and willing to make her own way. She learns, again through adversity, that acting out her negative feelings about others is a losing game. Her spirit-guide, Nicky, is not explored in depth; he is a ghost of some power, whose interactions with Celeste read to me as fantasy but could easily be interpreted as "from beyond" by less jaded readers. Meo, in the here and now, is uninteresting to me; he serves Celeste's desires and offers her companionship on terms that solidify her understanding of boundaries.

I'd like to shoutout the prose, in particular the resonance of the phrasemaking that permeates the story. There's a smart kid out there who will twig to how this style is chosen to do a specific emotional thing that isn't overbearingly, ham-handedly guiding you to Feel This Now. (Spoiler Stasi look away: Keep the first line in your head while reading the end.)

I would give this to an ordinary fifteen-year-old without hesitation. Not really so comfortable to hand to younger people than that, the independence and boundary-setting are just a bit more...mature...than their social development. But for that grand or nibling just getting to the "I want I yearn I long for" age, it can offer some guidance on that journey. It's always best to do this teaching by storytelling.

THE SHUTOUTS, keeping apocalyptic tales oddly fresh

THE SHUTOUTS
GABRIELLE KORN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A brilliant queer dystopian novel from the author of Yours for the Taking, following a cast of characters on the margins of a strange and exclusive new society.

The year is 2041, and it's a dangerous time to be a woman driving across the United States alone. Deadly storms and uncontrollable wildfires are pummeling the country while political tensions are rising. But Kelly's on the road anyway; she desperately needs to get back to her daughter, who she left seven years ago for a cause that she's no longer sure she believes in.

Almost 40 years later, another mother, Ava, and her daughter Brook are on the run as well, from the climate change relief program known as The Inside Project, where they've spent the past 22 years being treated as lab rats. When they encounter a woman from Ava’s past on the side of the highway, the three continue on in a journey that will take them into the depths of what remains of humanity out in the wilderness.

At the same time, way up North, weather conditions continue to worsen and a settlement departs in search of greener pastures, leaving behind only two members, drawn together by a circumstance and a mystery they are destined to unravel together.

Set in the world of Gabrielle Korn's Yours for the Taking, The Shutouts tells the captivating story of those who have been shut out from Inside, their fight to survive, and an interconnectedness larger than all of them.

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

My Review: A woman who's a teenager right now is writing letters to Orchid, her young daughter in 2041, a daughter she has not seen in some time. It is heart-wrenching because Kelly's letters are written as a mother who did the best she knew how to do tries to cross a ravaged US in a planet-scale climate apocalypse. She is not having an easy time of the trip. It is a terrible world and a terrible personal situation in that world—no one ever *wants* to leave their child behind. Switching to 2078, we have the second strand of the story, not epistolary but Orchid's third-person cinematic PoV, very close to the character.

This is the main way Author Korn creates investment in her not-very-active story. I have not read the first book, and I didn't feel the lack of the background mostly because I was always inside the field of vision of the narrator of each section. There might be apocalypse unfolding around them, but I'm...insulated...in their bubble of awareness and attention. It *should* feel slow, cut off from the world, instead I'm deeply enmeshed in the characters' feeling world, connected to their emotional responses to the situation. It works a lot better than I thought it would.

In large part, I think, because by using this technique, Author Korn is able to bring the reader through almost sixty years of immense upheaval without making that upheaval the matter of the book. I've sort of reached a saturation with The Climate Apocalypse as the story. Author Korn doesn't make me do the day-by-day; she lets me see the horrors through the eyes of a survivor of the horrors. In 2078, I'm in the world the apocalypse left, and as I'm in the limited viewpoint I'm seeing and responding to the parts that are in Orchid, the narrator's, attention. The centrality of Ava and her daughter Brook pull the mother/daughter bond along with us as we experience with Orchid the toughness needed to survive in this world.

It's an intense experience, and it's all queer all the time. It's that piece that warmed me the most. The world's collapsed and we're still here, we're in the survivors and doing great things with the space we take up. The intense personal commitment to mitigating the horrors, to ameliorating the suffering of all while incurring intense personal suffering from sacrifices made...well...it's quite a step from the usual queer fare I see everywhere. As the world fractures and fragments it's so lovely to see these queer folk making their very best efforts to extend survival and the opportunity to thrive so generously.

I'd give it all five stars if I hadn't felt rather pulled around to little enough purpose by some of the parts where Kelly's narrating her efforts to reach Orchid...I get it, it's really demanding, let's focus on how it makes you feel not what it's exacting from you. Likewise there are moments where Orchid's in motion for, well, for the sake of it it seemed to me.

I cavil; I would not say these issues were terrible, only niggling. It's a read that stands alone, yet makes me wish I'd already read its predecessor. Fine work indeed.

THE MURDERS OF MOLLY SOUTHBOURNE, novella-length novel-strength postapocalyptic horror story

THE MURDERS OF MOLLY SOUTHBOURNE
TADE THOMPSON
Tor.com Publishing
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Every time she bleeds a murderer is born. Experience the horror of Tade Thompson's The Murders of Molly Southbourne.

The rule is simple: don't bleed.

For as long as Molly Southbourne can remember, she's been watching herself die. Whenever she bleeds, another molly is born, identical to her in every way and intent on her destruction.

Molly knows every way to kill herself, but she also knows that as long as she survives she'll be hunted. No matter how well she follows the rules, eventually the mollys will find her. Can Molly find a way to stop the tide of blood, or will she meet her end at the hand of a girl who looks just like her?

My Review: A near-enough future novella that blends the horror inherent in a mutating, collapsing Earth and the human response to it with the species-level will to live no matter what.

I was utterly sucked into the narrative early on:

An example has aspects of a thing, but is that the thing itself? The mollys have aspects of Molly, but that doesn't make them Molly, does it?

I'm not going to tell you what Molly's relationship with the mollys is because this is a very difficult concept to get across. I want the whole reading experience to be as full and rich for you as it was for me. And I want to encourage you to spend $3.99 on a novella of surpassing strangeness, violence, and transcendent oddness.

What isn't odd, though sometimes is transcendent, is Author Tade's writing. He finds angles and corners where others don't look, or if they look don't see.

Her shoes wait in formation for her feet to quicken them.
***
Alarms are going off like the mating calls of robotic insects.
***
As she cuts the cadavers on the slabs, she realizes there is no sense to be made out of life.

With the exception of one, and only one, hideous and disfiguring instance of the w-bomb, the text is chillingly, even eerily, smooth and flawless. It resembles in its affect the narrative monologues of Rod Serling. You know the point is there, you can see it rising like the number Pi is said to do over all knowledge, glimpses above foggy lowlands of text, but it shifts as your gaze has to slip away from it for you to negotiate the steps of the ziggurat.


Climb, I urge you; the view is fine and the journey's toll is just the beginning of a quest.

THE DOG STARS is beautifully written. Maybe too beautifully. It's a Very Writerly novel.

THE DOG STARS
PETER HELLER
Vintage Contemporaries
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

THIS COPY RECEIVED FROM NOT THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW as a giveaway...thanks y'all!

The Publisher Says: A riveting, powerful novel about a pilot living in a world filled with loss—and what he is willing to risk to rediscover, against all odds, connection, love, and grace.

Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. His wife is gone, his friends are dead, he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor a gun-toting misanthrope. In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and to pretend that things are the way they used to be. But when a random transmission somehow beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life—something like his old life—exists beyond the airport. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return—not enough fuel to get him home—following the trail of the static-broken voice on the radio. But what he encounters and what he must face—in the people he meets, and in himself—is both better and worse than anything he could have hoped for.

Narrated by a man who is part warrior and part dreamer, a hunter with a great shot and a heart that refuses to harden, The Dog Stars is both savagely funny and achingly sad, a breathtaking story about what it means to be human.

My Review: I've tried and I've tried to think of a nice way to say that I don't like Iowa Writer's Workshop stuff because it's always Very Writerly. I was, as you see, unsuccessful. It's always full of good lines, it's always got charming or beautiful or moving imagery and characters with flaws and sometimes even dialogue with some zest.

But it's always Very Writerly. Thick and heavy and nutritious like spelt or brown rice. Sulphur molasses in gluten-free muffins. Serious and Good For You.

I hate that. Sorry, Mr. Heller, but that's you all over.

I like dystopias and post-apocalyptic stories, since I am the least chirpily optimistic person walking on Planet Earth. I want them to make sense, however, and not be rehashes of zombie munch-fests. This one makes sense. The pandemic that collapses the population? Totally buy that. The evil/vile behavior of the humans afterwards? Totally buy that. (Actually, from what I see, we haven't waited for an apocalypse to behave like scum to each other. But I digress.) The source of the dog Jasper's jerky treats? Brilliant, and also very frugal.

I like the story, too, up to the point where Hig, our pilot main character, flies off and Finds Himself. I know, I know, all characters must go through stuff and change as a result of it to make a novel really interesting. But the fact that Hig goes off'n gits him a woman is a little over the top. It's artificial feeling, like something inside Heller (or an editor outside Heller) said "there's no hope! give the poor bastard hope!"

It was, in my humble opinion, a wrong turn. The story up to then was an interesting, stream-of-consciousness exploration of an average joe who, inexplicably, survived the Apocalypse and kept on moving, breathing, numb from loss and scared, but real. And then, suddenly, he gets A Message and has to move move move to find the source! And he finds him a gal! Who knows, maybe that little impotence problem will clear up, they'll have a family....

That's not the same book I started reading, and I don't much like that book.

But in good conscience, I can't tell you it's a bad book. It's a pretty good book that could've been a really, really good book. It takes the subverbal vocalizations of its main character and puts them front-and-center, makes the style the point, makes the point the pleasure of reading. I just have this one little problem with the whole enterprise: It feels to me like it's been overthought, overwrought, and overworked. All down to that workshoppy aesthetic, and that happyendingitis that comes from thinking about the audience and not the story.

Well, so. Three and a half stars for the good, good phrases Mr. Heller has made and the promise of that first half. It will do.