Michael Barnes
Pretty sure everyone has heard of this retelling of the Greek myth of Circe by the author of The Song of Achilles so I imagine you know if you want to read it or not. I enjoy so many of these retelling Bea Fitzgerald's Girl, Goddess, Queen and The End Crowns All, Maya Deane 's Wrath Goddess Sing even Netflix getting in on the action with Chaos.
I was engrossed in learning more about Circe and given all she had experienced at the hands of others its surprising to find her as reasonable as she was, even given the whole turning sailors into pigs thing. Heck amongst the divine Greek gods that barely rates as more than a harsh prank.
What I drew most from this story was the realisation that there are the greatest riches reserved for those who seek an inner life and I was grateful that the end for Circe remained unresolved.
Silent City set six years after the story of Orpen first begun in Last Ones Left Alive where at the end of that story found her way joining the Banshees an all-female fighting force created in the early days of the zombie (or skrake as they are called in the book) plague to protect the people of Phoenix city, a walled part of Dublin. Banshees work in dedicated pairs with a style of fighting crafted to the world they face which leads to the sort of strong friendships and love you would expect in such situations.
Now Phoenix city is a collapsing dystopia "the citizens might be protected from the skrake, but they live under an oppressive regime, enduring poverty, hunger, and disease. Phoenix City is ruled by “the management,” a group of male leaders who get access to, and dole out, whatever perks are still available, while the less fortunate literally live and die in the dirt. Reading is forbidden, women are kept as breeders or recruited as banshees, and the management use and abuse the citizens in the name of keeping them safe". - Maria Haskins at Psychopomp.
The real fantasy here is the fantasy of revenge and one of the elements of this is the parallel details a series of attacks on the men of management by two women who leave them crippled and the reason is revealed later is delicious.
Liz Bourke at Reactor sums it up "Silent City is an atmospheric narrative, with compelling characters and deft, readable prose. Orpen is fascinating, and Davis-Goff is very good at straddling the line of the ordinary and the shocking in the banality of violence and Orpen’s half-estranged perspective. It’s also retreading some very familiar thematic ground, that of atrocity, complicity, and responsibility, though. And right now I don’t think any treatment of this theme has the power to satisfy me".
I enjoyed this far future science-fiction spaceship story. I wasn't aware that this story was an extension of her Nanotech Succession universe, Bohr Maker, Tech-Heaven, Deception Well, and Vast but I will track them down as well as the others in this "Inverted Frontier" trilogy. The title a reference to the book’s initiating event, a journey from the fringes of human space back toward its old centres.
The early chapters brilliantly evoked for me the sense of dread coming from isolation with a feeling that humanity being reduced to the isolated system of Deception Well due to the relentless attack of an alien machine intelligence called Chenzeme, a concept terrifying and familiar if you have read Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series.
Throw in some of the concepts from Ricvhard Morgan's Altered Carbon (though these books predates the 2002 edition of this work)with characters who have extensive control over their physical and mental conditions: they are able to go into cold sleep, or adjust their temporal senses, or exist as embodied or unbodied persons for as long as they need to. They are, in fact, thoroughly post-human, capable of completely redesigning or duplicating themselves as computational “ghosts” or physical avatars.
The story follows the return of an expedition sent from Deception Well to Chenzeme home worlds (presumably this is covered in the previous novel Vast) in hijacked and subverted Chenzeme courser he has renamed Dragon. The sole survivor Urban wants to return to the worlds of humanity’s birth and understand the fate of the “Hallowed Vasties,” those Dyson structures created centuries ago and now fallen into ruin.
During the centuries long expedition they inadvertently bring back to the ship an intelligent contamination, a metahuman consciousness immensely intelligent and arrogant. Marooned in space for some unknown reason, he attempts to hijack the ship as an avenue back to his original world.
The rest of the story sees the conflict between these competing elements.
I loved the worlds, with vast ancient spaces, machine intelligences, people comfortable with fluidity and changes, shaping copies of their mentals states the true breath of post human that Nagata has created and look forward to exploring the rest of this universe
In keeping with the title I sought a word that described a small, but complete, satisfying meal. It's not an hors d'oeuvre or appetizer as that is meant to anticipate the full meal to come, I toyed with bento or lunchbox but the time specificity didn't really suit.
Needless to say I found this upper bound in length novella (163 pages) a filling repast. Set in a future post-2nd civil war of succession between California and the formerly-United States, left California independent state and the only country to grant robots and other human intellect constructs limited rights.
The story opens during an atmospheric downpour, one of the those once in hundred year climatic events that we are now seeing far too frequently due to climate change, and our four robot protagonists work in a ghost kitchen in San Francisco. One of them is drowning in debt, while another finds herself trapped in an overly gendered body bolted to the floor as the greeter, and still another is trapped in the trauma from his time in the war as a military bot. With limited options, Cayenne, a search and rescue octobot who loves to get their tentacles all up in the web, hacks the system to make it seem like they’re human-owned and run. With the help of a local human in the community, the bots will dedicate themselves to the making of the food, the running of the business, the front of house, and decoration, while all pretending to be working for a human.
I loved that the structure of this story can be read as how people who have so little are often the ones who can work to build functioning communities. Whereas for some this could have been a story of how the plucky immigrant, or child of poor parents builds a franchise spanning food empire, instead this is about how marginalised people can combine and support each other and build a space that community can form round. If you wanted to read how to change/organise around what is important in our society this reads like a blueprint.
Also whilst I haven't tried spicy biang biang noodles I now desperately want to.
As a fan of Alison Evan's debut novel Ida and a fan of zombie stories this book was clearly one I sneeded to read and I loved it.
Welcome to the post-zombie apocalyptic Victoria featuring initially three different narratives of ferociously diverse cast of teenagers at its core, few of whom sit comfortably at the intersection of straight and cisgender. There will be no suprises for those familiar with this genre but it’s the cast of characters who are the heart of this story.
Dee and her bandmates escape to a secluded bush cabin on a post-graduation trip. Upon emerging from their isolation, they find no signs of life in the nearby towns. A social media blackout, limited television programming and no phone signal leaves Jojo and their sister Rhea, who are used to being saturated in information, in the dark. And a third, unnamed-until-the-end character, affirms her identity as a trans girl and finds partnership in a time of crisis.
These characters do eventually meet up and chosen family not all survive to the end of this story. No does the conclusion resolve other than with a determination to survive together.
Reading the first chapters with it’s the description of the mansion at the clifftops dominating view of the sea, the family old and once rich commanding the wealth and power all drawn from trade on the ocean. Of tall, pale ancestors, secret myths and a lineage falling into financial ruin, and a last true heir…. I thought "well this is Gothic as F*"
Mirin is our narrator who flees when her grandmother (abandoned by her mother when she was an infant) the matriarch plans to marry Miren off to a rich, abusive jerk. Mirin must also contend with the family deal with the Mer who unlike Disney would have you believe are dangerous and mysterious. We also meet Rusalka, kelpies, and more give All the Murmuring Bones a dark mythical feel.
Mirin follows her mother's trail to a hidden village where she encounters another abusive jerk (I am sensing a pattern in many of the male antagonists) where her mother and father established a village based on the silver from a well (and yes it has to do with water and bargains) but have recently left on a trip.
It is resolved as you would expect, in blood and along the way we learn that it's not the ancient, cold, bloodthirsty Mer folk who are the monsters…..
Yes it us, its humans but you know that.
In Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind the antagonist is late stage capitalism. The premise is an interesting one our hapless titular protagonist find employment after accumulating a horrendous debt from student loans, credit cards and loans owed by his parent who died. (it is even commentated that this is illegal, but as in our world you need money to prove illegal things done to you financial but since you have no money….) so he takes a literal job of his dreams where he is a Dream Auditor, charged by a secretive government organisation with going into white collar worker nighttime dreaming and removing all the negativity and hopelessness presumably leading to increased productivity. But knowing secretive organisations all that stuff is collected for horrible uses.
It’s surprisingly dangerous work, but what choice does Jonathan have when he’s summoned to a boringly unimaginative strip mall shop in which lie archives full of scraped away dreams and much of what makes these newly-positive-ivised slaves of the capitalist dream who they are.
In the boxes of the archives sit all the dark and terrible things no one willingly entertains in their waking hours, all of them so toxically terrifying that they have great power to inflict terrible damage, to leach away the very essence of who a person is and to make them forget very important, very human things.
The title comes from one of the many affirmations he recites throughout the book, and he needs such affirmations because he displays behaviours showing he is not kind, more thoughtless than cruel in his lack of kindness.
There is a sort of pitiable love story with neighbor Rhoda and her daughter Timmy. In fact his actions to assist her towards the end of the story are the few positive active choices he makes.
In all an interesting premise that the story didn't quite live up to for me. Some reviewers describe it as a comedy but I mostly just feel bad for the characters. It’s like a dull ache watching their lives so drained of energy and life.
I read, enjoyed and noted Hiron Ennes debut Leech and looked forward to reading their next work. The Works of Vermin is even more impressive than Leech. It’s a Weird City novel and as such as much a character as our protagonists and antagonists Niall Harrison at Locus puts it better than I could… "Tiliard, “a grand bridge of a city,” well-built across a gorge through which flows an acid and strange river that is referred to as a “liquid mind.” Tiliard is many-levelled, filled with factories and canals and fields of carnivorous tulips; its original architecture was concentric, but it has been etched by history. “When it cannot grow out, it settles for down, when it cannot crawl skyward, it turns inward.” It has a Sommelier Laureate and a Seamstress Laureate and a Dramaturge Laureate. It is a place where the high arts – ballet and poetry and portraiture and most of all opera – are not only revered but are actually part of the political infrastructure. Dances are also duels, or executions. It is a melange of Old Europe at its most decadent, architecture with a touch of Gaudi, court intrigue perhaps by Venice, performing arts by Germany. It has Rues as well as Streets. It is also a place infested with giant and/or mutated insects and other creatures, a place “warped” by “bioalchemic” incidents, and where weaponised perfumery is sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. It is an old city, in an old world, but given to frequent revolutions. It is ruled by a Chancellor and his Marshal, tyrants who fancy themselves patrons, perhaps philosophers; it is serviced by exterminators and sex workers and labourers. It is an intoxicating place to spend time, but its streets ring with echoes".
But its characters are no less complex and fascinating. Guy Moulène works as pest exterminator, hunting a giant bug that secretes ecdytoxin, which warps (horrifyingly, exquisitely) everything it comes into contact with, organic or non-organic – and there are far too many people who see the potential in that. Guy also does sex work on the side all this hustle to keep his feral younger sister Tyro from sign work contracts which for the underclass, the exploited are terrible. Another character Asteritha Vost (Aster), to call her a perfumer is to undersell think alchemist, wizard, and personal stylist. Her past saw her lungs were badly damaged by a chemical weapon when she was a child, in the city’s last civil war. Aster is sent to ‘acquire’ a dancer for her employer and patron, the Marshal (think head of the military under a dictator; he’s not the dictator, but he is not someone you want to fuck with). By the end, the city is on fire, and neither Guy nor Aster’s stories are anything like what you thought they’d be at the beginning.
Throw in toxins of the bizarre insects produced by the river are turned into perfumes that give gifts to the wearer: the ability to control people’s actions, or maybe just a more attractive smile. The devastating building-deforming toxins used in previous intra-regime battles have changed entire areas of the city, and led to artistic movements. Then there’s the opera, where the killings on stage are very real, with those who displease the ruling chancellor being put to death to serve the cause of theatre.
Around these wild concepts, Ennes builds a story of deep satire, constantly hilariously yet deeply disturbing and utterly ruthless about what it says about the ruling classes. This is a city whose constant changes of authoritarian regime are named as art movements: from neo-revivalism to extemporism. The centrepiece for this art-obsessed city is the opera, where as I noted above revolutions are powered by stage performances that portray real killings. It’s this mix of the utterly pretentious with the shockingly brutal that powers some of the outrageous wit and whimsical grotesqueness of the satire, sort of if Waugh’s Vile Bodies was crossed with 1984.
I realise this is too long and few if any will read it but sufficient to say when I read, about three quarters through the book, Ennes provides an astonishing pulls off one of the greatest structural narrative twists, which made me immediately lock myself into to re-read the book to pick up on those parts I had red and overlook pointing to this change. On tip from Sia at Every Book A doorway suggest "you should pay attention to character names, to people’s titles, and that this is a story that lavishes rewards on those who take heed of every detail"
Summing up I agree with Neil Harrison at Locus "Filled with some of the most twisted, inventive worldbuilding you’ll ever see and a perfectly poised balance of ruthless mockery of the decadent and corrupt with a well of deep humanity for those beneath them, The Works of Vermin is not just a landmark novel of dystopian satire but one of the great speculative works of the twenty-first century".
When I finished 'Lady's Knight' I wanted to immediately watch another amusing medieval mash up the 2001 movie A Knight's Tale ( Laura Fraser's Blacksmith Kate was my favourite, definitely need more stories featuring Medieval lady Blacksmiths, also more books about women brewer's in the medieval period apparently a profession that produced some amazing characters and wasn't as gendered as other professions) -Well sufficient to say I enjoyed this outing (well not so much the outing, that was horrible, but necessary for the story) of our Knight Gwen of Sparrow and our noble Isobelle of Avington and look forward to reading more.
As Williamaye Jones of Historical Novel Society puts it "Lady’s Knight is a riotous, romantic romp set in a fantasy England where dragons exist, girls joust (in secret), and queerness isn’t just present—it’s powerful."
The final book in the 'Her Majesty's Royal Coven' series. Our five witches introduced in the first book, Helena, Leonie, Elle, Niamh and Ciara have since divided (one died FFS, don't worry she got better) but with the prophecy of 'the Sullied Child' and the coming of the end of days in this book chapters come with different perspectives from these witches and others.
The prophecies, the demons, the cracks in the relationships were all leading in one conclusion. I the preceding two books led to satisfyingly conclusions stories of their own whilst contributing to a wider arc.
What we have this time round is an evil-genius level of meticulous planning to bring together threads from the previous books that you wouldn’t have even realised were important. All in all a very satisfying conclusion for our friends and as corny as it sounds the lesson - love has the means to conquer fear.
A Zombie novel similar in style to Colson Whitehead's 'Zone One' and Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth where as I am more a Mira Grant's Newsflesh zombie reader.
Our protagonist Orpen is a young woman who has grown up in the zombie apocalypse kept safe on an island off Ireland raised by her mother and Maeve. Her mother dies from a bite when Orpen is 12 then years later her other mother Maeve is bitten and she sets off on the mainland. Years into the apocalypse it is a desolate place, ravaged by a frightening and grisly foe, the skrake (Zombies). These demonic creatures infect a human with a poisonous bite, gradually transforming that person into one of their own.
The parallel story of Orpen's up bringing runs alongside chapters with her current situation carrying the slowing turning Maeve searching for a place called Pheonix City. The authors language evocates melancholy longing in a landscape both beautiful and brutal, and in the distinctive voice of Orpen a narrator who is both confident in her abilities and filled with fear and grief.
Orpen's tale continues in Sarah Davis-Goff's 2023 novel 'Silent City' which I shall read as soon as the Glen Waverley Public Library opens it's temporary collection while it is refurbished.
This was the book picked for my book club and if you are looking for a fast paced, well crafted LitRPG that has a bit more depth to it than the average Isekai adjacent genre then I recommend Dungeon Crawler Carl. Please remember it’s to be a 10 volume series first volume self-published in 2020 and when picked up by a publishing house exploded in popularity – even a live-action series is in production so I don’t need to say much more about it that hasn’t already been said. I am looking forward to reading the rest of the series. This book ends a natural conclusion but it does make you want to pick up the next volume immediately.
I will offer the words of Meed Touzani over at book summary
“Conclusion: The Verdict on This Beautiful Train Wreck Dungeon Crawler Carl shouldn’t work. It’s a book where a man kills monsters with his bare feet while his ex-girlfriend’s talking cat negotiates sponsorship deals, and somehow it also manages to say something real about corporate power, performative suffering, and what we’re willing to do to survive. “
All Hail Chaos is the second in the Time of Iron series in which of protagonist Rae dying from cancer finds herself in her sister’s favorite fantasy series. In the body of a villainess who in the original doesn’t live long, so Rae kinda had to change the story, just more changes than she expected.
Rae now betrothed to the dread forever Emperor (who she loved when she read about him, even loved the young man Key who he came from) now desperately wanting to change him to be less dreadful. The strength of this second outing in this meta-narrative series was the attention given to all the other characters were given the opportunity in the spotlight not just Rae and Eric. I especially enjoined the brief, but dramatic appearance of Merel the minstrel towards the end.
My only regret, the final in the trilogy isn't out yet.
There is a thriving genre of stories about female real world characters falling into another world as the hero of their favourite fantasy book or more recently in their favourite video game, there is now a number of those where you end up taking over the body of the major antagonist or villain. I first encountered this in the anime 'My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!' In that story our villainess avoids her doom by being unfailing positive, supportive and with an impressive gardening ability attracting all the characters to fall in love.
In this first in the Time of iron Trilogy our snarky rather than plucky Rae, instead leans into the role as sexy villain seeking only what she needs return to her world by stealing the Flower of Life and Death, which with her infinite knowledge of the story. That is, until she wakes up in the body of Rahela, the evil stepsister to the heroine, who is due to be executed the next day. Together with a motley crew of the most wicked characters, she starts scheming to pull off this deadly heist and maybe, possibly give the villains a chance at a happy ending, if they can survive until the final page.
A strong driver in this anrrative is Rae's growing awareness of the rest of her crew, she has named the vipers, who she initially considered she could use and disregard since they are just figures in the story. Long Live Evil is ridiculously entertaining, campy, and extremely meta, and somehow it just works? I love the narrative device of Rae not remember some of the details of the first book because it didn't get interesting until the Once and Forever Emperor appears.
The other characters are also interesting plays on the fantasy stereotypes with many readers really cheering for Key (the unhinged and slightly sociopathic guard with a dangerously seductive grin) and The Cobra (a rakish spymaster with a heart of gold despite his interestingly traumatic backstory). The second point of view, in the story is given by Marius, was an interesting take on the stoic, vow-restrained bad arse character with a tragic backstory and a merciless heart—yet somehow a hero.
The story involving Rae's cancer in our world is especially heart wrenching when I learned of the authors own struggles with cancer.
The ending left me leaping straight into the next volume All Hail Chaos.
The first novel The Blighted Stars is a fast paced thriller of a space opera with a war between cunning fungus, AI spinning into madness, ecological critique, explosions, banter, and challenging romance. The Fracked Dark is the bridge book in the trilogy and in many this is where the story can struggle but I found this sequel as enthralling as the first.
The tale continues the Canus as metaphor … Capitalism. So I like Alex Tas at Quil to live "dove into The Fractured Dark, commie senses tingling" and the realisation that you can even know about the infection, know it is influencing you decisions and you still fall for it.. Alex again "Extraction, environmental degradation, personal relations, the structure of society and the relations of the people within it are all tainted by this unseen force".
Other reviewers mentioned they found the story mor confusing than the first. I think the parts that could have been the most confusing though, were deftly handled by O’Keefe’s writing ability.
I also like how the author 'reset' the relationship between Naira and Tarquin partly feels like retreading old ground, with similar difficulties in the matter of power, ethics, and responsibility to negotiate but this time its is Tarquin knows more about Naira than she does about him, which reverses the dynamic from the first novel. This relationship is the emotional heart of the story so far.
Looking forward to reading book 3 The Bound Worlds.
In a far future where Earth exists but as a barely inhabitable abandoned husk and humanity lives in constructed artificial stations dominated by a corporate alliance known as MERIT (the initials of the surnames of the five constituent families) the reach of humanity is every expanding and yet impoverished all the time, their continued survival pegged to a rare mineral called relkaktite, first found on Venus and now mined everywhere, its presence in the artificial golden pathways that line everyone with added strength, knowledge and skills, the key, so it is said, to humanity’s future progress and success.
The Mercator family patriarch Acaelus is the archetypical controlling corporate tyrant/mafioso tolerating no failure or deviation in his orbit, including his gentle, geologist son Tarquin, whose frequent observation of the nature of this sixth cradle (the term for human sustaining planets) I was intrigued by and wish I knew more geology to know if it was through research or just sounded sciencey.
In this sci-fi world, humans have achieved a longer lifespan by “printing” their neural map into a new body when the old one dies. Reminiscent of Richard K. Morgan's of 'Altered Carbon'.
The book opens with exploding starships and the action from there never lets up. We meet one of our protagonists Naira Sharp who used to be a highly expert body guard called and Exemplar before she began to suspect that the Mercators were causing the planets to collapse.
Through in a mystery about TWO competing fungus, walking dead like missprints of people from these neural maps, Ais and space opera with cyberpunk corporate noir.
Consider two themes of this story
turning a blind eye to the ecological impacts of advancing technology. the danger of allowing a handful of individuals or families to control most wealth.
Can't imagine why this might resonate with readers
I was engrossed by Dolki Min's story of a shapeshifting alien. Such a character is of course going to challenge our binary categorisations of identity and gender. In our introduction to our narrator, whose name we only learn in the final page, cleverly drops information about themselves at the beginning of the story, and lets the reader assign a gender to the creature based on their own biases. This is, of course, a lesson to the reader, as the alien confronts our expectations of gender and our desperate need to gather data and slot someone neatly into a well-defined category.
Throughout the novella we are made aware of how much hostile attention is draw when they fail to successfully imitate a “normal” human, and the way this contributes to body conformity
“They can’t wait to ogle a monster. Without monsters, how would they withstand the unrelenting futility of their days?”
As a cis white able male I am unsure of how clearly this tale speaks to the experience those who society judges as non-conforming but even I can see how arbitrary and performative gender is. The alien labour under the earth's gravity and their old and constant enemy stairs I feel the story also makes pointed observations about ableism.
The translator has mentions she had to develop a different method to highlight the more alienesque thoughts than in the original Korean and her choice in the variable spacing font did a brilliant job conveying the difference.
I have yet to read a T.Kingfisher novel that I haven't enjoyed, her mixing of the horrific and charming and the her focus on female characters who in other stories or even history have long made her a favourite of mine.
And whilst I initially struggled with A Sorceress Comes to Call I realised it was nothing to do with Kingfisher but it is set in a period of history I personally find a bit blah. I have a similar issue with some of Shirley Jackson's short stories set in mid-century USA, it's not them it's me.
This story, a retelling of Grimm story of Goose Girl, soon entranced me with the tale of fourteen year old Cordelia whose mother is the titular sorceress Evangeline who seeks a position of security through the control of a wealthy man by marriage. She can brutally compel others to do her bidding, often forcing her daughter into complete, docile obedience whenever she does anything that annoys her. Their house has no doors, and Cordelia is allowed little privacy and fewer dreams of her own, frequently left isolated with no company beyond Falada, Evangeline beautiful, but deeply creepy horse/familiar.
The story is told through dual narratives Cordelia’s voice is balanced by that of the sardonic Hester, a crotchety spinster with a bum knee who brings a mature, sensible spirit to the story and serves as a stoic balance to the timid, socially awkward younger girl who has never been allowed to imagine a life of her own. Neither of these women is what anyone might call a traditional fantasy heroine.
Kingfisher’s male characters are also remarkably multifaceted and emotionally vulnerable in ways this genre is often loath to allow.
I was chuffed to determine a possible timeline to the story as the book Cordelia often refers to on how to behave is "the ladies book of etiquette and manual of politeness' was published in 1860 and a one part of the story references the concern that someone will develop 'Lockjaw'. Since a vaccine for Tetanus was first synthesised in 1890 and the inactive tetanus toxoid in 1924. The more effective adsorbed version of the vaccine, was developed in 1938, so can't be earlier than that.
Before reading this I recommend reading The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi first, it covers the story of our protagonist Amina al-Sirafi retired pirate legend dragged out of her quiet life by the promise of a big payday and a sense of old loyalty (there is also some blackmailing at play). Reassembling her old crew: Dalila, the unnerving Mistress of Poisons; Tinbu, her devoted first mate; and Majed, her sharp-eyed navigator. The book ends with Amina having traded one retirement for a new, stranger kind of life, sailing the seas on Peri (sort of gods of the air) business collecting 5 artifacts that are too dangerous for the world and destroying them. Amina seems to have actually found a decent rhythm. She gets to sail, do the occasional dangerous errand for the Peris and still come home to her daughter Marjana. It's not exactly the peaceful retirement she'd imagined, but it's manageable.
Then after Raksh, the spirit of discord she is unhappily magically bound to in marriage, goes and causes a scene with the peri council. The results in her next tasks on an inescapable island with a reality altering spindle possessed by a tyrannical embodied spirit if vengeance
The heart of this story is the friendship between Amina and Dalila. TDalila is someone we've always seen as composed, sharp, slightly terrifying with all cool efficiency and deadly competence. In The Tapestry of Fate, Shannon peels back those layers and shows us who Dalila actually is underneath all of that armor. Her past, her vulnerabilities, her deep and complicated love for Amina.
Another fabulous Mideastern adventure with a final line hooking me in to find out what happens in the next book.
This one certainly falls into the 'unreliable narrator' genre, but unlike most not because they are a psychopath or a narcissist, far from it. In fact Elenor's unrelentingly critical inner voice is one of the challenges of this debut novel. Elenor is acerbic, aloof, unbearably awkward, rude, and a complete lack of social skills and as her character and background is revealed and you begin to see the nightmare she was living and the horror she has lived as a child you only want to see her achieve some measure of happiness.
The book follows Eleanor Oliphant, a thirty-year-old finance clerk in Glasgow whose life is governed by rigid routines: work, weekly phone calls with “Mummy,” and weekends blurred by vodka.
The way the story is revealed, a detail here a memory there of what Elenor is hiding from herself (and therefore, the reader) as it shades in the rest of her world. The discussions of loneliness, trauma, and the life-saving power of ordinary kindness resonates. Eleanor’s journey from isolation to connection is neither easy nor sentimental, which makes her eventual hope feel genuinely earned.
This is Space Odyssey crossed with chosen family where four young friends (late twenties, though if you read them as younger that's fine as the emotional intensity of the characters would be consistent) who whilst investigating the mystery of the disappearance of all the crew on the launch day of the Providence 1 the first dark matter powered spaceship twenty years earlier mission to Proxima Centauri B on a near-future earth stumbling towards environmental and societal collapse.
But at its heart it’s a sapphic romance where the lead character Cleo, who’s long dreamed of becoming an astronaut but maybe not like this thank you very much, falls in love with the resident hologram Billie created by and from the mental engrams of head of the mission, Captain Wilhemina Lucas.
I thought her fellow accidentally crew mates Kaleshia, Abe, and Ros who are a breath of race and gender and sexual orientation more reflective of where I hope our culture will be by 2061, and frankly where our society should be already. I wish we had got more time with these other characters who were interesting and complex but had too little time in the story.
The title comes from a poem 'The Old Astronomer' by Sadie Williams.
"Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night"
Six years after the publication of Hench where we read the story of Anna Tromedlov's journey from office temp learning the cost of superheros and joining with villains at first for work and then because the superhero organisation and in particular the world greatest superhero SuperCollider who injured her and at the end of the book saw her be the engine of his demise.
Well this book I enjoyed even more than Hench (which I enjoyed a lot) but it does get darker as you would expect from Anna's arc. Sia at 'Every Book a Doorway' seems to have enjoyed it as much as me and provides an excellent description/warning "realistic, morally grey, awfully complex complexity continues; it’s Villain’s defining characteristic. Which makes perfect sense, because while Hench didn’t feel morally complicated (in the sense that, yes, Anna and her team were doing awful things, but they were doing them to unmitigatedly awful people!) Villain is a darker read, with Anna progressively taking more and more steps that fewer and fewer readers will be willing to cheer on. This is a natural continuation on from Hench’s ending – which was much darker than the rest of it – so if you flinched at that ending? Then you probably do not want to pick up the sequel".
This book like Hench also end on a dramatic cliffhanger and I hope I don't have to wait six years for the next but even if I do I am sure it will be worth it.
This is Kiersten White‘s second Dracula book, after her remarkable Lucy Undying, I am here for it and hope she continues to explore the mythology of Dracula. Set in closing years of 19th century Europe. Our remarkable protagonist is consulting detective Anneke who has been pursuing the figure at the centre of her famous father Abraham Van Helsing's murder. Anneke does not believe in the supernatural. She is a scientist, a seeker of truth that she can observe and note and study. I appreciated when Anneke reviews who fathers notes with her keen scientific method sensibilities was a crap vampire hunter. In her eyes, her father didn’t discover vampires in his later years, but spiralled into madness, keeping journals full of mythical creatures that do not, and never did, exist. Anneke’s journey, then, parallels her father’s own discovery that the world is darker, stranger, and more frightening than he could have imagined.
Another standout was the cast of characters that surround Anneke. They encourage her, challenge her, and provide skills of their own that Anneke lacks. While David and Maher were great, Inge the determined younger woman that Anneke saw so much of herself in. But it was the romance between Anneke and Diavola who she thinks murdered her father is where much of the strength of the narrative progresses.
"Call me...call me whatever the fuckyou like. Isha. Or Isobel. Io. Imogen. Iris. Ivy. If there is a point to all this - to any of the cacophonous bullshit in my head - it's that I don't think I've ever been sure what the I in I Am stands for. But it's the only word or name or pronoun that's always been mine. That nobody's tried to take from me."
So right at the start, if the title of the book hadn't clued you in "…from hell's heart I stab at thee" we know this is a science fiction retelling of a gender-swapped, queer as fuck Moby Dick in space and I am here for it.
So for those that have read Moby Dick I think will enjoy this even more because of the shout out the author/narrator/disaster pansexual makes about their story is clearly coming from someone who read Moby Dick. "And yes, in hindsight I could probably have worked that information into the text more elegantly instead of just devoting the occasional chapter to long digressions about biology,..."
This also made me realise just how much Moby Dick is an exploration of capitalism in which value is exploitivly extracted from everything just to make a few rich.
One of whateverthefuckyoulike's first encounters is a terran called Q whose dialog in Latin consisting mostly of quotes from Catullus or Cicero or the Vulgate Bible; a really delightful joke about Elmo are worth having a translation app handy.
Since I have read Moby Dick I am unsure if it stands alone for those who haven't. I think it would Cat Treadwell at the Fantasy Hive certainly thinks so "This captures the intrinsic humanity contained in great literature, and reminds us why such stories are told and retold. It reflects who we are now, with all our crazy dreams, goals and utterly illogical societies, via the deep inner thoughts of a lonely fictional woman from the far future".
‘We’re bound together by webs of trust and betrayal and pain and comfort and triumph and humiliation and caring and apathy and life and life and life.
And below the web, the endless void.
And at its heart, monsters.’
Our plucky protagonist is the fiercely alone Karys Eska who has a well-earned ‘fuck around and find out’ attitude a result of a foolishly desperate act in her teens when she bargained her soul away to a terrifying eldritch being, Sabaster. Giving her the abilities of a Deathspeaker; she can communicate with the newly departed and see things through the 'veneer' but means at some indetermined future Sabaster will 'claim' her which is just as terrifying as it sounds.
Karys earns money (but not a lot) using her gifts to investigate suspicious deaths around the city. However, her latest job went horribly wrong and leaves Ferain Taliade the last survivor of a slaughtered embassy existing in the material world only as Karys’s shadow and ever present voice in her head.
When Karys, her ever present soul shadow the mysterious Ferain and vivacious scholar Winola head to Varesli, Ferain's home country, the story becomes a road trip that involves travel by giant spider and encounters with skin-thieves. As in other Kerstin Hall novels her worldbuilding is subtly revealed - no long clunky blocks exposition devlivered by sidewalk story tellers - anything she needs you to understand, Karys sees, or interacts with, or has cause to explain or have explained to her, succinctly and elegantly and there is something new to discover—and marvel at or be horrified by—at every turn.
This dark miasma of a story that for all the fantasy and world building elements seems to have been crafted to explore the consequences of desperate choices. All of the major characters have made some that they were driven to make by their extreme circumstances.
A few found the ending unsatisfying but I think it's well crafted and given all we learned about these gods and the characters consistent.