bloodygranuaile

A few years ago a friend of mine was cleaning out her shelves and I wound up with her copy of Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs’ The Discworld Companion, the “updated” version published in 1997 and therefore covering only the first twenty books in the series or so. I picked it up this week largely out of the desire to move it off my TBR shelf and onto the read shelf with all the other Discworld books. (This should tell you what kind of mood I’ve been in lately.)

Despite now being somewhat out of date, it’s still a delightful tour through Discworld, with some new tidbits of information but mostly it just makes a nice trip down memory lane about reading the first 20 Discworld books. It is almost 500 pages long, which seems large until you remember that it’s still a lot faster to read than rereading 20 Discworld books would be. That it makes me want to reread all however-many-there-are-now Discworld books immediately is probably an unintended side effect.

If you have not read Discworld I believe it would probably be quite baffling to read–I cannot imagine why you would even do so in the first place if you weren’t already a fan–but perhaps if the humor resonated it would pique your interest. I don’t know, my initial interest in Discworld was piqued by reading goofy crossover fanfiction back in the graceless days of the early 2000s.

Is there a name for Discworld fandom or its members? Are we just “Discworld fans”? If we don’t have a name, can we go with “Turtle Movement”?

Because it is dark and cold and my brain is very tired and everything is on fire, I decided it was time for some comfort reading, so I scanned my shelves looking for some tropey Anglophile ten-year-old girl fiction, of which I never seem to run out. I went with a used copy of Jane Yolen’s Sword of the Rightful King that has been sitting on my TBR shelf for a while although I cannot remember where I got it. I have at least two other pieces of unread Arthuriana sitting on that exact shelf but this one was the shortest and seemed the easiest feel-good read.

Sword of the Rightful King is a retelling of the part of the Arthur legend where he pulls the sword Excalibur out of the stone, therefore making a big show to the rest of the country about how much he really is the legitimate High King of all Britain (no strange women lying in ponds in this telling). In this version the sword is named Caliburnus, and a couple other characters have names out of older alternate versions of the legend than the ones most people think of--Merlin is Merlinnus, Guenevere is Gwenhwyfar (the proper Welsh spelling), Camelot is Cadbury (like the creme egg).

The main plotline here is that Merlinnus has contrived the whole sword in the stone thing specifically in order to shut up the various clans and tribes and lords and chieftains that doubt Arthur’s claim to the whole island, by putting the sword in the stone himself and casting a spell on it that no man can remove it unless Merlin says the spell letting him. Our villain, Morgause, the North Witch, tries to interfere with this, because she is hellbent on assassinating Arthur and using her three of her four terrible sons--plus her one non-terrible son, if possible--to spy on him. The one non-terrible son, Gawaine, is despised for mysterious reasons by Merlinnus’ new apprentice, a young boy named Gawen who has a number of secrets, of which his real identity is the most easily and soon guessed if you are familiar with the type of children’s fiction this book is (hint: this book was written after the ‘80s).

There are some weaknesses to this book, like that Gawaine is our main viewpoint character for most of the first half of it and then is basically relegated to a secondary character for the second half. The breaks it makes with the original legend are modern and not too overdone with this particular story, but not exactly what I’d call pioneering within the children’s fantasy genre overall for a book published in 2003. But it is fun and familiar and satisfying the way going to Medieval Times and eating chicken with your hands off a pewter plate is fun and familiar and satisfying, and has similar vibes to works like T. H. White’s The Once and Future King or the BBC’s Merlin. Overall I am glad that I went with this one instead of jumping right into The Mists of Avalon, which might also be appearing soon in this winter’s hibernation reading.

A very long time ago I had a copy of Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and I’m not sure if I ever actually read the whole thing or not? I was very young, and I don’t know what happened to the book. But anyway, when my friend Kyle was weeding his book collection and gave people the chance to claim some, I put my name down for his copy so I could give it another go, having become much more of an Ursula K. LeGuin appreciator in the intervening 20 years or so.

A Wizard of Earthsea can be a little difficult to fully appreciate because it was published in 1968 and so some of the things that were quite fresh and revolutionary at the time have since become quite commonplace, like “writing fantasy novels specifically for teens” and “wizards: they had to have been young and learned how to wizard at some point, right?” Anyway this book is the coming-of-age story of a young boy who will eventually grow up to be a mighty wizard, but isn’t one yet. He starts off instead as a young boy who saves his fishing village from barbarian totally-not-Vikings and keeps getting into trouble by being very ambitious and overextending himself no matter how many grave and portentious-sounding warnings about the Equilibrium he gets from the older wizards. The main form of trouble that his pride gets him into is that he summons a dead spirit due to a stupid schoolboy rivalry and this lets something crawl out from the tear in reality that summoning the dead causes, and then the something hunts him for years until he figures out what it is and how to face it.

The magic in this universe is largely based on ordering things around by use of their true names. All the people have both true names, which are closely guarded secrets, and use-names, which are what are used in everyday life. Our protagonist’s true name is Ged and he is called Ged throughout most of the narration, but everybody calls him Sparrowhawk, because he likes ordering birds around, and occasionally shape-shifts into one. Ged is kind of an ass and a good part of his story arc is learning to be less of an ass, which is the true and correct story arc of all teenage protagonists.

Overall, I do wish I had actually gotten around to reading this book in its entirety when I was actually in my teens, as I probably would have had more capacity to then read the entire rest of the series, which I am now intending on doing but let’s be read, it might take a while.

A few years ago I reread the first three books in Garth Nix’s Abhorsen series but quite frankly never updated my brain to remember that there are now actually more than three books in the Abhorsen series, let alone that Nix has an entire career of writing other books that I haven’t heard of. But Angel Mage came to my attention through the very straightforward mechanism of my housemate putting it directly in my face and saying they thought I’d like it.

As indicated by the title, this book is about angels, which is not quite as much fun as necromancy but still quite interesting. It takes place 137 years after the country of Ystara got apocalypse-ed by something called the Ash Blood Plague, which turns people’s blood to ash and then also turns some portion of them into horrible monsters. This all had something to do with the guardian archangel of Ystara, Pallaniel, and his high priestess, Liliath. In what is now our contemporary timeline, Liliath, who had magically put herself to sleep for a while, wakes up in order to continue to enact her plans, which had gone horrendously wrong the first time and started the apocalypse. By this point, the refugees from the Ystaran apocalypse form a despised undercaste in the neighboring countries, known as Refusers, and terrifying to the general populace because angelic magic cannot be used on them, and if it is, they also break out in a case of the Ash Blood Plague.

Our heroes here are a group of four young people, all around 18, who are in training for a variety of careers in a vaguely French-flavored society. They are all bound to each other and to Liliath, whomst is our villain (because she is a self-absorbed psycho stalker), for mysterious angel magic reasons that nobody quite understands, but which brings a certain degree of suspicion down upon them. Each individual character is sort of obnoxious but together they are a fun and interesting team. They have a lot of exciting adventures that involve things like finding ancient treasure and getting in a ton of fights.

Overall this just didn’t grab me quite as much as the Abhorsen series but it was a nice light fantasy adventure and basically the perfect thing to read on a lazy holiday weekend.

I had intended to do this in January immediately after my reread of Gideon the Ninth but then life and book clubs got in the way, so it was only this weekend that I finally reread Harrow the Ninth, the second book in Tamsyn Muir’s certifiably insane and gothically delicious Locked Tomb trilogy. Notable occurrences upon second read, especially so soon after rereading Gideon, include “I understood what was going on a lot better,” “I caught more hilarious references that had apparently passed me by the first time,” and “OK now it’s actually quite clear what’s going on, I can’t believe I was so confused the first time, did I read this in a coma or something,” although the more likely culprit is just that my close-reading skills have atrophied in the 10 years since I’ve been in school from doing only business writing where the actual task at hand is to just find the simplest big-picture points to distill out of a page of writing. But in novels, it turns out sometimes the details are important!

Anyway, while most of this book is a lot darker and more fucked up than the first one, especially in the beginning, there were still several moments where I couldn’t help actually laughing out loud, a thing that rarely happens for me when I’m reading, and which especially hadn’t been happening this week, when I hit one of those walls where I got tired of doing responsible shit and just dropped all my coping mechanisms and opted to go ahead and be miserable for a bit. It was also frankly sort of soothing to read about people having a way worse time than I’m having and not necessarily powering through it like emotionally unbreakable protagging machines.

Because Harrow is a tiny nerd, this book did not inspire me to do between-chapter workouts as much as Gideon did, although I did manage to roll off the couch and make myself do 15 minutes of yoga about halfway through it, which is more than I’d managed all week. Neither did it inspire me to make soup.

In September there was a day that, probably coincidentally but maybe not, was a big publishing day for YA by trans and non-binary authors, and my social media feeds were flooded with them, in one memorable case all arranged by cover color theme in a rainbow. I remember that particular display because I remember, skulking gothically all the way at the purple end, a matte black book with lavender-silver foiled lettering and some vaguely occultish-looking drawing on the front, titled THE SCAPEGRACERS. I had not been in a very YA mood lately but I also have been around publishing for long enough to know that people work very hard on book covers and you absolutely should judge them, so I clicked through, surmised that it was supposed to be sort of like The Craft but gayer, and decided that I had to read it ASAP, given this year’s rules for fiction reads. I admit I had some apprehensions because the author is like 22 and I am not ready for the zoomers to be publishing—they are too powerful already—but there are a limited number of books about socially inept queer goth girls with magic powers, and I had already read the other two earlier this year. So I borrowed THE SCAPEGRACERS as soon as I could.

THE SCAPEGRACERS takes place over one intensely action-packed week in the life of one Sideways Pike, a pile of insecurities and trauma in a leather jacket, who until this week had mostly skulked around the school being friendless in the tradition of YA protagonists--although in Sideways’ case it is because she is deliberately scary and weird and an actual witch, not because she is a quiet mousy Book Girl who the narration is convinced is sweet despite being a condescending ass to everyone (Sideways’ narration dunks on this trope pretty hard, in fact, because Sideways has a modicum of self-awareness). (As someone who moved from mousy to goth basically because it was easier than learning real social skills, I loved this.) Sideways is also extremely gay; she is known as the school’s resident lesbian while the town’s other queer girls are quietly figuring themselves out, and her narration contains a sustained intensity of Feelings About Girls that is very endearing but also definitely trips my “how do allo people live, this sounds exhausting” cranky ace wiring. Sideways lives with her two dads (actually her uncle and his partner) who run an antique shop in a house full of gothy nonsense, which is insanely adorable.

Our plot kicks off when Sideways is invited to do magic at a Halloween party hosted by the three most popular girls in school. The magic works surprisingly well, until it is rudely interrupted for mysterious reasons, and then things start getting weird, even by the standards of Sideways Pike’s life. The ensuing plot involves such rollicking shenanigans as getting kidnapped by terrible religious zealots, daringly escaping from said terrible religious zealots, breaking and entering into a magical book dealer’s to look for magical books, reluctantly befriending a disembodied demon type thing that talks like a 1950’s news anchor, another outrageous party with magic that goes uncontrollably awry, and Sideways making an absolute fool of herself over a mysterious hot girl that goes to the other high school. Since it all takes place in early October, it’s got extra Halloween vibes on top of everything else, which is extremely rad.

But the main plot point, the thing that carries the book, is that SIDEWAYS FINALLY MAKES FRIENDS, a thing she is singularly bad at. Sideways’ attempts to Not Fuck Up friend-having are very funny and should be relatable to any undersocialized disaster queer. Despite the extremely short timeframe, this book doesn’t take the tack that teenage girl friendships are fake or shallow just because they are highly volatile; rather, they are extremely intense, and that intensity gets across very well. The popular girls here--Daisy, Jing, and Yates--are also all really entertaining characters. Daisy is the mean one, not in the catty way that “most popular cheerleader” characters are often portrayed, but just openly, over-the-top casually bloodthirsty in a way that probably would have had people concerned that she’d be the next school shooter if she were a guy. I found her hilarious. Jing is slightly more normal and Yates is actually nice, which sometimes makes her the odd one out.

One thing that sort of jumped out at me and made me feel very old is that there’s a lot of casual physical affection among the friends, not just hugs but also things like impromptu piggyback rides and piling on people because it is amusing to squish them until they can’t breathe. I had to stop and think a minute and be like “Were we that touchy-feely as younguns?” and the answer is absolutely yes, I had just completely forgotten when I grew out of it. (I’m not really sure how, given that I had a number of friends over the years who were dudes between 1.5x and twice my body weight, and in the social circles where I was one of the smaller people, I was therefore the most hilarious to sit on.) Anyway, I’m old, and several months of the “stay six feet away from everybody at all times” thing appears to have sunk into my limbic system and made me even more uncomfortable getting anywhere near other humans (except, oddly enough, in big crowds, which feel nice and normal), so all this entirely normal behavior--which, objectively speaking, is probably the least weird stuff in the book--struck me as strange and confusing.

Like with any good YA book I could probably spend a lot of time discussing what it says, both implicitly and explicitly, about identity and finding your place in the world and the way you present yourself to the world, but instead I’m going to keep it brief and just say: I have never read a YA book that is so unapologetically long-winded about the joys of feeling goth as fuck, like there is an entire page about the magical potential of surrounding yourself with gigantic-ass Hammer Horror movie type candles, and Sideways’ relationship to her leather jacket is practically talismanic, which I find very relatable.

This is certainly one of my favorite reads of the year, up there with the Locked Tomb series, and for very similar reasons--extremely funny and dramatic; lots of excellent female characters; representation of self-conscious goth girls with poor social sense makes me feel Seen--and I will for sure be grabbing a copy of The Scratch Daughters as soon as it is published next year.

Despite some issues with book formats I ended up very quickly ripping my way through Seanan McGuire’s In An Absent Dream, the fourth book in her very excellent Wayward Children series.

This one is about Katherine Lundy, known mostly as Lundy, who shows up in the first one afflicted with an odd sort of very slow Benjamin Button situation. Lundy’s world is the Goblin Market, a world that is extremely orderly in its own highly chaotic way, as is often this case with stories that touch on traditional fairy lore and all of its rules. In the Goblin Market the ruling principle of existence is giving “fair value” for things, and debts are held in the body, magical marks of wrongdoing applied and removed by the all-knowing magical Market itself.

Lundy is a loner, partly by nature and partly because her father is the elementary school principal and is also kind of an asshole, so nobody wants to hang out with her. She decides that this is OK and becomes a stern and quiet sort of Book Girl, the sort of overtly obedient one who looks for loopholes and ways to do her own thing very quietly and learns quickly that the more you follow the rules the more you’re actually allowed to get away with stuff as long as you don’t draw attention to it. I actually found her very relatable even though I was never quite that disciplined or obedient or friendless (though I was very much a Book Girl). Lundy assumes that she will grow up to be a librarian because she is a small child living in the suburbs in the ‘60s and that is the only book-related job she knows about. Lundy assumes she will grow up to have a husband because it would be very not-normal to not do so and Lundy assumes she is very normal (which she isn’t), but this does not at any point seem to be a thing she actually wants, is interested in, or has any plans to actively pursue in any way; it is assumed the universe will just dump one on her when it is time to be a normal grown-up. This assumption goes away when Lundy starts to intend to spend her adulthood in the Goblin Market instead. The book ends around when Lundy turns eighteen, and at no point in it does she express the faintest bit of interest in sex or romance, neither toward at any other character nor toward the idea of seeking it out. I like it a lot better than the kind of ace rep we got in the first book, to be honest--no whinging about how dating as an asexual is hard, no I’m-staring-at-this-beautiful-person-but-not-like-that, no vocabulary lessons. Just a complete lack of interest in or attention to the subject at any point. It’s quite nice.

A decent chunk of this book is about the power of friendship, since Lundy does in fact end up making one friend and makes some very risky bargains on her behalf. And another chunk of it is about family, which is also interesting because I feel like a lot of fairy tales either there’s no family or the family is so obviously terrible that there’s no reason for the child to be attached to them at all. But Lundy’s family is a bit more complex, with both her parents alive and well and truly thinking they’re doing their best by her even though they are emotionally stunted Silent Generation weirdos, and a little sister, Diana, who is too little to be important when Lundy first goes to the Market but who becomes an increasing tie back to the “real” world as she gets older and develops a personality. But most of the book is really about rules, and how they both make and obscure meaning, and about bargains and notions of fairness, and owing, and reciprocation. These might be slightly odd things for a YA series that has mostly been about identity and belonging and love and stuff like that to be about, but I think it ties in perfectly fine and is pretty important because, even though it is couched in the language of markets and money, it is about how you relate to the expectations people put on you, and we all spend a lot of time dealing with other people’s expectations, whether they’re spelled out explicitly or unspoken. “What kinds of authority do you consider legitimate and why” is at least as important a subject for YA literature as romance, in my opinion. (Insert recommendation for Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small series here, if somehow you are reading my reviews but haven’t read it.) “What expectations of reciprocity are real and what are attempts at manipulation” is also a subject that could use more page space for young folks, I think.

Anyway, if you were ever a weird cerebral child with a strong sense of fairness and a lot of books who spent far too much time alone and thinking about economics, you might enjoy this one very much! Also, I’m excited there are apparently enough of us to be a target market.

Continuing on a theme of “trying not to fall hideously behind on my Goodreads challenge,” I read the third installment of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, Beneath the Sugar Sky. It was a fun one to read in between episodes of The Great British Bake-Off, although the combined force of both made me crave baked goods that we did not have in the house at the time (it’s okay, I bought apple cider donuts this morning).

I liked Beneath the Sugar Sky a bit better than I thought I would, probably because I was prepared to be disappointed that this one was about a brightly colored Candyland instead of somewhere goth like the Moors, but fortunately the story itself isn’t too candy-ish. The gang of wandering children that visit Confection aren’t the ones for whom Confection is their proper alternate reality; they’re all visiting on a quest and they all seem to deeply hate it right up until near the end.

Our protagonist is Cora, a swimmer recently returned from a world where she got to be a mermaid. Cora absolutely hates the fuck out of Confection because Cora is fat and Confection is the kind of place people would think she likes and make fun of her for it, and she wants absolutely no part of that. Other major characters are Kade and Christopher from the first book, another girl from a water-based world who only sticks around for a little bit, and Nancy, who in truth only gets a brief cameo, but she’s a major character to me.

The person whose world Confection is is Sumi, whomst was murdered in the first book. The quest that constitutes the plot for this one is basically that Sumi’s daughter Rini, who wasn’t born yet when Sumi was murdered, comes back in time and across worlds to get our gang of wayward children to help her get Sumi un-murdered, so that she can grow up and have Rini. It is all very convoluted.

Rini is entertaining in much the way Sumi was entertaining, which is to say, they had many funny lines but overall they weren’t my favorite characters; they were outlandish in ways a little too close to ways that people I have actually known in real life were outlandish, and in real life it’s less funny and more annoying.

Overall, though, it’s a pretty good quest story, and still contains a decent amount of gruesome nonsense despite taking place mostly in a land made entirely out of sugar, and I’m going to go eat cider donuts now.

In an act of supreme generosity, my friends, whomst I have been most shamefully blowing off pretty much since lockdown began because I can only handle so many Zoom calls and also my ability to people has worn away, kept me in the rotation for the now rather battered ARC of Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth, the sequel to my new favorite novel in the history of absolutely ever, Gideon the Ninth. I have been having severe trouble focusing on fiction during this pandemicpocalypse but if anything was going to get me to actually pay attention to a fiction, it would be the dysfunctional goth lesbian space nuns of Drearburh, repressed nerd necromancer Harrowhark Nonagesimus and her dumb jock cavalier Gideon Nav.

I was a little disappointed but, given the ending of the last one, not entirely surprised that Gideon is not there for most of the first *mumblemumble* of the book, but it’s OK because we spend that time getting to know Harrow a bit better, and Harrow is also a hilarious character, if in a bitchier and more antisocial sort of way than Gideon, which is perfectly fine with me. The book is not written from Harrow’s point of view, although we certainly get inside her head a lot; rather, the book alternates between third person omniscient and second person, where an unnamed narrator is explaining to Harrow all the shit she’s gotten up to in the months before the Emperor’s murder. That’s not a spoiler; it’s how time is marked in the chapter titles.

I’m honestly not even really sure where to start reviewing because the structure of Harrow is deliberately confusing; it’s one of those jigsaw-puzzle-like books where you keep reading in part due to the tantalizing possibility of getting to the part where you understand what’s going on. I personally love this sort of thing; the narrative tension it provides is much more my style than, say, romantic or sexual tension, of which this book also has a good deal of but mostly just for seasoning; it doesn’t really constitute a subplot and it doesn’t ever do anything so boring and conventional as get resolved. Harrow is a deeply prudish character (which, relatable) in addition to literally being a nun so all instances of sexual tension (in many cases it’s not even attraction, just tension, due to everybody being very tense) are wrapped in several layers of distaste, either from Harrow (who hates everybody and describes them all in very unattractive terms) or from everybody else (Harrow is horrendously in love with A CORPSE, literally a dead body, who is referred to throughout the book explicitly as “the Body”). For a book whose back cover text reads “The necromancers are back, and they’re gayer than ever,” not very much actually happens on that front, except at one very drunk dinner party that Harrow flees as soon as she’s allowed to. This is not a complaint; if anything, this is perhaps the only book series I’ve ever read that rings true to my real-life experience, where everyone is queer but I have absolutely no idea what, if anything, anyone is up to at any particular time because it has nothing to do with me and at this point most people don’t even try to talk to me about it, both because I am also a deeply prudish character and because there is always other stuff to do instead, although at least in my case it usually doesn’t involve reanimated skeletons. (On the other hand, a lack of nonbinary characters is beginning to be something that significantly messes with my suspension of disbelief, and if I have one request for Alecto it would be that.) Anyway, I love a book that forgoes the obligatory romantic subplot in favor of just a lot of people avoiding dealing with their very complex feelings and blowing things up instead.

I meant to be dithering about structure there but ended up dithering about feelings, but I’m going to keep it, because I think that’s actually why the book is the way it is. It mirrors the stuff that is going on in Harrow’s brain, which is extremely messed up, due to lots of traumatic shit happening but also for magical reasons. Harrow’s general personality is already geared toward a pretty hardcore, disordered sort of asceticism--foregoing sleep to hyperfocus on studying, unable to bear the stimulation of food or drink (with one very memorable exception), uncomfortable being seen in any way other than completely covered, including her face (also relatable, although I just wear a full face of people makeup every day and not skull makeup, because I am a coward)--and there are times where she just Harrows herself into total dysfunction and you don’t find out about it until later. It’s fantastic. One downside is that it seems to have kicked up something ascetic and Catholic deep in my psyche and I have been in a weird mood since Sunday, but that’s probably also quarantine-related.

While Harrow is not quite as much of sentient pile of memes as Gideon, she still has her moments, as does...well, everyone else. In fact, two out of the three jokes that made me nearly throw the book off the balcony were made by God, the King Undying, whose real name is apparently John. One of the main features of this installation of necromantic nonsense is the appearance of a lot of high-ranking religious figures, as Harrow and Ianthe Tridentarius have ascended (or mostly ascended) to Lyctorhood, putting them in the legendary ranks themselves if they can survive more than a few months. Most of the book’s action takes place trapped in God’s enormous, eclectically decorated safe house/space station, and the only people around Harrow and Ianthe are God and three of the ancient and terrifying Lyctors, all of whom are just absolute bastards. Augustine, the Saint of Patience, is my favorite, because his entire personality consists of using flippancy as a coping mechanism. Mercymorn, the Saint of Joy, is also a delightful character, in that she is a hypercritical, waspish bitch who really wants nothing more than for Harrow to die already and get out of her hair. Ortus mostly just keeps trying to murder Harrow, which makes for some very gory action scenes, so no complaints from me.

There’s another Ortus, who was a minor entertaining character in the first book but is back as a much more substantial and extremely entertaining character in this one. He has one personality trait, which is being a Poetry Guy, which could have been annoying if the book treated this as being in any way deep or admirable, but mostly the book treats it as being entirely insufferable, which is good and correct. Honestly, if you are in any way a cranky or judgmental person, there’s just too much shit in this series that is so immensely satisfying. At one point someone is eulogized with a line like “She never said an unkind word, unless it was extremely funny,” which is certainly not a good description of me but is definitely a good description of some of the people I count as the kindest and most generous-hearted folks in my life, because anyone that can’t at make a decent mean joke when it’s warranted just isn’t going to be someone who stays in my life very long. These books are definitely for people who need to make that caveat even for the nicest people we know. Harrow is basically the triple-distilled form of my worst, most impatient self when I am trying to do shit and people are in my way (a thing that I’m struggling with a lot during quarantine especially) and I, at least, find reading her to be extremely indulgent in ways that probably don’t say flattering things about me.

The proper publication date for this book is August 4, which I am setting as now the date by which I need to konmari my book collection, so I can reward myself by buying hard copies of both Gideon and Harrow and rereading them and also just keeping them on the shelf where they can spark dumb, dysfunctional goth jock joy every time I see them.

Occasionally people will talk about a book and it won't catch my interest too much because they are leaving out a key piece of information, and then when I get that key piece of information, the thing shoots up a million spots on my To Be Read list.

Such a book was Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth. A bunch of friends had discussed it, fairly positively, as being about lesbian necromancers in space, which is certainly a hook. But it took a promotional email from Tor with a link to an article titled Gideon's Guide to Getting Galactic Swole: An Epic Tale of Skele-Flex Trashbaggery for me to realize that the book is ALSO about a big obnoxious jock lady with big obnoxious biceps and an internal monologue in a register that can only be described as Extremely Online. Given that the internet doesn't exist in the necromantic space empire Gideon lives in, it's quite a feat for her to be as Extremely Online as she is.

Gideon Nav is a big dumb redheaded meathead of an orphan who lives in the Ninth House of a creepy and extremely Goth necromantic space empire. The Ninth House is the creepiest and Gothiest of all the houses, of which there are, predictably, nine. The Ninth House is basically a weird religious colony that occupies a big crack in a planet that is definitely not based on Pluto. Gideon hates living in the Ninth House's Isengardian fortress of Drearburh, and everyone in the Ninth House hates her right back, although possibly not in that order. The only other person Gideon's age in Drearburh is the Reverend Daughter of the House, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, who is Gideon's opposite in every way--tiny, dark-haired, a gifted necromancer, basically not a dumbass at all, deliberately and cunningly cruel, and completely lacking in anything resembling muscle. She is, however, also a lesbian, although not nearly as easily distracted as Gideon is. Of course, they hate each other's guts.

However, due to a series of events in varying levels of deliberateness, Gideon winds up being the only person even remotely suitable to serve as Harrowhark's cavalier when she is summoned off-planet to compete to become a Lyctor, which is basically a sort of immortal knight-saint to the Undying Emperor. Necromancers absolutely must be paired with cavaliers, because they always have been, and necros and cavs ascend to Lyctorhood in pairs as well. So either they will both become immortal or neither of them will. Then most of the book takes place on the planet of the First House, which isn't really a proper House--the First House is technically the Emperor (I think?) but he's not allowed on the First House's planet, which basically exists as a big, ancient, crumbling, but much-warmer-than-Drearburh temple complex. The challengers--i.e., the necro and cav pairs from the Second through Eighth houses--basically have to hang out there with three priests and a bunch of reanimated skeleton servants until they figure out how to become Lyctors. From there, stuff starts going wrong.

One of the things I realized about a third of the way through the book that made everything ten times more hilarious was the realization that if this were a normal adventure book about a competition between different feudal houses, it would definitely have had a different House as its viewpoint. One of the ones that dressed sort of normal, at least. Probably the Fourth House, whose challengers were both teens, if it were a YA book. But the Ninth House would be the mysterious fan favorites--the weirdest, most distant House, with a lot of mystery surrounding them, both of its representatives aloof and inscrutable, wearing black robes and skull makeup and skulking in and out of scenes without talking to anyone. Harrowhark forbids Gideon from talking to anyone, so everyone else thinks she's taken a vow of silence because she's a creepy shadow cultist penitent, and are therefore spared from Gideon's walking-pile-of-memes thought processes until much later in the book, where they are (unsurprisingly, but hilariously) floored to hear how she actually talks. Just the contrast between the Ninth House's aesthetic and Gideon and Harrow's actual personalities makes me want to see this book adapted for TV; it would be the absolute funniest shit ever.

Even not filmed, it's still pretty funny shit. I made the mistake of reading it on the T a lot this weekend because I had to take the T a lot, and I was having the hardest time not absolutely losing it in public every time some absolutely idiotic meme got snuck in in a way that somehow made perfect sense, or whenever Gideon dramatically put on her sunglasses over her skull face paint or busted up the tone of some courtly dialogue by calling somebody an assmunch.

Another thing I liked about this book is that there is not very much romance! None of the romance that there is is robust or explicit enough to constitute a romantic plotline. There is a lot of Gideon being easily distracted and telling very bad suggestive jokes, and there is some unresolved but very tense tension in and among Gideon and Harrow's incredibly fucked-up lifelong loathing of each other, but nobody actually wastes any time on fluffy stuff because they are all very busy fighting epic bone constructs and getting completely covered in gore repeatedly and in the grossest ways Tamsyn Muir can think of (which are pretty gross; I am quite impressed).

So, in short: Goth stuff, ultraviolence, jokes, skellingtons, upsettingly large biceps, and no wholesome fluffy shit. This one definitely falls under the "It's like it was written just for me!" category.

The latest BSpec reading club book, which we will be discussing later this weekend, was Robert Jackson Bennett's new-ish release Foundryside, the first book in what it appears will be called the Founders series (I'm not sure how long the series is supposed to be but I am getting trilogy vibes).

Foundryside is a crime action-adventure fantasy in the "urchins of the dangerous underworld of corrupt city gets involved in things that piss off the power structure" sort of book, so if you liked the general vibes of books like Six of Crows or the Gentlemen Bastards series, you might dig this, too. The main character is a teenager, but it's definitely not a YA book; I'd say it's also comparable to the Gentlemen Bastards series in terms of stuff like swearing (not quite so creatively, though), graphic violence and gore, sexual content, complex political corruption that runs deeper than anyone even knows about, and being based in an Italian Renaissance-flavored port city haunted by the ruins of an ancient civilization more powerful than anyone can imagine but that nobody really knows jack shit about.

Our main character, Sancia Grado, is a thief, and she's very good at what she does, because she has magical gifts that make her good at thieving but also make her entire life an unbroken hell of sensory overload. She ekes out a sparse and dangerous living in a Dickensian tenement room in the filthy no-mans-land slummy bits of the industrial city-state of Tevanne that aren't claimed by any of the four big merchant houses that actually run everything, each of which hides behind big walls in their clean, pristine "campos" that eat up most of the city, kind of like Harvard if there were four of them and the rest of us weren't even allowed to take shortcuts through them.

Tevanne's early-modern economy is mostly based on scriving. Technically I think it is mostly based on merchant shipping, with a basic mercantilist relationship between the squalid urban core and an out-of-sight, out-of-mind set of far-off plantation lands that send in goods like coffee and paper. But the four big ruling trade dynasties in Tevanne got that way because they can do scriving, a type of sigil magic with more than a few superficial parallels to coding, except that it gets used for different stuff (using scriving to invent the equivalent of cars was apparently pretty easy; using it to invent the equivalent of a phonograph is apparently mind-blowingly advanced and happens several decades later).

The ancient ruined civilization from the ancient past is known as the heirophants, and it is rumored that they could do what is basically Scriving Plus, except that there are a lot of obviously silly legends about the heirophants and nobody knows what's real and what's not. And anyway, whatever they did eventually caused them to completely self-destruct so apparently it wasn't a good idea anyway. This does not, of course, stop the current generation of rich people from having a bunch of people in it who are obsessed with this stuff and willing to go Meddle In The Affairs Of Heirophants in the hopes of gaining some next-level powers.

At the beginning of the book, our gruff and damaged criminal street urchin of a protagonist gets offered an absolutely stupid amount of money to steal a very secret thing that's so secret that she doesn't even know what she's stealing. You can probably see where we're going with this: She does not quietly steal the thing, collect her payday, and live happily ever after. That would give us a very short book. Instead, she winds up almost getting murdered several times and setting some stuff on fire, then having to assemble an intrepid team of people who are all highly skilled at different things and have their own mysterious and tragic backstories in order to defeat the folks who hired her who are now dead set on murdering anyone who had anything to do with the heist, and to embark upon another, much more advanced heist to prevent the most batshit of the corrupt scriving dynasties from amassing otherwordly power using heirophant artifacts.

One of the valued members of this misfit team is Clef, who is a magic talking key. Clef is undoubtedly my favorite character. He is himself a heirophant artifact, and while that makes him several millennia older than anyone else in the book, his speech style reads a lot more modern to me, to hilarious effect. Everyone else is talking in that sort of passably-medieval-compliant-but-not-overdoing-it register where they talk like normal people but a little on the formal end; Clef talks like a 1930s private eye as written by someone writing today who is only middlingly familiar with 1930s private eye dramas (he usually addresses Sancia as "Hey, kid"). Clef talks the way you'd expect him to talk if he were a human named "Clef."

Other members of the team include Gregor Dandolo, a wannabe cop whomst is very idealistic and generally unaware that All Cops Are Bastards; Orso Ignacio, a splenetic master scriver; Berenice, his prodigy apprentice; and Claudia and Giovanni, a couple freelance scrivers who are more talented than their circumstances allow them to express. Berenice thinks Sancia is cute and exciting; everyone else thinks Sancia is grouchy and oh my god she's covered in blood again

Sancia and everyone else do get covered in blood a lot, because this book goes into some hella dark places regarding the economics of slavery, human experimentation, what rich assholes will do for power, and other important political themes regarding industrialization and primitive accumulation, but because of the magic element it has more "exploding people in midair by fucking with their personal gravity" than real-life early modern politics did.

It is, in short, extremely my kind of book.

One of the very earliest Discworld books I read was Soul Music, it might even have been the second, after The Truth. Since then I know I've reread it, since the first read was a library copy and now I own one. I also finally watched the 1997 cartoon miniseries a few months ago; it was better than I had expected.

Most recently I decided to reread it via Mark Reads, mostly as background audio while I was at work. As a result, I didn't pay the best attention to it, because I'm not great at multi-tasking like that. But that's OK; that's precisely why my work audio choices include Mark reading books I've already read!

Soul Music is part of the "Ankh-Morpork gets steampunkified" subset of Discworld books, in which a thing gets invented/discovered/released into the Discworld and then havoc ensues, and then probably nasty many-headed things invade from the Dungeon Dimensions. The book before this was Men at Arms, in which the thing that gets invented is a gun (or gonne, as the case may be), but Soul Music probably hews closer to the tradition of the fantastic Moving Pictures, because Pratchett has a lot of feelings about the chaotic potential of art, apparently.

There are a couple of plotlines going on here, as usual. One is that Death, the anthropomorphic personification, is pulling a mini Reaper Man redux and abandoning his post, trying to go off and find some way to forget. Since this existential crisis is kicked off by the deaths of Ysabel and Mort, I do find it darkly amusing that Death is so bad at dealing with bereavement and, apparently, incapable of figuring out how to mourn (attempts include joining the Klatchian Foreign Legion and drinking copious amounts of alcohol). Death's job must then be temporarily taken over by his school-age granddaughter Susan, not yet grown up into the fantastic Susan of Hogfather but a very cool character all the same.

Susan doesn't really like being Death; she doesn't have the acceptance of the randomness of the universe that it requires, and she is immediately plunged in over her head when a young musician who is supposed to die is sort of mysteriously saved at the last minute and, apparently, being kept alive by some force other than his own life force.

The musician is Imp y Celyn, eventually stage-named Bud in homage to Buddy Holly, and also his plotline is largely a sort of weird spoof of the Day the Music Died. Not a lot of people could spoof rock's greatest tragedy and have it not be in incredibly poor taste, but Sir Terry Pratchett is not most people. Imp aka Bud is a musician whomst has set out to Ankh-Morpork to seek his fortune. When his new troll friend squashes his harp by sitting on it, Bud buys a magic guitar in one of those shops that just appeared yesterday and retroactively has been there forever, and he and his new friends start a band and invent Music With Rocks In.

Music With Rocks In soon takes Ankh-Morpork by storm, leading to lots of shenanigans, the Wizards acting like surly teenagers, and CMOT Dibbler becoming the band's manager and sending them on a rather dreadful tour while stealing most of their money.

The bits of this book that have stuck with me over the years, even when I've gone ages without reading it, are always the wizards. The wizards get into Music With Rocks In hardcore. They do stuff like sew leather jackets and give themselves wear pompadour hairstyles with bacon grease and invent platform shoes and emblazon their clothes with studs that spell out BORN TO RUNE. In fact, even if the rest of this book sucked, it would be worth it just for the Dean and the jokes associated with his transformation into a fashion-forward wannabe rebel.

Fortunately, the rest of the book does not suck, although neither is it one of the best Discworld books. But since a middling Discworld book is still much better than your average attempt at comic fantasy, that's OK.

Oh, and the band name references are great. I probably missed most of them when I first read the book 17 or 18 years ago, but now I get a lot more of them.

Last weekend I went to Florida to visit my dad and Melissa, and I got to do a relax and read a whole fiction book. In this case it was an ARC of Laini Taylor's Muse of Nightmares, the sequel to her fantastic Strange the Dreamer.

This book picks up pretty much where the last one leaves off. The last one left off with many major plot twists, so talking about where this book starts would be pretty much a big batch of spoilers. Hmm.

In proper Book Two fashion, we also start to get backstory, not on the main characters, but on the civilizational conflict. A few small Easter eggs tie it into the conflicts of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series; it has been too many years since I've read the Fairies of Dreamdark books to have spotted if they fit the cosmology as well. But basically, the scope of the story widens, encompassing a few additional centuries and a few additional worlds. In proper Laini Taylor fashion, it is both very sappy and extremely brutal, with ties of love and hate and grief driving people to rack up bananas body counts and inflict unimaginable traumas on other people. Maladaptive psychology is a definite theme, with Sarai's gift as a dreamwalker allowing her to poke about in people's subconsciouses, witnessing all the ways the mind copes with staggering loss and brutality.

The book also has much more sexiness than one would expect considering that one half of the main romantic pairing is dead, but that's Laini Taylor for you. On a political level, it's good that people aren't dancing around this stuff in teen fiction anymore; from a craft perspective, it's well done; from a being me as a reader perspective, it's dead (ha) boring. I can't tell if there's something about it that's actually more boring than the first book or if I am just feeling less generous than usual about slogging through pages of horny teens being horny teens.

Anyway, that's... really my only criticism. The rest of it is lush and poetic and whimsical and tragic and murdery, full of very bizarre plot twists and exciting near-misses. There is fun wonderful wish-fulfillmenty magic and terrifying psychological horror magic, and everything in between. I can't wait for whatever she writes next.

My very first book of 2019 was an ARC of Holly Black's The Wicked King, which I stole from Gillian, who stole it from Lyndsay. Anyway, The Wicked King is the sequel to the delightfully stabby and messed-up The Cruel Prince, which we read for book club over the summer.

The Wicked King is also very stabby and messed-up. Our protagonist, the mortal teenage girl Jude, has ascended to the role of seneschal for the new High King of Elfhame, Cardan, who is a dreadful person and with whom Jude has mutual resentful, ragey unresolved sexual tension. Jude has Cardan under a geas for a year and a day where he has to obey her if she gives him orders, making her the real power behind the throne -- if she can keep it. Meanwhile, the queen of the Undersea plots against Cardan, because of course Holly Black would have evil mermaids.

I'm not really sure how to talk about this book without massive plot spoilers. The main thing about it is that if you liked The Cruel Prince, then whatever you liked about it, you probably get it here even more! Unless your favorite thing was Valerian, since he's been dead since the last book. But if the thing you liked about the Valerian plotline was Jude murdering insufferably smug enemies that violate her bodily autonomy, you're going to fucking love some of the later chapters.

Perhaps my favorite thing about this series, me being the un-romantic that I am, is that the Obligatory Romance Plot is entirely too fucked up to be classed as a romance. It is just sort of a Hate-Filled Sexual Tension That Does Not In Any Way Triumph Over Adversity Or Teach Them To Be Better People Or Do One Whit Of Inspiring Them Not To Scheme And Manipulate Each Other At Every Conceivable Turn Plot. Honestly, this series has a much more Les Liaisons Dangereuses vibe at times than I ever thought I'd see in a YA novel. It's just so not wholesome!

I really, truly enjoy what a psychologically damaged protagonist Jude is, and how psychologically damaged everyone else in this book is. Elfhame is clearly a terrible place to bring up children of any species. It's a mark of how skilled a writer Black is that it's quite easy to get sucked into Jude's head; she somehow feels relatable even as she is martial and cunning and ruthless in a way that a big dumb softie like me absolutely isn't. Her desire to enact revenge upon all of the casually cruel wackjobs around her is relatable, at least; I wouldn't like any of these people either. They clearly all need to be thwarted, just on principle.

I have a lot of friends that are into superhero stories. Like most of my friends, these tend to be fairly left-wing friends, and ones with strong critical thinking skills about literature and whatnot. They haven't shied away from or gotten defensive about the discussions going on in SF/F right now examining the strengths and weaknesses of superhero stories as a genre, the inherent sort of regressiveness of the individualistic, vigilante, strongman sort of narrative deep in the structure of the superhero concept even when an individual superhero story takes on other, more progressive politics. And some superhero stories do take on politics pretty head-on, with powers that embody the fantasies of marginalized people or directly rebuke regressive myths.

Libba Bray's The Diviners series is, pretty much, a superhero story, though that word is never used in it. It's about a bunch of teens that all have special powers, powers they don't understand and that society doesn't really believe exist. It takes place in the 1920s, which is a fun twist, but overall, so far so X-men.

I've never before read a superhero story, especially not a YA gothic historical fantasy novel, that was so explicitly about eugenics.

Earlier in the series the eugenics was lurking a little more in the background while the main plot revolved around Ouija boards and solving highly occult-signified murders, but as the series has progressed, the story of the Diviners has gotten more and more explicitly mixed up with a storyline about the myths of American progress--a storyline about medical experimentation, who counts as a person and an American, the violence of industrial capitalism, the narratives of "progress" and "science" used to provide cover for bigotry and exploitation.

We're currently at a tumultuous time in American history that has no small number of parallels to the 1920s. It's a time when we're being called to confront the sins of our past, where the inherent contradictions of trying to build -- or telling ourselves we're building -- a land of liberty and justice for all, on a foundation of genocide, slavery, and land theft are coming to the forefront. It's a time when technological advancement is being turned to regressive, invasive, and inhumane ends. It's a time when the government is disappearing people, although the government has done that to those it considers expendable throughout most if its history. It's a time when white supremacists are marching through city streets and anti-immigrant sentiment is high.

Sadly, there are no flappers. That's going to come back into style real soon, right? We're going to make this happen. Rouged knees and cupid's bow lipliner, the whole deal. It's not any dumber than purple highlighter.

Anyway. We're on to Before the Devil Breaks You, the third installation of what I thought was going to be a trilogy but is apparently going to be a quartet, which means Jake Marlowe isn't dead and the man in the stovepipe hat isn't defeated, although we do certainly learn a lot about both of them over the course of the book, in addition to learning a lot of other things about our main characters and how the Diviners were made and what Project Buffalo was really up to. It's a huge sprawling complex narrative spiced up with delightful banter, lots of toothy murder ghosts, some arson, some drunken escapades, and other fun stuff like that. The Italian anarchist dude who I have wanted to have a plotline for two books now finally gets a plotline, which sadly relies heavily upon Bad Ideas Anarchists Were Really Into In The 1920s And From Which Their Reputation Has Never Really Recovered, by which I mean blowing stuff up. Johann Most has a lot to answer for. This is also the book wherein everybody gets laid, which is how you know we're 3/4 of the way through the story (most of it happens almost exactly 3/4 of the way through this book, too).

In this book, though the sleeping sickness from Lair of Dreams is gone, the city is being haunted by angry ghosts calling themselves the Forgotten, who can possess people and get them to kill each other. A lot of these ghosts are attacking the Kirkbride asylum on Ward's Island, which is one of those little islands in the river around Manhattan where they put institutions for socially undesirable people (much like Blackwell's, which was operating around the same time). Others are wandering around the city. The Diviners all get together and learn to develop their powers, which they then use to go around killing the ghosts, which is only a temporary measure since the ghosts are being somehow activated by the man in the stovepipe hat, and also the ghosts have a point that it's bad that they've been forgotten. All our main characters, whether they're Diviners or not, are wrestling with various things in their past that are resurfacing, and how. In Theta's case, a person she thought she'd left behind literally shows back up in New York; for Evie, she learns a lot more about her dead brother James and what Project Buffalo has to do with everything. A lot of people besides Sam are being sort-of haunted by the telepathic voice of Sam's mother Miriam, which Sam has many feelings about. Jericho is being blackmailed about his iron lung juice that keeps him alive, so he ends up going up to Jake Marlowe's estate/lair/secret government agency to get shot full of more weird serums that basically turn him into a science project for Marlow's Future of America exhibition, like a rapey, irradiated Captain America. (Jake Marlowe firmly believes that radium is good for you. I hope his jaw falls off in the next book.) Memphis and Isaiah learn who Bill Johnson is and draw the attention of the wrong people. The dead are mad at Ling, probably because she keeps helping blow them up, and Ling has to wrestle with the disappointment of learning more stuff about Jake Marlowe, like a 1920s version of all those weird nerd dudes who get mad when people dunk on Elon Musk. Mabel, of course, is hanging out with anarchists, plotting to blow up Jake Marlowe's uranium mine. Why is he mining shit-tons of uranium in the middle of New Jersey? For plot purposes, obviously.

Anyway, it's all barreling towards some kind of major showdown for the contradictory soul of America, and I'm mad that I have to wait another entire year to find out what it is. America continuing to be what it is, I have a feeling that it's not necessarily going to end in the final defeat of the man in the stovepipe hat...

Since it is Labor Day weekend, I felt very strongly that I did not want to do anything that could be considered productive if I did not have to; in addition, I was in need of a palate cleanser after reading the educational and distressing Evicted. In other words, it was Cheesy Vampire Novel O'Clock.

I decided upon Deborah Harkness' The Book of Life, the third book in her witch/vampire romance All Souls trilogy, a set of doorstoppers stuffed with witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, time travel, srs bsns historical research, fake genetics, wealth porn, gratuitous Frenchness, the obligatory impossible vampire pregnancy plotline, elite academia, sexy libraries, and lots of wine (some vampires never drink... vine. These are not those vampires). In short, it's like Outlander for vampire nerds (and less racist, not like that's the world's highest bar to clear).

My biggest issue with this book is entirely my own fault, which is that it's been like six years since I read Shadow of Night and I forgot a lot of what happened? I remembered they went back in time to 1591 and Diana got pregnant and met Matthew's several-decades-dead terrifying vampire patriarch, Philippe. And that there was a Scottish vampire who had been a gallowglass and now his name was Gallowglass, just in case you were afraid we were going to leave out the sexy Scotsman from this time-traveling vampire romance. But this is a very big complex story with many threads and many, many characters across timelines, and vampire families are huge hierarchical monstrosities of tangled pack dynamics and generational sprawl, and so I was very lost for quite a lot of it. That's what I get for acquiring too many books and not finishing series in a timely manner, I suppose.

Like many vampire books, huge chunks of this series are basically just wish fulfillment for nerdy ladies. While some of the wish fulfullment aspects do not reflect any of my wishes and therefore fall a bit flat ("He's authoritarian and broody but he's also terribly tall" is basically Why I Do Not Read Romance Novels, also, I honestly consider "interested in genetics" to be a huge red flag, although perhaps it is less red flaggy for actual genetics researchers), other aspects of it go right to my lizard brain, like "has magical powers" and "gets to live in multiple fancy homes from multiple interesting historical time periods," not to mention "elite access to extremely fancy libraries" and "can actually memorize mystical shit beyond half the Tarot deck" (I have been reading Tarot for 15 years and only have half the deck memorized; this is how much I don't rely on my own brain for things). Diana also apparently goes months without checking her email, which annoys all the other characters but honestly sounds fucking glorious.

The book also features interstitial excerpts from Diana's commonplace book from the 16th century in which she takes notes on the signs of the Zodiac, and if you think I'm not going to copy them into my own little baby Book of Shadows later this morning, you have underestimated how much I am witchy pop culture trash.

I had a lovely lavender manicure when I went up to Maine for Father's Day weekend and then I decided to only read books with pretty purple covers. Unfortunately, I am dumb and forgot to take pictures of my hands holding the gorgeous hardcover of Shadowhouse Fall, the sequel to Daniel Jose Older's debut YA fantasy Shadowshaper, which was awesome.

I am pleased to report that Shadowhouse Fall is also awesome and features a magic tarot deck, or at least a deck of cards sort of like a tarot deck, except that it's got totally different cards and they change and also it's magic. The four suits in the deck feature four different magical Houses, and not all the Houses are visible at the same time. One of the Houses is the House of Light, who we met in the last book and they're freaking creepy. One of the other houses is the Shadowhouse, which is the shadowshapers--Sierra, as the Lucera, is now the head of that House. She's inducted a bunch of her friends and family into shadowshaping, which means they're all in the House too--and some of them have the specialized roles set out in the deck. Also because Sierra, as the new Lucera, has made so many new shadowshapers, Shadowhouse is in the ascendant--and the House of Light, which had been ascendant for a while, is extremely pissed off about it and very much prepared to do something about it. It's time for a magical dominance war!

This magical dominance war takes place in the same modern, political New York as the rest of the series (and of Older's other books). Issues of police brutality, school surveillance, the criminalization of protest, Rikers Island, gentrification, and other forms of institutional violence are seamlessly woven in with the dynastic and magical violence of the Houses of the Deck of Worlds. The characters are sharply realized, the emotions are real and messy, and the dialogue is snappy and hilarious. The plot runs fast and the stakes are high, and it all builds to a satisfyingly powerful conclusion whereby Sierra somehow becomes even more awesome (it's like a video game; she levels up at the end of each book apparently) -- and the very end hits at a sequel about straight up Nazi-fightin', which I can't wait for. Older has forayed into Nazi-fightin' before in the novella The Ghost Girl in the Corner; the way he constructs his world I suspect they're going to be the same or at least related Nazis. But anyway, did I mention that this book was highly relevant to current-day politics? Because it is.

Current Mood: anxious

In a rush to finish off one more series before my next round of book club assignments, I decided to pick up Elizabeth Bear's Steles of the Sky, the third and final book in her Eternal Sky trilogy. I'd read Range of Ghosts in 2013 and Shattered Pillars in 2014, and bought Steles of the Sky also in 2014 when it was first published, but, my book-buying and -reading habits being what they are, it got buried behind some other books, even though I had really liked the first two.

A downside of this is that it took me a while to get into this one, because I had forgotten a lot of stuff, and it's a pretty complex story. There are a lot of different players from a lot of different cultures under several different skies, and everyone's religion and magic work differently, and the thing I'd remembered most vividly from the previous book was the demons incubating in people's lungs, which is basically the only plot point that was apparently wrapped up last volume because there aren't any more lung demons in this one. There are lots of horses and yaks, though, and I will admit that I occasionally have trouble reading anything with yaks quite seriously, for which I blame Terry Pratchett. This is entirely a fault of mine as a reader, though, as the now-Dowager Empress Yangchen's journey of self-discovery and non-uselessness as she leads a refugee caravan to Rasa is an excellent story arc, and Yangchen's faithful yak Lord Shuffle is a perfectly good animal companion, even if he is not as supernatural as Bansh.

There is a lot of politicking, which I love, although various characters seem to finally be wising up and realizing how much al-Sepher is playing them off each other, which has the benefit of not making me real mad at how stupid they're all being for Plot Reasons (like... a lot of books) but on the other hand does seem to slow the pace down a bit now that it's largely Everyone vs. al-Sepher. (This slowing down is helped along by the fact that the writing is very descriptive--it's good descriptive, but there's a lot of it.) The best bits are Saadet vs. al-Sepher, considering Saadet is actually on his side, having married the now-deceased Qori Buqa and now bearing his child in order to take over the Khaganate for al-Sepher's purposes. The culture clashes between the Qersnyk and the extremely restrictive cult of the Scholar-God are quite intense.

Ultimately, it is the world-building that really is the coolest thing about this series, even though the plot and characters and intrigues and stuff are all quite solid. The world feels very detailed and very old, and has all kinds of rich secrets buried in it, and by secrets I mean GODDAMN DRAGONS. The dragons are kind of assholes; it's great.

This is not to undersell the number of great ladies in this series, from the Wizard Samarkar to the slave-poetess Ummuhan, Edene has truly become a queen of poisoned things, and Yangchen similarly finds herself in a position of authority over evil creatures. Saadet, as previously mentioned, comes into her own beautifully, even if she's still basically on the side of the bad guys. And those are just the viewpoint characters.

Probably my biggest complaint about the series is that I really do not know shit about horses, up to and including the colors, so there was a lot of horse talk that went totally over my head. One plot point involves Temur trying to put together a Sacred Herd of the sixty-four colors of horses, and I'm sitting here like a dumbass city girl going "What the fuck is a liver bay," even though there is a drawing of one on the book's cover. (Unlike many fantasy-loving little girls, I did not go through a Horse Phase.)

Overall, this series is pretty stellar, but I cannot quite shake the feeling that I should dutifully plug my way through some of the Elizabeth Bear books I already own before getting the second Karen Memory book, which adds a slight feeling of obligation that makes the reading of it less fun. That's on me, though.

Oh, and obligatory "How well would this translate into a TV show": Were it done properly and not whitewashed, fucking FABULOUSLY.

Current Mood: aggravated

I astonishingly had spare time between book club reads and work review reads, and so I decided to be super productive and finish a series that I had let languish in a mostly-finished state for about two years now. I think the social media conversations I'd had recently about how dreadful most romantic subplots are had also reminded me that there's a grand total of like, two series where the romantic plot was actually a main plot but I liked them anyway. The first is Outlander; the second is Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamourist Histories. I had stopped reading Outlander after the third book because a) the show is superior and b) the third book had some awkward treatment of the various non-white groups that populated mid-18th-century North Carolina, in a way that I felt was sort of white-saviory and at times voyeuristic. So I went for the other series, finally picking up my copy of Of Noble Family.

I did not read the summary before I made this decision because it turns out that this book is about Vincent and Jane going to Antigua to take care of some management business on Vincent's father's sugar plantation. While I am generally of the opinion that white people should stop writing extended liberal-guilt thought exercises about how they would handle ~very unexpectedly~ become slaveowners, I will concede that Kowal handled this particular thought exercise better than Gabaldon did, and certainly better than the guy who wrote the Bloody Jack books did (still a Problematic Fave of mine, but... ugh, he needed to not go there). Jane is also pregnant through almost this entire book, which is also not usually super high up on my list of Plot Devices I'm Particularly Interested In, unless it's written as body horror. This isn't body horror, but it is a fairly unsparing look at the hardships of pregnancy and childbirth in the eighteenth century, which is... actually pretty close to being body horror.

This probably all sounds like I'm complaining. I am not complaining! The Glamourist Histories are overall quite a testament to the power of Doing Things Properly, since, after five books, I've found myself invested in all sorts of things that I usually don't enjoy reading about that much, in addition to the things that I do usually like that are why I started reading the series in the first place (i.e., magic, a female lead, period dresses, people being good at their work, and absurdly convoluted intrigues) (and pirates; I started this entire series because of the pirates in Valour and Vanity). It doesn't even matter that Vincent has a lot of traits that I don't find attractive at all, because... Vincent is Jane's husband, not mine! Vincent and Jane are both well-developed enough characters, and their relationship is developed enough, that understanding what Jane gets out of her relationship with Vincent is actually an entirely different thing than determining what I would get out of it, because Jane isn't just a reader cipher. (This is especially important because I don't think I'd get along so hot with Vincent. He has too much character development to be dismissed as an angry potato (h/t Lyndsay), but he has no chill, and I lack chill enough for two people.) Anyway. Writers of shitty tacked-on romantic subplots, take notes.

The glamour stuff continues to be a lot of fun, even though Jane can't do glamour for most of the book. She learns about the differences between formal European and what is generally dismissed as "folk" glamour; by this point, the reader knows enough about the glamour system that all this shop talk makes perfect sense and is really interesting. It is heavily implied, though never outright stated, that working glamour essentially functions as birth control for men; Vincent never quite figures this out.

There is also a plot, of course. This one involves intrigues such as Vincent's father only pretending to be dead, the plantation's overseer embezzling from the property, some forgeries, an explosion, and stuff like that. The embezzling overseer also has an excitable English wife who likes to quote Byron at people; she's a third-tier character but she's absolutely hilarious. The network of house and field slaves that Jane has to figure out how to not be racist to is heavily populated by illegitimate relatives of Vincent; considering how messed up the Hamilton family's dynamics were to start off with, you can imagine what intrigues adding a whole new branch of it adds, especially considering the spiteful, supposedly-dead Lord Verbury literally owns most of them.

While I enjoyed this series very much I am not particularly devastated that it's over; perhaps now I can finally get around to reading Ghost Talkers.

Oh man oh man oh man. Despite having a list of things to do as long as my arm, I squeezed out some illicit spare time this week to read the new Tamora Pierce book, Tempests and Slaughter, the one I waited five hours in line to get signed. I did not dare take it out of my room at any point and I probably never will.

Tempests and Slaughter covers the early schooling of the boy who will eventually become Numair Salmalin, the mightiest mage in Tortall and awkwardly older lover of Daine the wildmage. But for now, we meet him as Arram Draper, a sensitive ten-year-old with an inquisitive mind and less than great control over his Gift, in the unenviable social situation of being the youngest student at the Lower Academy of the great mage school in Carthak. Ten-year-old Arram gets up to such adventures as lying about his age, accidentally falling into a gladiatorial arena, and flooding a classroom before he is mercifully bumped up to a semi-independent study level and the fun stuff can start. The fun stuff here largely consists of him finally making friends, because the power of friendship is a common theme in Pierce's books. His friends are two other gifted mages (in the "very talented" sense; obviously all mages are Gifted in this universe) who are also on semi-independent study tracks: the lovely and charming uber-kitchen-witch Varice Kingsford, and the seventh-in-line-to-the-throne imperial heir Prince Ozorne. You might remember them from Emperor Mage, as you might remember a whole bunch of other places and characters and gods in this book.

Little Arram is a very particular type of earnest, easily distracted, troublesomely smart kid that I think a lot of the folks who read Tamora Pierce books identify with a lot, even if for the first time ever in the Tortall books our viewpoint character is A BOY, which occasionally makes things a bit different than our usual Tortall viewpoint characters in ways that were apparently very embarrassing for Pierce to find technical consultants for (at the event at Booksmith, she talked about Bruce Coville basically laughing his way through all her drafts after her husband refused to answer any questions, claiming that he was old and didn't remember being a teenage boy very well). Teenage Varice is very charming and skilled and it's clear why Arram is in love with her, as is everyone else. Arram's BFF Ozorne is kind of a jerk already, being virulently racist against Sirajits because a bit of the state violence his dad was enacting upon them blew back in his face, and imperial logic dictates that the empire has a monopoly on brutality and fighting back is both illegitimate and proof that Those People need to be kept in line.

Arram also makes another friend about halfway through the book, which is the obligatory Adorable Magical Animal Companion. This one is a fledgling sunbird in disguise, "accidentally" stowed away on the back of a crocodile god from the Divine Realms. Her name is Preet and she is apparently just the essence of every adorable birb floof I have seen on Tumblr in the past two years. Preet is feel uncomfortable when we are not about me? but other than that is protective and charming.

Like most of the Tortall books, this book alternates its adorable wholesome content with pervasive violence. Social justice themes explored in this book include the commercialization of suffering (in this case, via gladiatorial combat), slavery (also, in part, via gladiatorial combat), the violence of imperialism (see: Ozorne's daddy getting what he deserved and everyone pretending it reflects badly on the Sirajit), and, to a lesser extent than some of her other books, the violence of poverty. Arram is training to be a healer, which takes him into such scenes of human suffering as a plague of typhoid in the city slums, and an intense stint as a resident healer for the fighters during a set of gladiatorial games. In an interesting serendipity of media consumption, I've also spent much of my commute time this week listening to the latest Hardcore History episode, "Painfotainment," which is also about violent spectacle, including Roman gladiatorial games and other popular public executions. (Fun fact: I can't spell "gladiatorial" correctly. Embarrassing for a copy editor! Good thing they aren't around anymore or I'd have to report on people betting on them.)

The plot is still a bit murky since we are only in Book 1 of the series but it does seem to be barreling inexorably toward Ozorne becoming Emperor, as the other heirs are picked off via horrible accident at an unlikely pace. Ozorne is surrounded by terrible people who do much to explain how Ozorne winds up terrible too, and it's actually quite impressive that he's not a bigger shit than he is at this point. Arram's teachers at school are mostly pretty awesome and terrifying, except for Master Lindhall, who is great but not terrifying at all. The power fantasy element of this book is very strong if you were an awkward bookish gifted kid, I'll tell you. Training in powerful magic via personalized instruction by multiple powerful mentors--baby me, sitting bored in the back of a classroom acing standardized tests, is jealous across twenty years. Of course, adult me can't be arsed to memorize her tarot card meanings and I've been reading the stupid things for fifteen years, so clearly magic isn't my forte; reading Tamora Pierce books is.

This probably isn't the strongest Tortall book but I really can't be objective about these things. I'm too delighted by all the call-outs to other books, including a couple of references to books written by Farmer Cooper and some of his and Beka's descendants. There are fun little things like Ozorne saying he wishes he had a Stormwing, which will make anyone who remembers In the Realms of the Gods chuckle knowingly. We're also clearly laying the groundwork for Numair's expertise in various kinds of non-Gift magic, a fairly taboo subject at the university.

Anyway, the problem with getting and reading this book within a reasonable amount of time is that now I have to wait the entire window between books for the sequel. I already waited seven years since Mastiff was published for this one, and now I gotta start waiting again! I don't know what I shall do with myself.

Wait, yes I do. I will dedicate my time to social justice activism and studying witchcraft. I think Numair would approve of that.

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bloodygranuaile

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Entries tagged with magic

The Turtle Moves

Sword distribution as the basis for a system of government

Dragons and shadows and birbs

Icons and apocalypses

She's into bones

In which there is good goth representation in YA literature

Fair value and feathers

Bakers, you have one week before your friend disappears

Where do I get a ribcage corset?

In which I am inspired to start doing bicep curls again

Be gay and do crimes, kid

LIVE FATS DIE YONGE

The sins of the fathers

Of murder, mermaids, and the Queen of Mirth

Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again

A house grows in Brooklyn

Re Temur builds his army

Glamourists of the Caribbean

Tempests and floofy birbs