bloodygranuaile

I’m at my annual writing retreat and, as has been the trend for the last couple of years, I’m treating it more like a reading retreat. Also, it being with the group it’s with, I determined that I would spend this time reading some actual spec fic for once, dammit. To that end I decided to kick off by reading the third and final installment of the last YA series I’ve gotten invested in, which was H.A. Clarke’s Scapegracers trilogy. To that end I spent most of Saturday reading The Feast Makers.

At this point in Sideways Pike’s life, she has her soul/specter back, and that’s about the only thing that’s going right. Sideways appears to be in acute mental and physical anguish in basically every single sentence of this book. She has a terribly unhealthy lifestyle, but she’s also like 17, which is an age where you can kind of get away with things like drinking too much coffee and sleeping at extremely weird hours and crashing on people’s floors. Sideways, for some reason, reacts to all these things like she’s thirty-five, or at least as badly as if she were thirty-five, though the specific complaints are slightly different. Her back and knees don’t seem to hurt but every third sentence is about how her mouth apparently tastes permanently bad and her eyeballs are about to explode and she is having a panic attack and can’t speak or listen or process information. But for all that she is apparently in a permanent state of something resembling advanced sleep deprivation and thus functionally incapacitated at all times, she is still a very active main character. She runs all over Sycamore Gorge hexing Chetts and going to parties and beating up witchfinders and making phone calls on her increasingly fucked-up phone, which, unlike Sideways’ head, cannot be magically healed after their run-ins with a particularly nasty witchfinder named Tatum Jenkins.

I had forgotten just enough of what had happened in the first two books to occasionally get a little disoriented but overall it was easy enough to slide back in to Sideway’s spiky teenage world and recommence cheering on our coven of feral mean girls. They are not nice but they do fight shitty conservative witchfinders and generally intend to use their magic to help people to the best of their shortsighted and often impulsive abilities, so it’s satisfying when they get a hit in. In classic YA fashion, most of the grown-ups ostensibly on their own side are also kind of shitty, thus forcing them into protagonisting even when they get involved in conflicts much bigger than themselves that ought to be handled by real grown-ups. In the matter of Madeline Kahn, we also get a plotline involving restorative justice in a way that manages to completely eschew the use of any nonprofit language, which I found beautifully aspirational, even if in real life we can’t actually solve things by hexing people’s ability to hurt others away from them.

Anyways, it was a fast-paced and gory ending to a fast-paced and gory YA series, and I enjoyed it very much. It may be the last new YA series I ever read and if so I will be OK with that.

My very talented friend Lyndsay Ely published another book! She’s actually published a few other books but I’m simply not going to read the Skibidi Toilet ones, sorry. But she specifically just published an original fantasy novel–her first for adults–which I had the privilege of reviewing a very early draft of back in the pandemic.

The Lost Reliquary is about a young woman named Lys who is in training to be of service to the last remaining god in the Devoted Lands, the flame goddess Tempestra-Innara. Tempestra is the goddess herself; Innara is her current human avatar; i.e., the person she’s possessed in order to be embodied. Lys, like all the other Chosen, loves the goddess, but in her case, this love is in conflict with an independent streak that resents that love, and is aware that it’s a deliberately inculcated dependence that the goddess uses to control her “children.” The only possible resolution of this conflict, as far as Lys can figure, is deicide.

An exciting opportunity to carry out said deicide drops in her lap when a band of heretics almost kills Tempestra-Innara, and the goddess entrusts Lys and a potentiate from her rival cloister with a quest to team up and go fetch the weapon the heretics used in their assassination attempt. The purpose of this quest, of course, is to bring the thing back to Tempestra-Innara so they can destroy it, but Lys has other plans. Lys’ assigned partner, Nolan, also has his own agenda, but it emphatically does not involve betraying his goddess in any way, shape, or form. (Betraying Lys, of course, could be another story.)

The quest takes Lys and Nolan out of their elite little cloisters and around to many different parts of the Devoted Lands, including some less-devoted parts of it that scandalize Nolan and tantalize Lys. Various leads are followed and lost, with an entertaining combination of violent fight scenes and sneaky intrigue and double-dealing. Lys deals with the constant pressure and violence the same way she always has, by being sarcastic, which irritates most of the various humorless prigs that infest the very serious religious establishment. Also she fights with two sickles, which is extremely cool.

The book comps here include Gideon the Ninth, which I think is correct as far as the book contains a truly shitty god character, a lot of gross fucked-up necromancy stuff, some delightful skulls (I was so glad to see Alistair again), and a martial female lead forcibly raised in a fucked-up monastery who uses bitchy humor as a coping mechanism. It should be noted, in case it misleads anybody, that unlike the Locked Tomb series this book is not screamingly gay, but rather refreshingly devoid of romantic concerns altogether. Lys’ complicated relationship with Nolan is interesting in its own right without shoehorning a romantic subplot into it, which I personally appreciated as a longtime hater of shoehorned-in romantic subplots.

At over 400 pages this book is fairly long, but it’s a fast-paced action-adventure and despite a murderously busy week I barrelled through it in a few 50- to 100-page sessions, including more than one round of staying up later than intended reading “just a few pages” before bed. This doesn’t happen to me anymore as much as it used to. I have probably read more action-adventure quest fantasies with heavily armed young women than most people could name in a lifetime, to the point where I have become somewhat critical and easily bored of them, but this one I found very engaging the whole way through. I’m also excited for the sequel, as I am interested to see how Lys deals with the whole new set of problems she acquires in the final pages.

September’s installment of the Vorkosigan Saga, Diplomatic Immunity, brings us back to our titular Vorkosigans, and specifically to Miles and Ekaterin. The two are on their way back to Barrayar after their honeymoon, scheduled to get back just in time for the birth of their first two children, who have been incubating in uterine replicators at Vorkosigan House. The last leg of their trip is unfortunately interrupted by a request from Emperor Gregor that Miles use his Auditor powers to investigate and de-escalate a situation in Quaddiespace that involves an impounded Komarran cargo ship, its Barrayaran military escort, and vague rumblings of discontent from the Cetagandans.

This book is a little on the shorter end compared to some of the other Miles adventures, but about middling for the series overall, clocking in at about 300 pages and change. It fits in an enormous amount of intrigue, though. Bujold doesn’t insult our intelligence at this point by dicking around pretending that the various crises that Miles is dropped into–the mysterious disappearance of Lieutenant Solian, the bigoted busting-up of Ensign Corbeau’s romance with the quaddie dancer Garnet Five, the upset Komarrans, the rumors of upset Cetagandans–are all going to be separate crises. I’m pretty sure Miles says something along the lines of “If these aren’t connected, I’ll eat my Auditor’s chain” sometime around his first round of interviews at Graf Station. The question was always going to be how they were connected, and the structure here is competence porn at its most engaging–Miles finds answers thick and fast, because he is good at his job, and many of the people around him are also good at their jobs, but the real story is sufficiently weird that the first several rounds of finding clues and answers and reliable witnesses and all that good stuff just makes things more confusing, and by the time the key real story is unearthed from under several layers of other seemingly contradictory stories, everyone is in deep enough shit that it will take all of Miles’ already-taxed cleverness to dig them back out again–and to do it fast enough to fend off war breaking out in an entirely other area of space.

We also get a nicely balanced blend of interesting new characters and cameos from old favorites–Bel Thorne pops back up as a fairly major character, and its quaddie girlfriend Nicol also cameos a few times. We also have an interesting reunion with the Cetagandan lady the haut Pel, although to even mention that she turns up again already feels like a massive spoiler. The best new character also doesn’t really turn up until the end, so I also feel like I shouldn’t talk about him much, but I will say that after his ordeals I hope Guppy gets everything in life that he wants and possibly even things it had never occurred to him to want (like maybe some peace and quiet).

Anyway, this is just a really good solid murder mystery in space, and I’m once again very glad that I’m doing this reading project. It’s consistently the highlight of my month.

The Beasties liftcord is doing a successive run of Jane Austen readalongs, so I skipped ahead in my plan to reread them all in publication order to participate in the one for my favorite Austen, the niche and generally least-loved Northanger Abbey.

Northanger Abbey is about a nice but fairly ordinary young girl named Catherine Morland, who is neither particularly smart, pretty, nor industrious, but is very sweet and a bit naive. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the story ends up destroying some of that naivete via having a plot happen to Catherine, and put her general integrity and good-naturedness to the test. Appropriately for a heroine she does find a moral spine re: treating people nicely, thus establishing it as an actual principle and character trait. The book starts off with a whole chapter about how un-heroinely she is compared to the elegant flowers that populate popular novels of the time, really getting in on the sort of hashtag-relatable thing that would eventually become more popular. It’s not as concise as the opening line of P&P but it’s still one of my favorite book opening chapters.

Naive, good-natured Catherine’s coming-of-age plotline kicks off when she accompanies a kindhearted but shallow family friend to Bath, thus leaving her large boisterous family for the first time. After an isolated beginning, Catherine makes some friends in Bath–a vivacious young woman named Isabella, whose brother is friends with Catherine’s older brother, which they find out when both young men also appear in Bath; and Eleanor and Henry Tilney, a brother-and-sister pair whose father is a general. Henry is a clergyman with a good-naturedly teasing sense of humor and no fear of reading “girly” novels; Eleanor is a quiet, sweet type who isn’t ordinarily that shy but goes back into her shell whenever her overbearing father is around.

The first sign of trouble in paradise (i.e. Bath, which Austen apparently hated) is when some scheduling conflicts break out between these two groups of friends, by which we mean every time Catherine makes plans with the Tilneys, the Thorpes show up at Catherine’s house to be like “get in loser we’re going shopping” and simply do not accept “I already have plans with other people and it’d be rude AF for them to show up and I’ve just fucked off somewhere else” as a sufficient excuse. This, tragically for Catherine, turns out to be just the earliest signs of something dreadfully morally deficient in the Thorpe family’s character, although not in any sort of dark and murdery way like happens in the kind of novels Catherine and Isabella like to read, and which Jim Thorpe also likes to read but pretends he doesn’t because he’s a sexist boor.

Even more tragically for Catherine, the drama with the Thorpes is basically the subplot, or at least the starter plot that foreshadows the main plot. For there is also drama with the Tilneys! And Catherine would rather die than have drama with the Tilneys. At first, Catherine is over the moon when she is invited to visit Eleanor and stay at their home in Northanger Abbey, which is, as you can probably guess from the name, a former abbey. As a gothic novel girlie, Catherine loves this, but also ends up letting her imagination run away with her a bit, which is very funny for the reader and occasionally mortifying to Catherine. Similarly to the first plot, the Tilney’s overbearing father is eventually revealed to be a huge dick, but in a much more prosaic way than happens in the types of books Catherine reads. Henry Tilney, as befits a romantic hero, ultimately defies his father and travels all the way to Shropshire to propose to Catherine, and the story ends on a happy note with Catherine, who has by now had her fill of abbeys, settling into the modern but charming parsonage with her nice, normal, supportive, funny guy who is not at all broody or tormented.

As befits a Jane Austen novel, the social commentary on this one is biting, focusing mainly on how being money-grubbing gossips causes people to mistreat each other, with a couple of digs on letting your imagination run away with you and the perils of only being able to talk about fashion. Also, while I’m more familiar with bad nineteenth-century fiction, I’ve read a couple of the kinds of eighteenth-century gothics Austen is sending up here–particularly The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk, which are name-dropped–to appreciate many, if not all, of the jokes she’s making.

At any rate, I think this book is an underrated classic and I love it to bits and I wish all overly excitable horror girlies an equally happy ending (even if it looks very different; I know British male clergymen are not for everybody, especially not me).

So, Winterfair Gifts was actually not my July installment of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga–that’s going to be Falling Free, which I haven’t gotten to yet–but I had basically forgotten to put Winterfair Gifts in the lineup as I had been unclear if it constituted a book or not. It’s a novella, hardly more than a short story, and doesn’t seem to have a standalone print publication, but I got the ebook and read it that way. It took me about an hour and a half to read the whole thing, which was a nice way to cap off a night where I’d finally finished a lengthy nonfiction book that it’d taken me upwards of 10 days to read.

Winterfair Gifts is a charming little story from the point of view of Armsman Roic, last seen at the end of A Civil Campaign wearing briefs, boots, his gun holster on the wrong way, a lot of bug butter, and nothing else. Roic is Miles’ most junior armsman, and until this point has mostly been a rather one-dimensional comic relief himbo sort of character, so it was fun to get a little bit of his background and see how things look from his point of view. Roic comes from a fairly provincial Barrayaran background and is somewhat in awe of all the galactic experiences and high-ranking shenanigans of his new employers, but he is doing his best to learn and expand his mind and lives in fear that Miles, Armsman Pym, and the other bigshots whose company he must now keep think he’s an idiot.

Roic’s horizons are abruptly expanded when two of Miles’ colleagues from his old life show up to Barrayar as wedding guests–the jumpship pilot Arde Mayhew, and the bioengineered werewolf-esque Sergeant Taura. Once his initial shock wears off, Roic finds himself very attracted to Taura, but unsure how to navigate picking up an eight-foot-tall galactic mercenary while constantly on duty.

Plot stuff happens when Ekaterin, who is already under some degree of emotional stress about the wedding, falls ill, and Sergeant Taura develops an unorthodox theory about one of the wedding gifts, which she attempts to investigate on her own. This doesn’t get very far, and instead, Taura and Armsman Roic find themselves trying to keep their cool while bringing in all sorts of very important ImpSec people that they’re not used to talking to. Fortunately, because this is a cute short short, the threat is eventually neutralized and the mystery solved, Ekaterin gets better and the wedding goes off beautifully, and Armsman Roic both proves himself Not An Idiot to his superiors and gets to snog Taura.

This story was overall pretty cute and fluffy (minus Ekaterin almost dying) in a way that wouldn’t at all have worked for me as an independent story with characters I didn’t know, but as a Vorkosigan Saga book it was a delightful little romp full of all our Fan Favorites and worked perfectly as an escapist palate cleaner from the day I’d been having. I’m looking forward to tackling Falling Free later this week.

Though Sad Irish Literature Month for me is traditionally March, I make an exception for Walter Macken’s Irish Trilogy. I read the first two at my dad’s cabin in Maine and I was going to read the third one there, too. The copies I have are ancient 1970’s editions from when my dad was living in London before I was born and as such I consider them to be Family Heirlooms and I will read them properly.

The first book in this trilogy, Seek the Fair Land, takes place during the Cromwellian ravages and I read it several years ago. Last year I determined to make some progress and read the second book, The Silent People, which is about the years leading up to and during the Great Famine. This one, The Scorching Wind, takes place in the 1910s and ‘20s, during the war for independence and the civil war that immediately followed.

Before I get into the book properly I must point out the things that this book has in common with Ken Loach’s movie The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Loach is an Englishman but The Wind that Shakes the Barley, featuring a not-yet-Oscar-winning young Corkman named Cillian Murphy, is nevertheless one of the most tear-jerkingly powerful movies about Irish history I’ve seen, with bonus socialism and extra bonus Cork accents so thick you could cut them with a butter knife and put them on toast. So. In addition to the general time period, both works feature a protagonist who is initially reluctant to join in revolutionary activity, because he is a medical student who is therefore a) very busy studying to be a doctor and b) more about putting people back together than blowing them apart. In the movie our half-doctor revolutionary is named Damian and in the book he is named Dominic. (One major difference: Damian, being played by Cillian Murphy, is very handsome, and Dominic is frequently implied to be not so handsome–certainly not as handsome as young Cillian Murphy, anyway.) Both protagonists have brothers who, at the beginning, are more militant than they are, joining the IRA first, while our black-haired heroes are still reluctant. By the end, though, it is our younger brothers who have become more militant and take the anti-Treaty side in the war, while the older brothers become Free State officials, pitting brother against brother in a way that makes an extremely heart-wrenching and dramatic ending to a drama about war. Also both stories take place largely in the Western part of Ireland, far from the drama in Dublin–Loach’s movie was filmed largely on location in Cork, and Macken’s story takes place in and around his native Galway.

From thence the similarities end, but it’s enough that I tried to look up if Loach had ever mentioned the book in an interview or anything. I can find some webpages that claim the film was influenced by the book but I can’t find any primary sources where they are getting that claim from on a quick search. Ah well.

Anyway. The prose style is trademark Macken, with a lot of very simple descriptive sentences interspersed by the characters’ unpretentious thoughts and bits of Hiberno-English that someone unfamiliar with the area could spend years looking up. Many of the characters speak in Irish but the book doesn’t generally include it; it translates it to English When an Irish word is used because there’s no real English translation or it’s just one word, Macken doesn’t italicize; it just blends in seamlessly the way Irish words are normally incorporated into Hiberno-English. As far as I’m concerned, a real strength is the way the characters talk about politics, especially as people who have a lot of history but not necessarily a lot of theory–it sounds believable to the way real people at the time would talk about politics, and not like the author is performing educational dialogues for the benefit of the audience. The fights Dominic and Dualta have at the end might not be blindingly original but they sound like real fights people on the opposite side of an issue have.

Another interesting approach here is that Macken doesn’t spend a lot of time on the high-level news–other than everybody getting the news of the Easter Rising in Dublin, the book focuses on the individual experiences of the characters involved, with little in the way of dates, cameos by famous people (except one brief one from John Redmond), or the characters conveniently turning up at high-profile historical events. They ping back and forth between various IRA operations and trying to go back to regular life for various stretches of time. The characters only ever seem to know the bits of things they’re involved in, and sometimes not even that–Dominic ends up on multiple jobs where his acquaintances basically just scoop him up and tell him to do something and he’s not really sure what it is that’s in the bag, or where they are going, or some other type of information that you’d think would be fairly critical to being involved in a guerrilla military operation. But no, everything’s done on such a tight NTK information ecosystem that I sometimes worried it’d actually be a security hole, making people do things they hadn’t agreed to with only your judgment of their character that they’d go along with it.

Dominic’s journey from a reluctant revolutionary who would rather be left alone to study to a hardened veteran of the flying columns involves a lot of pretty nasty stuff. Macken really excels at foregrounding the humanity of everyone involved–including unprincipled mercenaries like the Tans Mac and Skin–without falling into the common modern trap of being like “Sure, the oppression is bad, but isn’t fighting back against it worse if you find yourself losing even one inch of moral high ground by doing anything even a little bit shitty to anybody.” Dominic doesn’t like everything he has to do as an IRA man, like burning a really big lovely house down in reprisal for another house burning, but his doubt and disgust that this is really necessary–his reluctance to accept it as necessary even as he acknowledges that it worked–doesn’t lead to him quitting or renouncing the IRA or deciding both sides are just as bad or anything. It’s just used to show how having to do all these terrible things sucks, and no cause or tactical justification makes it not suck. The exploration of what having to do awful things, as well as having awful things done to you, changes you, is, I think, the essence of what makes the novel so powerful.

One of the other great features is its incredible use of ambiguity, which I will not elaborate on because it would give away the ending.

Overall, I’m very glad I finally read these and I’m not sure what took me so long.

The ideal atmospheric reading choice here would have been to save this for a trip to New York, but as I don’t have one planned, I went ahead and read Cat Scully’s debut novel, Below the Grand Hotel, this past week–mostly in Salem, which I guess is acceptable because all horror novels are thematically appropriate for Salem. But this is a very New York sort of novel anyway, because it’s about the art scene and fancy hotels in New York in the 1920s, and nowhere is ever as 1920s as New York.

The comp titles for this book were The Great Gatsby and Hellraiser, which aren’t wrong, per se, but for me the other work it reminded me of the most was probably Libba Bray’s Diviners series. This is praise; I thoroughly enjoyed the Diviners series even though I was losing interest in YA by the time the last book came out.

Our protagonist in Below the Grand Hotel is Mabel Rose Dixon, a young woman from Georgia who, as so many artists have before and since, came to New York to seek her fortune in the performing arts. Mabel has recently been rejected as a Ziegfield Follies girl, not due to lack of talent but due to lack of the things Mr. Ziegfield really wants in his Follies, which is an extremely specific physical look and compliance with his sexually exploitative management style. Mabel is therefore–well, not forced, but certainly incentivized–to put her stage magician skills to unorthodox use as a pickpocket in order to fund her ability to keep body and soul together while she works to break into the industry. Unfortunately, Mabel goes after the wrong bit of jewelry, and body and soul thus become forcibly separated in a nasty deal with some demons within the Grand Hotel, a labyrinthine pocket universe that draws in desperate people and never lets them back out.

The book is part video-game-like mystery as Mabel navigates both the physical hotel and the web of secrets and lies that she is now entangled in, trying to figure out a way to not only escape the hotel herself but to free a shifting arrangement of other people’s souls as well. It’s also part meditation on the challenges and paradoxes of trying to be an artist and make art in an industry where not only is the art a commodity, but celebrity culture means that the artists become commodities themselves as well–and those commodities are subject to the rapid pace of both the whims of fashion and technological change. Scully really digs into what would make selling your soul to demons to perform in a murder hotel you can never leave appealing, which is, essentially, the alternative it provides to trying to scrape together a living in the supposedly non-demonic art world. Also there’s a lot of gore; every time Mabel gets to take a bath and change her clothes it’s like two pages before she’s covered head to toe in viscera again. It was a lot of fun.

While I am certainly enjoying all my early American history nonfiction reading, I am finding that the highlight of my reading month is increasingly whichever installment of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga I have on deck. I decided to schedule these out so I didn’t burn out on the series but I’m increasingly finding that as soon as I finish one I really want to run right back to the library and pick up the next.

This month’s book was Komarr, in which our hero Lord Miles Vorkosigan, now an Imperial Auditor, accompanies another Imperial Auditor (formerly an engineering professor) to the titular planet to investigate a mysterious accident that had destroyed part of the planet’s terraforming infrastructure. Much of the book is from the POV of the other auditor’s niece, a Vor lady of about thirty, whose husband is the administrator of the department that includes the terraforming project. Ekaterin is a great character and I immediately found myself hoping that she got out of her shitty marriage with her shitty husband, which was in fact taken care of in a plot-appropriately terrible way that made it all nice and complicated but also very satisfying. Excellent look into the dynamics of an emotionally abusive marriage and what it can do specifically to very intelligent people that are, in fact, more intelligent than their partners, which the shitty partners are insecure about. (Obviously, this book might be upsetting reading for anyone who’s been in a controlling relationship with someone who used the same sorts of tactics, but a lot of the interesting psychological stuff that goes on in the Vorkosigan Saga comes with the same caveat, and I like that the book deals with stuff that regular people go through as well as dealing with insane space empire political and technological intrigues.)

This is one of the few books I’ve read in quite a while where the romance brewing at the end actually does have me all wound up and invested in it. I am chewing the drywall to see where this goes. So far the secondhand embarrassment is exquisite and the various mental tangles that Miles and Ekaterin are getting up to in rationalizing their feelings to themselves are excellently illustrative of both of their characters and situations. It also illustrates the difference between “being vulnerable and letting somebody take care of you” versus “being sloppy and making somebody else clean up your mess” in a way that has no business being woven into a story about mysteriously exploding terraforming equipment on Space Holland (trade oligarchy built on artificially reclaimed land. You tell me Komarr isn’t Space Holland).

Anyway this series really has it all and does it all; it is going off in directions I would not have foreseen from the first couple books but which nonetheless all make perfect sense for the series that it is. When is my June 1 hold coming in?

My April installment of the Vorkosigan Saga was Memory, one of the Barrayar-based installments, which I’m coming to enjoy almost more than the off-planet adventures. After nearly a dozen volumes I’ve become emotionally invested in the success of Emperor Gregor’s rein, the security and progress of Barrayar, and the fortunes of House Vorkosigan, which is a neat trick given what a feudal hellscape Barrayar is. Maybe it’s because I live in a back-asswards imperial goon squad with a country attached myself, so I find it hopeful.

Anyway! In this book, something is wrong with Miles. Well, two things are wrong with Miles, on involuntary and one voluntary. This moral, medical, and professional dilemma eats up the first chunk of our book, and the results are quite bad for our hero, who is now out of a job and has nothing to do with himself except kick around an empty Vorkosigan House, a state of affairs deeply unsuited to his entire personality. Miles is uhhh sort of rescued from his doldrums by the arrival of a much bigger problem happening to somebody else. The someone else is ImpSec chief Simon Illyan, Miles’ former boss and old family friend. Miles is certainly not going to allow his total lack of standing or the direct orders of the acting ImpSec chief prevent him from going into problem-solving mode and making a grand nuisance of himself. He scrounges up some temporary authority by wheedling Gregor into making him an acting Imperial Auditor and wades energetically into a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game with… someone; he does not yet know who.

I am middlingly pleased with myself to report that I guessed the culprit pretty early on in the game, and pleased with the book to report that I ended up second-guessing myself out of thinking that because the villain did a good enough job misleading both myself and Miles away from them until the key reveal near the end of the book. It was a pretty good plot, worthy of ImpSec! This book also hit some real milestones in terms of personal and career shifts for a lot of the characters; it’ll be fun to see where things go next now that everyone’s got new jobs and almost everyone except Aral and Cordelia have had their romantic lives shaken up. (There’s an adorable old people romance that the younguns remained quite oblivious to while it was becoming increasingly obvious to me; I found the whole setup very charming.)

I’m super tempted to go and release my hold on Komarr early, but I have other things to read and don’t want to burn myself out. I liked this series well enough to start off with but it has really grown on me as it develops.

I picked up A. R. Vishny’s Night Owls at a very bookish wedding because I thought it sounded like fun, even though it’s YA and I’m not finding myself to really enjoy a lot of YA anymore. (I think I am too old and stuff written for today’s teens does not resonate with me.) But this one promised queer Jewish owl-vampires and a lot of old New York lore and some shenanigans with dead people, so I figured it could be fun.

And it was! I am not super familiar with Jewish folklore, so for me as a reader, the estries were a fairly novel take on vampires, a subject upon which I am otherwise very familiar (possibly too familiar). I also learned a lot about late nineteenth and early twentieth century Yiddish theater, a subject upon which I am again not familiar. I don’t think I am the primary target audience for this book, in that the author is Jewish and seems to want to write about Jewish things for other Jewish people, but I enjoyed it very much all the same–it’s YA, so it’s an easy enough read and willing to explain all but the most obvious stuff to its adolescent characters, and I’ve read enough hundreds of variously warmed-over Christian-derived monster books over the past three decades that it was really great to get something else.

The setup is as such: Clara and Molly appear to be in their late teens but are in fact each well over 100 years old because they are estries. They are the curators and inhabitants of an old Yiddish theater called the Grand Dame, which has been revived as an indie cinema. They rent this building from the prince of demons in exchange for pictures of faces, because how else are you going to get affordable rent in Manhattan when you look like a permanent 18-year-old.

The shenanigans really kick off when Anat, Molly’s current human girlfriend, gets possessed by the ghost of what might be Molly’s first human girlfriend, Lena, who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Other strange things are happening, too. Initially unbeknownst to Molly and Clara, their hot mess of a box office assistant, Boaz, is also dealing with supernatural stuff, because his family is cursed to be able to talk to ghosts, and the ghosts are getting bolder and pushier. In order to save Anat, and save the world from the demon prince’s machinations, all our main characters will have to come clean about their supernatural secrets and start being able to trust each other for long enough to piece together what is actually going on–which is difficult both because they’re all long used to keeping this stuff secret, and because in true paranormal romance fashion, they are all full of inconvenient feelings. This all builds up to a beautifully chaotic climax involving the space between worlds–the world of the living and that of the dead–manifesting as all sorts of stage and movie sets and places from the characters’ pasts, as various ghosts and demons try to kidnap our characters, steal the family heirloom that Boaz’ Aunt Hila uses to do medium-ing, and generally overrun the world of the living.

Trying to thwart ancient demons isn’t particularly easy–they are clever and have had a lot of time to practice being shady–so the tension remains pleasantly high as characters are crossed and double-crossed, especially in the second half of the book where saving Anat/the world gets quite time-sensitive and poor anxious Boaz is getting hassled by strong-willed secondary characters left and right. Overall I found this book to just be really cute and fun–it’s a pretty quick read, and I got through it over the course of one snowstorm. There’s teenage angst and demons with bird feet and a bunch of wish-fulfillment-y nerd shit about old movies; what else do you need from a YA fantasy?