Jet Silver
This book includes the most utterly ridiculous dude fantasy I ever did see. Look, I mean, yeah, it's all drug cartels and the CIA being monumental assholes and all that history was interesting, even if it was very this-happened, that-happened in the present tense.
Buuuut. But, and I say this with the greatest respect for actual real sex workers, the one woman with a major role is the most hilarious example of the ‘whore with a heart of gold' trope I have ever seen. Like, for real, when you were finishing high school, she was studying the, um, blade. She is headhunted by a madam at sixteen and trains hard to become the best escort she can be, and she is! Every single male character universally thinks she's the most beautiful woman they have ever seen! She reads the sports pages and the WSJ and she's a great businessperson and investor! She speaks every language! She has never for a moment considered further applications for her skills! But like, she doesn't enjoy sex. Never! She can't even get off with a man! And her one true love is ... a priest thirty years older than her. Completely platonic, of course. They met because she was caught in the Mexico City earthquake and was 'a warrior helping the recovery effort'. Seriously, the only other women in this 500+ page thing are a couple of sainted wives (who all eventually betray their husbands for the good of the children) or three examples of...we'll say young mistresses though the narrative isn't so kind to them. Who also betray their partners - who are all murdering torturing cartel bosses who are shocked, shocked at the betrayal. And they all get murdered, of course. So, pick this up this for a fairly readable account of the War on Drugs that takes a dim view of America's role in it and in Latin America in general. Just, it's Dude Power Fantasy 101 and it's pretty ridiculous.
Self, you have got to stop with the recs from the ‘here are all the lesbian detectives' lists. Just having a lesbian detective does not a good book make. This story is all over the place.
Also, when I'm reading this book on the strength of lesbian detectives, do you know what is the exact opposite of what I want? Random crazies kidnapping her because of her red hair in order that she breed the next master race. Seriously? Kidnap, torture, drugging, and overt constant rape and pregnancy threats and grotesque restraints. Do. Not. Fucking. Want.
While the setting is really cool - an Indian-based matriarchal space-faring empire - and the premise is right up my alley - runaway princess dragged home from her violent life of smuggling to take the throne - the characters did not convince me.
This was one of those books where the characters don't feel like real people because their reactions, decisions and even what they know or don't know at any moment changes depending on what the plot needs. Even interesting religion based worldbuilding wasn't consistent through the book. For example, there's an early scene where it's shown as taboo to speak the name of a recently deceased person lest it pull their soul away from the afterlife, and then this taboo that was apparently deeply shocking is never mentioned again. Many, many dead characters are mentioned all over the place, by all sorts of people, though.
I really wanted to love this, but I won't continue with the series. That said, it's a good story, and if you're a reader who's less bothered by a book being obviously fiction, give this one a go.
This book doesn't deserve a two star rating, but its marketing team does. I was expecting ghosts interacting with physics, and I got all the ways that academia sucks for people who aren't white men (amen, absolutely), and a treatise on parenting. Which... was not the book I thought I was reading, or a book I'd pick up at all.
So I have that weird cheated feeling, which makes me mad at this book. Bu the book is fine. The book is a perfectly fine specimen of the kind of book it is. Just, why would you market your mundane contemporary lit fic as being sci fi / horror lit? Nobody ends up happy here.
I liked what this book was doing more than I liked how it did it, by which I mean its conceit is bloody brilliant and chilling and entirely correct, and at the same time it isn't the most engagingly written book. The idea is in the way of the execution, but also it doesn't matter because it makes its very good points in a very baroque way that I think is pretty effective, even while some readers will hurl the book across the room in frustration. It does not explain itself to you, and for me, that's completely fine.
Everyone should read it, and it's going to be confusing to a greater or lesser degree depending on where a person sits in their political leanings and familiarity with Australian political and colonial history - particularly from the Tampa scandal onward. Or any version of Western colonial history, quite possibly.
Extra props for the best, most subtle and damning sketch of how frustrating ‘I don't see race' is to everyone who doesn't get that luxury.
I'll be thinking about this one for a while.
Nooooope this was not for me.
Well written and all but I am so mad at this book. A fond three stars if it had ended at the start of WWII. After that, it took a trip to misery town via mass dog death and the sad tragic gay man. No thanks. *content warning on animal death below*...seriously, though WTF @ Antarctica. Some dude rebuilt his plan out of dog skin. The main character allows his own dog to be shot to be part of this. I don't care how much Antarctic Winter Madness we have going on here, I didn't need that in my head and now I'm never getting rid of it. Cheers, Chabon!
This is not the right book for someone who likes a plot-driven story, but it was just exactly the right book for me this week. Slow and dreamy and beautiful, and also full of queerness. This is going to be one of my favourite reads of the year, I think. It's certainly one of the loveliest lesbian awakenings I've read.
Beautiful prose, characters I wanted to cheer on one moment and shake until they got a clue the next. And I'm delighted to say, while it's not the kind of novel that spells things out, no one is dead at the end and there's the strong implication of a happy ending for all the queer characters.
Content warnings for: infidelity, physical assault (not between romantic/sexual partners), period-typical homophobia but no slurs and no on-page homophobic violence. No bury your gays trope, either, hallelujah.
Oh my God, Aaronovitch, please get an Australian beta reader if you're going to have prominent Australian characters. This was just embarrassing.
Otherwise, I liked this one a lot. It didn't have the pacing problems of the last two London novels, and was back to feeling like a fun read. Also it has more Nightingale, which is always good.
Made me remember how much I like Peter as a character.
Two and a half stars, rounded up.
The content notes I wanted were: Deliberate animal harm as a form of bullying. The cat does not live. If you want to avoid this storyline, skip Harley's chapter. There is a one-line reference to it another character's chapter but nothing else.
This is one of those books where the story is told from a series of POVs, only one of which is repeated. It did a surprisingly good job of allowing the homophobic characters to be sympathetic and relatable at the same time as being awful and - sometimes simultaneously - unsympathetic. In fact I think the non-taskforce characters had more care and attention shown to them than the queer characters did. It was a weird mix and in the end I wasn't that sure who the audience was actually supposed to be.
I feel like this book could have gone one of two directions - either the gay taskforce attempting to reform “the most homophobic town in America” is completely successful and it's all very heartwarming. Or, it's a real-world sort of darker outcome and there's violence and very little change bar one or two characters, or the whole town divides against itself.
Instead it went down the middle, and so wasn't really successful at either outcome. I think I was expecting the heartwarming version, and instead got bullied kids with no recourse and a dead cat.
I mean. HEA for most characters in the epilogue and all, but this really wasn't what I thought I was getting. Also, where was my chapter with Jamal? I feel a bit cheated.
Edit eighteen months later: Downgrade from three stars to two, because it turns out that every time I see this book cross my dash I only remember how unpleasant and awful I found the worldbuilding. It remains a well written book, just one it turns out I wish I hadn't read.
Original review:
The things I wished I knew going in:
The dog does not live. And there is rape upon rape upon rape, and on-page suicide as a result of rape. And mind wipes, constantly, which is the feature of this world. Also homophobia.
The structure was really interesting and well done. It was plenty readable. The love story was propulsive. As usual I wish books came with content tags, is all.
2.5 stars. It's well written and it gets artist characters right, which is why I wanted to read it. I wasn't bothered by the dual timeline and the characters are likeable. I really enjoyed the art restoration process.
But it needed a trigger warning for: violent on-page rape, experienced by the character as deeply traumatic and resulting in a pregnancy carried to full term of a child the character knew she did not want. The rape is a deliberate punishment in the text for a perceived slight, and is framed by the narrative as being enabled by the female character's choices in exercising her right to live her life on her own terms, ie the narrative suggests that she 'brought this on herself'. Other characters push back on this idea, but it didn't soften the experience for me. There is also: murder (of the rapist), pretty nasty racism and garden variety sexism, though also several explicitly feminist and anti-racist characters. Also suicide of a parent, grief for parents, difficult relationship with parents, alcoholism, mental illness (bipolar), incarceration, domestic violence, strong theme of guilt.
The author could have made different choices in setting up the central mystery without it being this. The world did not need another book like this and I wish I hadn't read it.
Abandoned at 50%. I was looking for stories of one man living in the desert, and I liked those parts. The social commentary, thoughts on policy and infrastructure, and to be honest the gore got rather too much. I'm sure Mr Abbey was quite socially liberal for his time, but the attitudes to women and anyone else who isn't a white able bodied manly man were more than I wanted to spend any more time with.
I was working with the audio copy, and it's possible I would have pushed through if I had a physical copy - I could have skipped the chapters about how cars are evil, etc, (sure, but that battle is lost) and the chapter about how to fix the Navajos (just yikes all the way), and then perhaps the voice wouldn't have began to sound so smug and self satisfied after four or five hours of this.
This one's just not for me, but if anyone knows of desert stories without too much in the way of regressive politics, I'd love the rec.
What an absolute joy of a book. I'm very sorry I put off experiencing it for so long.
As a reader, I'm amazed at the skill in crafting such a nuanced story without using any words at all.
As an artist, the skill in composition and rendering, the emotion that leaps from every drawing, is just astounding.
I think I'll be spending a lot of time with this one.
2.5 stars, rounding down.
The concept that drives this book is so cool: film as a method of haunting, film as doorway, and some pretty awesome mythology that was new to me. Lady Midday is a Slavic noontime demon/goddess, and I'm completely delighted to be introduced to her.
Despite some truly beautiful lines that just shimmer off the page, this one did not work at all for me in the execution. Maybe you need to be a film person to really resonate with it.
The story centres on Lois, an out of work Canadian film critic and former film studies teacher who wants to write a book that will make a mark. She's also a chronic pain sufferer, and the mother of a young son who is autistic.
She recognises some found footage as matching the imagery she remembers from a grade school textbook, and thinks she can prove that a woman who disappeared from a moving train in 1918 - at that time already a local legend of eccentricity and tragedy - was the first female Canadian filmmaker.
So, great framework.
But. It suffers from ‘expert syndrome': the writer is writing about her own field, and has fallen into the trap of including way, way too much explaining/complaining about one's job. Too much Canadian film history, technical detail, and talk of the politics of the Canadian film scene. This is supposed to be a horror novel, and while I do understand that grant applications are a thing of horror in their own way... they're not particularly horrifying to read about. This kind of thing really got in the way of the story, and there are ways for it not to. Elizabeth Hand's Cass Neary series, for example, geeks the hell out about everything to do with photography, but as technical as it gets, it never feels like it's extraneous to the story. It feels fascinating. In this book, all the detail just feels boring, and the POV character doesn't have the necessary humour or verve to rescue it.
Aside from that problem, the characters and pacing fall flat for me. There was so much potential here for a truly creepy, thrilling story, but the way the story is told transmits about as much emotion as a report about a school excursion. The POV character just does not seem to be all that worried about the supernatural, and is even less worried about the (pretty ruthless) non-supernatural enemies she has. At one point someone breaks into her flat, and her only reaction is to laugh and brush off her husband's alarm, because she knows that what they took is worthless to them.
The supporting characters don't feel real or fleshed out, more like foils who do what they need to do to move the plot forward.
My other problem was with relating to Lois. She is pretty unlikable, and that's fine, there are plenty of unlikable characters out that who I do in fact like quite a bit. I'm okay with her grumpiness and rudeness, and I can see where her snappishness comes from. The portrait of living with chronic pain and insomnia while caring for her son rings true to me, and as unsympathetic as she might come across in this context she felt real and relatable there. What I couldn't get past was how cold and driven she was. In the course of the story, several people she's been working with die, and some of them quite horribly. All of the deaths are related to their involvement in her project. And she feels nothing about any of them, not a single thought of grief or regret, remorse or acknowledgement of responsibility. She's only concerned with how each person's... well, I'll say unavailability, because that really seems to be her concern... is going to impact her project. At no stage does she worry for anyone else she's working with, or try to convince them to back away now. The sole exception is to try to prevent her husband from dying by dying herself, and even that is framed as choosing which parent would be better for her son to retain - it's still not shown as her actually worrying about her husband.
So all in all, pretty disappointed because goddamn that is a cool concept to start with.
I found this book to be very uneven. I loved the first half of the story and thought I'd be heading for a four or five star rating, but in the back half I was skimming. Clunky dialogue, cartoon evil, and heavy handed messaging soured it for me.
That said, I loved the two military characters and they really came to life for me. I an a sucker for a cocky fighter pilot and a long-suffering NCO holding it all together. My favourite parts of the story were their action scenes - and also Walker, back on Earth and trying to get back to Country before he dies.
I would love to read the book that this book is maybe another two rounds of edits from becoming.
This was cool. It's a gripping mystery with supernatural elements, but without all the usual ick that shows up in a dude-written murder mystery. It's a relatively graphic set of murders, sure, but no major sexualised violence. Two of the main characters are gay and good friends of the MC. Racism is called out all over the place and punished whenever possible. No misogyny to speak of.
This seems a low bar to clear but my god it was nice to read a gritty, plotty mystery full of details about what guns everyone is using, a high body count, and a serial killer, without having to put up with any of them. I'm definitely continuing with this series. It's got a noir sort of feel in that the MC is a bit of a lone wolf who finds the connections no one else saw, in a sliiiightly unbelievable manner that I forgive on grounds of rule of cool, gets menaced wherever he goes, is a complete smart ass, and is an alcoholic in recovery. I liked that he's a former cop and kind of looks into things for something to do as he adjusts to life after the murder of his wife and young daughter. It puts him in a position to have cop and FBI contacts as well as criminal contacts, which makes for a far more interesting cast than either alone. I'm really interested to see where the supernatural side of this series goes. I do not particularly care about the make, model, and history of every single gun that shows up, but it would not be a dude-written murder mystery without this detail.
I'd been really looking forward to this but it wasn't for me. Reading it felt kind of like swimming in lilac jelly. All very pleasant on a sensory level but there was nothing to grasp onto and everything was the same shade of purple.
Also, I've read a lot of Max Gladstone, and now I can see his writing tics, and if I ever read another description of somebody “breaking” something or someone it will be too soon.
(I started counting once. It was either this or Empress of Forever, and the count was 37 instances of ‘break' and its variants used as a verb. Stop, sir, I beg of you.)
