50books_poc | Entries tagged with sf/fantasy

The Mimicking of Known Successes presents a cozy Holmesian murder mystery and sapphic romance, set on Jupiter, by Malka Older, author of the critically-acclaimed Centenal Cycle.

The premise here sounded right up my alley, but the writing style really wasn’t for me and I had a lot of difficulty following along with the investigation plot. I do believe people who enjoy Sci-Fi Mystery with a healthy dash of sapphic romance (exes who have to work together!) will have better luck than me with this novella.

cesy

Black No More by George Schuyler is early sci-fi about race. I found it very much in the style of its era rather than modern pacing and readability, but really good. It does the thought-provoking thought experiment on society that a certain type of speculative fiction is really good at. And given its age, it's easy to find cheap or free ebooks. Check the blurb for the concept if you might need content notes, but I can't quite work out how to summarise effectively without spoilers.

yatima

(Hi! I'm new here. Let's jump in.)

Kel Cheris is a gifted mathematician underemployed as an infantry officer. Shuos Jedao is the technological ghost of a genocidal general. Together, they fight crime, where "crime" is defined as heresy against the calendar. In Yoon Ha Lee's brilliant device, a calendar is a social contract from which physics - and hence, weaponry - flow. Calendrical heresy disables these weapons and thus undermines the power of the state.

If you love bold, original world-building, reflections on colonialism, and complicated relationships between clever protagonists who have every reason to distrust one another, you'll eat up the Machineries of Empire series as avidly as I did. If military SF and n-dimensional chess sound like a bit of a slog, see if you can stick with it anyway. The language and imagery are utterly gorgeous, and these very timely stories have a great deal to say about complicity, responsibility, and the mechanisms of societal control.

brainwane

I read The Underground Railroad in 2016. I thought it was engaging, moving, and accessible,* and I nominated it for a Hugo Award (Best Novel).

Na'amen Gobert Tilahun reviewed Underground Airlines as well as The Underground Railroad in Strange Horizons and discussed several aspects of both books. That review mentions speculative elements in Whitehead's book beyond the railroad mentioned in the title, in case you are wary of spoilers.

I have read John Henry Days, The Intuitionist, and I think at least one other Whitehead book, and am trying to reflect on how Whitehead approaches and uses the railroad, because I think it's different than the way a lot of speculative fiction authors do, and has more in common with how other mimetic fiction authors tend to use speculative premises. I want to compare The Underground Railroad to Never Let Me Go, where the story doesn't concentrate on (or, sometimes, even mention) the origin story of the big plot premise, and instead the story is entirely about the lives of people living or resisting -- just for themselves, to survive or thrive -- within that system.

* I think Whitehead deliberately works to make the book accessible to people who have not previously read slave narratives, fictional or nonfiction -- I think he spells out subtext more often than he would if he assumed the reader had more of a grounding in antebellum history or the history of anti-black racism in the US.

kaberett

This came into my possession via the latest Humble Ebook Bundle, and I am so glad it did. This is how glad I am: I am about two-thirds of the way through it and I can't wait to finish before I tell you all how good it is.

The protagonist, Hanna, is sixteen, manic depressive (and explicitly, canonically prefers that descriptor to "bipolar", Because Reasons), and Finnish-"island girl" (Hawaiian?), raised (for most of her life) in Dallas. She describes herself as biracial and bicultural, and she's bilingual in English and Finnish - and the codeswitching is genuinely plausibly represented.

The dude she ends up hanging around with a lot is the same age, Latino, and bilingual in Spanish and English - again, really nicely represented.

The story takes place in creepy smalltown Texas. It's sub/urban fantasy and abusive parents and a critique of the medical-industrial complex and teenagers having (complicated, not always happy) sex lives all tied up in tight, funny monster-killing brilliance. It's lovely.

( Content notes. )

dorothean

I've just finished reading Marjorie M. Liu's four "Hunter Kiss" urban fantasy novels. They are very fun, but I am short on shelf space so I'd like to give them to someone else who'd like to read them. Any takers? Just leave a comment saying you'd like them, and I will pick someone by random selection, and contact the winner by comment and private message. I'll do this after noon next Sunday, December 15, Eastern Standard Time. It doesn't matter where in the world you live, but I would like to dispose of all four at once -- if you've already got one of the novels, let me know which and I'll put that one up on Bookmooch, but I'd like to send at least three together.

What's it about? -- Maxine Kiss is the latest in a matrilineal line of demon slayers, the Hunters. Her job is to fight demons who possess humans in order to create and feed on pain and anger. The demons she meets have slipped free from the Prison Veil, behind which they were trapped after an epic battle thousands of years ago. The only exceptions (cue ominous music) seem to be the five demons allied to the Hunter, who hunt with her at night and during the day are trapped on her body as protective living tattoos. (Yes, this is really awesome.)

Hunters are supposed to wander the earth as strangers, without establishing relationships that could make them vulnerable, but Maxine broke with this tradition when she met Grant, a really sweet (but muscular, of course) former priest who runs a homeless shelter in Seattle. Grant has strange magical powers; with his voice or flute music, he can heal physical and psychic wounds and even persuade demons to lead a more ethical life. Maxine was not brought up to be anything other than tough and merciless, so Grant does pretty much all of the emotional nurturing in their relationship, a reversal I quite enjoy.

There's also a large cast of entertaining secondary characters -- morally ambiguous demons, really nasty demons, Maxine's mysterious-but-charming grandpa, etc.

As the series goes on we learn more about how the demons became imprisoned and what happens if they get out; I'm not super keen on this part because I'm really in it for the violent fluff (Liu is great at describing demons eating things), but there's definitely ongoing plot.

If you're curious, book #4 answers a lot of questions and tentatively wraps up some situations, but Liu is writing another Hunter Kiss novel now. There are also, I think, two novellas and a short story about Maxine. I've read one, "Hunter Kiss," which was published in an anthology (but is also available separately as an ebook) before the novels. It is more of a romance than the novels and explains how Maxine and Grant met, but I don't think it's as good as the novels.

My reviews on Goodreads:
0.5. Hunter Kiss
1. The Iron Hunt
2. Darkness Calls
3. A Wild Light
4. The Mortal Bone

seekingferret

19) Zone One by Colson Whitehead

I'd been anticipating this novel tremendously since I'd first heard it was coming out. I had it on pre-order months before it came out. Then it came out, I started reading, and... ten months later, I finished it.

I cannot come to you with as enthusiastic a review as I'd hoped. It's a very strange book that works by its own internal logic. I did really like it. But I had to move my head into its headspace in order to read, and I found that process to be very slow going.

Zone One is Colson Whitehead's zombie novel. If you're at all familiar with Whitehead's other work, stylistic novels on the boundary between Modernism and Post-Modernism like John Henry Days and The Intuitionist, this might surprise you. But hell, every literary novelist worth his salt is following Chabon and McCarthy into the genre ghetto these days, so it's not really all that surprising, though one review that went viral when the novel first came out compared a literary novelist writing a zombie novel to "an intellectual dating a porn star." As a lover of genre fiction, a lover of postmodernism, and a lover of mashups, I was looking forward to seeing how Whitehead would achieve his synthesis.

Zone One is the story of the "season of encouraging dispatches", a period of time where the survivors of the zombie apocalypse, struggling with Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD) and still unsure where their next meal will come from, gather together under the banner of a new government in Buffalo and try to fight back and reclaim the world for humanity. Calling themselves the "pheenies" as the representatives of the American Phoenix, risen from the ashes with good old fashioned American try-hardness and gumption and hope as their only assets, they launch a major offensive in 'Zone One', the lower Manhattan region from the Battery up to Canal Street. They build a wall across the island at Canal Street and go street to street clearing out bodies and 'stragglers'- infected people who stay in one place and don't attack, unlike the true zombies that are actually offensive threats.

Whitehead's writing is beautifully delicate, full of his classic wry metaphors. Time is distorted and distended beyond recognition in his prose, which nests flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, sometimes all within one paragraph, so that the novel's slow movement forward through the three days of present time are constantly disrupted with journeys back to the time before, both into life before the zombies came and into the stories of how Mark Spitz, the protagonist, and his compatriots survived the Apocalypse.It was this that caught me up. The distortion of time made the novel sometimes difficult to follow and difficult to get into a reading flow for. I found it lacking the constant movement that keeps a zombie novel ticking. I'd frequently read five or ten pages in a sitting, enjoy the setting and Whitehead's clever, pop culture tinged humor and genuinely like the characters, and not feel any urge to continue or even find it a struggle to motivate myself to continue.

By the time I'd finished, I did enjoy it, and I moved through the second half of the novel a lot faster than the first half. But there's something hard to explain about the novel that was hard to negotiate for me as a reader. In reflecting on it now, I think negotiation is the right word. Whitehead has a story here that he wants to tell in a certain way, and I as a reader have expectations of both a zombie novel and a Whitehead novel, and I had to enter into a negotiation with the text to find a way forward we could both find agreeable.

At its core, this is a story about a new kind of loss and memory. It's about dealing with loss on a scale that seems newly comprehensible in the wake of the 20th century. When the Black Plague struck Europe, it was just as disastrous as Whitehead's zombie plague, but the difference was that existence was often much more local back then. You barely knew anyone outside your village: if everyone in your village was wiped out, everything you'd ever known was gone, that hundred or two people that were your universe. But with the flattened world, with the information technologies that Whitehead litters through the novel as zombified relics, a catastrophe like this is global and feels global. Suddenly Mark Spitz is reduced to his urb, suddenly Zone 1 is all of his existence and anything beyond is Buffalo, a vague pheenie rumor of a better place. How do you deal with knowing that your whole known world is lost, when your whole known world is billions of people?

20) The Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed

Seriously, this was the most interesting fantasy novel I've read in years. I'd been anticipating it since I read "Where Virtue Lives", a short story by Ahmed featuring the same characters which serves as an excellent prologue to the novel. The book is set in a fantasyland medieval Arabia, where ghuls and other creatures from Arabic folklore wage battle against mages and demon hunters and dervishes as people around them struggle to live ordinary lives.

It's hard to avoid the comparisons to Tolkien, because everyone's in quest of the great non-Tolkienian fantasy, but this really feels like fantasy that's barely aware of Tolkien. It borrows particularly from Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and takes inspiration from other early 'sword and sorcery' type fantasy novels, with exciting fantasy cities and characters of strong independence and individuality forming hesitant bonds of friendship to band together against a dangerous world. But its lack of anything even remotely resembling Norse mythology makes it feel like its own thing at a deep level.

It's possible Ahmed could have written women better. He is constrained by the quasi-Arabic world he is writing, which has clear ideas of women's roles (which are not the same as women's roles in the present-day Arabic world, nor the same as medieval Western civilization, but they are in their fashion constraining), and he does write two really interesting female characters (plus a third we don't see much of), but they are interesting because they defy expectations, not because they're interesting within their context, especially Zamia. There is admittedly a nice trope inversion in Zamia shyly pursuing Raseed while he tries to resist.

But together the trio of Zamia, Raseed, and Adoulla are the best kind of ass-kicking, monster-killing badasses. And I want as many of their adventures together as possible, which is awesome because this is a fantasy series, so I get sequels!

seekingferret

17 Mind Storm by K.M. Ruiz

This is really good cyberpunky post-apocalyptic action-adventure with psionics. It is loaded with gee whiz, basically. I discovered it in the Yuletide suggestions post, but I'm not sure it'd make a good Yuletide fandom. It'd make a great rpg setting, though. Perhaps a Gamma World mod. It's sufficiently gonzo, though it also has some Shadowrunny things going on.

The story begins with a little Mad Max- a team of government agents moves across an irradiated desert wasteland on a secret mission to track down a rogue. After just enough time to introduce us to our heroes, we're given an explosive fight scene in fallen LA that throws open the door to startling revelations. And while the combat slows down from there as we move into the intrigues and preparations of the middle part of the book, the pace never slows down. There is a continuous stream of new faces, new alliances, new pieces of information. And there is a gorgeous plan driving the story, an interlocking plot of great intricacy designed to look to its participants like utter chaos.

I am eagerly looking forward to future books in the series. This one was certainly a lot of fun, and it left plenty of questions open for the sequels.

And note that this book is eligible for Best Novel in the 2012 Hugo Awards.

18 John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead

I've been stalled on Whitehead's Zone One for about a month now, but I plowed through this with a vengeance. Actually, that's not quite true. I read it eagerly for a while, got sidetracked into a bit of a Nick Hornby kick, then returned and plowed through it with a vengeance. That's important to note because when I returned to John Henry Days from the airy wit of Hornby the density of Whitehead's writing was a bit of a shock to the system.

Whitehead writes heavy, overloaded prose that I admire the hell out of. He stays just on the edges of his characters' minds so that all you can see of them is the shadows and echoes cast off. There is always a remoteness to Whitehead's writing: in John Henry Days, the main character is known only by his first initial for the entire novel. His first name is implied once or twice, but never stated, and even when he tells someone what it is on the final page, the reader isn't let in on the 'secret'.

But what impressed me about John Henry Days is that despite sharing this remoteness with The Intuitionist and especially Apex Hides the Hurt, this time around Whitehead's emotional narratives go so much further. I became invested in J. I became invested in Pamela. I became invested in their relationship. I wanted them to get together. I wanted J. to leave the business, delete himself from the List, teach Pamela how to bury her father and I don't know, live happy hipster lives in Brooklyn? Of course this novel was heading for a horrible ending, but I was invested enough in it to be devastated by that ending even though I knew it was inevitable. Which is the core, I think, of the John Henry legend that the novel dances around. Was John Henry's death inevitable and if it was inevitable, why?

ms-mmelissa.livejournal.com

Stories of Your Life & Others boasts an incredible pedigree and came to me highly recommended from a wide variety of individuals. Virtually every story in the book has been previously published by a big name literary magazine (Asimov's, Omni, etc) and have won awards. I came to the book with high expectations and was left disappointed.

The problem with Stories of Your Life is one that is often levelled at sci-fi writers by its detractors; the ideas are good, the writing is flat. In fact, in this case, their often isn't much of a story there at all. In Understand a man becomes hyper intelligent as a result of a clinical drug study. The story is about 40 pages long and a good 35 of those is spent simply describing the man's new found intelligence. Some conflict does eventually arise (a great conflict in fact), but is quickly dealt with in the last few pages of the story. This is pretty much the problem with the rest of the stories in the book. Chiang may be great at coming up with new worlds and interesting concepts, but he is flat out terrible at building a story.

There are a few stories in the collection that manage to escape this tendency of Chiang's to get lost in the science of things. Tower of Babylon, based on the bible story of the Tower of Babel, is interesting and gripping and comes together in a great way. Story of Your Life is messy, but the execution is interesting, even if it's not perfect.

One thing I did appreciate about the book is that there is a section of notes in the back where Chiang talks a little bit about the inspiration behind each story. They're never more than a few paragraphs long, but I thought they were a great addition to the book.

spiralsheep.livejournal.com

13. The Young Inferno by John Agard and Satoshi Kitamura is a verse retelling of Dante's Inferno embedded in a picture book. I liked Kitamura's stark, black and white, art style but in the art-as-storytelling stakes it seemed to me to lack variety. It also clashed with one of the text's spelled out messages: "My teacher said, 'You've got a point. Quite right. / It just shows that neither beast nor man / can be divided into black and white.' " Except this is a black and white book in several senses. Agard's verse text didn't work for me as either narrative or poetry. (Note to self: don't read retellings of Christian morality stories unless they're specifically subversive in some way.) However, I'm probably about as far from the target audience of hoodie-clad schoolboys as it's possible to be so who cares about my opinion anyway? I just hope this isn't picked up from the teen, graphic novel, section of the library by a reluctant reader who is consequently discouraged further. Agard writes good poetry but this isn't it. Kitamura's first and second illustrations are both interesting as art, especially the way Our Hero is represented as a negative (in the photographic sense) of himself, but the only illustration which wholly won me over is the fossil landscape in illo 4.

14. Too Black, Too Strong by Benjamin Zephaniah is an extremely powerful collection of individually skillful and soulful poems. Ben is one of the most humane people I've met and it shows through in every word of his work. Most people know him as a Rastafarian lyricist who wrote that "funny" poem about turkeys and Christmas, and maybe as that political poet who refused to accept the Order of the British Empire he was awarded, or that black British man who was bereaved of a family member by police violence (although that describes too many people), but his work is so much more: witty, political, memorial, deeply spiritual, widely literary, and linguistically sophisticated. There are several example poems at my dw journal.

15. Fiere* by Jackie Kay is her latest, 2011, poetry collection. I've loved Kay's writing since the first time I encountered it, years ago. Amongst other forms, she's an extremely accomplished poet in both Scots** and English. Kay's poems aren't generally confessional (in the strictest literary sense of that word) but they do contain enough autobiography that I feel some minimum background aids understanding, and that's provided in the brief blurb on the back. Kay is multiracial, her mother was a Scottish Highlander and her father was a Nigerian Igbo. She was born in Edinburgh and raised by white Scottish adoptive parents. There are two example poems, the ecstasy and the agony of human relationships, at my dw journal.

* "fiere", Scots, meaning "companion/friend/equal"
** Scots, which is primarily related to English, not Scottish Gaelic which is a different language.

Tags: women writers, african-caribbean, black british, britain, british, british-african-caribbean, caribbean, black scottish, scottish, guyanese, poetry, japanese, biracial, multiracial, children's books, sf/fantasy, fiction, guyanese-british, igbo, young adult

zeborah

(A lightly-edited dump of my Goodreads reviews.)

Suckerpunch by Hernandez, David
Hooked me in at the start but the way events followed each other more realistically than determined by a story shape didn't quite work for me. (There was a story shape, it was just more in the gaps between the events.

Dawn (Xenogenesis, #1) by Butler, Octavia E.
So many consent issues... Very good: it's got the claustrophobia, the every-exit-is-a-deadend feel, that I'd normally associate with horror, but manages to retain an optimism about it. The aliens are convincinly alien, and the frustration of their refusal to listen is steadfast without becoming unbelievable.

Straight - A novel in the Irish-Maori tradition by O'Leary, Michael
Straight is the second book in the trilogy; I came to it without having read the first, but felt it stood alone well enough that I had no trouble following the plot. Unfortunately that plot -- the protagonist discovering his father may have been a Nazi, then getting blackmailed and kidnapped by Nazis -- was way too melodramatic for me to take seriously. The prose (especially the dialogue) clunked badly for me, too. I did like the motif of dreamland vs reality vs realism though: that played out well.

My Name Is Number 4 by Ye, Ting-xing
Most disasters bring people and communities together; it seems as if the Cultural Revolution was designed to tear them apart. But this book shows that the struggle to survive and to keep relationships alive is always worth making. --Excuse shallow triteness; reading this book in the aftermath of earthquake I have deeper thoughts on disasters and communities but verbalising is harder especially for fear of simplifying. It was a good book anyway.

People-faces, The by Cherrington, Lisa
This is mostly Nikki's story, of how she's affected by her brother's mental illness and her journey in understanding it - caught between Māori and Pākehā models of understanding - and her journey alongside that of getting to know herself and her strengths. Her grandmother tells her that the dolphin Tepuhi is her guardian, but her grandmother is demonstrably not infallible and with the repeated point that Joshua is of the sea while Nikki is of the land, I think the book bears out that the real/more effective guardian for her is the pīwaiwaka.

Her brother's story is told in the gaps between, and completes the book.

Despite the focus on Nikki and Joshua, we get to see various other points of view, showing the further impact on the rest of their family and their motivations. Some of the point of view shifts are a bit clunky, for example when we get a single scene from the Pākehā doctor's point of view, or just a couple from Nikki's boyfriend.

But this is well-told; the author (of Ngāti Hine) is a clinical psychologist and has worked in Māori mental health services, and the emotions of the story ring very true to me.

Cereus Blooms at Night: A Novel by Mootoo, Shani
This was a fantastic read but at times a very hard one; serious trigger warnings for child abuse (verbal, physical, sexual).

It begins as a beautifully sweet story about racial and sexual and gender identity; about family separations made by force or by choice, and about forbidden liaisons both healthy and unhealthy. Set in the country of Lantanacamara, colonised by the Shivering Northern Wetlands -- more an open code than fantasy countries -- the story focuses on three generations of locals, straight and gay, cis and trans, more and less inculturated by Wetlandish education. The narrator begins by disclaiming any significant role in the story; instantly I want to know more about him, and (though he was right that this is more Mala's story) I was not disappointed.

The main story, switching among its several timelines, grows darker and winds tighter with perfect pacing. Revelations are neither too delayed nor too forced. And as it heads towards the catastrophe we've foreseen, through horror worse than we could have imagined at the start, so it brings us towards its equally inevitable -- and no less satisfying -- eucatastrophe.

veleda-k.livejournal.com

#7: The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez.

( The Gilda Stories )

pauraque

Octavia Butler is one of those authors I always meant to read but never got around to. This is the first book of hers that I've read, and it didn't disappoint. There is probably little new that I can say about an author who is so well-known, but humor me while I give my impressions anyway.

Kindred is the story of a black American woman, Dana, who finds herself mysteriously and unwantedly transported to another time and place -- antebellum Maryland. She quickly realizes that the reason for her time-traveling is her ancestor Rufus, a white boy who somehow involuntarily calls her to him whenever his life is in danger. Whenever Dana's own life is threatened, she, also involuntarily, returns to her own time.

There are a few rules -- each time she visits Rufus, he is years older, though little time has passed for her. She is able to bring things with her to the past by touching them, including her husband Kevin, who is white. The mechanism of the time travel is unimportant, and is never explained. We don't question why, for example, the carpet she's standing on doesn't travel with her! It's not that kind of a book.

This is not a Quantum Leap story, where she is supposed to make things better than they originally were; it's a Back to the Future story, where she must simply ensure that Rufus's child is born so that she in turn can live. There doesn't seem to be much danger, actually, of Dana not surviving, or at least I never thought it was likely. The real tension comes from wondering how Dana will cope with living as a slave in the months between her time traveling, and wondering just how much Rufus will grow up to be a product of his time.

( More discussion, no real spoilers )

Overall, I liked it a lot. I look forward to reading Butler's other work.

tags: a: butler octavia, african-american, sf/fantasy

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

14. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

A sort-of fantasy novel about Tilo, a 'Mistress of Spices'- immortal, mystical women, trained in magic and secret knowledge, sent out into the world to help people. Tilo is sent to Oakland, California, where she slowly becomes personally involved in the lives of the people around her, and begins to reveal her own backstory.

This novel is very hard to describe, because it doesn't have much of a plot for most of its length. Instead, it's full of beautiful, poetic descriptions of spices and food, magic, Oakland and imaginary places like the Island where Mistresses are trained. Some parts are very realistic; others involve rampaging pirate queens or singing sea serpents. It took me a while to get into this book, because the beginning is very slow, but by the end I was in love. The language is incredibly evocative, and the resolution felt just right. I really grew to like the characters, particularly Tilo, who shows herself to be much more of a flawed human than any mystical fairy.

Highly recommended.

Current Mood: lazy
Current Music: "Naomi" Neutral Milk Hotel

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

A gorgeous, haunting comic book with echoes of everything from the very best bits of Stephen King to some of the very worst bits of American history, with detours into a very creepy take on Alice in Wonderland, not to mention Br’er Rabbit.

Lee is a tiny but very determined little black girl living in Charon, Mississippi, 1933, on the banks of a bayou full of strange beings whom no one but she sees, or at least no one but she acknowledges. When her white friend Lily is taken by a folk song-humming monster, Lee’s father is jailed for kidnapping Lily (basically because he’s black) and is under threat of being lynched.

Lee ventures into the bayou to save her father and her friend, and so begins her journey into a twisted Wonderland in which the racism and weight of history that exists above the bayou also plays out below, enacted by monsters and giants, butterfly-winged spirits and talking dogs.

This is one of the most purely American works I’ve read in a while, and it gains a lot if you can catch at least some of the passing references to history and folklore. I’ve heard the argument that so much American fantasy is set elsewhere because America doesn’t have enough history and folklore to draw on. Apart from that this leaves out most of America's actual (Indian) history and folklore, this brief book alone proves that even recent history and folklore is sufficient for fantasy: though this volume is short, it’s the start of a series with a distinctly epic feel.

The art is gorgeous, often with a pastoral, children’s book illustration feel, which only makes a lot of the often-horrific images even more disturbing. Some panels, like one of Lee standing against the sunrise with the silhouette of a crow flying overhead, are simply beautiful. The colors are almost translucent, like watercolors.

I liked this a lot, and will definitely be following it. It’s beautiful to look at, deals with a lot of folklore and history that’s very close to my heart, and Lee is exactly the sort of heroine I adore, a prickly, real-feeling person who ventures into completely unknown and dangerous territory armed with nothing but love, courage, and a big historic axe. (And, eventually, a shotgun she borrowed from a swamp monster.)

Bayou

Volume 2, which is available for pre-order now, comes out in January. Bayou Vol. 2

This entry was originally posted at http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/864548.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

Sarwat Chadda, Devil's Kiss

The Knights Templar are still present in modern-day London (though there's not many of them left), and they have a secret mission to fight the forces of evil: vampires, ghouls, ghosts, and so forth. Billi's dad, Arthur (a white British Christian), is the head of the Knights Templar, and ever since her mom (a Pakistani Muslim) died as a result of the Templar's work, he's been cold and closed off to her, focused only on the mission. Billi feels pressured to follow in his footsteps and join the Templars, but she wants her own life, her own friends, and for her dad to pay attention to her.

I really liked this book; it's fast-paced, with an exciting plot (involving the Ten Plagues of Exodus), and interesting characters (including appearances by the Angel of Death and Lucifer), and some genuinely scary moments. I was a bit confused by the fact that everyone in the Templar has a name from the Arthurian legends, some of which are names you would expect to see in modern London (Arthur, Kay) and some which you wouldn't (Gawain, Percival). But this patten is never mentioned in the book, and Arthurian legends have nothing to do with the plot, so I didn't understand what was up with that. There's a sequel that's just come out that I haven't read yet, so maybe it plays a part in the next book.

My favorite parts were moments when the characters dealt with issues regarding Knights Templar in the modern world. For instance, there a long-running argument between Arthur and Gwaine on emphasizing the "demon fighting" aspect of their mission over the "killing people of other religions" part of it. It's mentioned that Billi was raised as a Muslim, but had to convert to Christianity to join the Templars. This isn't a major part of the book, but for me, it made the whole thing feel much more real. I would have liked more exploration of how the Templars have changed and adjusted to the present, actually. Again: maybe in the sequel!

A fun read, and one I recommend.

livii.livejournal.com

This is a mostly terrific book: it's a story about families, immigrants, fathers and sons, regret, identity, and, oh, time travel. And meeting Luke Skywalker's son, Linus. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe takes a unique approach to the above themes and also to the concept of time travel itself. It's a twisty, strange ride, full of sadness and humour, and a definite postmodern touch (such as the fact the protagonist is named Charles Yu). Yu's perspective on immigrant life and the effects it can have on families and identity is very insightful in particular. The novel does meander a bit, and the sentences become a bit ridiculously long and convoluted for no good reason as it goes on, sometimes putting me in a daze, but overall it's a striking and successful story. (I recommend against reading the Kindle version on a phone, however - there are charts and diagrams and other supplemental asides, which are very cool, but were mainly unreadable on that device...)

bulliciosa.livejournal.com

( Fledgling )

bulliciosa.livejournal.com

I actually completed these a few months back, but just now feel compelled to review them after having a bit of time to fully digest.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

( Parable series )

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

According to his bio, Chadda was raised Muslim and married a vicar’s daughter, with whom he had two daughters, and he wrote this book for them so they could read about a bad-ass, biracial heroine from a Muslim-Christian marriage.

Billi SanGreal, daughter of a white and unenthusiastically Christian father and a Pakistani Muslim woman who died protecting the young Billi from ghuls, is now the only girl in the modern version of the Knights Templar. The Templars protect the world from supernatural evil; though only Christians can officially be knights, they have a number of active allies from other religions. Billi’s group is down to nine Templars, and they train and fight like maniacs to make up for their small numbers. But Billi is tired of constantly training under her distant father’s harsh supervision, and wants to have a normal life. Good luck with that!

What I liked best about this book was the treatment of religion and religious myth. Though Christianity is central to the Templars, Jewish and Muslim myth, culture, and characters play significant roles that aren’t just window-dressing. The religious and racial diversity is handled in a matter-of-fact way, which I appreciated.

I liked Billi a lot — despite carrying a lot of weight on her shoulders, she mostly avoids whining, and she’s both pleasingly kick-ass and believably prone to making mistakes and getting beat-down by fallen angels. And I liked the grubby, believable London setting.

What I did not like was the prose, which varied from passable to absolutely terrible. Billi describes her own eyes as “black orbs” at least twice, giving me flashbacks to “The Eye of Argon.” And that’s not the only turn of phrase which is Argon-esque. (I should note that Billi never describes how pretty she is - it's all stuff like "My black orbs met my father's blue ones as I gasped in horror.")

Recommended if you like the premise and can tolerate some seriously bad prose and a lot of gross horror imagery. Also note that though there's some humor, the story is more dark and less fluffy than it sounds. (No sexual abuse or assault - it's dark in other ways, including but not limited to endangered children.)

Devil's Kiss