A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

In a prologue that's very Terry Pratchett-esque without actually being funny, an enormous floating tower appears in England, becomes a 12-hour wonder, and is then forgotten as people have short attention spans. Then thirteen random people suddenly vanish from their lives and appear at the base of the tower, facing the command ASCEND.

I normally love stories about people dealing with inexplicable alien architecture. This was the most boring and unimaginative version of that idea I've ever read. Each level is a death trap based on something in one of their minds - a video game, The Poseidon Adventure, an old home - but less interesting than that sounds. The action was repetitive, the characters were paper-thin, and one, an already-dated influencer, was actively painful to read:

Time to give her the Alpha Male rizzzzzzz, baby!

The ending was, unsurprisingly, also a cliche.

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While on a commercial expedition, an unexpected accident causes Mai, an engineer, and Juna, an HR person, to crash-land on a pitch-black planet called Shroud. They can't get out of their escape pod because the air is corrosive and unbreathable, and they can't call for help. Their only hope is to use the pod's walker system to trek all the way across the planet... which turns out to be absolutely teeming with extremely weird life, none of which can see, all of which communicates via electromagnetic signals, most of which constructs exoskeletons for itself with organic materials, and some of which is extremely large.

As readers, we learn very early on that at least some of the life on Shroud is intelligent. But Juna and Mai don't know that, the intelligent Shroud beings don't know that humans are intelligent, and human and Shroud life is so different that it makes perfect sense that they can't tell. As Juna and Mai make their probably-doomed expedition across Shroud, they're accompanied by curious Shroud beings, frequently attacked by other Shroud creatures, face some of the most daunting terrain imaginable, and slowly begin to learn the truth about Shroud. But even if they succeed in rescuing themselves, the predatory capitalist company that sent them on their expedition on the first place is determined to strip Shroud for materials, and doesn't care if its indigenous life is intelligent or not.

This is possibly the best first contact novel I've ever read. It's the flip side of Alien Clay, which was 70% depressing capitalist dystopia and 30% cool aliens. Shroud is 10% depressing capitalist dystopia and 90% cool aliens - or rather, 90% cool aliens and humans interacting with cool aliens. It's a marvelous alien travelogue, it has so many jaw-dropping moments, and it's very thematically unified and neatly plotted. The climax is absolutely killer.

The characterization is sketchy but sufficient. The ending is a little abrupt, but you can easily extrapolate what happens from there, and it's VERY satisfying. As far as I know this is a standalone, but I would certainly enjoy a sequel if Tchaikovsky decided to write one.

My absolute favorite moment, which was something you can only do in science fiction, is a great big spoiler. ( Read more... )

A historical children's novel by a Ukrainian-Canadian author, based on Ukrainian teenagers and children forced into slavery during WWII. After watching her neighbors and finally her family getting dragged off by the Nazis, Lida, a Christian Ukrainian girl, is kidnapped along with her younger sister. They're immediately separated and Lida is sent to a horrendous work camp. She's skilled at sewing, which keeps her useful and so alive for a while. But then the Nazis need bombs more than uniforms...

This book is an impressive feat of walking the line between being honest and straightforward about how terrible conditions are while not being too overwhelming for children to read. Lida and the other girls endure and try to support each other. Lida gives a Jewish girl her crucifix necklace to help hide her identity, and an older girl advises Lida to lie about her age so she isn't killed immediately for being too young to work. The German seamstress Lida works with (an employee, not a prisoner) is occasionally casually kind to her, but also gets a gift of looted clothing from a probably murdered French woman, and gets Lida to meticulously remove the woman's stitched-in initials and re-sew them with her own. A Hungarian political prisoner, who gets better soup than the Ukrainians, advises Lida to say she's Polish, as that will improve her her food. Later, Lida muses, It seemed that just as there were different soups, there were different ways of being killed, depending on your nationality.

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The book is interesting as a depiction of an aspect of WWII that isn't written about much, a compelling read, and a moving story about some people trying to keep hope and caring - and rebellion - alive when others are being as bad as humans can get. It's part of a trio of books involving overlapping characters, but stands completely on its own.

The afterword says that Skrypuch based the book on her interviews with a survivor.

Sciona, the first woman ever admitted to the University of Magic, takes on Thomil, a janitor from a discriminated-against culture, as her lab assistant, and they both learn dark secrets about their world.

Thomil is introduced when his clan makes a desperate run across deadly ground to get to the safety of a city surrounded by a magical shield. The shield protects against bitter cold and the deadly Blight, which randomly zaps and dissolves people, but the area around the city is particularly Blight-infested. Only Thomil and his baby niece survive. When they arrive, they find that the city natives hate their race and has consigned them all as a permanent underclass.

Ten years later, Sciona, a well-to-do young woman in the city, is preparing for her magic exam to try to get into the sexist magic university, which no woman has ever passed. Though she does pass, all the male mages but her mentor hate her and hassle her. The only other person who's even remotely nice to her is Thomil, the janitor, who is assigned as her lab assistant as a cruel joke. But though Sciona is racist and classist, and Thomil is mildly sexist in an oblivious way, they find that they kind of get along...

Wang has an engaging, easy-read style for the most part, the intros to the two main characters are quite compelling, and despite the heavy-handed axes of privilege themes, Thomil and Sciona have a nice dynamic.

I said "for the most part." The exception is the magic system, which I think is basically computer programming via magic typewriters (spellographs). The wizards program a spell to access a specific area of the magical Otherrealm (which they can't see or sense in any way, so they're just plotting points on a grid) to grab magical energy or matter from it. But we get MUCH more detailed and lengthy descriptions of it, from long explanations to actual spells:

CONDITION 1: DEVICE is 15 Vendric feet higher than its position at the time of activation.

ACTION 1: FIRE will siphon from POWER an amount of energy no lower than 4.35 and no higher than 4.55 on the Leonic scale.

ACTION 2: FIRE will siphon within the distance of DEVICE no higher than 3 Vendric inches.

If and only if CONDITION 1 is met, ACTION 1 and ACTION 2 will go into effect.

The first half is Sciona and Thomil working on various spells, interspersed with very heavy-handed commentary on colonialism, sexism, and how Sciona totally gets feminism when it applies to her personally but is oblivious to all other isms. Sciona is an awful, self-centered person and Thomil is mostly perfect. Almost exactly halfway through, there is a shocking reveal. At least, it shocked many readers. It did not shock me.

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Despite what the plot description sounds like, Sciona and Thomil do not have a romance beyond occasional sexy feelings. It's a magical dystopia/dark academia, I think similar to Babel (which I could not get very far into) but less anvillicious in that it does not have literal footnotes saying stuff like "This is a racist comment and racism is bad." (In the bookshop, I have Blood Over Bright Haven tagged "If you like Babel you will like this.") Sadly for M. L. Wang, this comparative subtlety got them some reviews on Goodreads accusing them of condoning Sciona being a bad person and endorsing her beliefs.

I did not care for this book but I can see how it would work for many readers, especially if they're shocked by the twist at the halfway mark.

I just saw Ryan Coogler's Sinners. I have not felt so exalted by a movie since Baahubali. It's glorious and transcendent and made me glad I was alive to see it. I want to see it again, immediately.

It's got serious themes but it's also incredibly fun. Also very hot. The themes are complex, layered, and interesting, touching on racism and exploitation, finding joy and community even under horrendous oppression, and the power of music. Brilliant acting all round. Fantastic writing and direction.

I went in knowing nothing but that it's set in the 1930s, stars Michael B. Jordan as identical twins, and there's vampires. This is the best way to see it. I have since watched the trailer, and highly recommend not doing that before you see the movie; it gives away several major plot points that occur late in the movie, and is also... not misleading exactly... but focuses on the horror/action elements, which are important but also only half of the movie. It's kind of Big Night meets Near Dark meets Devil in a Blue Dress meets Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, but also totally its own thing.

As that suggests, it's a musical, sort of, with a pair of INCREDIBLE diegetic dance scenes. If you have any interest in music, the movie is worth seeing for those alone; the one inside the juke joint is one of the best movie scenes I have ever seen, and the one outside it comes pretty close.

If you're not a horror fan but the other elements appeal: it's got a lot of gory vampire violence, but it's mostly confined to the gory vampire violence scenes, ie, not pervasive throughout the whole movie. You could look away for those parts.

Stay for the whole credits. There's a mid-credits scene which is not an Easter Egg, but the actual ending and it's wonderful. There's also a post-credits scene.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

This children's book was first published in 1949. I picked up a reprint from 1969 at a library book sale because it said Judy worked in her father's ice cream shop, and I wanted descriptions of a 1940s ice cream shop. And I got them. The ice cream and homemade sodas, with syrups full of bits of real fruit, sounded delicious.

A Chinese-American girl, Mayling, moves in next door to Judy, and Judy is eager to introduce her to her "Saturday Club" of girlfriends. Mayling is wary, but Judy assures her the other girls will love her. But one of them very much does not, and says the Chinese girl goes or she does! The entire club breaks up over this, then reforms in a new configuration plus Mayling and minus the racist girl.

I was expecting the racist girl to repent, but we literally never hear from her again and the plot then goes in a new direction. A poor family in the neighborhood needs some help, and Judy decides to raise money for them by putting on a show. She not only gets a very diverse group of kids to participate, but when her piano playing flops during rehearsals, she swallows her pride and MCs instead - and learns that she's a much better MC than a musician.

This book is a fun read but most interesting as a period piece. (There's also a great bit where Judy visits the Automat.) The theme is anti-bigotry and pro-diversity, and while some of the language surrounding that is dated and it's a bit rah-rah America, it's refreshing to read in a book from 1949. (Or now, unfortunately.) Nobody talks in dialect. Judy, who's Christian, has a crush on a Jewish boy who plays the harmonica. The happy ending is a multiracial and multi-religious group of kids, who all met because Judy wanted to help out her neighbors, gathered to celebrate their success and eat delicious-sounding ice cream sundaes.

That amazing cover is an extremely accurate drawing of an actual photograph which is reproduced in the book, of a performance piece by Claude Cahun.

Liberated is a graphic novel telling the true story of Claude Cahun, a French Jewish writer and artist born in 1894. Cahun, along with their lover, the photographer and artist Marcel Moore, was active in the Parisian surrealist movement. Later, they resisted the Nazis via a stealth propaganda campaign aimed at occupying Nazi soldiers. They created pamphlets and fliers, and smuggled them into the soldiers' cigarette packs and even pockets! And they did all this while Cahun was chronically ill. Eventually, they were ratted out, arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, but the war ended before the sentence was carried out.

Assigned female at birth, Cahun's life and art interrogated gender, persona, and identity, writing, Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. Marcel Moore was also assigned female at birth, but I'm not sure how Moore identified in terms of gender, or whether the name Marcel Moore was a preferred name or a pseudonym/artist's persona. I think the graphic novel probably doesn't pin this down on purpose, and my guess is that either it wasn't clear at this remove, or it seemed more true to Moore to leave it ambiguous/fluid.

The two of them met at school, fell in love, and traveled Europe together. And just when it started getting socially dicey for them to stay together, social cover fell into their lap when - I am not making this up - Moore's mother married Cahun's father! When they moved to the island of Jersey to escape the Nazis (this only worked for so long) they represented themselves as sisters living together.

The graphic novel is largely told in Cahun's words, with lovely graphic art plus a few of Cahun and Moore's own photographs. It's a quick, moving, inspiring, thought-provoking read, more relevant now than ever.

After a weird apocalypse called The Storm that seems to have killed most people on Earth, 17-year-old Liz lives alone in the bookshop where she used to work, occasionally trading books for useful items. But when the more hardbitten Maeve shows up, the two girls fall in love. But is the world about to end all over again?

This book sounded so up my alley. Alas, it was not good. In fact it was kind of the bad lesbian version of Erik J. Brown's All That's Left in the World.

Given the title, you'd think the story would involve books and reading and how they matter even after the apocalypse - a kind of bookstore version of Station Eleven. It's not that at all. A lot of books are mentioned in passing, but "books are important" is not a theme, and reading isn't important to the characters. Liz is living in the bookshop out of trauma and inertia, not because it's her passion or a community center or it feels like home.

Liz is so incredibly helpless and useless, it's hard to believe she survived normal life let alone a post-apocalypse setting. When the tap water stops running, she's unsurprised but also has only one day's worth left stored up in bottles - and it's been running for months, with her expecting it would stop running any moment the whole time! She doesn't bother to lock the front door of the bookshop, even when she goes to sleep. There's all sorts of dangerous damage to the shop that she doesn't know how to or doesn't bother to try to repair, AND doesn't ever ask for help with even though a fair number of friendly people come to her shop. I get that she's supposed to be paralyzed by trauma but she also comes off as a passive nitwit.

Even apart from Liz herself, a lot of stuff in the story makes no sense. Liz literally hasn't left the bookstore in months, she only gets a customer every couple days if that, and the customers only give her small items like a couple batteries for a book. How is she getting enough food to stay alive?

When Maeve turns on a small generator and it doesn't come on immediately, Liz leaves it switched on and tries to manually start it by sticking her hand inside it and giving the fan a spin. (Amazingly, she does not precede this by saying, "Hold my beer.") It promptly turns on and starts sucking her entire body into it, like it's a jet engine.

This gives Liz an extremely severe injury - the skin is ripped off her hand, bones and tendons are visible, and she can't move her fingers at all - but she's basically fine two days later after some extremely vaguely described first aid.

Liz realizes Maeve might be dangerous because she has a prized and valuable knife whose blade is caked with blood. If it's that valuable, YOU'D CLEAN IT.

People mostly use knives as weapons instead of guns for no reason. When someone does have a gun, it's not loaded. I guess guns and bullets are super rare in America!

The apocalypse is a one-time rain of acid that melts everyone who was outside at the time. No one ever mentions that this is fucking bizarre, or speculates on why it happened. The set-up in the pre-apocalypse flashbacks is that a climate change catastrophe is ongoing, but that does not include LITERAL ACID RAIN.

Also, the world is way too depopulated for a one-time event that happened at night, when not many people would be outside, and spared everyone who was inside. There's barely anyone left in Liz's entire town, and we meet something like ten survivors max in the entire book.

It also makes no sense that an acid strong enough to completely dissolve a human in 20 minutes did so little apparent damage to anything else. All the structural damage that's described is what you'd expect from a tornado, not a 20 minute downpour of extremely strong acid.

Liz and Maeve's relationship was boring and barely there. Actually, the whole book was boring. I ended up skimming heavily.

There's some interstitial bits where people write one-page first-person accounts of their survival in a notebook Liz keeps. This sort of thing is almost always so much fun, people recall it as their favorite part of the book. All but one of these bits are boring! How do you even do that?! (The one that I liked was a woman whose dogs saved her from the acid rain by refusing to go on their regular night time walk.)

Spoilers for the end. ( Read more... )

This book, the first in a 7-book middle-grade series, was recommended to me by a customer who wanted to buy A Little Princess for her daughters who had gotten interested in it after reading this book.

Tilly Pages lives in her grandparents' home above their bookshop, as her mother vanished without a trace shortly after she was born. She discovers that she and her grandparents (and her mother) are bookwanderers - able to step into the pages of books and interact with the characters. (She only ever explores out-of-copyright books due to real life copyright laws.) Book characters can also sometimes step out of their books and interact with bookwanderers in the real world - Tilly discovered her gift when she met Anne Shirley and Alice from Wonderland.

This is a whole lot of fun, and also has a truly amazing twist. ( Read more... )

I look forward to reading the next book, which looks like it will center around fairytales.

Millie just got out of jail, which makes her unemployable. She's young, pretty, homeless, and desperate. So she's delighted when she gets hired as a housemaid for a wealthy family. Needless to say, the family turns out to be very weird and possibly very sinister...

Love the cover and blurb, but they're misleading. The story isn't about Millie learning the secrets of a wealthy family by spying on them, whether though a keyhole or because they don't pay attention to her. She does learn their secrets, but she's in the middle of the action and very much noticed at all times.

This book is widely scorned and also accused of plagiarism. I looked up the book it supposedly plagiarized, and while there are some significant similarities, there's other books that also contain similar scenes and plot points. I could be wrong because I didn't read the one it supposedly plagiarized, but it seems at least as likely that books in the same genre may have a lot in common. It's also a bestseller, not just in general but specifically at my bookshop, which is why I read it.

I can see why it's a bestseller. It's extremely entertaining. I could not put it down. Millie deals with a possibly evil child, a hostile lunatic of a wife, a sexy but probably sinister husband, a sexy but suspicious Italian gardener, and a completely batshit plot that combines gothic with domestic thriller. The twists weren't totally shocking but they were fun, and the ending was very satisfying. I get why people like it. I liked it.

Content notes: Domestic abuse, gaslighting, violence.