A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Joan, the daughter of an English mother (deceased) and a Malaysian father, learns as a child that her mother's family is unusual. They call themselves monsters, and can do what appears to be genuine magic, if of a minor variety: they can make small objects appear and disappear. Joan can also do this as a child, but the ability fades away as she grows up. By the time she's sixteen, it's gone and she's relegated the whole monster-and-magic thing to the realm of "my eccentric family has weird beliefs."

Needless to say, there's a lot more to it than that.

Only a Monster is a YA fantasy that partakes in some current YA tropes (the love triangle) and does its own thing in other ways. Unusually for a modern YA, the worldbuilding is excellent and original. The monsters have their own society, with families who have different abilities, mostly of a pleasingly eccentric and small-scale variety. Because the powers aren't world-shattering, there's a good amount of figuring out how to use them in clever ways. I LOVE this kind of thing, and it's very well-done.

There's another power that all the monsters have. It's time travel, of a very unique variety and with a real and disturbing cost. I've never come across this exact variant on time travel before, and the worldbuilding around it and the society than grew around people who can do it is also extremely well-done. The plot is mostly very good, with some excellent twists and surprises.

The flaw in the book is that two of the three main characters are not very interesting. This didn't at all ruin the book for me - I enjoyed it a lot - but it's definitely the sort of book where the supporting cast is enormously more interesting than the leads.

Joan is kind of an everygirl figure and she feels more there as a vehicle to tell the story than a three-dimensional character. She often refuses to listen to people trying to tell her information she really needs to know when that serves the plot, but is very clever and quick-witted when that serves the plot.

The other issue is the love triangle. One of the boys accompanies Joan for almost the whole book, and we see their relationship grow from strangers to enemies to friends to could-be-lovers. This really worked for me. The other one is someone she had a crush on before the book starts, we get a tiny bit of very dramatic interaction at the beginning, and then he's off-page for most of the book, but we're told that their love could move worlds, etc. This didn't work for me.

Bizarrely, there is another love story, between supporting characters, in which the characters are almost never in the same place at the same time, and I was REALLY invested in that one. Maybe it worked better because it was pushed less hard? But it was a very difficult technical feat to pull off, and it was executed beautifully.

This book has a satisfying "settled for now" ending, but the story clearly continues. I'll be following it, because I LOVE the world and the supporting cast is great.

In which Dove, Edgar, Zora, Chloris, and a mystery guest continue their studies, leading up to their magical thesis project, a personal examination of worthiness by the Shape of Peace, and a metaphysical transformation which they must make or die. Also, there is a unicorn.

This is the sequel to A Succession of Bad Days. strikeslip described the series as "Imagine the Shire, but it's populated by six-foot-something very strong green people who drink poison, and also the rest of the world is Mordor. The shire-orcs spend their time trading pickles, designing short-range missiles, and having strong opinions about propriety re: who cooks and eats the latest giant monster. The author really *really* likes canals."

I'm re-reading this before I move on to the next book, and will put up discussion posts for the chunk I've read so far. Since I can't predict in advance when I'm putting up posts or how big the chunks will be, spoilers are likely to be incomprehensible without context, and events often only make sense in retrospect, it's fine to discuss the entire book in comments. No need for rot13 or anything like that.

They're really good about trying not to fill the link up with inarticulate expressions of joy.

The book opens with Zora taking a walk in the snow to escape the intense togetherness of the rest of the students, who have formed a polycule and are madly in love. This is probably the single most personally relatable moment for me in the series so far.

Most of this book is narrated by Zora, the youngest and least powerful of the students, the only one not in the polycule, and the only non-militant. (In this context, non-militant means psychologically incapable of using magic to kill... an intelligent being? Anything but a weed? Something like that.) Her magic involves doing things with objects and living things, and if that seems a bit vague, that's concerning to her too. The others seem to have largely figured out what their magical talents are, and she still hasn't. She's 21, everyone is in love but her, she's staring down the barrel of an immortality that means she'll outlive her family, and she has to grow up or die.

In the previous book, I liked Zora a lot but found her the least interesting of the group (well, after Kynefrid), as she had no trauma and didn't seem to have significant inner conflicts. My level of interest in her skyrocketed in the very first chapter.

( Read more... )

In a world rendered post-apocalyptic by thousands of years worth of warring Dark Lords, a group of adult students attend magic school to learn how to do civil engineering with magic. They spend the first quarter of the book using magic to build a house they can live in for the rest of their time at school. Later, they build bridges and canals.

This isn't quite as relaxing as it sounds, because if they don't master their innate power, it will fry their brains. The only way to avoid getting their brains fried is to transform themselves into a "metaphysical form," which is a sort of magical expression of their inner selves and/or the form they want to be. They can still keep a normal-looking form for social occasions, but their real self is now a coil of flame, a sunless sea, etc, immortal unless something kills them. Also, in order to get formally licensed as an independent sorcerer, they need to do a senior project which is a work of original magic.

In between, they drink a lot of tea (some of it lethal), cook and eat (some of their food is created from memories), fall in love, practice making magical explosives, and help out the community by doing stuff like creating hot tubs out of pure sapphire, fixing a dam, and making innovative anti-mosquito spells.

Either this premise appeals to you or it doesn't. It greatly appeals to me. I love books based on process (doing a thing) rather than conflict. Of course process-based books often include conflict, just as conflict-based books often include process, but typically one dominates, and in western books, it's nearly always conflict. (If it's 50-50, you get Dick Francis.)

I LOVED this book. It's very weird and also somewhat difficult, but I found it extremely worthwhile. It's cozy but also appealingly strange, it has a very cool magic system which involves a lot of science, the ensemble cast is very likable, the worldbuilding is incredible, there's a pleasant amount of dry humor, there's a lot of beautiful and/or cozy elements but also some excellent understated horror, and it's centrally about people trying to do the right thing and maintain a just community against extreme odds. It has a very uplifting feeling overall. Enormous amounts of competence porn if you like that.

It's the sort of book bound to attract a following whose numbers are inversely proportional to their enthusiasm. If you like John M. Ford, Pamela Dean, C. J. Cherryh, and/or Gene Wolfe, this might be very much up your alley.

In this world, lots of people have a little bit of magical power, and a very few people have immense amounts of it. Power tends to corrupt, corrupt people tend to murder potential rivals, and so anyone powerful who might have not been a tyrant tends to die before they grow up. The result is a quarter of a million years of immensely powerful sorcerers casually mutating and enslaving the population, and fighting incredibly destructive battles with each other. The world is now overrun with horrifying magically created plants and animals called weeds; people spend a lot of time weeding.

But the book's setting is the Commonweal, a small and beleaguered island of non-horribleness in a world otherwise consisting of assorted Dark Lords and their horrible kingdoms. (They're not actually called Dark Lords in the book, but that's basically what they are.) The Commonweal has used some elaborate magic and the offer of a life that's not fucking awful to lure in several former Dark Lords to play well with others, and established an equality-based society. However, due to all the fallout of the rest of history, famine and invasion are ever-present threats.

To be more specific, the setting is the second Commonweal, which has been isolated from the first as the result of an invasion in the previous book. (Yes, there's a previous book; I'll get to that shortly). The majority culture here are the Creeks, who are not exactly human. In fact I'm pretty sure none of the characters are exactly human. Among other interesting cultural differences, the use of gendered pronouns indicates a sexual or romantic relationship with the person you're calling "she" or "he," so we don't always know what gender characters are.

A Succession of Bad Days is narrated by Edgar, who just had a magical parasite removed. It turns out that the parasite has been feeding on their power and also their ability to learn. With it gone, Edgar has quite a lot of power - enough that Edgar needs to start learning to control it, or it will destroy them.

Edgar joins a class consisting of Dove (an ex-sergeant who was deeply traumatized in a recent battle; iron-willed and possessed of absurd amounts of magical potential), Chloris (prim and proper by Creek cultural standards, which are not ours; not happy to be there), Zora (a teenager who likes to create illusory wings; the least powerful of them and an absolute sweetheart), and Kynefrid (who has already studied magic a bit; this is not an advantage.) Edgar is sweet, earnest, and generally a cinnamon roll. Edgar is also deeply, deeply strange.

Their teachers are Wake, a necromancer and ancient eldritch horror in a human suit; Blossom, who likes to blow shit up, looks like a cute teenager, and is actually a coil of flame in human form; and Halt, an unfathomably ancient former Dark Lord who typically appears as a sweet grandma who knits, drinks tea, and rides a giant fire-breathing battle sheep named Eustace. If you have enough magical power, you can perceive her as a giant spider. If you have an absolutely absurd amount of magic power, you can just barely glimpse the unfathomable horror behind the spider...

Together, they build a house, borrow an ancient forest, build a canal, navigate some interesting local politics, and grapple with the implications of becoming sorcerers in a community which both needs them and was specifically created to limit their political power.

I should note that this is actually the second book in the series. The first is The March North, and is the reason why it took me so long to get to this one. I made a number of very determined attempts to read The March North and could not make heads or tails of it. I think I understood about one sentence out of every three. Luckily, it turns out that you do not actually have to have read The March North to read A Succession of Bad Days.

The March North is the story of an attempted invasion of the Commonweal, resulting in the second Commonweal splitting off from it. Dove, Halt, and Blossom are in it. I may take another whack at it after I read more books in the series and hopefully have more context.

The prose style of A Succession of Bad Days is uhhh unique. Many commas are involved, nesting like birds at spring. It's very clearly a deliberate choice, is often quite beautiful, and sometimes understatedly funny. But. It reads like it was originally written in a different language, then translated into English by someone determined to preserve as much of the original syntax as possible. Add to that a tendency to imply rather than state, show events that only make sense in light of information learned 100 pages later, and an enormous amount of technical vocabulary, and you can see why I'm calling it difficult.

All this is also true of The March North, except that the style tends more toward the terse, the narrator explains absolutely nothing because they already know what's going on, and they culturally and personally minimize emotional expression which makes it additionally hard to know what's important and what isn't. Edgar wakes up with no idea what's going on and is very curious, and has lots and lots of feelings, so despite their tendency to use commas as all-purpose punctuation, they're a much easier narrator to follow.

A Succession of Bad Days is the first part of the students' story, which concludes in Safely You Deliver. I loved that too. I'll review it separately because I have a LOT of questions specific to it.

If you've read A Succession of Bad Days, let's talk here! Spoilers for this book (but not the later ones) are fine in comments. No need to use rot13. If you read the book later and want to discuss, please start commenting whenever, and I'll come talk with you.

You can buy this book, along with the rest of the series to date, on Apple, Google Play, Kobo, and probably other places. You cannot buy it from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. There is no print edition.

Spoilers! Questions! Hopefully the author will appear and shed some (possibly gnomic) light!

( Read more... )

I bought this book in the library book sale, based on a logline about orphans surviving on an mysterious island. Little did I know what I was in for.

I HATED this book. It's not a realistic or even unrealistic survival story, it's a preachy allegory that doesn't even make sense on its own terms AND has unnecessary plotlines that seem set up only to frustrate the reader by going nowhere AND has a bad message AND appears to advocate letting toddlers use filleting knives.

There are nine children on the island. There are always nine children on the island. Every year, an otherwise empty boat arrives with a toddler. The toddler gets off the boat. The oldest child on the island gets in the boat, and the boat takes off by itself. That child is never seen again. And so the cycle continues.

The kids have no idea why this is happening, but regard it as a normal fact of life and have been told that if a child ever refuses to get on the boat, the sky will fall. Who told them this? Older kids. Who told those kids? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The book opens with the arrival of a new toddler, Ess, who speaks in obnoxious phonetic baby talk, "Whah dis?" and "Ess sooze" (shoes). I HATE baby talk.

Deen, the oldest child, gets in the boat over the tearful protests of the next-oldest child, Jinny.  Now Jinny has lost her best friend and is stuck as the primary caretaker for Ess. Lucky for Ess, the island is a paradise. Food is extremely easy to get, there are bees but they don't sting, there are snakes but they don't bite, the sunrises depict beautiful flowers opening and stuff like that, and if you jump off the cliffs a gentle wind will blow you back. None of the kids ever get sick or hurt, except for very minor scrapes.

So clearly, we're dealing with either Heaven or a constructed environment. At first, all signs point to "constructed environment." There's a library of real books from our world, and Jinny marvels over such strange things as "movies" and "candy."

None of the kids have any idea what's off the island or if the books are describing real things, because they all arrived when they were so young that they couldn't explain anything, and by the time they're old enough to talk coherently, they don't remember anything before their arrival.

( Minor spoiler )

This is why I kept reading - I was curious WTF was going on with the island and why. Virtual reality? A carefully maintained super-playground? A long-term science experiment? A generation ship? This is all a dream while Jinny's in a coma in the real world?

The kids have very limited knowledge about the world, as they all arrived as toddlers and were taught by preteen kids who were also taught by preteen kids. So a lot of the names for things are ones they made up, because they don't know what the real names are. (This is why their names are all spelled oddly.) Sometimes I liked this, like "jellyblobs" for sea anemones. Other times I did not like it, like "wishing" for peeing/pooping, and the toilet being a "wish cabin" BARF FOREVER into the wish basin.

This also fails to have a point. In books like Piranesi or The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, we see how specific people construct knowledge in different ways depending on who they are and what they have to draw from. In Orphan Island, it's all just cute or twee and not drawn from anything specific beyond not knowing how to spell.

But all is not well in cutesy paradise. Jinny is resentful over being stuck with Ess, worried that Ess will get hurt, and doesn't want to get in a boat and sail off to somewhere totally unknown and possibly to her death. None of the other children think those are reasonable concerns for Jinny to have, and everything in the narrative supports the other kids.

When Jinny tries to teach Ess the things the older kids are supposed to teach their toddler charges, Ess doesn't seem to learn them very well, Jinny gets impatient, and the other kids lecture Jinny on how it's very important that Ess learn and Jinny needs to teach her better. (Note that Jinny is the oldest kid, and she's like eleven. In fact, she comes across as the youngest short of Ess, because everyone else is smarter and more competent and calmer than her.)

I hesitate to say that I have a literal trigger for anything in literature, but if I do, it's when a character is criticized or punished or mocked for being unable to do something when they've never been taught how to do it and there's no reason why they should know how to do it, and the narrative seems to think this is fine. (I don't mind if the narrative clearly thinks this is unfair.) How is Jinny supposed to teach Ess how to read? She clearly has no idea. The other kids, disgusted with her inability to do so, take over and successfully teach Ess to read, but we don't know how they do it because it happens off page.

Similarly, Jinny fails at teaching Ess how to swim, largely because she's worried that toddler Ess could drown. The other kids tell her that's impossible, and one of them tosses Ess in the ocean. This successfully teaches her how to swim!

Jinny is worried that if she tries to teach Ess to scale and gut a fish with a sharp filleting knife, she might cut herself. Remember, Ess is a LITERAL TODDLER who talks like "Dinny, pease stay?" The other kids tell Jinny she's being overprotective and to let Ess use the knife. Of course, Ess is fine.

The lessons are so bad here that I started to feel like I was being gaslit by a book. Okay, sure, in this specific situation the kids are clearly being protected by something and it does seem impossible for them to get hurt, not to mention that toddlers are somehow magically capable of the physical coordination to SCALE AND GUT A FISH, so Jinny actually is being overprotective, buuuuut...

If this was black comedy, I would probably like it. But it's not, and Jinny is presented as being clearly in the wrong. That's not to say that I like Jinny. I actually couldn't stand her. I just hated the other kids even more. Needless to say, none of the characters came across as actual kids.

Oh and also Jinny is explicitly being condescended to and lied to by the other kids - at one point they explain to her that her lost bestie Deen, who she'd thought was an advocate of letting her do things her own way, had secretly told them that the key to smooth relations with Jinny was to let her THINK she was getting her own way, but actually to manipulate her so she only thought that was true UGH UGH UGH.

ANYWAY. So what's up with these boats? Let's leave aside the possible science fiction explanations and look at it as allegory. The children arrive when they're very young and know and remember nothing. They're cared for by others. When they're older but just before they hit puberty, they get in them again and sail away. The allegory seems like the arrival is birth, and the departure is leaving the golden, protected, beautiful land of childhood behind and entering into the uncharted and scary waters of adolescence.

But that is not a good allegory for adolescence. (Even apart from very few people thinking of their childhoods as perfection even if they were happy!) The children have no idea where they're going or whether they'll ever see any of their friends again or even if they'll survive. Adolescence is kind of an unknown, but not to that extent. You're still allowed to see your younger friends! The departure feels much more like an allegory for death.

So is Jinny's desire to not get on the boat an allegory for a child afraid of becoming a teenager? Or is it an allegory for a person refusing to face death? This is a children's book, mind, so if it's the latter that's a little disturbing.

Orphan Island feels like a preachy, message-y book. But what's the message? Well...

( Are you fucking SERIOUS )

In conclusion, fuck the baby talk, fuck the misspelled names, and fuck wishes that come out of your ass.

My favorite review from Goodreads: "We listened to this on audiobook, and upon completion my children wanted to stop the vehicle and put the discs under the car and run them over. [...]

We ranted for at least a half an hour. We woke up the next morning and one of my son's first words were, "I'm still angry about the book."

Miri's wife Leah was on a submarine that sank to the ocean floor and was lost for six months. When Leah returns unexpectedly, she has clearly come back wrong. The book alternates Miri's point of view in the present, living with the eerily altered Leah, and Leah's tale of the doomed submarine trip.

Isn't that a great premise and cover? I love things going horribly wrong on submarines, and I love "came back wrong," and Armfield's prose is very accomplished. It seems like this book (which got rave reviews from everyone but my commenters who had read it) had to be good. Unfortunately, you guys who commented were right. I didn't like it for the exact same reasons you guys didn't like it.

Things Miri does not do with her wife who is turning into something very strange: research folklore, take her to a doctor.

Things Miri does do: mope, take her to couple's counseling.

In the present timeline, Miri feels completely emotionally disconnected from Leah. Miri mopes around the house remembering her past life with the Leah she loved, and being mildly creeped out by and estranged from present Leah. Present Leah has all sorts of bizarre symptoms, doesn't eat, drinks salt water, and spends almost all her time in the bathtub. She doesn't do any normal human things or relate to her wife at all. Her only dialogue is to occasionally recites facts about the sea.

Despite Leah obviously being either extremely sick, turning into something inhuman, or an undersea doppelganger who isn't Leah at all, Miri makes only half-hearted attempts to get her medical care or figure out what's going on. She tried to contact the mysterious Center that ran the doomed expedition, but only gets a bureaucratic runaround. She does get Leah into couple's counseling, but it fails because Leah shows up for one meeting, is weird, and then refuses to return because she's too busy sitting in the bathtub.

In the past timeline, narrated by Leah, we get the doomed submarine expedition. It sank mysteriously and then sat at the bottom of the ocean floor. The three-person crew can't see anything or contact anyone. This storyline is amazingly boring. Very little actually happens, you get no sense of what life on a submarine is like, and the events that do happen are brief and don't have emotional impact. Like Miri, Leah spends a lot of time mentally reminiscing about their marriage.

As you can probably tell from Leah getting couple's counseling but not medical care, and Miri's failure to, say, do any research on ocean folklore, this book is not horror or dark fantasy at heart, but rather an allegory on the loss of a partner. Leah's condition and Miri's reactions to it have elements of a marriage dissolving for emotional reasons, losing a partner to dementia or mental illness, and losing a partner to terminal illness.

I love horror and fantasy that's metaphoric, but for me it has to be actual horror or fantasy as well as a metaphor. Pet Sematary is about death and how we cope with mortality, but there are also literal resurrections that people react to in a plausible manner. His House is about the cruel way countries treat immigrants and how you can leave your country but you can't leave your past, but there are also actual ghosts that people have to deal with. Our Wives Under the Sea doesn't work in terms of its actual plot, but only as a metaphor for the loss of a partner.

Unfortunately, it also didn't work for me on that level. I didn't like either Miri or Leah. I didn't dislike them. I just didn't care about them. They didn't feel very differentiated from each other pre-submarine - we get a ton of relationship minutiae and how they relate to the ocean, but all that detail didn't cohere into strong characters. I didn't care about their relationship, and the entire story is about the dissolution of their relationship. Miri is so disconnected from present Leah, and past Leah is physically separated from Miri, so the only time we saw their relationship actually working was inside their heads and in the past. I've seen writers make this sort of thing work, but it didn't work here.

This is a short book but it felt slow. Miri keeps going on and on and on about random stuff that has no point, like the neighbors who leave their TV on. There were a lot of individual good lines and paragraphs and ideas, plus some good body horror, especially a scene involving eyes. (If not for the brief but horrific eye scene, I classify this as definitely dark fantasy rather than horror.) There's a great subplot about the internet forum Miri finds where women roleplay being wives left behind by their astronaut husbands. But as a whole, I didn't like the book. And while I often like ambiguous or not completely explained endings in horror, WOW was the ending unsatisfying and annoying.

( Spoilery complaints )

Content notes: Body horror, mostly not that graphic but there's one very freaky eye horror scene. The entire book is about grief.



I love the watery woman cover and am annoyed that it was switched for this boring one. I guess the point is that the sea might as well be a desert if you're grieving? That's not a metaphor that appears in the book.

Marianne is a young woman whose parents were from the tiny country Alphenlicht, but was raised in America. After her parents died when she was a teenager, she found that her traditional father had left his substantial estate to her... in a trust controlled by her horrible half-brother Harvey, who attempted to rape her when she was thirteen. He withholds the money from her, forcing her to squeeze every penny. However, she sells her mother's jewels to buy an old house, which she lovingly restores by herself, in between studying for a graduate degree and working in the campus library.

Marianne meets Makr Avehl, the Prime Minister and Magus of Alphenlicht, when he comes to campus for a lecture series. (Alphenlicht is so tiny that "Prime Minister" doesn't have quite the usual meaning or importance.) He looks exactly like Harvey but is much nicer. Realizing that they must be distantly related, they immediately bond and flirt.

He discovers that Harvey has been attempting to work evil magic on her by sending her unpleasant gifts, such as a painting of a girl being menaced alone at night and a Japanese wood carving of a creepy ghost, and replaces them with similar but positive ones, like a painting by the same artist of happy girls lighting up the night and a Japanese wood carving of two mice gnawing a nut, to break the spell in a way that won't alert Harvey that it's been brokem.

Marianne begins learning more about Alphenlicht and its magic and her heritage, while she and Makr Avehl try to figure out who's been teaching Harvey magic...

The first half of this book, which is the part I described above, is a favorite comfort read of mine, and I've re-read it many times. Despite the dark elements, it has a powerful atmosphere of coziness and healing.

Sometimes a book strikes a chord with me that doesn't have much to do with its objective merits. Writing out the story of the first part of this book, it has a weird quasi-incestuous theme with her love interest looking just like her abusive half-brother, and being related to her albeit distantly. No idea what's up with that. But Marianne is charming, I could read forever about her restoring the house she loves, I adore her getting taken out for dinner and lavished with affection and good food, and the Alphenlicht lore and magic is fascinating.

Halfway through the book, Marianne is whisked into a series of bizarre, surreal, dreamlike otherworlds. Until now, I never managed to get very far into the second half of the book, despite re-reading the first half multiple times, even though the entire book is under 200 pages long. This time I determinedly plowed through to see if it ever gets back to the charm of the first half. The answer is no. It ends very abruptly with a transfer to a different timeline, which I assume is picked up in one of the sequels which I've never read.

So this is an extremely odd book, only half of which I even find readable let alone good. And yet I can't tell you how many times I've taken it off the shelf to re-read Marianne's date with Makr Avehl, or the box of evil gifts and its replacement box of similar good ones, or her happiness at waking up in a house she's made beautiful.

Do you have any books that you love only in part, but you love the parts a LOT?

A brother and sister encounter a sweet but distinctly incompetent witch and her flying earthstar. I had never heard of an earthstar before reading this book, but the kids are familiar with them.

Unsurprisingly for a Ruth Chew book, shrinking is involved. This book is collected as "Three Shrinking Tales," to go with her other collections "Three Witch Tales" and "Three Wishing Tales," but in fact most of her books contain at least two out of the three if not all three.

The kids bounce back and forth between trusting and distrusting Trudy the witch and it takes them forever to figure out the secret of the earthstar, so they were not my favorites. But there's lots of great shrinking bits like the shrunken kids getting covered in juice eating part of a raspberry, and the regular-sized kids cutting up a raisin with scissors to add to cornflakes served to the shrunken witch in a bowl made of the cap off a bottle of lemon juice. Also a pair of absolutely amazing illustrations of a shrunken boy getting fed to a baby bird.

An Amazon reviewer writes: Had this book when I was a kid. It ignited my love of mushrooms, reading and witchcraft.



Original cover:

This is the completion of the trilogy that began with The Belles, which sounds like a standard "Everyone is ugly and beauty is controlled by the government" dystopia, but it really isn't. It feels more like a lost novel by Tanith Lee with lots of fairytale motifs and canon FF. It's decadent, immersive, and I highly recommend it

The second two books are also very good and worth reading, though I do think the first is the best. They don't answer all the questions that were raised by the first book, but they do answer some of them. They also go in some unexpected and interesting directions.

Worldbuilding spoilers: ( Read more... )

What Clayton is interested in, particularly in the second two books, is how the Bells are exploited, forms of enslavement and resistance, and how people deal with an unjust society. There are still plenty of gorgeous dress descriptions and teacup pets, don't worry.

The second book has an author's note at the end that is pretty jaw-dropping. Don't miss it. The third book has a new narrator, which is fun, and is a bit of a mythic take on the Hunger Games. The end felt a little rushed and oddly paced but the final outcome is satisfying.

Clayton is now on my "buy anything she writes" list. She has an interesting, original voice and set of concerns, and her books are compulsively page-turny and just a pleasure to read.

he has a new book out, a middle grade fantasy, which I will read shortly.

Two WWII RAF fighter pilots are shot down over enemy lines, then fall into a strange world at the center of the Earth!

This 1952 boys' adventure book is charmingly enthusiastic. It opens with a note on how the author found the manuscript in a war-torn area and believes that it's absolutely true, then dives into first-person accounts of the two pilots, Johnny Wild and Danny Black, who are shot down! Over water! In enemy territory! And fall into a pit! Where they almost die of hunger and thirst! Before they realize that they can parachute down into an even deeper hole! And arrive in a strange land in the center of the earth that's at war! And help the inhabitants build an airplane!

This is a lot of fun but I couldn't help wishing that the amazing plot had been written by W. E. Johns; Carter's style is a little dry, and despite telling us that Johnny is the leader and the smart one and Danny is the follower and the strong one, they feel interchangeable. But the plot is great and it's full of fascinating little period details: emergency chocolate concentrate is dry and bitter, and parachutes were equipped with inflatable dinghies and paddles! (Or did he make that up?) The underground world is also full of cool little details, like that there are no animals so everyone is vegetarian, and they have advanced electrical/battery technology but no gunpowder.

I'm surprised I never heard of Bruce Carter (real name Richard Hough) before because he's one of those "does more stuff than any normal twelve people" guys that I tend to enjoy - he was a RAF fighter pilot in WWII, wrote 90 books, was a maritime historian, married children's book author/illustrator Charlotte Hough who served prison time for assisting in the suicide of an 85-year-old friend (Her daughter recalled that, afterwards, "She was always saying, 'When I was in prison' and bringing dinner parties to a shuddering halt."), and had five children of whom three became authors.

Content note: Period-typical, relatively mild, completely random racism, like We passed the time whilst walking discussing the merits of white, yellow, brown, and black skins.

A trad-published D&D coffeeshop AU in which an orc mercenary, Viv, retires from adventuring and opens a coffeeshop. That's it, that's the book.

For a fantasy novel, there's a surprising lack of fantasy. Viv being an orc only means that she's big and strong and people assume she's a brute. There's no orc culture or anything else that would make her different from being a big tough human warrior in a world with gender equality. Her staff is of various D&D races and classes, but in a way that's similar to her being an orc - we only get a tiny bit of physical description of how they're different from being human, and otherwise they act exactly like modern humans. The coffeeshop serves iced coffee, hot coffee, lattes, cinnamon buns, chocolate croissants, and biscotti.

Given that this is a fantasy world which is basically modern America with window dressing, I'd have wanted something more Terry Pratchett-esque, where it has some commentary on the society that it really is. This isn't that, though it does have some mild commentary on not judging by appearances.

It's very cute and cozy. I liked it but I didn't love it. It's in a genre I enjoy - a book centered around the process of creating something rather than centered around conflict - but for me, it was just slightly skewed from being a book I'd have loved. It hit a sort of uncanny valley for me in that it was too similar to our real world to provide the fantasy-genre pleasure of exploring what a coffeeshop in a D&D world would be like, but its similarity to our world didn't reveal anything about our own world.

I'd have been much more interested if it really got into the fantasy aspect, serving food and drink that you can't get at Starbucks, having to deal with genuinely different cultures, maybe having some races be allergic to others' delicacies, etc. Diane Duane's Star Trek novels do that sort of thing extremely well. But it clearly wasn't what Baldree was interested in.

This was a smash hit so there's clearly an eager market for cozy, process-based fantasy. Good! I'm sure I'll love some of what's written as a result of this book making the big leagues.