Carnival, by Elizabeth Bear

I enjoyed this a lot, but man it took me for. ev. ver. to read. It's really long for a start, but it's also throws a lot of stuff at you from all directions. And it's all cool stuff, but I had to go up a gear in my brain to keep track of it all.

We have two ambassador-spies, (fact: I bought this book based solely on the promise of ambassador spies), Vincent and Angelo. (His full name is Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusunagi-Jones, and there's an explanation for this ridiculousness in the book, a good one even, but still. What a name). They were once lovers, but have been apart for seventeen years after their affair was discovered. Homosexuality, under the rule of the Governors who represent Old Earth and control much of this universe, is super illegal. They were lucky not to be straight up killed for it.

But now they're needed for this mission to a planet called New Amazonia. As the name suggests, it's all super matriarchal and shit. There are men, but they are very much second class citizens, divided into two roles: stud, and gentle. Gentle males, or "safe" males as the New Amazonian society views them, are gay. This is why Vincent and Angelo have been reunited; the woman who rule New Amazonia would only accept "gentle" ambassadors. (So much of the New Amazonian and Old Earth societies is interesting subversions on ours. Not just the gender stuff, but also the approach to energy use and resources and stuff. It was really cool).

And the Governors, on behalf of Old Earth, really need this diplomatic mission to go well. Energy use is a huge issue for the rest of the universe, but New Amazonia has a seemiglny unlimited supply. Vincent and Angelo are to get them to share their secrets, peacefully or.... otherwise.

But both men have their own agendas, and this is where a good chunk of this book struggled for me. Figuring out Angelo and Vincent's differing agendas and keeping them straight was a real mission. Oh and also Lesa, our New Amazonian POV, who also has an angenda other than the one everyone is pretending to have on the surface.

I think because both of them had complicated backstories and complicated true purposes for being on New Amazonia, and it tied into the complicated history of the universe Bear had created, and was influenced by the complicated politics of social strata of New Amazonia. So all these complicated little balls were bouncing off each other in all directions and I was expected to juggle them.

After the fifty percent point I started to feel like I understood the history and politics that were informing what everyone did. The reality of the Governors and everyone's motivations and all of it clicked into place, which made the second half way more enjoyable for me than the first. I still enjoyed the first half, I was just confused a lot. I really loved watching Vincent and Angelo circle around and figure out what their relationship looked like now. The way they would describe each other and the way they interacted was like soothing aloe vera on the confusing burn of everything else.

I thought more than once while I read this that it would be enjoyed by folks who loved the recent and fantastic This Is How You Lose The Time War. It doesn't reach the same poetic heights, but that 'spies who love each other' vibe is all over this. You and Me vs. all our bosses.

So yeah. I have no idea why this book has so few ratings, because Elizabeth Bear is fantastic and this is a fantastic book by her. Imagine being so prolific that a book like this could become almost forgotten amid your incredible back catalogue?

The Heart of the Circle by Keren Landsman

What a strangely compelling book this was. And when I say compelling I don't just mean your standard 'one more chapter whoops bedtime was three hours ago' kind of compelling. This book was like quicksand.  When I first sent it to my kind I opened it just to check that it had worked, and the next thing I knew I was four chapters deep. I'd plan to read a chapter or two with lunch and lose an afternoon. I was late back from my lunch-break at work yesterday and, yes, there were missed bedtimes.

Pretty impressive, considering I don't even know if I liked it that much. Hell, I honestly can't even pinpoint why I found it as compelling as I did. Take the prose, for example. It might be a result of the translation (this book was first published in Hebrew), but I found it to be on the clunky side. And yet there was an open quality to it, a complete lack of pretense, that made reading the sentences almost effortless. It literally felt like the story was just flowing into me.

The plot, I should have loved. Not because it's exiting or twisty, but because it's really not the focus. Plots happening in the background while characters angst at each other is basically my favourite flavour of book, but even if the plot is in the background it should still make sense. I mean the plot here isn't too complicated; in a world where sorcerers are both common and discriminated against a far-right group wants to kill all the non-sorcerers and take control. Our protagonist, an empath named Reed, and his friends want to stop them. The issue I had is that too often B didn't seem to follow logically from A. It would be like if a car crashed into a tree, and the driver said 'great, now I have to buy more milk!' and the other passengers are like, 'obviously.' There were too many, 'wait, what?' moments from me.

I did really like the worldbuilding. The different kind of sorcerers and how they were introduced. I liked how Reed's empathetic abilities were explored, although I was a little uncomfortable with how they tied into mental health and depression. Honestly though this is not an area I have enough experience in to know if the books portrayal of that was problematic, though the fatalistic way everyone just seemed to accept that all empaths would struggle with depression and suicide seemed wrong to me.

My favourite part of this book was the seers. I liked that they were common, because normally a seer character is rare and OP in any universe. Here they're a dime a dozen, and they're all competing to push things there own way. Little touches like how two seers can become quick friends by jointly "seeing" all the future conversations they might have was one cool example of the unique approach the book takes to them. Although I have to wonder why things are so bad for sorcerers around the world if there are so many seers on their side?

I guess every aspect of this book I could describe as 'pretty good, but...' And yet somehow all of these flawed parts made up a whole that I couldn't read fast enough. Strangely compelling really is the best way I can describe The Heart of the Circle. A big thanks to netgalley for letting me read it.

This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

A woman approaches you. She's wearing a dark coat. She reaches into an inside pocket and holds something out. "Hey you," she says, "look at this." You're not entirely sure what you're looking at; but it's beautiful. Multi-faceted like a diamond. Intricate like one of those sculptures where the artist makes stone look like lace. You try to get a closer look, but she whisks it away and holds out her other hand. This one holds something as alien as the first thing, just as beautiful, just as intricate, but wholly different. Even as she tells you to look at it she's pulling it away, but there's something new back in her first hand....

This is what reading This Is How You Lose The Time War feels like. An onslaught of sharp and beautiful things, one after the other, no context and no mercy. Neither of the heroes, if heroes is even what you could call them, strike me as the kind of women prone to hand-holding, so I guess this makes sense. 'Keep up or drown and I really don't care which,' is a sentiment I could see coming from either one of them. It's certainly how they feel about each other. At first anyway.

Every second line of this novella is the kind of startling perfection most other books would hinge their entire selves around. The worldbuilding, or at least the worldbuilding shown to the reader is flashes and reflections, is rich and raises endless questions. It's not hard to picture a multi-volume sci-fi epic set in this world(s), but at the same time I didn't find myself unsatisfied with the briefness of this story. And the inherent briefness of a novella is nine times out of ten my main issue with the format, so that's high praise from me. It was similar to Kai Ashante Wilson's two breathtaking books that way; the prose is rich enough and just challenging enough that each lines carries the weight of two, or three.

If you were to strip this prose back to the barest language I suppose you would find a plot that lands on the scant side. Easy to spoil, with beats that aren't impossible to predict. You might notice that a good third of this novella is just two (human? delightfully unclear) woman confessing their feelings for each other in different ways while nothing else really happens. Although I think even in this scenario you'd have be impressed by how time travel is handled here, how all the usual paradox's aren't ignored so much as not even dignified with a response.

But anyway, these complaints that might ruin another book mean little here, because you're not stripping the prose away. It'll be there to paint scenes so soft you could almost sink into them, to carve moments so sharp you might look up from your reading to check you're not actually losing blood. When you finish a book like this you know you've read something special. Even if you didn't love it, even if you flat-out hated it, it's something wholly unlike anything else. And wholly different things are rare gifts in this world.

(My thanks to netgalley for supplying me with a review copy of this book).

Strange Grace by Tessa Gratton

I know it's the showy epics that span years, or decades or, (lord help me), full on centuries, that make people go ohhhhh such skill! such talent! such a hole in my wallet! but my heart will always belong those authors who can take a few days and make a whole book out of them.

Like Strange Grace. At it's centre - and this isn't me being an insightful reviewer and talking about the books thematic core, I mean it's literal centre, the midway point - is a sacrifice. The rest of the book is the few days before it, and the few days after. Which might sound like spoilers, but it's not really.

The sacrifice, for instance, is something the residents of Three Graces, the village in which this book is set, are very upfront about. This isn't some shadowy conclave doing what needs to be done while the ignorant sleep. Even the children know that two hundred years ago a witch made a deal with the devil that lives in their forest, and now their village is blessed with perfect weather and perfect health and perfect harvests. And every seven years they send a boy into the forest to die.

And not, like, the weird boy who keeps setting little fires that one really likes much anyway. Only the best will do for the sacrifice, and this year it's pretty obvious that the best is Rhun. And let me just stop here to appreciate one of the many ways in which this book shines. Rhine is a genuinely good and wholesome young man, he's handsome and kind and good with small children and, shockingly, not at all boring. Writing an interesting areshole is easy, writing an interesting walking embodiment of lawful good, now that takes skill.

Although if interesting arseholes are your jam, don't worry, you're also covered. Arthur Crouch spent the first seven years of his life thinking he was a girl, because his mother disguised him as such in an attempt to save him from the sacrifice, and now he has issues. And as I typed that I realise how flippant it sounded, which is unworthy of the insightful way the author handled this aspect of Arthur's character, or the fact that it is only a single aspect of his wonderful, prickly, total arsehole character.

The final protagonist of Strange Grace is Mairwen, daughter of a witch and one of the young men who was sent into the forest to die. She's very invested in the idea of one day recovering her father's bones from the forest, but it's like she's never entirely sure if it's because she wants to lay him or rest or if she just wants an excuse to go inside. She's kinda obsessed with the evil devil forest, like you know how some girls really love horses? Like that, except its an evil devil forest full of mutated wolves and deer-abominations and shit.

Mairwen also loves Rhun, which is fun because she's stubborn and prickly and he's so easy-going and kind. She also loves Arthur, which is fun because he's stubborn and prickly but a slightly different flavour of it and they clash like crazy. What's even more fun? This isn't a love triangle. Because Rhun loves Arthur, and Arthur loves Rhun, and they both love Mairwen, and I've said it before and I'll say it again, there is not enough polyarmory in fantasy. Watching the three of them navigate a path towards each other was my favourite part of the whole book.

I enjoyed the mystery of the sacrifice slightly less (I know up there I said there was no mystery, but I'm trying to be vague here), so by the end of the book I was a little annoyed that it was getting more page-time than the three interacting. But to be clear, the sacrifice mystery was like really good chocolate cake, it's just the Mairwen and Arthur sniping at each other and Rhun loving Arthur right down to his worst parts was like the best chocolate cake you've had in years. Both are great, but you can't blame me for wanting more of one than the other. But I am aware that this is very much a me preference and not a fault in the book itself.

What else can I say about this book? The prose is lovely, the atmosphere spot on, the forest and it's devil perfectly creepy, and there are twists I saw coming and a few I didn't. Highly recommended, especially to fans of Stiefvater's Raven Cycle. (The atmosphere, characters, and things the book focuses on are what made me think of TRC again and again, and I actually found Strange Grace in a review for a different book that was being pushed as 'just like TRC' but in fact was like an off-tasting store brand version of TRC. The reviewer offered Strange Grace as an example of something that actually was like TRC, and that reviewer was correct).

And I'm back!

I mean, I was only gone for a minute...

I did strongly consider deleting all my old reviews and starting fresh, but I decided to let them be, awkward and defenseless little things that they are. Like baby horses.