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.

The Perk of Being a Wallflower, by Stepen Chbosky

Oh man, 16 year old me would have lived and died with this book. I’m not kidding, it’s like Chbosky rounded up a bunch of teenagers, whizzed them up in a blender and was left with a pure distilled essence of teenage angst, which he then used as ink to pen this novel.

Not that I mean to sound dismissive of teenage emotions. I still remember what it was like to be that age. In a lot of ways it was amazing, and in a lot of ways it really, fucking sucks. Chbosky really captures that. The feelings of wonder and discovery and the feelings of pain and awkwardness.

Like I said, 16 year old me’s life would have been changed by this book. I think the way Charlie (our weepy protagonist) talks about his parents would have opened my eyes and had a real impact on how I looked at and related to my mum and dad. And the way he interacts with his friends, the positive and negative, would have helped me deal with the occasionally great occasionally brutal arena of teenage friendships. Unfortunately 25 year old me found the book to be too overwrought and dramatic. I knocked it out in a day and enjoyed it well enough, but whereas as young adult books like ‘The Fault In Our Stars’ or ‘How We Will Now’ can connect to me and move me, all ‘Perks’ really did was make me feel old and alienated. Which I guess is the point. This a young adult book in the purest sense of the word. A book that will speak only to young adults, and leave all others somewhat confused by its success.

(Actually a lot of the negative reviews I see for this book complain that Charlie seems younger than his age and emotionally stunted. Which to me was like complaining that that a one legged character only seemed to have one leg. Well, yeah, duh. He is emotionally stunted. That’s kinda the point…)

I hope that one day I have kids who I can get to read this book, and hopefully they will love it in the way that I’m just too old to do.

I bought this book

Review: Bitter Seeds, by Ian Tregillis

You definitely can’t fault bitter seeds on a sentence by sentence level. From the opening to the finish this book is overflowing with beautifully crafted imagery and interestingly worded lines. Nor can you fault the plot. It’s world war 2. The nazi’s have engineered a team of soldiers with supernatural powers, while the British have enlisted a group of warlocks to broker deals with dark and terrible powers.

And you definitely can’t fault the characters! Will, Marsh and Klaus are well rounded, flawed and believable. Will, an upper class young man whose alcoholic grandfather forced him into a world of dark magic, is charming and genuinely funny. His character arc is the most tragic, as we watch him fight against becoming all the things he hated about his grandfather.

Street urchin turned spy Marsh is dark but will a concrete centre of nobility, he’s believably good at his work and more than a little bad ass. While he has no mercy for those on his level, and time again Marsh defends those weaker than he is. This instinct is handled quite subtlety, and it was an impressive piece of characterization. I also enjoyed the relationship he has with his boss/father figure. An impressive example of showing over telling.

And Klaus, while on the outside should be wholly unlikable, garners the reader’s sympathy through his tragic upbringing and love for his sister. What makes it worse is the guy clearly can’t see how abusive and awful his life has been, all he wants is to impress the man who inflicted much of the suffering upon him. It’s a clever way of making the reader actually care about what happens to a nazi character, without having to make them secretly all noble and good inside. His sister, who has see the future, is a more mysterious character. Tregillis takes full advantage of her abilities and it’s a lot of fun watching her be twenty steps ahead of everyone. He also wisely never lets us inside her head, making us view her through the eyes of others and thereby preserving her mystery.

So, prose, plot and characters can not be faulted. But sadly this book is really, fatally, let down by the pacing. It’s too short, for a start. The whole war is blitzed over in this relatively short volume. But that could have still worked, if it weren’t for Tregillis’s maddening habit of only showing us the aftershocks of events. None of the major decisions were made “on page-” we only ever saw the characters discussing things after they had been implemented. There are few action scenes, instead there are scenes where the characters deal with what has already happened. For example; we have one sentence of Marsh saying hello to a girl, and then the next scene he is in is their wedding. It’s very jarring.

These jumps in time also means that instead of smooth character progression the characters appear almost like new people each time we meet them, Will especially. Of course it’s a good thing when characters change- that’s what we want! But the whole point is for the reader to see it happening, not to jump from a to c with nothing inbetween. It keeps the characters at arms length, which is a shame because like I said they are very well crafted and it would have been easy to get really attached to them, which would have given the book’s ending a much bigger impact.

I think when you out the pros and the cons together what you're left with is a book that’s not bad, but not entirely good either. I think I will read the next one (even though the cover the new publisher has gone with lacks all the grace and charm of the original cover of Bitter Seeds, which is what drew me to the book in the first place), if only to see if Tregillis can bring his pacing up to the same level as everything else. 

I bought this book