What I read this August
Science Fiction and Fantasy
ed. Sharyn November, Firebirds Soaring. A collection of ya speculative fiction. The stand outs were:
"Egg magic" - by Louise Marley. A farm girl loves her chickens and dislikes her step-mother and new siblings. She yearns to meet her mother, the mysterious Magda. This is a mature, nuanced story. I really believed in the characters, and the touches of magic were wonderful.
"Three twilight tales" - by Jo Walton. "It's a fairy story that questions the demands that stories make of their protagonists. Like most fairy tales it's liminal, it's all about edges and thresholds and twilight and possibilities."
"Fear and loathing in Lalanna" - by Nick O'Donohoe. Hilarious!
"Something worth doing" - by Elizabeth E. Wein. A young, aimless girl decides that her brother, who just died, will not have died without accomplishing something. She takes his place in the RAF. Fantastic training sequences and I love the main character; really satisfying story all around.
MT Anderson , Feed. A brilliant, scathing commentary on our world today: pop culture, youth culture, consumerism, colonialism, environmentalism. Anderson is incredible at creating futuristic pop culture, comprised of trends like "speech tattoos" (in which someone pays to have a word--say, a brand name--inserted into every sentence they speak), bands, fashions. He is equally excellent at believable characters.
The grief and horror of this book are almost overwhelmingly realistic.
Cinda Williams China , The Wizard Heir. The sequel to The Warrior Heir. Seph McCauley is a rich orphan with loads of charisma and a party-loving attitude. But he never lets himself get too lost in hedonism, because when he's out of control, odd things happen. Dangerous things. After burning down a nightclub (and killing his friends inside), Seph is sent to a mysterious boarding school called the Havens. The headmaster, Leicester, takes an immediate interest in him.
Seph is a wizard, and Leicester has been chaining young and pliable wizards to him for years. But years of dealing with the adult realm has made Seph wary of agreeing to unseen contracts, and he resists Leicester . He is beaten and tormented with nightmares, both waking and sleeping, for months. Yet somehow, Seph finds the will to resist, even as it kills him to do so. But how long can he hold out? And why does Leicester need so much power?
The book is written straightforwardly. Chima is no wordsmith, but there are only a few stumbles (Seph's thoughts about hacking and nightlife are embarrasingly clunky). Seph is annoying at first, but I grew to like him. The backdrop of the novel is the real draw: after the wizards' hold over all magic was broken in The Warrior Heir, the other magic-users have to learn how to deal with them. The wizards are still more powerful, and they have had centuries of tradition and privilege to perfect their magics and their power-based. After years of being hunted down and used as slaves, the enchanters, sorcerers, seers and warriors are loath to work with the wizards--but deal with them they must, somehow.
Elizabeth Bear, Seven For a Secret. The sequel to New Amsterdam, although it says so nowhere in the book. I read this without having read its predecessor (dear publishers: PLEASE label sequels), but I got a handle on the characters, their relationships, and the world pretty quickly. I like this best of everything I've read by Bear. It's significantly less hackneyed than her short stories. The dialog is still a little off, but the world building is quite good. Bear also has a talent for likable characters; this world is populated by several, not least Ruth Gell, one of the Prussian army's Sturmwolves.
Years after New Amsterdam, wampyr Sebastian and his elderly scholarly friends Phoebe and Abigail return to England . But it is not an England as we know it--the presence of magic has changed history. The American colonies are only just becoming a nation, and England has fallen to the Nazis. English schoolchildren are taught to Prussian values. Among those schoolchildren is Ruth, a pretty teenager with two secrets: one, she is Jewish and two, she is desperately in love with her schoolmate Adele. Less secret is this: Ruth, like her classmates, is being turned into a werewolf. Can our heroes save the children from becoming Nazi weapons--especially since the children don't want to be saved?
RM Meluch, The Sagittarius Command. Third in the USS Merrimack series. The year is 2445 CE, and Earth and the Palatine Empire (a neo-Roman group that broke away from Earth control a few generations ago) have declared a temporary truce in order to combat the Hive. The Hive cannot be reasoned with, cannot be stopped for long, and they will never, ever stop coming. Because they are hungry. And all life is food.
I read these as really excellent Star Trek:TOS fanfic, with Captain Farragut as a smarter, kinder version of James T Kirk and Augustus as a creepier version of Spock. I have an unfortunately huge crush on Augustus, who is filled to the brim with rage and controlled by an intellect the size of a planet and a loyalty stronger than death. He gets his kicks psychologically torturing his cohorts--Farragut is the only person he has ever met who can deal with his mind games. In fact, Farragut misses Augustus's attempts to rip apart his psyche once he's gone. OTP! I have less interest in the other relationship in the books: between Steele and one of his marines, the sexually free, physically aggressive Kerry Blue. They are both complete numb-skulls, and I wish they'd just get together and stop bothering me with Steele's constant "oh how I love her soft femininity" rumblings.
It took me a few chapters to get into this book--Meluch's style sounds like a particularly terse cowboy--but once I got past the sentence fragments and back into the adventure, I was hooked. I read it in a single sitting, unable to put it down to eat.
Lynn Flewelling, Shadows Return.The two roguish heroes of Flewelling's "Nightrunner" series return, almost ten years since their last appearance. Only a few years have passed in their world, but they've still experienced some serious changes: not least, there is a new queen of Skala, and she has little use or trust for the Watchers. Alec, Seregil, and the remnants of their merry band are left to raise families, build inns, or play at being dissolute nobles. When the queen commands Alec and Seregil to deliver a message to her exiled sister Klia, they leap at the chance for another adventure.
(SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT)
But instead of the swashbuckling excitement and intrigue they (and the reader) expect, they are quickly kidnapped and sold in the slave markets of Plenimar. (The slavers in this fantasy world are dark-skinned, keep harems, and have curly beards. OH FLEWELLING NO.) There, Alec's unique half-blood heritage is both a blessing and a curse--instead of warming someone's bed or working in a field, he is bought by an alchemist, who first "refines" Alec's blood and then uses it to create otherworldly monsters. The alchemy and the creatures are chilling and interesting; the rest of the book is less so. Alec and Seregil spend hundreds of pages just sitting around their slave quarters, and the B plot (Thero and Micum, their fellow Watchers, try to rescue them) seems tacked on. All this could have been forgiven had the interpersonal relationships been interesting, or the inner monologues been insightful, but alas, that too was not to be. Instead, I had a hard time remembering who many of the characters were. Several horrific scenes were rendered significantly less horrific due to A)Flewelling's unexpectedly euphamistic style and B)not having any emotional connection to the characters involved.
This is a mediocre beginning to another trilogy in the Nightrunners series. I like Seregil and Alec as a couple (refreshingly little angst!) and Flewelling has written good court intrigue and adventure in the past. I hope she returns to her strengths.
ed. Denise Little, Swordplay. This is a terrible collection. The stories chosen are each so incredibly awful--so casually offensive, clunkily written, and devoid of imagination--that I cannot believe a single one of them was published, let alone all of them. There is one good story in this entire collection--Nina Kiriki Hoffman's piece. I've always enjoyed her work, but generally find it a little too bouyantly surreal. But this story, an emotionally powerful take on Wagner's Ring, is possibly the best she's ever written. For her story alone, this collection is worth checking out of the library. But don't waste a cent on it.
English Historical Fiction
Elsa Watson, Maid Marian. Robin Hood is my absolute favorite legend of all time, but somehow nobody ever manages to match my idea of him. Far too many insist on making him gritty and morally ambiguous and useless, whereas I see him as a very smart, very righteous man with a great sense of humor. The POINT of Robin Hood is that he's a champion of the poor and the downtrodden, but he never loses his humanity or ability to laugh--and Watson gets that. Additionally, she managed to pack in most of my favorite tidbits of the Robin Hood legend: the Merry Men living around the Greenwood, wearing Lincolnwood green, the cave as the fall-back position, the shooting match where Robin Hood wins a golden arrow, the over-arcing ideal of protecting the throne and the kingdom, collecting King Richard's ransom...Robin Hood's friendships feel real, and his relationship with Maid Marian is exceptionally believable.
The story is told by Maid Marian. Growing up as the Norman Lady Marian Fitzwater, her life is bound by the rules of Queen Eleanor of Aquitane's court and her childhood marriage to Sir Hugh of Sencaster. But Hugh's untimely death sunders her expectations of adult life, and her struggle to regain her dower lands shows her that neither her former mother-in-law nor the queen can be trusted. Seeking information about her mil's plans, Marian ventures into Sherwood Forest , looking for the infamous outlaw Robin Hood. The two clash immediately (Marian has pretty privileged views, particularly of the Saxon-Norman conflict), but there is a spark there that neither can deny. Months later, Robin Hood saves her from a forced marriage and the two flee to Sherwood. They have a number of adventures, culminating in a devious plan to snatch back Marian's dower lands.
The writing is ok, the villain fairly ridiculous (definitely the weakest part of the book), the historical knowledge very good, and the emotional lives of the characters very well thought out. It's a slightly uneven book, but it's definitely one of the better perspectives on the Robin Hood legend.
Veronica Bennett, Angelmonster. A fictional, though fairly historically accurate, take on Mary Shelley's early life. Mary falls in love with titled, nearly penniless poet Percy Shelley, and runs away with him. They, and her step-sister Jane/Claire Clairemont, live lives full of poetry and squalid emotional scenes amidst a sea of dead babies, suicides, and affairs. Their lives were amazingly tragic, but Bennett mostly manages to keep the book on an even keel. My one problem with this book was the constant, heavy-handed foreshadowing. For fans of this book, I'd recommend reading Death and the Maidens: The Death of Fanny Wollstonecraft, a non-fiction look at the same family.
Non-Fiction
Greg Mortenson and David Relin, Three Cups of Tea. A former mountain-climber and nurse made his life's mission to raise support for education in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan . Not well written, but a fascinating tale.
Patti Gully, Sisters of Heaven: China ’s Barnstorming Aviatrixes: Modernity, Feminism, and Popular Imagination in Asia and the West. I was really excited by this book, which purports to tell a history I had never even heard of--that of female pilots who flew for China in the 1930s and 40s. They were: "Hilda Yan, once China's representative at the League of Nations; Li Xiaqing, known as film actress Li Dandan before becoming China's "First Woman of the Air"; and Jessie Zheng, the only commissioned female officer in the Chinese Air Force." They mostly flew as part of exhibitions tours raising money for the Chinese war effort in WWII. Although the subjects of this book are fascinating, Gully's writing is a big distraction. Her organization is terrible, and her style gossipy and light weight. There's a weird classist, sexist, fetishization-of-China undercurrent to the whole thing as well. (see quoted example below) It's not terribly written, but there's no way I was going to slog through 300 pages of history with such a dubious bent to it. In the end, I'm very glad for this book; it showed me how little I knew, and how much history there still is left to learn.
"Although born in China, they spent most of their formative years abroad, and were unavoidably influenced by this contact, but while they learned to become thoroughly at home in the West, they remained, at their hearts' core, essentially Chinese, and beneath the veneer of Occidental modernity that they affected were embedded the ancient Confucian principles they had imbibed since their birth. This dichotomy of East and West created a sort of schism in their souls, and much of the conflict they experienced in their personal lives was probably related to this duality. By leaving their husbands and children--a new-fangled expediency...they were going against the grain and clashing harshly with the venerable Eastern notion of respect for family. The women gained their freedom, but in so doing, they cut themselves off at the knees."
Mike Kurlansky, Salt: A World History.A fascinating study of salt throughout human history. I really appreciate that Kurlansky did not forget about the non-Western world in writing about this book (although there is rather more about American salt practices than most other countries--unsurprising, given Kurlansky's language, previous books, and nationality). My only criticism of this book is that it has a tendency toward anecdotes rather than data, especially toward the end. There are no sum-ups or final conclusions drawn in the last few chapters, just a tossed salad of all the random tidbits the author hadn't managed to fit in elsewhere.
Still, incredible stuff! Even reading just a few pages of this book will give you material for days' worth of small talk.
Harriet O’Brian, Queen Emma and the Vikings. Queen Emma (called Aelfgifu by most of her subjects) was a strong-willed Norman who was queen of England twice over--first as the wife of Anglo-Saxon king Aethelred, then as the wife of the conquering Danish king Cnut. She had little impact in Aethelred's court, but was (according to O'Brien) very involved in revitalizing Cnut's reputation in Europe through conspicuous acts of piety and generosity. After Cnut's death, she fought long and hard to get one of her sons on the English throne. Cnut's two sons, Harold Harefoot (son of Cnut's first wife, also named Aelfgifu) and Harthacnut (Emma's son) each claimed the throne, but Harold died and Harthacnut was crowned King of England without having to fight. Emma's younger son by Aethelred then returned to England (he had been hiding in Normandy ) and joined his half-brother Harthacnut as co-ruler. Harthacnut was a brutal and heavy-handed ruler, and few mourned when he died only a few years later. Edward, later called "Confessor", was then the sole ruler of England . Upon his childless death many years later, Emma's nephew William the Conquerer claimed the throne.
It's fascinating history, but there is frustratingly little known about Emma herself. Today, we only have a few clues, from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the history she commissioned, the Encomium Emmae.
David Nicole, Arthur and the Anglo-Saxon Wars. A really excellent resource about the time between the Roman's loss of power in England and the Germanic tribes' ascension.