Read-a-thon # 5: Within the Flames, by Marjorie Liu

This was actually the last book I read on Day One, but I didn't have a chance to write a review before the clock ran out. So I'm writing it now that the clock has started up again.

He's a former car thief and current psychic investigator with angst about an abusive childhood, a dead sister, and the pyrokinetic powers he can no longer due to events in an earlier book which I either never read or totally forgot about! She's a half-dragon children's book artist lurking in the subway tunnels with angst about her permanently dragoned left arm, her dead parents, and the pyrokinetic and dragon-shifting powers she can no longer control due to the events surrounding her parents' death! Together, they angst, bond, make out, burst into flames, burst into flames while making out, meet up with characters from previous books, and fight wife beaters and a cabal of blood-drinking witches!

For fans of the Dirk and Steele series, which I like to describe as "The X-Men done as genre romance," I could just say, "This is Eddie's book." For me, that was both the draw and disappointment. It focuses almost exclusively on Eddie's angst, when what I liked about him in previous books was his charm. As a romance novel about the romance between an angsty pyrokinetic and a were-dragon, it's quite satisfying. As a novel about Eddie, it's not quite what I wanted.

The first two-thirds have too much repetitive push-pull between Eddie and Lyssa about "I need to protect you from bloodsucking witches"/"Go away, I trust no one!" The last third, however, brings in some excellent drama, action, and plot surprises. There's also a nice supporting role for the gargoyle and amnesiac from an earlier book. (He's a gargoyle in disguise! She's an amnesiac covered in blood! Together, they battle the Queen of Faerie!)

Within the Flames (Dirk & Steele)

Read-a-thon # 6: Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture, v. 1, by Ishikawa Masayuki

Sponsored by cyphomandra.

Tadayasu, the young heir to a small-town sake brewery, has the power to see microbes. They look more or less like this. The manga begins on his first day at a Tokyo agricultural university, where his unique ability makes him sought-after by a maniacal professor with dreams of using microbes to terraform new worlds, a dedicated microbiology student whose punk boots hide a colony of athlete's foot fungus, a germ--phobic student, a pair of money-hungry students attempting to use their disgusting dorm room as everything from a sake brewery to a lab cultivating medicinal caterpillar fungus, and everyone on campus who doesn't want to get food poisoning.

In the tradition of many reluctant heroes struggling to balance great power with great responsibility, Tadayasu complains, “What has it ever gotten me? Being fed creepy and disgusting food.”

Moyasimon practically defines oddball, combining gross-out comedy, nostalgic college-days humor, and meticulously presented lessons on microbiology, fermentation, and agriculture. The word-to-image ratio is as dense as Death Note, using cute microbes and funny situations as the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine sake-brewing demonstration go down.

I could have done without quite the amount of grossness, but I enjoyed the college hijinks, the science, and the sheer bizarreness of the concept.

I leave you with this representative quote: “You know what they call worms? Dragons of the earth! Respect their power!”

Moyasimon 1: Tales of Agriculture

Read-a-thon # 7: The Truth, by Julia Karr

Sponsored by mme_hardy and lab.

This is the sequel to XVI, the infamous Sexteen. I tried to keep an open mind about the sequel. Honest. However, two pages in, I realized that liveblogging it would do a better job of capturing the reading experience than a normal review.

Page 1: Hey! This one actually begins with a concise and clear explanation of the XVI tattoo: Given to girls only at the age of 16, wears off in about sex six years, means that they’re legally available for sex. Does not legally mean that they can be raped with impunity, but in practice it works out for that. Good job. Seriously. Book one never explained it clearly.

Page 5: B.O.S.S. as the acronym for the evil government agency will never not sound like something out of Get Smart.

Page 8: “John’s got an appointment with the big trannie dealership in Evanston, so I have the afternoon free.”

The plot so far: Nina has quit school to work for the Art Institute. She’s dating Sal, who spends most of his time disguised as a homeless person to cover his NonCon (revolutionary) activities. (I can never not read NonCon as “nonconsensual.”) Sal is showing signs of being a creepy, stalkery control freak. Nina and her little sister Dee are living with Pops (her disabled and mentally fading grandfather) and Gran. Her revolutionary father, Alan Oberon, is out there somewhere. B.O.S.S. doesn’t know that Nina killed Ed, the evil B.O.S.S agent who murdered her mother.

The Resistance is sexist and doesn’t let girls do anything dangerous, but there are still girl Resistance members. Wei, Nina’s high-tier friend, will induct Nina into the Sisterhood.

Page 30. Slang of the future: “Skivs! Dee’s been waiting!”

Page 31. Slang of the future, Part II: “Zats! Nina, you look awful!”

Page 42: Slang of the future, Part III: “Welfs” for “welfare recipients” joins “verts” for advertisements and “digi” for digitize in a further demonstration that good invented slang needs to consist of more than just abbreviating words.

Pops has been taken away by evil government ops, and Gran has a heart attack, then is confiscated for an experimental procedure done by the creepy Dr. Silverman. Dee and Nina are evicted, and go to live in Wei’s ultra (cool) home.

94. Wow! A teenage interracial lesbian couple pops up! Good for Karr, seriously. Even if this brief mention is the last we see of them, they are the first lesbians I have spotted in any teen dystopia. More props if they both survive till the end of the book. (If the brown-skinned one dies, a prop will be withdrawn.) They are part of the Sisterhood.

117. Nina gets carried away and almost has sex with Sal. He takes her no for an answer, protesting, “I’m not a sexer.” Despite the idiotic slang, this is the best part of the book so far, as Nina struggles with real and complicated questions about love, sex, and how to tell the difference between her impulse to rebel against society by refusing to have sex, and genuinely not wanting to or not being ready.

149. “Here’s a free hire trannie ticket.”

168. Classic moment of unintentional comedy: Nina’s Dad makes a daring illegal interruption of the constant stream of verts to broadcast subversive propaganda! The content of the subversive propaganda? “Once upon a time, Holiday meant more than a buying frenzy. It was a time for family and friends and compassion for the less fortunate.”

168. A trannie spun out of an alley, nearly knocking me over.

171. There should be a ban on the scene, which I swear I have read about a billion times, in which, hundreds of years in the future, the classic baby boomer musicians are enthusiastically praised by hip future teens as world-changing and superior to modern pap. I love Bob Dylan and Joan Baez too, but come on!

188. The inevitable appearance of the love triangle. Chris, Wei’s brother, treats Nina as an equal, unlike the possessive, over-protective Sal. Nina points out to him that she can take risks just like a boy, and that murder is not gender-specific. I wonder if Karr got criticized for all the victim-blaming in book one? This one has way less of that, and some actual discussion about victim-blaming. Again, seriously, good for her.

This was a big improvement on the first book in the sense of being less politically objectionable, and less hilariously bad. The points Karr seems to be trying to make are more supported by the actual text, so it doesn’t constantly switch back and forth from lectures about the evils of sexism to in-text virgin-whore dichotomies. I was also surprised and pleased that the lesbians survived – even the brown-skinned one!

That being said, The Truth is mediocre. The plot is aimless, many of the supporting characters are blank slates, and I didn’t care what happened to anyone. Sal randomly vanishes about two-thirds of the way through the book, apparently just so that Nina can get some quality time with his rival, and it’s explained in an epilogue that he’d been off on a mission. There are a lot of loose threads, which may be tied up in the presumably forthcoming sequel. I don’t feel moved to seek it out.

The Truth

Read-a-Thon # 8: The Shadow Speaker, by Nnedi Okorafor

Sponsored by tool_of_satan.

The world has been transformed by magic, science, and war. In a future Niger, West Africa, storms and camels speak with human voices, teenagers type and listen to music on their e-legbas, and some children are born with the ability to fly, call rain, or listen to shadows.

Ejii is a teenage shadow speaker. Her father once ruled her village according to harsh traditions, but he was executed by a woman called Jaa, whose rule is more egalitarian and modern, but who is equally ruthless. Jaa wears a translucent burka and wields an otherworldly living sword; when she speaks, sometimes red flowers fall from the sky. When Jaa hears that the people of another world are planning to invade, she asks Ejii to come with her on her mission to stop them. Ejii's mother forbids it, but after consulting the shadows, Ejii takes off after her anyway, across a magical, dangerous landscape.

The worldbuilding in this is absolutely fantastic. The blend of magic, technology, and magical realism is utterly convincing and really fun to read. Unlike the last 20 or so futuristic YA novels I've read lately, people have cultures and religions and tribes, they speak different languages, the ecology is weird but believable, towns have economies, and the whole world feels real enough to touch.

The first two-thirds of the novel, which sets up the story and then follows Ejii's quest across the desert, is simply plotted but made fresh and new by the strength of the world. The final third has some good moments but is a bit of a mess in plot terms, with too much chaotic action and several crucial moments falling flat. ( Read more... )

.

The prose is plain, occasionally poetic but also occasionally clunky, and the characterization is solid. But one of the main reasons I like sf and fantasy is for the chance to explore new worlds, and this is a great new world. Despite my caveats, I liked it a lot, and I would recommend it. It's more obviously flawed than Zahrah the Windseeker, to which it's loosely related, but its strengths are much stronger and it's overall a better book.

I also love the cover. Nnedi Okorafor's books all seem to have great covers.

The Shadow Speaker

Read-a-thon # 9: The Gilda Stories, by Jewelle Gomez

Sponsored by oursin.

An unusual, meditative collection of linked stories about an African-American vampire as she lives through the centuries, starting with her “birth” as an escaped slave in 1850 Louisiana, and concluding in an apocalyptic 2050.

As a young slave, she is taken in by a 500-year-old white vampire, Gilda, who teaches her, bonds with her, and finally passes on her name before swimming out to her much-delayed death. The original Gilda had hoped that the new one would also take on her lover Bird, a Lakota vampire, but the angry and grief-stricken Bird takes off instead. The new Gilda meets other vampires, helps people in need, and watches time go by and history march on. Periodically, vampires from her past return, to reconcile or attempt revenge. As she was taught, she takes only as much blood as she needs to survive, without killing anyone; in exchange, she leaves behind new ideas, new insights, and, most often, hope.

This is known as “the black lesbian vampire book,” but that’s not quite accurate. While Gilda seems to prefer women for romantic relationships, feeding has a distinctly sensual aspect, and she feeds on both men and women. But it’s not a romance, paranormal or otherwise. Nor is it a horror story. It’s mainstream literature, with mainstream conventions, which happens to be about vampires. Even when there’s a lot of action and drama, with Gilda fighting for her life, it has a slow, thoughtful, philosophical, humane tone to it. (It’s in omniscient POV, which is probably a good choice for a story with this much sweep.)

I liked this but found it uneven. The stories have a through-line and continuity but also stand on their own, and some are much stronger than others. (It looks like at least some of them were originally published separately.) The emphasis on daily life, complex emotions, and moral quandaries works very well in some stories, but feels dry or slow in others. The first story is wonderful; the others vary between nearly coming up to that standard, and failing to come up to it.

Gilda doesn’t have anywhere near as much culture shock (“time shock?”) as I expected given the entire premise of the book, and I think that’s a flaw. There's also almost no addressing of historical attitudes toward lesbianism, which I would have liked to have seen. In general, though bad things happen and racism exists, the focus is on resilience, hope, love, and endurance. This works beautifully in some stories, but makes others feel unlikely or slight.

Note that there is an attempted rape right at the beginning, and that the story set in the 1950s is way more graphically violent than anything else in the book. (The cover I’ve linked below is misleading. Most of the book isn’t violent at all, other than some gentle, humane, sensual – albeit often nonconsensual – bloodletting. My copy has a much more representative cover, with a black and white photo of a black woman in a white dress.)

The Gilda Stories

Read-a-thon # 10: The Folk Keeper, by Franny Billingsley

Things Corinna Stonewall likes:

1. Power.

2. Secrets.

3. Rain.

4. Lurking in cold, damp, pitch-black cellars.

Things Corinna Stonewall doesn't like:

1. Sunlight.

2. People.

Corinna is a Folk Keeper, assigned to live in a cellar and feed, ward off, and placate the hungry, spiteful, dangerous Folk, who otherwise will eat the animals and destroy the crops. An orphan, at age eleven she decided that she was sick of doing boring housework, and so cut her hair, disguised herself as a boy, and learned to be a Folk Keeper. She has spent five years lurking in a cellar. Then she gets taken to a new estate overlooking the ocean, where everything changes...

This was GREAT. The language is gorgeous, Corinna's voice and character are prickly and funny and wonderful, the characters are all vivid, and the story is full of twists and cleverly used folklore motifs. I saw the most important surprise coming, but didn't catch about three others.

If you liked Billingsley's Chime, you will almost certainly like this. It has some similar motifs and virtues, but is shorter, simpler, and less dark.

The Folk Keeper