Ceridwen

I'll admit I was trepidatious about being assigned this novel to review at first. Much as the setup is catnip to me -- a fresh take on technological shutdown and societal collapse? Sign me up! -- I have a real thing about how the Amish are sometimes portrayed. They're sort of infantized and fetishized in a lot of contexts, like they're just these adorable weirdos who don't have electricity. Not to get too far into it, but any religious group who practices shunning is on my shit list, and that goes for Scientology as well. But! The Amish are no monolith, like any group, and embrace a number of societal ideals I find admirable, non violence being the main one. Anyway.

David Williams managed to sidestep all of my fears, and spin a compelling tale. His main character, Jacob, is not without faults, but his very active engagement with the rough realities of the technological failure of the English (that's us, to them) is deep and thoughtful. A very good book. 

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Enjoyable action-driven detective yarns, with a magical twist. Though I occasionally have "but wait..." moments about how the House system works -- surely that makes no sense -- I admit this is nit-picking. I'm not reading Andrews novels for robust legal systems, so what I am complaining about? But they are good at energetic, ranging plots full of enough bloodshed and yearning to keep me well pleased. 

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I've been intermittently reading James's novels as the mood strikes me for historicals, and it always seems to go thusly: one novel that's cute and light, followed by one (or even two) that are too douchey or dumb. I first hit James because she's the daughter of Robert Bly, a local poet of some note. I pretty much live to hate read Bly's stuff, which I have the occasion to do because my dad thinks he's awesome. So there's this tangled web of fathers and daughters and reading and whatnot. 

Though James is a romance novelist, she's also a Shakespeare scholar and Robert and Carol Bly's kid. (I like Carol better than Robert as a writer; Carol's essays are aces.) So sometimes James writes a nice little ditty, and sometimes she goes too far up her own thing referencing Elizabethan poets. I adore Donne, but seriously, there's a limit. It just feels douchey at a point in Georgian romantic smut. And it's not as if I oppose some literary gilding in ur romance fiction, but just that it was excessive here. For sure the main character's dad DID NOT write the Christopher Smart poem to His Cat Joeffry, which is a great poem, and the misattribution annoys me some, even though it's fully acknowledged in a preface. 

This was not bad, just .. odd as a romance novel. It took me ages to sort the primary couple, which can be fine, like in Talisman Ring, but here just felt diffuse. Maybe it's the Georgian setting, which is historically less, ahem, straightlaced than either the Recency or the Victorian periods, but the open fuckery sometimes felt forced. Even set now, where fuckery is not entirely unexpected, I find the easy acceptance of marital affairs, especially by women, not precisely believable. Women have always been under the thumb.

Anyway, this was fine, but clearly the start of a series, so it feels like set dressing more than playing. I'm sure I read a later book in this series at one point, and while are nods to all kinds of shit that happened in previous books, which I find irritating, the book itself was well richer for the personalities laid down earlier. Alas, early and later have their issues. 

A literary map of London, with its writers and characters charted by neighborhood. Which, this us just about the coolest. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul have nowhere near the literary relevance of London (not even close), but I would kill for a literary map of my hometown(s). Here's a start:

--Dr and Mrs Kennicot from Sinclair Lewis's Main Street honeymoon near Lake Calhoun; she's from St Paul
--Much of the action of War for the Oaks takes place in and around First Ave
--Zombie novel Fiend bops around St Paul and the St Paul suburbs, ending in the St Paul County Courthouse
--Meridel LeSeuer's The Girl takes place in the dodgy part of St Paul circa 1920s; not sure where exactly
--Franzen's Freedom takes place in Ramsey Hill in St Paul
-- Diablo Cody worked as a stripper in Sex World, Sheikh's, and other Minneapolis strip clubs, as detailed in Candy Girl
--Though much of Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods takes place in the Lake of the Woods (doi), it starts in St Paul when the protagonist's bid for governor fails
--Similarly, the (I think only pseudonymous narrator) of Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance starts in the Wedge neighborhood. Specific streets are named, something like 25th and Colfax
--For sure there's stuff by William Kent Kreuger, Garrison Keillor, Robert Bly, and Louise Erdrich I can't think of right now.

Man, I really like Clarke's stuff. Not real flashy, but emotionally detailed.

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How do I go about changing an entry? Four Sisters is the working title of this novel, not its actual title. Which is Star's End, and quite good. Maybe not as affecting as her other stuff, but still something that I'll be thinking about this week. 

The Golden Spider and The Silver Skull are both fairly paint-by-numbers steampunk: it's vaguely Victorian-ish, with the ton & the peerage and all that, but there are Babbage cards and steam mechanicals and such too. 

The Golden Spider is probably the better novel, following a girl scientist trying to stop a killer and cure her brother and also there are spies.The Silver Skull relies on one of those "we have to pretend to be married so we might as well bang" scenarios, which I find tedious, and I didn't buy the reasons for the lovers to be apart anyway. But bonus points for pteranodons that the evil lady saddles up so she can have sky battles with airships. That was fresh. 

What I really wanted to say about this series, the thing I found utterly charming, was the epically nerdy science behind both of these plots. A science that was lovingly detailed with so much legit scientific terminology that I would just start skimming at points as the principals breathlessly talked chemistry at each other. The author's bio states that Renwick has a PhD in chemistry, and it shows: she loves this shit; she's not going to dumb it down; and she's going to work out the science plausibly, even if it's fictional. 

Hard science is very rarely my thing. I simply do not care about verisimilitude, unless you wrap it up with some actual characters, which doesn't happen as often as I'd prefer. And generally I'm not reading steampunk for the articles, but because I like the dash-punk pulp aspects: I want to see me a fucking kraken, or an airship battle that crashes, burning, into the sea, or some automata struggling with sentience. But here, in books where the steampunkery was wan and drab, I lived for the nerdy stuff, in a weird reversal. It just goes to show that the enthusiasm of the writer towards the subject, be it chemistry or krakens, goes a long way toward my enjoyment of a novel. 

I am not fucking around: this is a great Kim Stanley Robinson novel. It's got everything I like about him: a bunch of hugely nerdy digressions, some legit science, a little light-hearted didacticism, and words words words. This man can write. Ok, sure, the plot is loose, but who even needs a plot when you've got a world like this, like ours but in extremis. 

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So this is a round-up I did for B&N SciFi, which is a little listicle-y because it's number 10 in a series and nobody much cares about, like, an actual review at that point. Either you'll read it because you're on the hook, or you won't.

But coming up with the list kinda reminded me how kinda terrible the Mercy Thompson series is about relationships between female characters. I think there's a big step forward in Silence Broken -- Mercy has real conversations with Honey, that Russian witch lady, and Marselia -- but that doesn't precisely make up for the previous 9 novels. It ends up being one of those bummers where I pretty much like everything about a series but a huge fucking gaping hole where normal human interaction should exist between people of the same gender, but alas, it doesn't. Or it does a little not, but. 

Oh, but as per the actual plot: I thought this one unstuck some stuff that had been, um, stuck, in the few previous. Mercy ends up kidnapped into Europe, so we get a whole new political and literal landscape to deal with. I though it shook up some things that needed shaking up in the Mercyverse. 

Uff da, this is some silly stuff.

Venom and Vanilla started with a bang. We're introduced to Alena on her death bed, cut down by a communicable disease that's so virulent that she's flown out to Whidbey Island off the coast of Seattle to die isolated and alone. It's a sad, slow beginning, nostalgic for her simple life and small rebellions. Alena was a member of the Firstamentalists, an almost cult-like religious group who brooked no contact with the Supernaturals: vampires, werewolves, etc. Of course, fiction being what it is, the narrative lack dictates that, in order to cure the fatal disease rapidly killing her, Alena must become a Supernatural. 

I actually loved watching a protagonist struggle with her religion. Alena holds to her principles, even though she'd long questioned them, long past my expectations. While I found her childish refusal to do anything close to cussing annoying -- for fuck's sake, donkey butt has nowhere near the frisson of asshole -- I commend the commitment to character. Alena is a good girl, a religious girl, and she's not going to shed her convictions just because she's like a giant snake or there's a hot vampire or whatever. 

But that's about where I stop my praise, because this novel is such an absolute fiasco. Alena is turned into an ancient Greek monster by Merlin, THE Merlin, of all people, to be murdered by Achilles, who is apparently a thing, and Zeus works for Wal*Mart, plus there are vampires and naga and werewolves and satyr and god knows what fuck all. Oh, and there's a standard dystopia where Supes are second class citizens dumped onto the other side of a wall (oops, sorry Canada, you're now the dumping ground for supernatural creatures). 

This is one of those stories that is so far gone that I enjoyed it, just waiting for whatever bananas ass shit was going to happen next. Lightning shootout in Wal*Mart? Fine. Naked girl fight in a Queen Anne neighborhood attic? Sure. Casual slut shaming while reveling in the lead's nascent sexuality? Whatever. A house-sized snake fighting minotaurs? I guess. So much random shit happens, SO MUCH. SO MANY characters hide footballs, and not even stealthily, but like right in front of you like you don't have eyes in your head. It's so blatant it passes over insulting into something else completely. 

Anyway, I guess what I want to say is that the reader for the audio is fucking amazing, and I think she's the only reason I finished this thing. Her name is Saskia Maarleveld, and I really like her voice. 

The End. 

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I should have known I was not going to be into this. We've met one of the main characters, an Irish priest named Carwyn, in the Elemental Mysteries series. He was fine as the duffer coot friend of the hot lead, but promoting him to romantic lead himself is way too much. He's officious and holier than thou, and his crush on the girl was gross. Hunter sidestepped a lot of the pedo-stylins of vampire fiction quite neatly in the Mysteries series, making her characters perfectly cognizant of the ethical problems of their predicament. Here it's like Carwyn is so busy being right all the time that he can't see how wrong he is. 

Picked this up because I saw it on a list of completed romance series -- you know, don't get stuck hanging for a year because Moning can't help but end everything on a cliffhanger -- and the list included a couple series...es that I liked. (Brothers Sinister by Courtney Milan and The Guardians by Meljean Brook, specifically.) This is sold as post-apocalyptic, set in a post-solar storm America. There's a religiously oppressive city with all the money and power, and a ring of sectors beyond with various governments or lack thereof. So far so good. 

I kind of can't believe I'm saying this, because I like sex writing as much the next sex-positive feminist, but there was way too much pointless sex for my tastes. I want to be clear I'm not saying "I'm not a prude, but", a phrase that is an exact indicator that the speaker is a massive fucking prude. None of the sex depicted was beyond my comfort level or anything. I mean, sure why not have a ruthless gang of bootleggers have a company orgy every Wednesday; seems legit. But I didn't feel like much of it was in the service of, like, plot or character development, so it ended up often feeling mechanical. 

There was a sort of trajectory, sexually speaking, for the leading lady. She is ejected from the confines of her shitty, repressive city life for being sexually precocious, and then learns a little something about menage, BDSM, and blowjobs, and maybe, just maybe, something about herself. This trajectory was undercut a little by having her jump immediately into public sex and blowjobs after maybe sixteen seconds of thinking, oh no, my repressive upbringing, I couldn't possibly. So, it's not so much a trajectory as a backstory we are only told about, and a present course of complete sexual openness. That's not a story; that's a situation. 

One of the reasons I like PNR is that it so very often deals credibly with body trauma, people moving from grief and brokenness to wholeness. Because there was no real emotional trajectory for anyone (and I do not credit hero dude struggling with these completely new feelings of tenderness and possessiveness, what are these things I'm feeling?) nothing that happened, no matter how theoretically sexy, had much juice to it. It was stuff that was happening. Except for the tattooing sequence; that was hot, rarrr. 

I guess what I'm saying is that I want this book to buy me dinner before we skip to the fucking. I didn't realize I was that old fashioned.

Anyway, if you like kinda light BDSM and lots of group sex, you could find a lot worse. Nobody is slut-shaming or becoming a massive alphole. I mean, even when the main pair get together, they still fuck around with other people instead of reverting immediately to middle class American monogamy. So that's good! But I'd prefer a little more apocalypse in my post-apocalit. Alas. 

I thought I'd check this out while waiting on the most recent Kate Daniels to get its ass in at the library. On the Edge deals with a pocket universe called, ahem, the Edge, that exists between the Broken (us'ens) and the Weird (magic'ens). The Edge is a narrow band separating the two, where magic and tech mix. The people the occupy the Edge tend to eke out a pretty haphazard existence, working shit jobs in the Broken because they don't have the requisite papers from our world, or bartering between the Weird and the Broken for trinkets and Pepsi. Or they farm, or cook meth, or whatever. Altogether, a pretty great metaphor for populations who live in poverty for one reason or another, be it cussedness or that they're los illegales.

Main character Rose is in her 20s, raising up two much younger brothers after her mom died and her dad run off (again). She's got a grandmother who helps out, but that's about it, and a minimum wage job in the Broken cleaning offices for 10 hours a day, no time off for good behavior. The novel opens with one of her brothers tearing up his new, expensive shoes by being a boy, and the crushing decision to buy him new ones. Because she knows he'll be laughed at in school with the wrong shoes, or torn shoes, or, God help them, no shoes at all. He'll be laughed at anyway, but new shoes is just one fewer reason. Shoes bought, then she has to figure out how they're going to eat for the next week. 

So, so rarely does pop fiction deal in actual poverty, working poverty, the kind that so many of my fellow Americans have to live with. A good friend of mine is getting foreclosed on -- she's losing the house she raised her boys in -- because she donated a son a kidney after his utterly failed. I'm not sure how this would have been treated under Obamacare,  but this was before the ACA passed, and was treated like an elective surgery. ( I know the ACA kept me out of a spiral of medical bills, which was passed just months before I would have been crushed by the "preexisting condition".) But before Obamacare, her kidney transplant to save her son set off a spiral of medical bills and lost work that lead her here, looking at getting turned out of the home that she's spent 25 years paying a mortgage on. Fucking hell. 

So it was, refreshing isn't the word, maybe satisfying is what I mean, to see characters grapple with the implacable cruelty of poverty, how poverty gives zero fucks if you have a degree or a good work ethic or a dying son, it's just going to grind you down like glaciers. And other people, otherwise well meaning people, are going to judge the ever living fuck out of you for your bad shoes and bad car and bad food. For having the temerity to be poor. 

On the Edge ends up being something of a Cinderella tale, all told, which I don't quite know what to think of. On the one hand, I don't mind a wish fulfillment exercise when the wishes are "get me the fuck out of this impoverished nightmare". Rose is not a pretty useless nothing, but principled and disciplined, understandably more competent than her 22 years might imply. She's had to grow up, and grow up fast, and has too many people counting on her to swoon or moon over a rich dude. Rich dudes are dangerous and trouble; they think they can own you.

Nor do I particularly want it to end with dire disaster. I can read miserablist fiction for that, thank you, not urban fantasy. I guess I just wish there had been a middle path, one that let Rose live in her Edge community, near her grandmother, on the land of her ancestors. Maybe that's the real wish fulfillment exercise, a naive wish within myself that we can break out of the rote poverty without severing ties completely, cut off from our peers because they are no longer our peers. Alas. 

Unborn pretty much exemplifies everything that I find unpleasant about paranormal fantasy; not sure why I finished it. First off, we have a lone woman, an exemplary special girl who has untapped powers surrounded by a whole bunch of dudes. Then said dudes spend all kinds of time treating other women like shit, and this is somehow a reflection on the women and not the dudes. Then, and this is my special favorite, most of these dudes are the main girl's brothers, but they persist in treating her like a sex object, and this is funny. Because incest is funny. Why are you being such a buzzkill? 

Oh, and it ends on a cliffhanger. I know, right? 

This is the sort of book that makes me appreciate this book's antecedents, stuff like Black Dagger Brotherhood and the Fever novels. I made some fun of those at the time, but actually the way those series navigated some seriously problematic shit was pretty deft. BDB has the whole dudes-only feel, but the banter is honestly amusing, and the whole thing ends up being an exploration of masculinity that doesn't have to hate on every woman but the protagonist. Fever, well, Morning turned the cliffhanger into an art form. Unborn does neither of these things well.