A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Her fist-size nipples spiral hypnotically.

Olivia is a fallen angel of desire, which means she's a vampire. She feeds via "quills" in her mouth, which make cuts so small and sharp that people don't even notice them, but need to be frequently sharpened. This can only be done by grinding her quills against the quills of another angel-vampire. She can also bite people harder with "full fang," draining "several quarts" of blood which doesn't harm them so long as they get a blood transfusion within a couple hours. She and other vampire-angels pay $8000 a pop to hunt people whose blood has been tested for drugs/blood-borne diseases.

Like other vampangels, she has no vagina.

This book has some pleasingly batshit angpire worldbuilding, but unfortunately Olivia is only half the narration. The other half is the story of tormented neuroscientist Dominic, who is plagued by visions of past lives. He is extremely boring. His assistants are named Peter and Paul, in case we missed the religious themes.

I assume Dominick's love causes Olivia to grow a vagina, but I didn't get that far.

Berkley marketed the book as dark fantasy, not paranormal romance, which explains why it goes on for so long before Dominick and Olivia meet - I gave up before they did, but flipping ahead, it looks like it's about a quarter of the way in. For either genre, it's weird.

This is the same Skyler White who co-wrote The Instrumentalists with Steve Brust - a book which I made several determined attempts at, but never got past the first chapter.

In an alternate Los Angeles, there are canals instead of freeways (but the boat traffic jams anyway) and osteomancers gain the powers of ancient animals by mining the La Brea Tar Pits and eating their bones. The magic then settles into their bones, leading to a highly unfortunate situation in which you can gain the collected power of an osteomancer by eating... them.

In this fantastically realized alt-historical/urban fantasy setting, Daniel Blackland is the son of a famous osteomancer who infused him with power before getting killed and eaten by the current ruler of Los Angeles, the Hierarch. Rather than seeking revenge, Daniel laid low and became a highly skilled but basically mid-level thief, running a crew consisting of Jo (a shapeshifter), Cassandra (a safecracker/sharpshooter), and Moth (a fighter who can regenerate like Wolverine.)

But there's another man who also had a parent killed and eaten by the Hierarch. Gabriel Argent also sought survival over revenge, but took a completely different route. He works for the Hierarch as a highly skilled but basically mid-level investigator, whose true love is bureaucracy and city planning. When his sharp eye for oddities puts him on Daniel's trail, he borrows Max, a Hound - a highly trained and specialized slave, treated like a police dog only with less kindness. Gabriel sees potential in Max, a highly competent depressed nihilist who is under a death sentence for murdering his original handler. Their relationship was tied with the worldbuilding/magic system/sense of place for my favorite part of the book.

sholio has a review with way more detail on Gabriel & Max.

This book is basically a cross between The Lies of Locke Lamora minus the misogyny, a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits, and my "i love la" tag.

The LA-ness was SO GOOD. It feels 100% local and real and lived-in, not the sort of outsider's view of what's important about LA and its history that you often get. I literally knew EXACTLY where most of it was taking place, down to random warehouses. At one point Tito's Tacos makes a crucial appearance. That's that taco joint by the freeway three blocks from my old apartment! I cracked up that Daniel also thinks it overrated, which is a very unpopular opinion.

I also liked that okay, you get some world famous Hollywood figures, but you also get William Mulholland as a water wizard controlling the Department of Water & Power (both kinds of power), and the whole plot turns on things like the La Brea Tar Pits and LA not naturally having water.

The social/political aspects really worked for me. The central problem, which is the literal devouring of natural resources until the powerful are literally eating the powerless, is makes sense both as a metaphor and as a reality within the world of the book.

The magic system was fantastic. There's aspects which are underexplained (mostly non-osteomantic magic), but overall it's clever, evocative, original, and generally delightful. If you want super-strength, you get it from specific animals, so they're forever battling people imbued with the essences of short-faced bears, saber-tooth tigers, and, memorably, an entire herd of mammoth!

The parts of this book that were good were A+. However, it had some flaws that knock it down from excellent to very good. I think it needed one more editing pass. Several extremely important emotional moments occur entirely off-page, some of the characterization is very thin, and the crucial matter of the connections, history, and emotional bonds between Daniel and his crew are told in summary rather than shown, which made those feel thin too. There's also some significant pacing issues - the book needed at least one more chapter between the action climax and the last chapter, among other things.

My big issues fell into two general categories: important things occurring off-page, which affected the characterization and general emotional tenor, and pacing.

The book would have been SO MUCH BETTER if we'd gotten full chapters of flashback for each of Daniel's crew as actual scenes rather than Daniel narrating what happened in summary. A lot of anime/manga does this really well. It would have made the revelations seem cooler, and added a lot of depth to the characters, and given a certain spoilery revelation more punch.

Jo especially was thinly characterized, which was frustrating as it also isn't explained at all in this book how shapeshifting works and how it's different from osteomancy. A flashback chapter in which we see Daniel meet her would have helped a lot.

The explanation of why Moth can regenerate is interesting (more so in retrospect after a certain revelation, actually) but I was wildly curious while it was still a mystery, and then disappointed when Daniel just summarizes it. If it had been a flashback chapter and shown rather than told, it would have been much more satisfying.

In general, Daniel's crew is supposed to have incredibly tight and long-lived relationships, but their characterization felt thin and so I wasn't very invested in them for a lot of the book. Whereas I was extremely invested in Gabriel and Max, partly because they were cool, unusual characters, but also because they meet in the present day so we actually see their relationship develop rather than it being summary + wisecracks.

(Daniel wisecracks a lot and not very funnily. For a lot of the book he was my least favorite character.)

Other issues are super spoilery. There's one twist that made my jaw drop - it was startling, logical, perfectly done, and illuminated a whole lot of things that had happened before. I recommend that you read the book first, if you want to be surprised. But I know most of you won't, so I'll try to talk around it a little bit.

Content notes: Cannibalism, injustice, torture, police brutality, depictions of racism/colonialism, environmental issues. The book is generally very fun, but it doesn't whitewash social issues.

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“Passing Strange” is a standalone historical fantasy novella, mostly set in San Francisco in 1940. In the present day, an elderly woman sells the original chalk painting of a pulp horror magazine cover, an action which is clearly part of an elaborate, years-spanning plan. Then the story goes back in time to when the painting was created, and focuses on the queer women who have created a vibrant community despite having to live partly (but not entirely) in hiding.

I absolutely loved this story, but it’s hard to review because a lot of it is unpredictable and more fun to discover unspoiled. For instance, while the rough outline of what happens at the end is somewhat predictable, other fairly basic plot elements, such as who the love story is about, take a while to become clear.

It’s full of Dick Francis-worthy fascinating details about all sorts of things – how to use fish to make fixative for a chalk painting and why you need to, laws against women wearing fewer than three items of feminine clothing, what people called avocados and pizzas in 1940 (alligator pears and tomato pies) and where you’d go to get them in San Francisco, how to magically rearrange space with origami – and it’s all both fun to read about and necessary to the plot. The characters and place and milieu feel incredibly real and vivid, and the language is lovely.

Contains period-typical homophobia, sexism, racism, violence, and past child abuse. But it’s not about how people are ground down and destroyed by oppression and trauma, it’s about how people survive and thrive and find happiness and build community within a system that doesn’t even acknowledge their humanity, and so is a story that was particularly good to read right now.

“Hey Presto” and “Caligo Lane” are short stories about supporting characters from “Passing Strange,” and are both in Klages’ collection Wicked Wonders.

“Hey Presto” is about Polly, a teenage girl who wants to be a scientist and whose father is a stage magician, and is about how they begin to repair their previously distant relationship when she has to sub in for his assistant. It’s sweet and has nice stage magic details. (Note: I’m reviewing it as part of FF Friday only because of its connection with “Passing Strange;” to my recollection, Polly’s sexual orientation never comes up one way or another in either story.)

“Caligo Lane” is a lovely, heartbreaking short story about Frannie and her magical shortcut-creating origami. Either it’s set several years after “Passing Strange” or isn't quite consistent with it, as her abilities seem significantly stronger here. It has a long, beautiful description of her doing a work of topographical magic that’s clear and detailed enough to read as an instruction manual, and hypnotic enough to be a spell itself.

Wicked Wonders

Passing Strange

A highly enjoyable novel about shifters (Wrasa) secretly living among us and the human woman writing a lesbian romance novel about them which is unwittingly all too accurate. Despite the amusing premise and a number of quite funny scenes and bits (the liger shifter heroine nearly gets her cover blown due to setting off a human's cat allergy; a menacing lion shifter is maced with catnip and starts rolling around on the ground laughing hysterically), it's overall fairly serious, with high stakes and lots of intricate shifter worldbuilding. The Wrasa are more animalistic and less human than is usually the case nowadays, and Jae gets a lot of mileage out of exploring that.

Griffin, a liger soldier/assassin dedicated to protecting her society’s secret at any cost, is dispatched to investigate Jorie, the romance novelist, to find out why her in-progess novel is so accurate. (Jorie’s beta-reader is a Wrasa.) While posing as an expert on big cats, Griffin gets to know Jorie and her three housecats, and starts questioning her society’s priorities and her own mission, which is likely to end with her getting the order to kill Jorie. My common complaint about novels not following through on their premise is a complete non-issue here: every aspect of the premise, including “What if I get ordered to murder an innocent woman who I think I might have a crush on?” is explored in satisfying detail.

This reads more like an urban fantasy novel from the 80s than like a typical paranormal romance. There are a number of important relationships other than Griffin/Jorie, and the antagonist gets his own POV. (The other relationships are great; the antagonist POV doesn’t add much, IMO, though at least he’s a well-meaning extremist rather than a sadistic psycho.) Though it does allow for all three POV characters, two of whom know anything about writing or publishing, to somehow instinctively know that lesbian fiction is “niche” and unlikely to sell well. I feel that this part just might be autobiographical.)

I liked this a lot and will read the other book set in the same world. It’s nicely plotted, the characters are interesting and fun, and the worldbuilding is really well-done.

Second Nature

Gloria is a 40-something woman who used to be in the army, and now runs a halfway house for lesbian werewolves. (It’s self-supporting as a B&B; they just don’t book guests on full moon nights.)

The chef, Nadine, is a refugee from a controlling/abusive pack, and has been there for six years while they both refrained from acting on their attraction for reasons that I have already forgotten even though I am writing this review literally hours after finished this novelette. Something to do with not being sure the other was into them and/or not wanting to disrupt their friendship, I think. This is the book where they get together – again, I have already forgotten exactly what sparked that. Meanwhile, there is an unexpected family visit or two, and a pack of sexist male wolves is moving in on them. But it all works out okay.

I ought to have loved this – the premise is great, and I enjoy stories about day-to-day life in a specific community – but I only mildly liked it. The rival wolves didn’t ever feel like a real threat, and the family drama was not very dramatic. There’s past trauma, but too lightly sketched in to give the book a deliciously iddy/angsty tone or to give the present healing an emotional punch.

That leaves what should have been the real draw, which was the depiction of the community. But the characters felt thin, and other than the delightful bit about them all having to lock themselves in the basement with a kiddie pool and chew toys when they wolf out, there weren’t enough specific details to bring the setting to life or make the day-to-day aspects compelling.

However, it has universally rave reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and I’m sure some of you would absolutely love it. It has a female alpha who’s decisive and compassionate, most of the characters are female or queer or both, and it contains many elements that people often say they want in fiction, such as characters who articulate their feelings and communicate clearly with each other rather than having stupid misunderstandings or unnecessary conflict. Humanity For Beginners is extremely wholesome and full of good values—too much so, for my taste. Without being preachy, it still has a “good for you” atmosphere, with extremely valid issues phrased like the human relations section of Ask MeFi. Personally, I wanted more bite.