FF Friday: The Cage, by A. M. Dellamonica, and some books I didn’t finish

Jude, a carpenter, has a meet-cute with Paige, a single mom with a baby who needs her basement retrofitted to make it soundproof by the next full moon. It also needs to be well-ventilated and comfortable. And indestructible by, say, an energetic baaaaby wolf. Not that she has a baaaaaby wolf! It’s for, uh, band practice. For her garage band that not only trashed the basement last full moon, but also peed all over the floor.

This is the lesbian werewolf novelette that is everything I wanted Humanity For Beginners to be. It has likable characters, a plot that’s just the right size for its length, nicely worked-out details, and a lesbian community which, while definitely on the wish-fulfillment side, also feels very realistic; it’s like dropping in an actual community on one of its best days. Interestingly, it shares an aspect of worldbuilding with Humanity For Beginners that I don’t see much in contemporary werewolf stories, which is that you become a wolf during the full moon rather than at will, and that when you do, you have a wolf mind rather than a human mind. Also a world in which werewolves are known to the public and have varying legal statuses depending on local jurisdiction.

You can read it for free at Tor.com.

Or you can buy it for 99 cents on Amazon: The Cage: A Tor.Com Original

Has anyone read anything else by A. M. Dellamonica? I see that she has a YA portal fantasy trilogy and a pair of fantasies that are maybe about magic based on color? Those all sound interesting.

I also started and failed to get very far into several FF novels.

Runaway, by Anne Laughlin. The premise is that a PI who grew up in a survivalist compound falls for her new boss while searching for a missing girl. It has a killer prologue in which, at age 16, she escapes the compound by SHOOTING HER FATHER. Then it jumps ahead to her present and becomes a romance about her and her boss, who is cheating on her girlfriend. Cause of stallout: I dislike infidelity storylines and do not find this romantic in any way. Also, I wanted the book about the fallout of having been raised by survivalists, but the actual book appears to be primarily about the cheating romance. Discard.

Firestorm, by Radclyffe. Smokejumpers in love. This does in fact seem to be about the premise, with the twist that the new smokejumper is the daughter of a famous homophobic politician. Cause of stallout: the prose is really clunky. I might get back to it eventually.

Desolation Point, by Cari Hunter. Two women are stranded hiking in the Cascades with a killer on the loose. Cause of stallout: an offputting encounter with stereotypical teenage Latino gangsters in Los Angeles, which in addition to everything else needed an Ameripicker. Otherwise it was reasonably well-written and readable, so I might get back to it eventually.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

I didn't think this was very good. Squee-harshing below cut; no major spoilers but probably don't read if you liked the movie. For calibration, the Star Wars movies I like best are A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and Rogue One. I think the prequel movies are terrible and Return of the Jedi largely meh (not big on Ewoks.)

This is literally the only movie I've ever seen in which I hated the lighting so much that I couldn't resist whispering complaints about it to the friend I saw it with. Except for a sequence near the end, every single location is lit so dimly that I struggled to make out the actor's faces, and all the locations look gloomy and depressing and samey. There was obviously a deliberate decision to dim out the actors' faces specifically, because at some points windows, knick-knacks, etc would be lit so they could be seen clearly, but the actors' faces were always deeply shadowed. It gave the entire movie a general air of gloominess and not being fun, which is about the opposite of what you want in a movie about Han Solo.

I was so perplexed by this baffling decision that I looked it up afterward. Apparently the cinematographer is very highly regarded for his use of dark lighting. Apparently it actually looks good if presented absolutely perfectly, but in many or possibly the average theatre, the projection quality isn't up to the job and the result is muddy, gloomy, and a strain to view. Okay, but I've seen lots and lots of movies at that theatre, and none of them had this problem. If your technique is going to look dreadful in tons of theatres and only looks good at the absolute best ones, maybe it's not the best choice for a blockbuster movie that's going to be shown everywhere.

So, if you haven't seen this yet and want to, it's probably best seen in a prestige or IMAX theatre.

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