Ready for Summer Reading
Just reviews and nothing but reviews for today’s newsletter!
The TL;DR is 5/5 to these titles:
Speculative Fiction (Sci-fi, fantasy, horror)
Slayers of Old by Jim C. Hines
Seed Beetle by Mahaila Smith (poetry)
Ten Incarnations of Rebellion by Vaishnavi Patel
The Orb of Cairado by Katherine Addison
The Graceview Patient by Caitlin Starling
Direct Descendant by Tanya Huff
Fiction
Ecstasy by Ivy Pochoda
Punished by Ann-Helén Laestadius
Non-Fiction
Toni at Random by Dana A. Williams
Sick Houses by Leila Taylor
Ghosts Behind Glass by Dolly Jørgensen
Holler by Denali Sai Nalamalapu
Propaganda Girls by Lisa Rogak
Poetry
The Magpie at Night by Li Qingzhao
Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola
Memoir
Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen
Full Reviews (in the order I read them)
Slayers of Old by Jim C. Hines. 5/5
Slayers of Old is clearly, obviously Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic, with Jennifer Winter, a Hunter of Artemis, standing in for Buffy Summers; a demon whose name begins with An-; a teenage group of monster-killers--here the Slay Team replaces the Scoobies--a Watcher (oops, Guardian) from a Council of old white men who get teen girls to fight evil for them, and who has a relationship with the Slayer's--I mean Hunter's--mom, a Bad Xander whose name is, in fact, Alex, a Faith stand-in (Hope), and so much more. That said, part of the fun of reading it was finding the references and Easter eggs and being happy about the changes introduced--the more diverse Slay Team beats the mostly-white Scoobies for representation by a long shot. And it's a fun read! Jennifer, Annette (a succubus), and their magician friend Temple—now all in middle age or older—share a magic house/bookshop in Salem, where they have a mostly quiet life among the other supernatural folks of the area, until they're suddenly attacked and have to fight for their families, friends, and home. I loved the Artemis of this book, who likes Beyonce and Taylor Swift, and the characters are nicely developed and individual. There's banter and quips and good fighting scenes, and teamwork and community coming together in the best ways possible. I'm delighted to recommend it to my readers!
Penric and the Bandit by Lois McMaster Bujold. 4/5
Pen and his demon Desdemona are on a hunt for an abandoned temple and its treasures (manuscripts) when they fall into the company of a bandit on the run from his own gang. Taking Pen for a fool, said bandit makes plans to fleece him after "helping" him with this treasure he keeps hearing about. In the end, Pen's gentle treatment of the man and Des's less gentle treatment of those after him enable the bandit to change his life for the better. I wouldn't call this a standout in the series, but it's pleasant enough read. Readers will need a little familiarity with the previous entries in the series to get the full effect.
Stone and Sky by Ben Aaronovitch. 4/5
Stone and Sky is the newest Rivers of London novel, in which Peter Grant and co. (the whole co., aside from Molly, it seems) are in Scotland for holiday and some field work when they're dragged into some very nefarious goings-on among the supernatural and magic practitioners of Aberdeen and the North Sea. The plot ties nicely into the horrible effects of deep-sea drilling for oil, and Bev gets a chance in the spotlight as an action hero. Chapters narrated by Abigail enliven those narrated by Peter, which are a bit plodding at times and could use some tightening up. Readers will need to know a lot about what's gone before in this series if they're to make sense of this episode, but it's certain to please fans.
Curandera by Irenosen Okojie. 1/5
While this novel is full of lush imagery and, as one other review says, inventive language, the continuous stream of adjectives swiftly becomes dull, in the way that making everything special makes it certain that nothing is special. The characters aren't so much characters as they are enactors of ritual, ambiguity, chaos, and power; there's nothing interesting about them because they have no depth or particularly human qualities. And that's fine--it's clearly deliberate--but it also adds to the book coming across like a poorly pitched religious tract than a novel.
Toni at Random by Dana A. Williams. 5/5
This is a superb, powerful, and compelling book about Toni Morrison's work as an editor of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and the un-classifiable at Random House. (It's the book The World She Edited by Amy Reading could have been.) Williams, using Morrison's archives, digs into the how and why of Morrison asked authors for the changes she did, how she analyzed manuscripts, how she brought her expertise into editing groundbreaking works including Angela Davis's autobiography, poetry and fiction by Lucille Clifton, how much care and meaning she took with the layouts of the books she edited, her approaches to marketing and publicity, her deftness with contracts and working with authors who presented challenges, like Gayl Jones and Mohammad Ali and his various ghostwriters. Anyone interested in publishing and the creation of books should read this, and I'd add it to any syllabus for students wanting to become editors. It's also a pleasure to read in its own right--Williams is a master of biography and every word, excerpt, and detail is carefully chosen and placed and given context. It's a masterpiece.
Seed Beetle by Mahaila Smith. 5/5
Excellent, original, dazzling poetry that tells a story of despair, coercion, and ultimately hope. Utopic Robotics offers a poor community in an environmentally-destroyed place the opportunity for jobs, revitalization, and healing of the land, but it comes, of course, with steep and unexpected prices. The fragmentary nature of many of the poems is perfect for the fleeting thoughts and time of the characters and narrators, and the result is a work I'd love to see taught everywhere. Perfect for book groups and classes, as well as any and all readers interested in climate change, poetry, and narrative.
Isaac Bashevis Singer: Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt by Isaac Bashevis Singer. 5/5
I was really happy to get approved to review this, because I find Singer's work interesting and important, but the formatting of the Kindle edition I received was so badly mangled--sentences that cut off, never to complete, sentences that started in the middle, with no indication of where they began, odd capitalization and font and spacing changes everywhere--I was unable to read most of it. What I did dig through is superb and timely and will undoubtedly be the subject of many conversations and debates, so 5 stars for the content, and 0 for the mess that is the eARC..
Ecstasy by Ivy Pochoda. 5/5
Although the blurb makes this sounds like a bad reality-TV show, it's actually a great retelling of The Bacchae. An unpleasant spoiled son, now a real estate developer, takes his mother and one of her oldest friends on vacation to his newest project. But the land there isn't his, and local forces make that very clear while drawing in the older women to celebrate their own power There is tragedy, yes, but also great liberation, and the novel provokes excellent questions about gender and age and what it means to defy patriarchy and oligarchy. A must-read.
The Sea Gives Up the Dead by Molly Olguín. 3/5
I found this collection of wonder tales a bit hit and miss. While some stories--like the titular one--are excellent, short glimpses of wonder and unexpected turns, others were a chore to read. The collection doesn't really get off the ground until several stories in; once it does, there's lush and evocative writing to be savored, but the first third or so is dry and sometimes plain dull. I wonder if a different reading order might change the overall feel of the book, or if other stories might have replaced the ones that feel like warm-ups.
Sick Houses by Leila Taylor. 5/5
I really enjoyed this smart and well-argued book about the roles of houses and homes in horror literature and screen media. Taylor writes clearly and elegantly about the ways in which living spaces represent the body and mind, the state of the world in which characters and readers live, and how readers and viewers might theorize unsafe spaces as part of their understanding of the zeitgeist. She uses up-to-date examples and explores a variety of subgenres and different approaches from creative artists to support her ideas, and writes in such a way that readers don't need to be academics or grounded in any particular kind of language in order to follow her thoughts. I know folks in gothic studies are already looking forward to the release of Sick Houses, and I'm sure it will find a wide audience among general readers as well.
The CIA Book Club by Charlie English. 1/5
I struggled to get past the ableism and fatphobia, but it was really the terrible, scattershot organization of the book that made me give it a single star. The topic is timely and the stories are important to tell, but the book reads like a first draft of a student thesis, lacking coherence and a sense of narrative or linearity as well as lacking context.
Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen. 5/5
Bad Bad Girl is a biography, a memoir, a fantasy, and an extraordinary piece of work. Jen chronicles her mother's story, a journey from China to America, from an ambitious young scholar to a depressed parent struggling to deal with the family she left behind and the obligations of following Chinese customs and mindsets even while trying to assimilate in the US. Jen writes about her father as well, a violent man whose behavior worsened the more he felt he was losing control of his family. And of course she writes about how her upbringing--and that of her siblings--created rifts and disparities between them that can never be rectified. The writing is immediate and honest and compelling, and offers opportunities for thinking about parent-child relationships and how parents value (or don't value) their children, and the complexities of how adults might still love parents who were abusive to them. This will be a top choice for book groups when it comes out, and for excellent reasons.
A Different Kind of Tension by Jonathan Lethem. 2/5
While I've liked some of Lethem's work in the past, there wasn't much in this collection that I enjoyed. Some of the stories are interesting from a lit studies perspective, but they too often felt like exercises without significant thought behind them.
Dinner with King Tut by Sam Kean. 1/5
The topics and information in this book are interesting and thought-provoking, but it's all utterly ruined for me by the author's repeated ableist, ageist, sexist, condescending, and otherwise problematic writing. "Voluptuous" doesn't equal "matron." We don't use the word "crippled" any more. The whole project reeks of white privilege that is occasionally acknowledged, but always with a laugh, as if it's not meaningful. And experimental or experiential archaeology is nothing new, as Kean claims it to be; several of his claims are examples of misinformation--the book really needs a SME to go through it with a fine-tooth comb. Fortunately, there are other writers engaging with science in a narrative style that don't engage in any of these things. Let me recommend them to my readers instead: Sarah Parcak, Christina Souyoudzoglou-Haywood, Aidan O'Sullivan, Katherine Crighton, Heather Pringle, and dozens of others.
Rare by Patrick de Moss. 1/5
Rare needs a big edit. A big edit. For clarity, coherence, and style. The premise is interesting--a young woman gets a non-existent (in our world) record, denoting Things Happening in the Unseen world--that of magic, the unnatural, and the supernatural--and she's pushed out the door and told to run by the psychic living in her apartment building. The young woman, it turns out, isn't much of a character, but there are dozens of others who propel, drag, and shuffle the story along to its blessed conclusion. There's just too much packed in here--too many cosmologies, too many undeveloped characters (many of who seem lifted right out of other fantasy books), too many unexplained subplots and sideplots and backgrounds and places and objects. It's a mess, but with some really good editing could be a lot better. Oh, and FYI to the author and editors, we don't use the word "crippled" anymore. It's ableist.
The Rarest Fruit by Gaëlle Bélem. 3/5
Told in a highly florid, baroque style, The Rarest Fruit is a creative non-fiction/fantasy based on the life of Edmond Albius, a Creold man who figured out how to pollinate vanilla, setting off a craze for the spice around the world. I read this in English, and there are times when the translation feels awkward and not-quite-right, but I haven't gotten a French copy to compare. At the beginning of the book through about the middle, it's odd enough to distract from the overall experience, but then it smooths out in the second half. Apart from that, it's a feast for readers who like lots of description and historical novels/fanfic.
Ten Incarnations of Rebellion by Vaishnavi Patel. 5/5
This fabulous and gritty novel about a world in which the British stayed in power in India until the 1960s is a brilliant examination of colonization, creating a resistance movement, and the costs that go along with doing so. Kalki's father is hauled away by the Brits for "treason"--agitating against the British rule in India, and as she grows up, Kalki herself is gently groomed and follows her own path to becoming the leader of the Kingston (Bombay/Mumbai) guerilla cell against them. Hers is a harrowing life, albeit studded with moments of joy and triumph, and Patel doesn't hold back on the dangers and consequences of Kalki's actions or those of her comrades. There are a few unexpected twists, and a few spots and ideas that could have sued some fleshing out, but overall, this is a book I want to give to everyone to read.
The Bachelorette Party by Camilla Sten. 2/5
Camilla Sten is an excellent writer of thrillers--I really liked her previous two--but this one kind of misses the boat. You'll get the joke if you read it. Four young women vacationing on a island are killed, or at least presumed murdered. Later, a woman who needs a big story to revitalize her true crime podcast joins her friends for a vacation on the same island. Bad things ensue. The people who do the bad things are kind of obvious. And I'll just add that if you didn't know it already, domestic/intimate partner violence kills more pregnant and post-pregnant women each year than any other cause. Nearly 20% of women experience violence during pregnancy. Partners being controlling is a massive red flag for D/IP violence. This is your PSA for this book, which I just can't really recommend.
Ghosts Behind Glass by Dolly Jørgensen. 5/5
I thoroughly enjoyed this brilliant book about how the world interacts with the extinct and the potentially extinct. Jørgensen does a wonderful job of explaining extinction to a wide audience, and I was fascinated by the various ways in which she approached the topic from multiple angles. If you've ever wandered through a natural history museum or viewed a cabinet of curiosities and wondered why the curators chose to pose those animals that way, or to put animals and plants from different time periods or places together, or thought about whether de-extincting is really possibly, or pondered on the fate of the thylacine, passenger pigeon, dodo, quagga, and other species killed off by humans and/or human intervention, this book will be a treat. I will offer guidance that some of the images of wet preserved and taxidermied specimens might be a little disturbing. The thylacine pup made me cry.
The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris by Evie Woods. 1/5
Wow, this was terrible. A whiny woman in her late 20s moves to France and doesn't bother to do any homework before she gets there, including learn much French or figure out exactly where she's going. The characters are total caricatures. There's a boring guy who is also the villain (for a while), a lot of horribly stereotyped French people, and a ghost. The author insists on writing out what she thinks is a French accent, so all zose characterz 'ave dialogue like diz. The boring guy wrestles with his conscience, the whiny woman stops whining a little bit, and there's a tidy end with everyone being happy. I think the author has either read Emma or watched Amelie too many times and tried to shoehorn her own unlikable character into the mold. You can absolutely give this one a miss.
Holler by Denali Sai Nalamalapu. 5/5
This is a lovely and excellent work of art that chronicles the activism of everyday folks in Appalachia protesting the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which ruined land, polluter the water, and caused massive ecological damage during the time developers were trying to put it into place. The author explains her path to climate justice and activism, and those of the people she interviewed for this project, who range from a single mom to a woman who chains herself to her car in protest. These aren't necessarily the acts and activists we hear about in the media--in fact, I think the media has mostly given up covering climate and environmental activism, alas--and their acts of rebellion and protest are heartening and inspirational. It's a great book for almost any audience.
Perspective(s) by Laurent Binet. 2/5
I can't say I enjoyed this much. In this epistolary novel, Binet does a good job of walking the fine line of using early modern language without making it seem overwrought to today's readers, but the form resulted here in a very slow pace and the characters all had the same voice. The conceit of using the epistolary form to introduce multiple viewpoints is good, but because of the sameness and slowness, it didn't deliver. In addition, the "famous person solves mysteries" genre didn't work for me in this case--it never seemed particularly believable.
The Magpie at Night by Li Qingzhao. 5/5
Astonishingly beautiful poetry to be savored and re-read multiple times. I appreciated the excellent introduction, but wish that the endnotes were footnotes so that they were immediately accessible for reading with the poems. I'll be teaching from this volume the next time I teach nature poetry.
Where There Be Monsters by Alby C. Williams. 4/5
Where There Be Monsters is a sweet, lovely adventure for young readers in the magic + boarding school + evil government administrators mold that centers Black and Brown characters, has a neurodivergent main character, and includes a nonbinary character. Glory lives on the Seam, a world where magic is abundant and where people settled after fleeing Earth. There, her mother publishes the Brown Book, an analogue to Earth's Green Book, which helps travelers across the local planetary system navigate its places safely. When a boy pops up near Glory's home, an inn, and is being chased by monsters, Glory's desire to help sends them on a trip through multiple worlds, where they uncover corruption and avarice before making important magical discoveries and setting things right. At times, it maps a bit too closely on other books in this genre, like Harry Potter, and makes me wonder if it began as fan fic, but even so, it's a fun read.
The Orb of Cairado by Katherine Addison. 5/5
This is an utterly beguiling, enchanting, wonderful novella set in a fantastic and intriguing world. A young scholar, unjustly expelled from his profession, comes into possession of a culturally valuable artifact, and goes on a journey into the deep literal and historical underground of his homeland. The story floats along like a dream, never rushing, never dragging, and is full of rich imagery and detail. In many ways, it reminds me of Kij Johnson's The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe, another novella about a journey that is immersive and phantasmagorical. The world-building is a masterclass in how to do it—readers observe Addison's choices in titles, place-names, customs, and languages, allowing them to become slowly immersed in the world. This is a jewel.
The Graceview Patient by Caitlin Starling. 5/5
A magnificent examination of chronic illness, medical knowledge, testing, and ethics, and unreliable narration. I'd teach this in literature classes. Meg, a disabled woman, agrees to take part in a medical trial, entering a hospital for several weeks. But the trial isn't what it seemed to be, the staff is sketchy, the other patients are dead or dying, and Meg begins to experience hallucinations that drive her to find answers about what she's been exposed to and why. This is visceral, wrenching horror (CW: body and medical horror) that brings both revulsion and tears to the reader. Starling's depiction of Meg's social circle dwindling because of her illness and her explanations of the social model of disability are spot-on. Highly recommended, even if horror isn't your usual genre. This is criplit at its best.
Propaganda Girls by Lisa Rogak. 5/5
An excellent, well-documented book about the work of four women in WWII, Propaganda Girls is full of detail about how propaganda works and worked in various projects, ranging from operations to bring down German morale to convincing Japanese fighters that it was honorable to surrender. Rogak confronts the sexism and other bigotries of the day head-on in chronicling the women's careers, aspirations, and challenges, explaining why they were qualified for what they did and how they did their jobs. Lively and written in a conversational style, this is sure to please a wide range of readers.
Punished by Ann-Helén Laestadius. 5/5
An outstanding companion to Laestadius's Stolen, this novel focuses on the older generation of the earlier book, offering a compelling look at state schools, the oppression of the Sami people, and how forced cultural changes are a kind of violence. Laestadius's writing is clear and forthright and a pleasure to read, and her characters have considerable depth and inner workings that readers find revealed a little at a time. A great book for this moment in history, and one to be shared and discussed at length.
Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola. 5/5
This is a terrific poetic romp through 1990s Tennessee and the Helen of Troy who lives there. Recollect the heyday of the period as Helen and the town "swams" tell the tale of beautiful Helen and her husband, the "big cheese;" of her affair with a man from the North; and her everyday life. This is a great companion to H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, complete with a Helen who ranges from being sardonic or ironic to weeping vulnerably on the reader's shoulder. It's fun and well-planned and will work well even if you don't know much about Greek mythology. Book groups will gobble it up.
The Watermark by Sam Mills. 2/5
In The Watermark, people visiting a famous recluse of an author find that he's invented a way to suck out people's imaginations and put them in his books. Two young people are trapped and must work through various novels—a Dickens pastiche, a Russian epic, and others—in order to escape from him. In doing so, Mills gets to write 4—or is it 5—different novels in one, all focusing on the various ways a relationship can develop. It reads as if Tolstoy wrote The Eyre Affair, which is to say, the concept is not novel and while some scenes and plot elements were interesting, much of it nearly put me to sleep. It'll probably win all sorts of awards for being creative and boggling people's minds, but I wasn't impressed.
Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell. 2/5
I really liked Wiswell's debut novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, but his new book lacks the cleverness, wit, and charm of the first, which had excellent plot twists and moved at a good clip. Wearing the Lion seeks to rehabilitate Heracles from the murders of his family, and while I'm all for a good rehabilitating-the-gods tale (I've written one myself), WIswell's approach here doesn't work. Determined to clear Heracles of all wrongdoing or all kinds, Wiswell makes the demi-god a simple, earnest fellow, who is manipulated by the gods he reveres and makes friends with the creatures he's sent to kill. Wiswell tries to rehab Hera as well, making her attacks against Heracles, particularly the one in which she drives him to madness and he kills his family, all a terrible misunderstanding. Throughout, the tone is uneven, with the Erymanthian Boar depicted as a traumatized man and the hydra, who is written as kind of a borscht-belt comedian, as suffering from migraines in all of its heads. Heracles does him a favor when he gets rid of all those extra heads: "here, take my head, take two, why doncha?" The luminous Ceryneian Hind is a brief instance of beauty and magic in the novel. The characters are mostly regrettably flat—Athena is about as deep as onion skin—and awfully repetitive. I get that Hera's perpetual epithet for Zeus is "my dipshit husband," but it grows old quickly, as does Heracles's "Dear Auntie Hera" prayers. The pacing is slow and the repetition doesn't help, and the novel drags towards a dull finish.
Sonnets for a Missing Key by Percival Everett. 4/5
The poetry is excellent and original., albeit sometimes repetitive in ways I'm not certain are deliberate The layout is a disaster, moving accidental signs (sharps and flats) away from their key names, ruining the musical significance.
Here Beside the Rising Tide by Emily Jane. 1/5
It's very rare for me to select a Netgalley title that I then find so dull that I'm tempted not to finish it. This is one of those. I did finish it, though, and can report that it has all of the excitement and sophistication of Dick and Jane books, and while the premise sounds solid, the writing plods. And plods. And plods.
Direct Descendant by Tanya Huff. 5/5
This is a great romp in a small town, where magic and contracts with supernatural forces maintain the status quo. It's got excellent characters including two adorable and fierce protagonists, terrific dialogue, and perfect pacing. It's a standalone, and I liked it so much I'm going to go read more of the author's work, and lucky for there is a TON of it.