Comfort Me With Apples

Comfort Me with Apples

By Catherynne M.Valente

Sophia was made for him. Her perfect husband. She can feel it in her bones. He is perfect. Their home together in Arcadia Gardens is perfect. Everything is perfect.

It's just that he's away so much. So often. He works so hard. She misses him. And he misses her. He says he does, so it must be true. He is the perfect husband and everything is perfect.

But sometimes Sophia wonders about things. Strange things. Dark things. The look on her husband's face when he comes back from a long business trip. The questions he will not answer. The locked basement she is never allowed to enter. And whenever she asks the neighbors, they can't quite meet her gaze...

But everything is perfect. Isn't it?

I was so pleasantly surprised that this book qualified for one of the reading prompts, and wasn't a total slog to get through, that I re-committed to the challenge after a three month break.  We'll see how long it lasts. 

Anyway, I found Comfort Me pleasing and distracting, tantalizing enough to get you hooked, but nothing that required strain to finish.  I will admit to spoiling myself by flipping randomly through the pages and noticing a key part of the Fox's conversation with her about what her husband's name was.  So I can't speak on whether or not I would have "figured it out" before Sophia does. 

I enjoyed this version of the story, although my initial reaction was disappointment that it was not much like Bluebeard. However, in retrospect, it is very much like Bluebeard - the secret murdered wives and so on.  I guess what I really want is a very good re-telling of Bluebeard, and not necessarily an unsettling version of the creation of man.  

It's sharp and pointed, and, if drawing accurately from the source material, a very unsettling examination of misogyny at the core of some of the world's largest religious myths. I would absolutely not call it a "thriller" or even really a mystery.  It's a little gothic story, straight from god's mouth to your ears. 

08: A Book Under 250 Pages 

Honeycomb

Honeycomb

By Joanne M. Harris

An entrancing mosaic novel of original fairy tales. The toymaker who wants to create the perfect wife; the princess whose heart is won by words, not actions; the tiny dog whose confidence far outweighs his size; and the sinister Lacewing King who rules over the Silken Folk. Dark, gripping, and brilliantly imaginative, these magical tales will soon have you in their thrall.

 

 This collection of fairy tales feels, well, "real" is the wrong word, but maybe "lived in"? It feels like these have been sitting around for a few hundred years, maundering through Europe and getting jotted down by Perrault in passing.  Well, for the most part.  Some of them (the barnyard animal voting series) are fairly heavy-handed comparisons to the current American political environment.  

The book contains a multitude of short stories - and here it's important to note that this version at least (and hopefully all of them) is exquisitely illustrated and put together, feeling both whimsical and substantial - generally no more than three pages each.  Periodically, we'll catch up on the latest doings of the Lacewing King, a faerie king who starts off  terribly cruel, but then faces a series of punishments and setbacks (mostly orchestrated by people whom he's pissed off) and tries to find love and redemption. It's interesting, but not really what I wanted from a book of grim fairy tales. I wanted all of the stories to be short, pointed, and harsh.  I mean, the first story ends with some eye-snatching. That is some quality dark content!

The book itself is very nice, the illustrations are top-notch accompaniments, and the paper quality is weighty and feels rich.  I was a quarter of the way through when I bought a copy as a gift for someone, it impressed me that much.  We'll see if they like it though!

47: A Book Featuring a Parallel Reality

Fugitive Telemetry

Fugitive Telemetry

By Martha Wells 

When Murderbot discovers a dead body on Preservation Station, it knows it is going to have to assist station security to determine who the body is (was), how they were killed (that should be relatively straightforward, at least), and why (because apparently that matters to a lot of people―who knew?)

Yes, the unthinkable is about to happen: Murderbot must voluntarily speak to humans!

Again!

Aaaaaaaaaaah, I love the Murderbot series!  I didn't really like the novel as much, (thought that it took too long to get started, needed more humor and less world-building) but I find her novellas to be just right - no slow parts, just a depressed, formerly murderous robot, the humans it helps despite their overwhelming feelings, and the other bots that alternatively befriend or try to kill Murderbot (I liken this to the scene in The Princess Diaries (there's a throwback!) where they're talking about two kinds of women in James Bond movies: the sexy blondes who have sex with James Bond and the sexy brunettes who try to kill James Bond).

This one is a bit more self-contained that the previous ones, which build on each other - I guess this is supposed to be set in between two earlier books, so Wells had to be more limited in that respect.  I don't think that's a downside, as I said above, I like the episodic nature of the installments, and honestly I would probably read and thoroughly enjoy four or five more CSI/Murderbot crossover novellas.  

Critiques: not enough references to soap operas; needed more slapstick humor, like the early scene where the detective is questioning Murderbot's timeframe for the death and then the tech comes in with the exact same information and the detective rolls their eyes and the tech is sad no one is excited. I find this book very visually easy to picture in my mind grapes.  

Good parts: Murderbot needs a name-tag! Jollybaby is an absolute unit!  Historical ship lifeboats! Nervous chatty people in interrogation rooms! 

Anyway, two thumbs up, highly recommend, fine holiday fun.

Ten Second Reviews

Men to Avoid in Art and in Life

By Nicole Tersigni

This was like the froth on a cup of coffee: fun to contemplate, but when it came to drinking the stuff, basically intangible.  I like the idea, but maybe it's better enjoyed on a scrolling read, rather than in book form.  There's some attempt to match topic and art, but not always successful.  Like I said, briefly enjoyed, and briefly remembered.  

Hex Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery

Edited by Christopher Golden and Rachel Autumn Deering

Well, first of all, it's very hard to compete with the gold standard of witch stories, which is, obviously, Nine Witch Tales, by, ahem, "Abby Kedabra", published in 1968. But there's always room for second place! 

Okay, I know this is dumb, but I liked the length of the stories.  And I know, I know, that sounds like I'm damning with faint praise, but honestly, if I'm reading short stories, one of things that bugs me is when I get like, five twenty-page stories, and then like, one seventy-page story. That is no longer a story, sir, that is a novella.  Also, as much as I like shakin' things up (to wit: very little) I much prefer orderliness.  Anyway, to the actual review!

Some good ones, some not so good ones. Of the ones that stuck with me, I have to call out Sarah Langan's The Night Nurse, which is definitely NOT something I should have been reading as a pregnant person and Tananarive Due's Last Stop on Route Nine was chilling and spooky, and took me down a Dozier School for Boys hole, which is where I thought the story was going (it wasn't but it was still satisfyingly spooky).  Angela's Slatter's Widows' Walk, Hillary Monahan's Bless Your Heart, Ania Ahlborn's The Debt, Chesya Burke's Haint Me Too (which felt inspired by Beloved, at least in the beginning style), and Theodora Goss', How to Become a Witch-Queen,were all above average, enjoyable witchery stories.  

I felt a bit let down by Helen Marshall's The Nekrolog, and Kristin Dearborn's The Dancer, both of which were really great, but wrapped up without a satisfying resolution. Both felt like they were excerpts from a much larger universe, but even thought the world was interesting and well-done, I wanted something more complete in my stories.

I also feel like calling out Rachel Caine's Home: A Morganville Vampires Story, and Amber Benson (yes, of Buffy fame)'s This Skin, which were my least favorites, by far. Home was part of a larger universe thing, and I don't know if the people were more sympathetic if you read the books, but in the story, this witch comes to town, looking for a drop of blood from the vampires who murdered her and her husband in order to resurrect her husband and her murderers basically are huge assholes to her, basically being all "she's a terrible person, blah blah blah" even though they're the ones who killed her and frankly should be expecting revenge. And then she doesn't even do anything that bad to them, she just leaves once she gets the blood.  This Skin was a let down, again with a protagonist who didn't draw you in, one of those ones who thinks they're soooooooo much smarter than everyone else, and when things don't work out, it's hard to tell if it's because we're meant to believe that the narrator did get away with murder because they're just that smart, or because the narrator is an idiot and has just puffed themselves up into buying their own hype. 

How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

By N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her short fiction, which includes several never-before-seen stories, Jemisin equally challenges and delights with narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.

Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

Anyway, this book and a random comment elsewhere made me realize how much I was enjoying these short stories, and the last time I felt like this, which was when reading Connie Willis.  Short stories are tough, man!  I just put a book in the giveaway pile because I read like, four of the ten stories are didn't really get into any of them.  Obviously not all of the ones in a collection are going to be knock-outs for me, but here's some of the ones I liked best:

•  Red Dirt Witch, which combines the fae and Civil Rights Era Alabama,

• L'Alchemista, whose main character is a down-on-her-luck chef in Italy, who is given some magical ingredients,

• Cloud Dragon Skies, about the consequences of interference with nature again after we already fucked it up and then agreed to live with it,

• The Storyteller's Replacement, which uses the framed story to tell a story about a king who eats a dragon heart in order to get a massive hard-on, but karma revisits him in the form of his daughters (somewhat similar to a story by Kate Elliot, whose book of short stories I wasn't into nearly as much)

• The Brides of Heaven, about the interrogation of a woman who, in her desperation to re-seed a male population which has died off, has allowed something...wrong...into their homes

• Walking Awake, which is about a woman who works  at a body replacement facility slowly realizing that she's doing something awful and fighting back,

• Sinners, Saints, Dragon, and Haints, in the City Beneath Still Waters, which is about post-Katrina New Orleans, except with dragons (and sinners and saints and haints and the battle for the City's soul).

Not that the others aren't good - at a minimum, they all do that good sci-fi thing where they tell a story about our world using another world, i.e., The Ones Who Stay and Fight (which is a direct response to The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursala K. LeGuin, which I had to look up because I'd never read it) is a reminder that we've simply accepted how fucked up things are, but even in a world that demands cruel things, we don't have to let ourselves be cruel, or simply walk away and wash our hands of those necessary evils.

Or the Narcomancer, which I enjoyed, and which was more straight-on fantasy, but which felt also like the shorter version of a bigger world (which she says in the introduction it was).  Henosis, which is about legacy, combined with a touch of Shirley Jackson. Or The Effluent Engine, which is a steampunk New Orleans spy-action story, set around the time of the Haiti Revolution. I'm telling you, if you like sci-fi or fantasy at all, you gotta read this. Or The Evaluators, about a predator that takes on the shape of those it hunts (which, I'll be honest, only made a little bit of sense to me, but it felt cool).  There's definitely something for everyone. Also a lot of like, pregnancy horror, so I would say not to read it if you're expecting.  Pregnancy is enough horror all on it's own. 


So this was a bit of a last minute add-on because The Woman in the Window got pushed to 2020, and in the spirit of the competition, I decided I would definitely read a book being made into a movie that was actually released in 2019, but when all was said and done, I didn't really want to read The Goldfinch, since I'd already tried A Secret History and hated it, so I decided I would make Where'd You Go, Bernadette? my selection for 01, and move How Long 'Til Black Future Month? into 16.  Long story short, I am very glad I got prodded into Black Future Month, and very sad I read The Woman in the Window which turned about to be for nothing, nothing!


16: A Book With A Question In The Title

Ten Second Reviews

Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

By Harry Kemelman

Rabbi Small takes over a congregation in a modern suburb of Boston which doesn't quite know what to make of the scholarly young rabbi.  When a dead woman is discovered in his car, the rabbi is caught between temple politics and a murder mystery.

This was more of a character study than a murder mystery - the solution comes out of nowhere in the last ten pages, and we spend more time with various congregants debating whether or not Rabbi Smalls'  solution with the broken down borrowed car is fair than we do going through clues.  It's kind of a cozy, where no one is threatened, and the wrong person is arrested and everyone is basically nice to each other.  Not bad if you're in the mood for it.  Also, and this is not relevant to the review, it seems like Harry is a weirdly uncommon name for an author.  I know it's a nickname, but I feel like there's lots of Jacks out there, not that many Harrys.  Food for thought!

Descendant of the Crane

By Joan He

Princess Hesina of Yan's father is murdered and she's thrust into power, suddenly the queen of an unstable kingdom. Determined to find her father's killer, Hesina enlists the aid of a soothsayer—a treasonous act, punishable by death, because in Yan, magic was outlawed centuries ago. Hesina doesn't know who to trust as she gets to the heart of the mystery surrounding her father's death, and the political machinations which are forcing Yan into war.

I actually read this before Behind the Throne but they share a lot of similarities - unhappy maternal relationships, murdered fathers and a quest for justice, a princess taking power unexpectedly, (spoiler!) family members secretly betraying them, bodyguard/detectives who keep them from getting killed and help solve the mystery, asian-inspired settings, imminent war with neighbor, you get the picture.  But both were disappointments, and I don't know if I would have liked Behind the Throne more if I'd read it first, since, in addition to the larger issues I had with it, it also felt kinda derivative.

I was into Descendant of the Crane initially, but it falls into the same trap as Behind the Throne:  too many people, too much confusion and plots, obvious villain (at least in this case, the villain was only obvious to the reader, not the main character, so her lack of action makes more sense) and by the mid-way point I just didn't care about anyone.  This did have a weird fucking subplot about magic and immortal people and her father and mother having lived for aeons (how they transitioned power without anyone noticing this was the same fucking person all the time, and also why they only just now decided to have and adopt a bunch of kids is totally unexplained, by the way) which is when I kinda felt like the whole thing jumped the shark for me.  I was enjoying the imminent war with neighboring country plot in Descendant of the Crane, but there's too much going on, and even the parts I liked didn't make up for all of the bloated parts about her weird dad and her adopted brother taking over. I'd be interested in finding out what happens, but I don't think I'm going to read any more books in the series.