Title: Ship of Souls
Author: Zetta Elliott
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Format: ARC
Year: 2012
Pages: 124
Genre: Fantasy, YA
  Subgenre: Urban Fantasy
Full Disclosure: I received this free through the Amazon Vine program.

Jacket Description
Set in New York City, Ship of Souls features a cast of three African-American teens: D, a math whiz; Hakeem, a Muslim basketball star; and Nyla, a beautiful military brat. When D's mother dies of breast cancer, he is taken in by Mrs. Martin, an elderly white woman. Grateful to have a home, D strives to please his foster mother and succeeds -- until Mercy arrives. Unable to compete with a needy, crack-addicted baby, D disappears into the nearby park and immerses himself in bird watching. At school, he unexpectedly makes friends with Nyla and Hakeem, but just when D thinks he has finally found a way to belong, an unexpected discovery in the park changes everything.

A mysterious bird leads D and his friends on a perilous journey that will take them from Brooklyn to the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan, and into the very realm of the dead. Their courage and loyalty are tested every step of the way, but in the end, it is D who must find the strength to fulfill his destiny. Steeped in history and suspense, this inspiring urban fantasy provides an enriching experience that readers will find hard to forget.

My Review
This was a well-intentioned novel with a decently evocative sense of place that I found unfortunately too heavy-handed to be enjoyable to read.

The three main characters are the sort I wish there were more of in fantasy -- non-white characters who are centered in the narrative and who are clearly shaped by their race but not entirely defined by it. Unfortunately, they are never given the room to come to life. We are given the information encapsulated in the jacket description, and one or two offhand statements that begin the process of humanizing those descriptions (D giving up on dreams of college because his foster mother is unlikely to pay for it; Hakeem trying to figure out how to integrate his faith into his day-to-day life; Nyla's alternately manipulative and supportive relationship with her stepmother), but then the entire rest of the novel is spent developing one of the clunkiest love triangles I have ever had the displeasure of reading.

The setting was similarly disappointing -- there was just enough that piqued my interest for me to know that Elliott had a potentially fascinating world built up in her head, but somehow it never quite translated to the page.

But the element I found most cringe-worthy, that made the book nearly unreadable to me even at 124 pages, was the plot itself -- the magical bird with a glorious mission only D can complete. That was handled with all the grace of a Saturday morning superhero cartoon. Here is a representative sample of the bird's dialogue:

"It's a long story, and I don't have the strength to tell it all tonight. I can, however, share some of my history."
"You have endured much for one so young."
"You should rest now. You'll need your strength for the task we must undertake."
"When it is time, all will be revealed."

Just absolutely the worst sort of not at all informative, vaguely mystical claptrap that always seems to come out of the mouths of poorly realized magical mentors in programs aimed at five year olds. The dialogue was so trite, in fact, that I was kind of hoping that the bird would turn out to be evil, manipulating the vulnerable, newly orphaned and unsure D with the things little kids want to hear. But, unfortunately, the bird was played entirely straight.

The second half of the book was a series of action sequences that, while not tremendously thrilling, were always clear about who was doing what and why. But overall, this felt like a novel that would have been stronger with significantly more space for the non-fantastical aspects of character and world-building, and needed an entire rewrite of the fantasy plot to remove the cliched dynamics and dialogue.

My Rating
Overall Satisfaction: ★★
  Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★
  Emotional Satisfaction: ★★
Read this for: The themes
Don't read this for: The plot, the prose
Bechdel Test: Fail
Johnson Test: Pass
Books I was reminded of: The Hallowed Hunt, by Lois McMaster Bujold

Title: Point of Hopes
  Series: Astreiant #1
Authors: Melissa Scott & Lisa Barnett
Publisher: Tor
Format: Hardcover
Year: 1995
Pages: 384
Genre: Fantasy
  Subgenre: Fantasy Mystery, High Fantasy, Urban Fantasy
Full Disclosure: Nothing to report.

Jacket Description
Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett's previous fantasy collaboration, The Armor of Light, is a cult classic. Now they return with Point of Hopes, a rich, exciting story with colorful, charming characters. In the convincing and wonderful fantasy world Scott and Barnett have created, astrologers and necromancers are the pundits and power brokers of the Kingdom and the police are known as pointsmen.

The royal city of Astreiant, the capital of the Kingdom of Chenedolle, is bracing itself for the influx of people, money, and trouble that invariably accompanies the Midsummer Fair. For Nicolas Rather, the wiry, street-smart pointsman with a strong sense of justice, the fair means more work: keeping the peace, preventing the pickpockets from getting too bold, and tracking down runaway youths and apprentices. But this year the number of missing children is far larger than usual; someone has been stealing them away without a trace and the populace is getting angry. At least the children are alive, Rathe knows, even though it adds to the mystery; the necromancers have not noticed any new ghosts of children.

To complicate matters, the citizens have another good reason to be anxious: theirs is a world ruled by the stars, and the heavens are now in a transition that heralds an upheaval in the Kingdom and possibly even the death of the reigning Queen. Contenders for the throne are jockeying for position, each claiming that her stars are the luckiest and most suited for the position.

Rathe suspects that the astrological portents and the missing children are linked, but has no idea how. With the unlikely help of Philip Eslingen, a handsome, out-of-work soldier, Rathe must find the children and stop whatever dark plans are being hatched before the city explodes into chaos.

My Review
This novel is incredibly satisfying, despite being fairly uneven technically. The characters are charismatic; the mystery, though fairly simple, maintains an excellent sense of tension due to the stakes; and the world is fascinating, lovingly detailed, and fairly unique among fantasy worlds. I stayed up all night to finish this, and immediately wanted to read the next in the series. (Sadly, neither of the two other Astreiant books are available in any of the library systems I have access to.)

It's actually a little surprising to me, how much I enjoyed this book, because there were several elements of its execution that normally irritate me. Scott & Barnett had inconsistent control over POV -- most of the book is told from a tight third-person viewpoint centered on either Rathe or Philip, but every once in a while they slipped into a third-person omniscient, or switched POV from Rathe to Philip mid-section. Now this isn't uncommon, particularly in fantasy from the 80s/90s, but it always bothers me. The prologue, which let the book pass the Bechdel test on the very first page, was in the POV of characters that did not appear again until a couple hundred pages in, which again isn't really uncommon in high fantasy novels, but again, usually gets under my skin.

And oh, the info-dumping! There are a LOT of passages that are just the characters thinking about how their world works, how peoples' stars affect their chances in life, what the various political factions think of each other, all things that people don't actually think to themselves in real life but which they do in fantasy novels because the authors have put in a lot of work into building their worlds and want the reader to see it. Normally this is a cardinal sin to me; I would much rather just be thrown into the world and forced to figure out what's going on for myself. But here I was willing to forgive it, because the world was legitimately fascinating. The entire social order is built around astrology, so everyone knows the time of their birth down to the hour or better, and their stars determine what careers will suit them, and they go to astrologers often to get readings for what their near-future might hold. There are masculine stars, which encourage people to wander, and feminine stars, which encourage people to settle, so for the most part women hold political power by virtue of being landowners while the militaries and trading companies are dominated by men, but plenty of men have feminine stars and plenty of women have masculine stars. Stars also determine when it's propitious to marry or have children, so same-sex relationships are common and same-sex partners can have legal standing entirely separate from marriage, which is (I think) heterosexual and focused exclusively on property.

This is what perplexed me most about Scott & Barnett. On the one hand, as I said, there were quite a few heavy-handed info-dumps about astrology and politics, and I was fine with them because they were interesting, but I still noticed them. But the world-building around gender and sexuality was just as interesting and different from the norm as the political and magical systems, and Scott & Barnett conveyed that information in my preferred fashion -- the characters simply used the terminology as was appropriate, and I was left to infer what it all meant on my own. I don't know if one author handled the politics/astrology and the other handled the gender/sexuality, and that was the cause of the difference, or if they left the gender/sexuality world-building mostly oblique so that it could fly under the radar of more conservative fantasy readers; but either way, though I did not mind the info-dumping, I wish the astrology/politics world-building had been handled as subtly as the gender/sexuality world-building was.

It was, of course, for the gender & sexuality world-building the I picked up the book -- I'm always looking for SFF that has alternate gender roles and more expansive ideas of sexuality than is typical. On the sexuality front this book satisfied completely; as I said, queer sexualities are incredibly common and entirely unremarkable in this world, and that is delightful. On the gender front my reaction was a bit more complicated. On the one hand, it's world where political power is mostly concentrated in female hands -- Chenedolle is ruled by a Queen, all the prospective heirs are female, most property owners are female, and property passes down to daughters. And this is one of the rare books that I placed on my GoodReads "A Passel of Women" shelf -- there are women everywhere in this world, as pointsmen (police officers), pickpockets, tavern keepers, and shady financiers. The preferred gender-neutral sentence construction is "she or he" instead of "he or she." The book passed the Bechdel Test despite having male leads.

But. There was a pattern that I noticed about halfway through the novel, and it's one that I do not like. Despite all the women in the book, somehow, the characters that actually moved the plot were all male. The two leads, of course; but also the butcher that reported the missing apprentice that got the action started; the drunk journeyman that was the main instigator in Philip's changes of fortune; the necromancer that helped Rathe put the pieces of the mystery together; the traders who provided a crucial piece of evidence; the shady businessman who was more involved than he knew.Now, it's possible that this was a deliberate choice by Scott & Barnett. After all, if feminine stars are about stability and masculine stars about change, then it is vaguely in keeping with the focus on astrology for the men to be astrologically more inclined to be the movers and shakers of plot. But really, I'm pretty sure that's a terrible bit of fanwanking on my part; I strongly suspect that despite women having equal or greater power in the world, the men have greater power in the plot because that's how insidious sexism is.

Still, despite all those little critiques, this book was simply fun. I did see where the mystery was headed in advance, but that didn't detract from the tension through the middle of the book because though I knew what was going on I did not know that everything would end well. The climax felt a little rushed, mostly because it wasn't until the climax that I was actually convinced that the astrology-based magic actually had power in the world rather than being superstition, but it was still emotionally satisfying. And despite my reservations about the narrative's gender equality, the world itself is exactly the sort of place I like to spend time, the sort of place I wish was more common in SFF -- one not enslaved to our too-narrow ideas of gender and sexuality, and with swashbuckling heroes and magic to boot. All in all I am very happy I read this, and will be seeking out more of the authors' work as soon as I can.

My Rating
Overall Satisfaction: ★★★★
  Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★★1/2
  Emotional Satisfaction: ★★★★1/2
Read this for: The world-building
Don't read this for: The prose
Bechdel Test: Pass
Johnson Test: Fail*
Books I was reminded of: The Bone Palace, by Amanda Downum; The Ladies of Mandrigyn, by Barbara Hambly; Swordspoint, by Ellen Kushner.
Will I read more by this author? Yes.



*Brit Mandelo and Jo Walton both seem to think that the Chenedolleiste are brown-skinned, and that therefore most of the characters would count as characters of color; I am not convinced. It's true, they aren't the blonde-haired blue-eyed northerners, like Philip; but they aren't the dark-skinned, coarse-haired southerners either, and given that the world bears the most resemblance to Renaissance Italy, I think they read as simply Mediterranean "brown" and therefore white.

Title: The Best of All Possible Worlds
Author: Karen Lord
Publisher: Del Rey
Format: Ebook
Year: 2013
Pages: 233
Genre: Science Fiction
  Subgenre: SF Romance, Soft SF
Full Disclosure: I received this ebook free through NetGalley.

Jacket Description
Karen Lord’s debut novel, the multiple-award-winning Redemption in Indigo, announced the appearance of a major new talent—a strong, brilliantly innovative voice fusing Caribbean storytelling traditions and speculative fiction with subversive wit and incisive intellect. Compared by critics to such heavyweights as Nalo Hopkinson, China Miéville, and Ursula K. Le Guin, Lord does indeed belong in such select company—yet, like them, she boldly blazes her own trail.

Now Lord returns with a second novel that exceeds the promise of her first. The Best of All Possible Worlds is a stunning science fiction epic that is also a beautifully wrought, deeply moving love story.

A proud and reserved alien society finds its homeland destroyed in an unprovoked act of aggression, and the survivors have no choice but to reach out to the indigenous humanoids of their adopted world, to whom they are distantly related. They wish to preserve their cherished way of life but come to discover that in order to preserve their culture, they may have to change it forever.

Now a man and a woman from these two clashing societies must work together to save this vanishing race—and end up uncovering ancient mysteries with far-reaching ramifications. As their mission hangs in the balance, this unlikely team—one cool and cerebral, the other fiery and impulsive—just may find in each other their own destinies . . . and a force that transcends all.

My Review
This novel is simultaneously deeply subversive and disappointingly conventional.

It obviously owes its premise and much of the feel of its world to Star Trek. It's set in a universe where the speed of light is no barrier, where there are quite a few practically-human species capable of star flight, whose planets interact the way countries here on Earth do (meaning there's immigration to and from, they form alliances and declare war, and there's trade) and all of them can interbreed. The Sadiri, the victims of the genocide, are definitely Vulcan-like; though they have not rejected emotion in favor of logic, they have epitomized restraint and morality to the rest of the galaxy, and they attribute their superiority in those fields to the way they have developed their telepathy through meditation and mental exercises.

Interestingly, though not particularly relevant to the story, this is a galaxy without Earth and humans-as-such; Earth is apparently under an interdiction, and the rest of the humanoid species have no contact with it other than the occasional snapping-up of doomed groups to be brought into the galactic fold for their useful genetic diversity.

The first sign that this is much more than just Star Trek-influenced cross-cultural-contact SF is the information, right off the bat at the start of chapter two, that Cygnians and Sadiri (who make up nearly the entirety of the cast of characters) possess "eyes, hair, and skin all somewhere on the spectrum of brown." There is one character, late in the book, that I would identify as white; he's so minor that I've forgotten his name, and what role he played.

The second sign is the nature of Cygnus Beta, the planet almost all of the action takes place on, and the home world of the protagonist. It is a planet of refugees, one of which the protagonist says "There isn't a group on Cygnus Beta who can't trace their family back to some world-shattering event. Landless, kinless, unwanted. . ." It is a poor planet, and one that the rest of the galaxy views as superstitious and backward. But it is not the violent, gang-ridden techno-poverty of the sort that is so often fetishized in cyberpunk, and it's not the picturesquely feudal and martial poverty of, for example, Lois McMaster Bujold's Barrayar; it's just the poverty of being a people whom circumstance and hostile action have rendered relatively resourceless.

The third sign is the breezy, confiding tone of Grace's narration. Lord's first novel, Redemption in Indigo, took that same tone; there, it was the obvious choice, a folktale fantasy narrated as it would be around a fire on a winter's night. But that tone, when transposed to a distinctly science fictional setting, becomes in itself somewhat revolutionary. Much of science fiction, particularly science fiction with pretensions at seriousness, adopts an objective tone, a distant faux-historical viewpoint that is meant to give it gravitas. That tone often hides as much as it highlights, encouraging the reader to look away from all the things that are missing (brown people, poor people, oppressed people). Grace's voice, warm and occasionally exasperated and always distinctly personal, makes this book feel real, aliens and telepaths notwithstanding.

That level of personal-ness is ultimately what I found so exciting about this novel. It is 100% science fiction, and the sort of science fiction I always find more satisfying, where the world is messy -- multiple types of telepaths, lots of different cultures and subcultures, the sense that the characters in the novel all have existences extending far into the past and the future, rather than existing purely for the sake of the plot. But it is also incredibly domestic -- ultimately, what the Sadiri need is to find a whole bunch of brides, because in the aftermath of the almost-genocide they were left with an incredibly male-skewed gender balance, and so the plot of the novel is taken up with a quest through Cygnus Beta looking for communities that have higher percentages of Sadiri bloodlines, so that the remaining Sadiri males can look for mates.

And that is where the novel becomes unfortunately conventional. Lord makes a point of how progressive Cygnus Beta is: there is a character of whom Grace says "Lian has chosen to live without reference to gender. This may or may not mean that Lian is asexual, though many of those who are registered as gender-neutral are indeed so. However, it doesn’t matter, because this has no bearing on our mission and is thus none of our business”; various comments indicate that bi/pansexuality is the norm; Grace jokes with her mother that the woman her mother is trying to seduce away from her husband actually wants Grace's mother to join in a triadic polyamorous relationship with the both of them. But there is absolutely none of that diversity of sexual and gender identity represented in the Sadiri and their plight: the Sadiri survivors are (almost) all men, and they are all going to be forced to enter into heterosexual monogamous relationships that are expected to be reproductively fruitful. And no one blinks an eye at that. It is a strange bit of cognitive dissonance, that Grace is so fully enmeshed in a non-heteronormative, non-monogamous society and yet is falling in love with a man from a society so much more rigid without even once questioning how willing his people are to abridge their right to self-determination.

(It is particularly galling, given that this is a science fictional setting, that Lord never addresses any potential technological fixes to the problem of a small, male-dominated survival group: no mention of genetic engineering, cloning, uterine replicators, anything beyond "get boy and girl to have sex, make babies".)

Still, aside from that conventional core, this novel is a delight. Grace's narration makes it a fast, enjoyable read. The quest plot takes the reader through quite a few very distinct subcultures on Cygnus Beta, the same way Isaac Asimov's Prelude to Foundation explores the various sectors of Trantor. There are several call-backs to Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, the Sadiri coming to Cygnus Beta intending to reshape it for their needs but ending up becoming rather more Cygnian than Sadiri in the process. There was also a significant reference to Jane Eyre, which seemed out of place. But most of all, I spent the novel thinking that Lord was doing much the same thing science fictionally as Lois McMaster Bujold was doing fantastically in her Sharing Knife quadrilogy -- they set up rigorous SFF worlds, and then they put those worlds at stake, positioned their cultures on the brink of extinction due to both external and internal forces; then they resolved the stories by having their characters settle down and make babies. This is, of course, an entirely fair resolution; if your culture is in danger of extinction, pretty much the only solution is to have children to carry it on. But it's a solution that sits oddly in the SFF canon.

A note on the cover: When I first saw this cover, my thoughts were pretty much "Hey! The person on the cover is non-white! Yay! But what's with the elephant?" I got to the end of the book and kind of wanted to *headdesk*. The elephant, surprisingly, was entirely relevant, was one of two symbols used heavily throughout (the other was a hummingbird, which made its way onto the British edition cover). But the woman on the cover, who I assume is Grace, has very definitely been white-washed.

My Rating
Overall Satisfaction: ★★★★1/2
  Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★★★1/2
  Emotional Satisfaction: ★★★★1/2
Read this for: The themes, the atmosphere
Don't read this for: The world-building
Bechdel Test: Pass
Johnson Test: Pass
Books I was reminded of: Embassytown, by China Mieville; Prelude to Foundation, by Isaac Asimov; The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury; Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga and Sharing Knife quadrilogy.
Will I read more by this author? Yes.

Title: Moscow But Dreaming
Author: Ekaterina Sedia
Publisher: Prime Books
Format: Ebook
Year: 2012
Pages: 288
Genre: Fantasy
   Subgenre: Fairytale Fantasy, Magical Realism, Urban Fantasy
Challenge Information: WWEnd's Women of Genre Fiction Challenge
Full Disclosure: I received this ebook free through NetGalley.

Jacket Description
The first short story collection by award-winning author Ekaterina Sedia! One of the more resonant voices to emerge in recent years, this Russian-born author explores the edge between the mundane and fantastical in tales inspired by her homeland as well as worldwide folkloric traditions. With foreword by World Fantasy Award-winner Jeffrey Ford, Moscow But Dreaming showcases singular and lyrical writing that will appeal to fans of slipstream and magical realism, as well as those interested in the uncanny and Russian history.

My Review
Despite containing several stories I loved, this collection was a disappointment to me. Sedia is clearly a talented writer, but too many of the stories either took risks that didn't pay off or remained completely opaque to me, even after turning to Google to see if I was missing references. I was also confused by the inclusion of two distinctly non-Russian stories; one is a retelling of a Japanese folktale, the other is a pseudo-African folktale, and both seemed completely out of place in the collection and lacked the depth of history and mythology that Sedia brought to her Russian-set stories. And while Sedia has been lauded as a feminist writer, concerned with the place of women in the world and the power dynamics between women and men, these stories more often than not positioned their female characters as victims. Not agent-less victims, I will grant, and victimized more often by the patriarchal machinery of society as a whole rather than individual men, but still victims. Several of the stories also positioned fatness as grotesque and malignant, and there were hints of cultural appropriation, ableism, and classism that made me uncomfortable.

Still, when Sedia was writing in what appears to be her comfort zone, magical realist and fairy tale influenced stories set either in modern-day Russia or among Russian immigrants elsewhere in the world, she was quite impressive. "Citizen Komorova Finds Love," "Tin Cans," and "You Dream" were all incredibly evocative, packing both significant thematic and emotional punches into not very many pages. None of these three are happy stories -- actually none of the stories in the entire collection is happy -- but they resonate the way short fiction ought, illuminating little corners of much larger worlds.

( Descriptions and reviews of the individual stories behind the cut.Collapse )

My Rating
Overall Satisfaction: ★★★
   Intellectual Satisfaction:  ★★★
   Emotional Satisfaction:  ★★★
Read this for: The atmosphere
Don't read this for: The themes
Bechdel Test: 3 out of 21 stories pass
Johnson Test: 3 out of 21 stories pass
Books I was reminded of: Catherynne M. Valente's The Orphan's Tales and Deathless; Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities; Shel Silverstine's The Giving Tree; Brandon Sanderson's Elantris.
Will I read more by this author? I'll give at least one of her novels a try.

Title: Grail
   Series: Jacob's Ladder #3
Author: Elizabeth Bear
Publisher: Bantam Spectra
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Year: 2011
Pages: 330
Genre: Science Fiction
   Subgenre: Generation Ship, Soft SF
Full Disclosure: Still an Elizabeth Bear fangirl. Plus I read this just about a year ago, and wrote this review from my notes.

Jacket Description
At last the generation ship Jacob's Ladder has arrived at its destination: the planet they have come to call Grail. But this habitable jewel just happens to be populated already: by humans who call their home Fortune. And they are wary of sharing Fortune -- especially with people who have genetically engineered themselves to such an extent that it is a matter of debate whether they are even human anymore. To make matters worse, a shocking murder aboard the Jacob's Ladder has alerted Captain Perceval and the Angel Nova that formidable enemies remain hidden somewhere among the crew.

On Grail -- or Fortune, rather -- Premier Danilaw views the approach of the Jacob's Ladder with dread. Behind the diplomatic niceties of first-contact protocol, he knows that the deadly game being played is likely to erupt into full-blown war -- even civil war. For as he strives to chart a peaceful and prosperous path forward for his people, internal threats emerge to take control by any means necessary.

My Review
Dust was an ambitious novel, drawing on a medley of influences ranging from medieval romantic ballads of chivalry to gothic horror novels to classic SF generation ships, all overlaid with a smattering of Judeo-Christian myths. Its sequel, Chill, was best read as a character study. Grail, the final novel in this trilogy, just might be my favorite. It is that rarest of all beasts: an anthropological and philosophical science fiction novel like few people have written in my lifetime.

I have to admit I do not remember the plot described on the back of the book. I remember that it was there -- I think it's mostly Benedick and Tristen investigating the murder, revisiting some of the places and people we met in Chill -- but this is absolutely not a tense murder mystery/thriller. I called this philosophical SF because it really is -- all the scenes that stand out in my memory are talky scenes, scenes between Perceval and the remaining Exalts, and between the political leaders on Fortune, and between Perceval and Danilaw, each speaking as representatives of their people. And all those conversations, ultimately, revolve around what makes people human, and what makes a good society. Because both the Jacob's Ladder and Fortune are the generations-later products of people attempting to build a utopia.

I won't spoil the details of either world; suffice it to say that we learn a lot more about what the people who set the Jacob's Ladder in motion were thinking, and we also discover that this series takes place in the same universe as Bear's stand-alone novel Carnival nd get to see how the universe reacted to the events of that book. What I loved about these two contrasting utopias is that Bear takes care to highlight both societies' strengths and weaknesses, the ways that their founders were still blinded by their own prejudices and the ways that they were ultimately successful despite that. And unlike in more didactic utopian SF novels, the characters are not simply products of their societies, not passive mouthpieces for the philosophies behind them; instead, they are all conscious actors, actively engaged with their society and doing their best to bend it into a shape more to their liking. I found it thrilling, on an intellectual level, to see how Bear managed pit the two societies at loggerheads at so many points without ever making either of them wrong.

And in many ways, they fundamentally do not work together, partly out of prejudice but partly because they have simply grown so far apart that it is hard for either group to consider the others fully human. It raises the stakes incredibly high, because the people of the Jacob's Ladder need to find a way to make a home on Fortune to survive at all, and with less than fifty pages until the end I could see no good resolution. So I understand why so many people, after reading this book, felt Bear used a deus ex machine. But, perhaps because I read it shortly after reading Laurie J. Marks' Water Logic, I am tempted to defend her choice. Water Logic is all about intuitive leaps, characters taking really disparate bits of information and, through some alchemy of genius, making something new and better out of them, so when the characters in Grail spent the entire novel talking about how they needed some leap like that I was primed to follow them. I will have to see, on rereading, what kind of hints Bear dropped; but I am pretty sure they will be there, unlike with Chill's resolution.

But even if they aren't, even if a reread convinces me that Bear did pull the ending out of thin air, I loved this book. For the talky bits, and for the complicated optimism at its core.

Rating
Overall Satisfaction: ★★★★★
   Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★★★★
   Emotional Satisfaction: ★★★★1/2
Read this for: The themes
Don't read this for: The plot
Bechdel Test: Pass
Johnson Test: Pass*
Books I was reminded of: The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin; Water Logic, by Laurie J. Marks
Will I read more by this author? Only everything she's written.



*I am not 100% sure of this one, because my notes didn't note it. I distinctly remember tracking which characters on Fortune were described as dark-skinned versus light-skinned, and then looking for conversations between only dark-skinned characters. It took a while! But I'm pretty sure there was eventually one short conversation that did not revolve around either the light-skinned Fortune characters or the characters on the Jacob's Ladder.**

**The characters on the Jacob's Ladder don't count because they're blue. Blue skin does not count as non-white because (a) There are no blue people on Earth, and (b) The reason their skin is blue is because it's translucent, so their dominant color is that of their unoxygenated, nanite-infected blood, and that is a call-back to the term "blueblood" here on earth, a class- and race-based way of delineating *good* white people with their pale, pale skin that you could see the veins through (because they're rich and not out in the fields) from *bad* white people & non-white people whose veins are hidden by melanin (because they're exposed to the sun and/or not white).

Title: Fat Girl in a Strange Land
   Series: Short Fiction Anthology
Editor: Kay T. Holt & Bart R. Leib
Publisher: Crossed Genres
Format: EBook
Year: 2012
Pages: 150
Genre: Science Fiction, Fantasy
   Subgenre: N/A
Challenge Information: N/A
Full Disclosure: I received this free through the Library Thing Early Reviewers Program.

Jacket Description

My Review
I found this collection extremely uneven. There were several stories I absolutely hated, which is unusual for me in short fiction: "The Tradeoff," "The Right Stuffed," "Nemesis," and "Sharks and Seals." But there were also several that I loved deeply, passionately, without reservation: "Cartography, and the Death of Shoes," "Flesh of My Flesh," "Davy," and "Lift." What surprised me even more was how my tastes broke down by genre: I found all but one of the fantasy stories good to great, and disliked or hated all but two of the science fiction stories. Also surprising (and a little disappointing to me) was that there wasn't a single story where the protagonist liked her body. Still, on the strength of those four stories that I loved I would recommend this collection, and I am grateful to Crossed Genres and the editors Kay T. Holt and Bart R. Leib for making it.


( Descriptions and reviews of each story behind the cut.Collapse )


My Rating
Overall Satisfaction: ★★★1/2
   Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★★
   Emotional Satisfaction: ★★★1/2

Title: Racing the Dark
   Series: The Spirit Binders #1
Author: Alaya Dawn Johnson
Publisher: Agate Bolden
Format: Trade Paperback
Year: 2008
Pages: 368
Genre: Fantasy
   Subgenre: Epic Fantasy, High Fantasy
Challenge Information: Fantasy Challenge 2012 category "Heroic Fantasy Novel"
Full Disclosure: I read and review this now in honor of Black History Month.

Jacket Description
Enter a land of volcanoes and earthquakes, plagues and typhoons, of island nations separated by water but bound by fear of the spirits they imprisoned to control their volatile environment. The first act in a grand dance of loyalty, love, sacrifice, and death is about to begin. This is an unforgettable coming-of-age story set in a world where wielding power requires understanding the true meaning of sacrifice.

My Review
I hate epic fantasy. I hate the Chosen One trope, I hate the perspective switching that's now de rigeur. I have a strong aversion for coming-of-age plots, and love-practically-at-first-sight, and absolutely anything having to do with Fate. This book has all of those things. So why did I read it?

I love high fantasy. You must understand that I define epic fantasy as only those fantasies where the plot involves the saving of the world, while high fantasy is simply any fantasy taking place in a secondary world. Obviously, the two sub genres overlap quite a bit. So while I try to avoid it, I do sometimes end up reading an epic fantasy novel, if the secondary world seems interesting enough.

This one was.

So much high fantasy takes place in a generic medieval Europe, particularly France and the British Isles; a small but visible minority takes place in vaguely Arabian or Chinese settings. I don't think I have ever encountered another fantasy novel that draws on Hawaii for its backdrop, as this one does. It's set in Hawaii only as much as Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series is set in France or Robin McKinley's Beauty is set in England -- which is to say, Johnson took the names and some elements of the geography and not much more -- but just that much difference was enough to pique my interest and put this on Mt. TBR.

Unfortunately, there is a danger attendant upon breaking that sort of new ground. A fantasy novel set in generic medieval Europe can draw on a wealth of world-building tropes that an average fantasy reader will expect and accept with no further explanation; a fantasy novel set in an unfamiliar setting has to be built from scratch, and the average fantasy reader (at least if the average fantasy reader is at all like me) is likely to interrogate the world-building a bit more closely.

So, for example, I loved exploring the world of Johnson's outer islands -- that world made sense given my knowledge of Hawaii and other parts of Polynesia. But when the story moved to the inner islands, which are temperate rather than tropical, the world started to feel. . . confused. I believe Johnson was trying to evoke Japan, but little European influences seemed to sneak their way in -- a character playing a lute, another character using nightshade and bitterwort in a potion. Of course, this IS high fantasy, and the whole world is made up, so using European-derived items isn't inherently WRONG. . . but when the world feels so different, I found it distracting to see something suddenly the same.

Still, while I became less enamored with the world as the novel went on, I was pleased with the level of technical prowess Johnson showed in this, her debut novel. The pacing was a bit uneven, but I never found the somewhat convoluted plot hard to follow. And while I always felt distanced from the individual characters and their mental/emotional states, I was very much invested in the survival of the world as a whole, and the climax of the novel was therefore intense and effective. The cliffhanger ending (another reason I hate epic fantasy) worked, at least in that it made me want to run out and grab the next book immediately. The only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that this series is that most frustrating of types: doomed forever to be unfinished because it was dropped by the publisher.

My Rating
Overall Satisfaction: ★★★1/2
   Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★★1/2
   Emotional Satisfaction: ★★★1/2
Read this for: The world-building
Don't read this for: The characters
Bechdel Test: Pass
Johnson Test: Pass
Books I was reminded of: A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin; The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N. K. Jemisin.
Will I read more by this author? Maybe.

Title: Servant of the Underworld
   Series: Obsidian and Blood #1
Author: Aliette de Bodard
Publisher: Angry Robot
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Year: 2010
Pages: 431
Genre: Fantasy
   Subgenre: Epic Fantasy, Fantasy Mystery, Historical Fantasy
Challenge Information: Mystery Challenge category "New Kid on the Block"
Full Disclosure: N/A

Jacket Description
Year One-Knife.

Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs.

The end of the world is kept at bay only by the magic of human sacrifice.

A Priestess disappears from an empty room drenched in blood.

Acatl, High Priest of the Dead must find her, or break the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead.

My Review
Angry Robot provides cheeky but helpful classifications on the jackets of their books; on this one, they says: "File Under: Fantasy / Aztec Mystery / Locked Room / Human Sacrifice / The Dead Walk!" Now how on earth could I resist that? As it turns out, I am very happy I didn't resist it, because within I found a very strong debut, one equal parts detective, historical, and epic fantasy novel.

The detective component was extremely satisfying. As is traditional, Acatl has a sort of semi-formal standing with the authorities, undertaking the investigation for personal reasons but with official backing (though not always with official resources). He is also personally invested; though not truly a locked room mystery, the only apparent possible suspect at the opening of the novel is his own brother, so much of his initial investigation does revolve around proving that someone -- anyone -- else could have committed the crime.

And while in broad strokes the plot works like any other mystery plot, with Acatl roaming the city interviewing witnesses and suspects, in its details it derives a great deal of novelty from the setting. This is the Aztec Empire at its height, not London or New York or Los Angeles, and de Bodard keeps that fact front and center. Acatl has different laws to obey, and different resources to draw on, than most other detectives; not least of those is the need to keep clear of the ire of the gods, and the efficacy of blood magic. Additionally, on a pure-craft level, I was very impressed with how subtly she kept cluing me in to who was who, and who represented whom, in a very different sort of hierarchy than the ones I am more familiar with; she also used names that were fairly easy to distinguish and track despite their likely unpronounceability for her audience.

But if I have one quibble with this novel, it is the two major liberties de Bodard took with her otherwise historical setting. First, she made up one branch of the temple hierarchy up out of whole cloth; I find that practice personally problematic, and in this novel at least (there are currently two sequels) it didn't seem to add anything. It actually confused me quite a bit, because the character who represented that branch didn't fit with my understanding of Aztec society as established in the rest of the novel. The second issue was that, in order to make Acatl more sympathetic, she removed the human sacrifice he almost certainly would have practiced from his temple's purview; again, I find that decision problematic and I think the book might have been richer if she had engaged with the issue rather than skirting it.

She had the opportunity to address the issue from a sympathetic angle; after all, blood magic does work in this world. The gods want sacrifices, and they become more and more entangled in the attack Acatl is investigating. By the climax Acatl's entire world is at stake, in good epic fantasy fashion, and the resolution feels earned.

Ultimately, though, while I enjoyed the mystery and historical fiction and epic fantasy elements, what makes this book special, what makes it stand out from other similar books, is the development of Acatl's character. He is a very different person by the end of the book than he is at the beginning, and the climax is so completely rooted in that journey that the book could not exist were he a different person. That, to me, is incredibly impressive, and makes de Bodard's career one I am excited to watch grow.

My Rating
Overall Satisfaction: ★★★★
   Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★★★
   Emotional Satisfaction: ★★★★1/2
Read this for: The characters
Don't read this for: The world-building
Bechdel Test: Fail
Johnson Test: Pass
Books I was reminded of: The Bone Palace, by Amanda Downum; New Amsterdam, by Elizabeth Bear.
Will I read more by this author? Yes.

Title: The Liminal People
   Series: Stand-alone
Author: Ayize Jama-Everett
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Format: Advanced Reader Copy
Year: 2011
Pages: 205
Genre: Fantasy
   Subgenre: Fantasy Thriller, Superhuman
Challenge Information: None.
Full Disclosure: I received this free through the Library Thing Early Reviewers program.

Jacket Description
Taggert is a confused mess of something more than a man.

Endowed with quizzical powers to both heal and hurt, Taggert spent much of his life trying to master these "things that lived inside of him." It was only with the help of Nordeen, an ancient drug dealing enigma of a man, ten times more powerful and a thousand times more mysterious than himself, that Taggert can even attempt to have a semi-normal life. But when Taggert's old love Yasmene calls to him from London, Taggert will have to shake the Moroccan coastal soil he's called home for so long off his feet and head into a world that has long forgotten him. Through violent and passionate encounters with people who have similar abilities, Taggert will face loss he's never seen before but gain what could only be described as hope. But a hopeful Taggert is a far more deadly adversary to those who would harm Yasmene and her family than even Nordeen can predict.

And Nordeen does not like to be surprised.

The Liminal People is an occult tale of struggle, hope, and commitment set in a world that dismisses such ideas as juvenile.

My Review
I really hesitated in requesting this book from the Early Reviewers program. This was partly because it's a debut novel, and I wasn't sure I had the patience for one of those right now; but it was mostly because, as I mentioned in my review of Zoo City, I'm getting a little burned out on the noir style, and I didn't know if I could give another noir-influenced SF/F novel a fair shot as a result.

The first half of the book went better than I expected. It was a very typical noir set-up, full of disconnected people carving out an existence on the fringes of society through the judicious application of violence and a relaxed (but not nonexistent) moral code. The hero, of course, gets drawn back into the world he gave up by a beautiful damsel in distress, and in trying to save her is forced to reexamine his life -- past and future. The nice thing about this familiar set-up was that despite some first-novel clunkiness in the exposition, the story was paced quite well; I would probably even describe it with all the appropriate t-words: taut, and tense, and thrilling.

It bogged down a little, for me, in the latter stages of the middle when it turned into a superhumans-with-powers novel, full of rhetoric about choosing sides in the coming war, a war in which mere humans are likely to be nothing more than pawns and casualties. I have liked noir in the past and am simply tired of its tropes at the moment; I've never liked the tropes of the superpower stories, so this turn of events made me wrinkle my nose a bit.

But the climax redeemed all, made me happy I requested the novel and happy to start pushing it on my friends. Because rather than playing the noir tropes straight, Jama-Everett neatly subverts them, proving the tag line of the jacket description accurate rather than a bunch of hot air. Ultimately, this is indeed a novel about hope and commitment, one about building communities rather than tearing them down. I suppose I should have suspected this from the beginning; Taggert is a healer, after all, not just a killer, and for the chance to read about that sort of hero (particularly a male one!) I'd put up with a great deal more than just some tropes I dislike.

Overall Satisfaction: ★★★★
   Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★★★
   Emotional Satisfaction: ★★★★
Read this for: The themes
Don't read this for: The prose
Bechdel Test: Fail
Johnson Test: Pass
Books I was reminded of: Nobody's Son, by Sean Stewart