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I was very, very good at Readercon this year, and only bought three books, which I admit I was pretty sulky about because it's hard to be at Readercon surrounded by so many lovely books and resist buying them. But one of the books I did buy was Elizabeth Bear's Stone Mad, a novella that's the sequel to the delightful steampunk Western Karen Memory.
This story takes place a bit after the end of the last one. Karen and Priya have bought a cute little ranch together and, upon first moving into it, decide to celebrate their unofficial marriage with an unofficial honeymoon, by going to the only fancy restaurant in Rapid City, which is the dining room for the only fancy hotel in Rapid City, and then going to an illusionist show. This plan is interrupted when two young mediums interrupt dinner by levitating a table in order to scam a free meal, and in the process, wake up the hotel's long-dormant resident tommy-knocker, which had been hiding in the basement since it sort of accidentally did a multiple murder upon first being imported from Alaska several years ago.
Karen, Priya, the two medium ladies (who are sisters), and the illusionist--an elderly lady who was the wife to a previous famous illusionist, who had also been having dinner in the fancy dining room--all join forces to find and handle the tommyknocker before it kills anyone else. Because this is an awesome female-coded story, handling the tommyknocker does not mean fighting it, because that would end poorly for everybody: It means trying to figure out what it wants and how to communicate with it well enough to return it to its natural habitat.
While the tommyknocker is the main action plot, the main emotional plot revolves around Priya and Karen. Early in the tommyknocker sequence of events, Karen does something thoughtless and she and Priya get in a fight about it, and the rest of the book is largely them figuring out how to both have the space to feel their feelings (i.e., be mad) without it tanking their relationship, and how to communicate even when mad so that they can get through it to a point of not being mad anymore. Karen has some good internal monologuing as well as discussion about her own self-assessments and theories of relationshipping, but Priya really shines here as the queen of emotional intelligence. Her speech near the end about how easy it would be to misuse the power of being the injured party is disturbingly on-point--we like to think of abusive relationships as clearly defined and with abusers as monsters, but we all have the capacity in us to do shitty things for our own benefit if we've got the leverage and incentives to do so. It requires a certain degree of actual emotional intelligence and self-awareness to not do that.
Anyway, who's got two thumbs and Blind Guardian's "Tommyknockers" stuck in her head now? This girl!
This story takes place a bit after the end of the last one. Karen and Priya have bought a cute little ranch together and, upon first moving into it, decide to celebrate their unofficial marriage with an unofficial honeymoon, by going to the only fancy restaurant in Rapid City, which is the dining room for the only fancy hotel in Rapid City, and then going to an illusionist show. This plan is interrupted when two young mediums interrupt dinner by levitating a table in order to scam a free meal, and in the process, wake up the hotel's long-dormant resident tommy-knocker, which had been hiding in the basement since it sort of accidentally did a multiple murder upon first being imported from Alaska several years ago.
Karen, Priya, the two medium ladies (who are sisters), and the illusionist--an elderly lady who was the wife to a previous famous illusionist, who had also been having dinner in the fancy dining room--all join forces to find and handle the tommyknocker before it kills anyone else. Because this is an awesome female-coded story, handling the tommyknocker does not mean fighting it, because that would end poorly for everybody: It means trying to figure out what it wants and how to communicate with it well enough to return it to its natural habitat.
While the tommyknocker is the main action plot, the main emotional plot revolves around Priya and Karen. Early in the tommyknocker sequence of events, Karen does something thoughtless and she and Priya get in a fight about it, and the rest of the book is largely them figuring out how to both have the space to feel their feelings (i.e., be mad) without it tanking their relationship, and how to communicate even when mad so that they can get through it to a point of not being mad anymore. Karen has some good internal monologuing as well as discussion about her own self-assessments and theories of relationshipping, but Priya really shines here as the queen of emotional intelligence. Her speech near the end about how easy it would be to misuse the power of being the injured party is disturbingly on-point--we like to think of abusive relationships as clearly defined and with abusers as monsters, but we all have the capacity in us to do shitty things for our own benefit if we've got the leverage and incentives to do so. It requires a certain degree of actual emotional intelligence and self-awareness to not do that.
Anyway, who's got two thumbs and Blind Guardian's "Tommyknockers" stuck in her head now? This girl!