Posted February 13, 2022 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Apple-Tree Throne, Premee Mohamed
This is a strange little ghost story: Braddock returns from war after his commanding officer got most of his unit killed, and was himself killed. Braddock isn’t sure why he survived, what purpose he has now, or where to go: being drafted saved him, gave him purpose, and without that he’s drifting. He speaks at his commanding officer’s funeral and is almost adopted by his parents, slowly being sucked into his place — attending church with them, courting his fiancée…
And all this while, his commanding officer is haunting him. Sometimes angry, sometimes kind, sometimes incoherent, but always there. The ghost of his commanding officer, and the awful pain in his leg (which seems to have already healed).
All of this is set in an alternate history which we only get little glimpses of, and which I’d be curious to explore more of.
It was difficult to see where this is going, and I almost expected it to become way creepier, and to think way less of Braddock than I eventually did. The last page or so sounds a very wistful, bittersweet note. I found it a really interesting setup, beautifully written, and I’m definitely curious to read more of Premee Mohamed’s work.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Premee Mohamed, SF/F
Posted February 7, 2022 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Wylding Hall, Elizabeth Hand
Wylding Hall uses Fairport Convention’s real history as a starting point: the tragedy (a suicide in this book, two deaths in a car crash in real life), the music and style, and the time spent at an old house in the countryside (Wylding Hall in the book; Farley Chamberlayne for Fairport Convention)… and then Hand takes it off into imagination. It’s not really about Fairport Convention, just using them as a jumping-off point, but if you’re into their music you can’t help but think of them while you read. (Though this time I was thinking about Siobhan Owen’s version of “Scarborough Fair”, as well. There’s something wistful and otherworldly about her voice that makes a good accompaniment to this book.)
The format is of interviews with the remaining members of the band and some other people who got involved in the story — as if it’s a documentary, long after the fact. Slowly, each character contributes what they saw, heard and felt, building up a picture of something eerie and chilling, but indeterminate. Hand is very careful not to reveal the horror until near the end.
I think the Neolithic barrow with Julian’s watch in it and the final photo of the girl are probably actually a bridge too far — it takes the book from being haunting and eerie, lightly touched by something ancient and unknowable, and gives it a moment of horror that doesn’t quite sit with it. It doesn’t spoil the book, but it’s a slightly discordant note. Then again, without that finality, it’d feel like the story just tails off. So maybe that’s the best ending, after all.
The book was a reread for me; not something I’d have predicted myself rereading, but the book does have something special, that restless strangeness at its heart that doesn’t have a satisfying answer. It came back to me all of a sudden when someone was talking about a different book written in interview format, and I suddenly had to read it again!
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Elizabeth Hand, horror, SF/F
Posted January 31, 2022 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
The Councillor, E.J. Beaton
I really enjoyed this book. Reviews that mention it being slow aren’t wrong, but that was part of the appeal: it took a while for me to get into the world, to understand Lysande’s place in it and how to interpret everything that was happening, and once I did understand that, I was immersed. I’d regularly pick it up to read a couple of pages and emerge again half an hour later unaware that time had passed.
The characters are all flawed in their own ways, despicable in their own ways, like real humans. Lysande has her addiction and her ambition; Luca Fontaine is a cold-blooded snake; everyone in Axium is wedded to an “everything has a place” motto that means “the poor stay in their place”… and Sarelin Brey, the queen who is murdered (this isn’t a spoiler, it’s in the blurb), is the most flawed of all: a good warrior, a victorious leader with the gift of making people love her, and a poor queen for those who won’t stay in their place, or who happen to have been born with magic. I think the book does a great job of exploring that, of how you can be both flawed and great.
The relationships between Lysande and Derset, and Lysande and Luca, are pretty amazing — the power plays between them, done subtly, without explicit detail, but leaving it very clear what everyone wants.
I have one frustration, and that’s the fact there were two plot points that I grasped a long time before Lysande, despite her supposed intelligence. Partly that’s because she got blinkered by looking in the wrong place, which is very human, but it’s still a bit frustrating. They felt very obvious to me, and it felt a touch clumsy that she didn’t get it.
I wish there was more right now.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, queer fic, SF/F
Posted January 30, 2022 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Absolute Book, Elizabeth Knox
I don’t really know what to say about this book. I finished it, because there were many things that intrigued me, and which I wanted to see through to the end. The mixture of mythology — which includes an interesting use of the Arthurian legends — was interesting, but at the same time it meant I was never quite sure of which rules we were following. In fairytales, there are always rules that govern the story, but the rules which govern this story aren’t clear (even though they are present).
Partly that’s because one of the key characters is a guy called Shift. He loses his memory every few hundred years so he doesn’t know all about his past, he’s hiding things about himself, he’s not human, and he’s being hidden by a spell that makes it hard to really look at him. The whole story feels like that, to be honest, and it makes sense for it to be like that… but I didn’t enjoy it so much.
I do like Shift, actually, and Jacob and Taryn as well — perhaps that’s what I stuck around for, really, to know what happens to them.
The weird thing that other readers should be aware of is the fact that the first 50-70 pages or so read like it’s going to be a thriller. When it takes a left turn into fairyland. Also, though you’d think the love of books should permeate the book, there’s very little time spent actually reading. Taryn’s an author and talks about her book… but if you’re looking for vicarious enjoyment of musty libraries and big old tomes, I don’t think the books end up being that important to the plot.
Rating: 2/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Elizabeth Knox, SF/F
Posted January 9, 2022 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Strange Beasts of China, Yan Ge, trans. Jeremy Tiang
I was intrigued by the sound of this book when I read that it was based on a bestiary. In a way, I can see why that’s the description — the opening paragraph and closing paragraph of each chapter sound like that, though mostly it sounds like a series of articles/stories (which is actually what the frame story is: the narrator is a novelist, researching and writing stories about beasts for a column). I was also intrigued by the mention of the main character being a zoologist… but she’s mostly a novelist, and the book doesn’t really have much of a scientific outlook toward the beasts and their stories.
I’m kind of torn on what to think about it and how to rate it, honestly. I feel like I might’ve enjoyed it more if I’d had more of a sense of what it would really be like — though I also felt like it was needlessly opaque sometimes, like I’d need a diagram to understand exactly how everything was related and why the outcomes were the way they were. I don’t know if that was the translation (the “opaque” feeling is something I get with work in translation sometimes), the story itself, or me being slow-witted today, but it just didn’t quite come together for me.
I guess the final bit also felt a bit heavy-handed, like… the stuff that I didn’t need to be spelled out to me about the themes was, while I was still mentally drawing diagrams about how the different characters were related!
All that said, it was an interesting experience — one of the early comparisons to come to my mind was Ursula Le Guin’s Changing Planes; there’s something of the same tone and intent there, I think, the same consciousness that a point is being made. I loved Changing Planes, so that’s not a diss on this book, it’s just that it didn’t quite work for me here.
Rating: 2/5
Tags: book reviews. Yan Ge, books, SF/F
Posted January 7, 2022 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Darkness Outside Us, Eliot Schrefer
This is a very claustrophobic book, with a very tight group of characters. In the “present” of the book, there are three: the operating system running the ship, the spacefarer from Federation, and the spacefarer from Demokratia. There are some glimpses of other characters in the past, but the action takes place on a spaceship, with just those three, stuck together.
It’s a book that I think most people would prefer to read blind, so I’m not going to say too much — most of my comments about the book as a whole would give too much away. I will say, though, that I expected it to be more about the romance and less about the sci-fi/mystery, and instead I’d say that the sci-fi/mystery is the primary thread, with the romance… not quite taken for granted, but definitely not the primary story being told here.
I found it really readable, and actually finished big chunks at a time, though some of the tense bits triggered my anxiety for a bit and I had to put it down. There were things I found predictable, but I was curious about less the “what” or even “why” than the “how”. That paid off for me, especially from part two onwards; in part one I was kinda wondering if I’d stick with it because of that.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Eliot Schrefer, mystery, queer fic, romance, SF/F
Posted December 29, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Becky Chambers
Received to review via Netgalley
I was surprised to find that A Psalm for the Wild-Built didn’t get under my skin the way every other book of Chambers’ has: I enjoyed it, and enjoyed the discussion of figuring out your purpose (and whether that’s important or not). I enjoyed the idea of Dex’s work as a tea monk, helping people relax and unburden themselves — and I totally sympathised with the fact that Dex learned a whole profession, got good at it, and then found themselves wanting to start over and learn anew. All the same, it didn’t quite get the emotional reaction from me that I expected.
The world Chambers builds here is interesting too: utopian, and yet not without people who are dissatisfied, people who don’t know what to do with themselves, the everyday hurts and troubles that are going to be inevitable amongst people. As ever, there’s something profoundly hopeful about this story.
The robots are perhaps the most interesting part, and I’ll look forward to reading more about Mosscap and its opinions about humanity, as it begins to journey and meet people and ask questions. The story feels complete and satisfying on its own, in a way, but I won’t argue with getting more of it!
Rating: 4/5
Tags: Becky Chambers, book reviews, books, queer fic, SF/F
Posted December 29, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Flowers for the Sea, Zin E. Rocklyn
Received to review via Netgalley
I’m not certain why I originally requested this on Netgalley, because it is very much not my thing. It’s set on an ark, in a world where water has swallowed the land, and the main character is pregnant when others on board have all lost babies, died in childbirth, etc. Slowly, we get some details about the world before the ark, while it becomes obvious that it’s no ordinary pregnancy.
It’s a very visceral book, ripe with details about scents (most of them awful) and sensations (again, most of them awful). Much of it is body horror, which is extra specially not my thing.
It’s beautifully written, which is most of what kept me turning the pages. I sometimes felt that the dreamlike narrative got in the way of me understanding quite what was happening — mostly in the memory sections, and in the relationships between the characters. It probably didn’t help that it was so very much not my thing, as well: I can’t say I was paying my best attention to the details while cringing!
Rating: 2/5
Tags: book reviews, books, horror, SF/F, Zin E. Rocklyn
Posted December 27, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Comeuppance Served Cold, Marion Deeds
Received to review via Netgalley; release date 22nd March 2022
I think this was first described to me as “Phryne Fisher with magic”. It’s not quite, since it’s not a detective story, but I can see why the comparison: there’s something very Phryne-like in Dolly’s matter of fact certainty about things. But don’t downplay the magic element when you’re thinking about this book: there’s a whole rich world outside the novella, happening before and after it, and giving it a context. There’s stuff going on that isn’t really explained, that just stands there as background, and it makes me hope there are going to be more books following Dolly/Comeuppance.
Everything about this is remarkably well-handled: telling a non-linear story in such a way that everything comes together with a snap at the end is a pretty good trick. You get just enough information to not quite trust everything, but not to put all of it together at once.
I enjoyed the characters a lot, in the end — even Fiona, to my surprise. I feel like there are two or even three strands of the story I’d like to follow in future books: I’d love to see more of Gabe, Philippe and Violet, as well as more of Dolly, or of her associates.
It comes together really well, tells a complete story, and leaves me wanting more. What more can you ask?
Rating: 5/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Marion Deeds, mystery, queer fic, SF/F
Posted December 27, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
I Only Killed Him Once, Adam Christopher
And just like that, I’ve finished the last Raymond Electromatic book. I feel a bit sad now, though there’s no doubt I’ll come back: it’s a fun idea, and Christopher does a good job at a pastiche of Chandler’s style. I was quicker to the final answer here than Raymond, in several ways, but that only makes sense: he’s limited by a 24-hour memory, allowing Christopher to sprinkle in clues and deductions by him that he can’t remember, but which the reader can.
It could feel just annoying and obvious when Raymond finally arrives at the answer, but things speed along quickly enough — Raymond is aware of the limitations of his memory, so sometimes he’ll go along with something that’s happening in a way that both makes sense for the character and his limitations and prevents the reader from hopping up and down with frustration.
This last book brings a few things together and gives us some much-needed answers, in a way that’s pretty satisfying, while maintaining that pastiche feel and being a pretty slick read. For me at least, it brings it home triumphantly.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: Adam Christopher, book reviews, books, mystery, SF/F
