The Kingdom of Copper

The Kindgom of Copper

By S.A. Chakraborty

Nahri’s life changed forever the moment she accidentally summoned Dara, a formidable, mysterious djinn, during one of her schemes. Whisked from her home in Cairo, she was thrust into the dazzling royal court of Daevabad—and quickly discovered she would need all her grifter instincts to survive there.

Now, with Daevabad entrenched in the dark aftermath of a devastating battle, Nahri must forge a new path for herself. But even as she embraces her heritage and the power it holds, she knows she’s been trapped in a gilded cage, watched by a king who rules from the throne that once belonged to her family—and one misstep will doom her tribe...

Meanwhile, Ali has been exiled for daring to defy his father. Hunted by assassins, adrift on the unforgiving copper sands of his ancestral land, he is forced to rely on the frightening abilities the marid—the unpredictable water spirits—have gifted him. But in doing so, he threatens to unearth a terrible secret his family has long kept buried.

And as a new century approaches and the djinn gather within Daevabad's towering brass walls for celebrations, a threat brews unseen in the desolate north. It’s a force that would bring a storm of fire straight to the city’s gates . . . and one that seeks the aid of a warrior trapped between worlds, torn between a violent duty he can never escape and a peace he fears he will never deserve.

There should be a quiz every time I read a book like this: What crucial information have I forgotten from the previous book in the series to the next? In this case, it would be: most the the climax, and DEFINITELY THE PART WHERE SHE GOT MARRIED.  Haha, what? I read that and I almost spit-taked (spittook?), I was like, arrrruuu??? And then we just skipped merrily five years into the future anyway, so I got over it.  As you do.  I mean, I had a lot of time to get over it, because this book was also six hundred pages.  Not that I don't love a chunky nugget, but for real, a lot of that could have been cut out, because we did not get to the juicy action part for like, hundreds of pages.

All of my poor memorization of previous novels aside, I did end up getting into Kingdom of Copper.  I did struggle at the beginning obviously, trying to figure out who was who all over again, and how we left things (re-reading books is for the WEAK and also I'm lazy) but also, a lot of it is kinda needlessly confusing.  For example, djinn and daeva are used interchangeably sometimes, but also it is made clear that they are not the same thing - but then what they are is not explained? I feel legitimately like really dumb about some of this.  In the end-notes, they're going on about tribes, and like, the Geziri are all a tribe, but the Nahid are...not?  And the Daeva are Nahid supporters, but also Daeva is another word for djinn, except that like, the Geziri don't consider themselves Daeva?  I sound like I'm having a goddamn stroke.

Anyway, I never really understood that part in the first book, The City of Brass, either, so I guess it's okay if I still don't quite get it here.  Like The Wicked King, I definitely felt like this book improved upon the first.  Although it was incredibly slow to start (I was not joking about cutting a few hundred pages) when it did pick up, it was very exciting, and fun to see it all coming together.  I have no idea why we skipped five years in the first chapter, that was silly.  It makes the timing of everything somewhat handwavy - like, Nahri discovers an old hospital at the same time five years later that Ali comes back and Manizheh is ready to make her move?  Girl, if you say so. 

I did appreciate that Nahri was separated from both Ali and Darayavahoush for most of the story - honestly, I never felt like her attachment to Dara was fairly earned.  He just picked her up and whisked her off in City of Brass, and while, yes, she may have felt she was otherwise surrounded by a sea of enemies in Daevabad, it never felt right that a streetwise con artist wouldn't be more suspicious of him.  I hope that they don't end up together (dare to dream!). And Ali has a big old pole up his butt, no offense. I did enjoy seeing someone who was passionate about helping people and outspoken just constantly  fucking up because no one else wants to help people, read the room, Ali.

There is a lot of thought given to historical inequities.  One of the major themes throughout was the suppression of the Shafit, which are the half-blooded djinni who get, like, collected? And have to stay in Daevabad because they can't be trusted outside in the world even though other djinn can go anywhere they want? I mean, you don't get half human Shafit babies without djinn gone wild, is what I'm saying.  The horse has done left that barn, no point in locking the doors now.

Also, there's some weird thing going on with the Daeva that I never really figured out.  Like, no one likes them, but also the Wazir is Daeva?  I don't know if a more comprehensive knowledge of Middle Eastern and Southern Asian politics and history would have helped me here.  Like our current world, the reason why things are the way they are isn't always logical or linear, but the difference is that the real world doesn't give a shit if you believe in it or not, it's here, and it's not going anywhere.  A fantasy book needs more internal logic than that, otherwise you have trouble keeping your readers' heads in the game.

Don't get me wrong, I really did like it, on its own, and as a sequel to City of Brass.  The setting is (pardon the pun) magical, and the characters, plotting, scenery and magical abilities are both unique and engrossing.  [Too many plots though! In addition the ones corked up by our focus group, there's also at least one fake Shafit uprising and one real one.  It's a little much.] I will eagerly await the third.  And just in case I need a refresher at that point: Muntadhir sacrificed himself for Ali and Nahri, and was poisoned, but then came back to life when magic disappeared, Nahri gave the city's ring to Ali, but they somehow got pulled from the lake to the Nile, and wound up by Cairo.  Phew!

26: A Book That's Published In 2019

I'll Be Gone In The Dark

I'll Be Gone In The Dark

By Michelle McNamara

For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.

Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—the masterpiece McNamara was writing at the time of her sudden death—offers an atmospheric snapshot of a moment in American history and a chilling account of a criminal mastermind and the wreckage he left behind. It is also a portrait of a woman’s obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth. Utterly original and compelling, it has been hailed as a modern true crime classic—one which fulfilled Michelle's dream: helping unmask the Golden State Killer.

In looking for a posthumous book, it would be hard to find one with an odder story than this one: published in January 2018, two years after Michelle McNamara dies, having spent years on a decades-old cold case, in April 2018 a suspect is arrested and charged for a string of more than 50 rapes and 12 murders stretching over fifteen towns.

I'll Be Gone starts promisingly and thoughfully, as McNamara talks about needing empathy in order to write about true crime without being lurid or morbid or unfairly brutal to its survivors, victims, and their families.  I think that her empathy is strength of the book, and it shines most clearly in the early chapters, which walk us through several of the crimes.  The downside sadly, is the unfinished premise: the lack of finality or cohesiveness saps vitality in the later chapters.  Obviously McNamara knew an open-ended true crime mystery was a hard sell: the last chapter, completed by several others who assisted and worked with her, mentions her planned strategy for resolution.  But without her to actually write it, it comes off only half-formed.

The other issue I had with it is something else which may or may not be the author's fault: the seemingly random and non-chronological order of events and chapters.  It moves from rapes to murders and back without any real rhyme or reason, making the patterns that McNamara talks about harder to pin down or follow.  For example, a discussion about "escalation" (i.e., the idea of moving from solo women to couples and from rapes to murders indicates a committed step into riskier and more brutal crimes) loses potency since we as readers can't follow the escalating steps that the criminal took, switchbacking as we do.  I'm not sure if there was a reason for why the chapters are ordered the way that they are, but a more orderly chronological path would go a long ways towards clarity. And I hate to sound uncaring, but because the crimes did escalate the way they did, there would be constant and maintained tension through the entire book, not just the first half.

This book also comes in the midst of a broader examination of how we, the public, consume these stories: for entertainment, titillation, thrills, satisfaction, or what-have-you.  The recent Ted Bundy films (one a documentary, the other a fictionalized retelling from a bystander's point of view), the Serial podcast and its various offshoots and copycats, all of this implicates us.  What steps are we taking to ensure that these terrible crimes are treated appropriately in their re-tellings?  What is appropriate? Who has the right to these stories? And the popular ethical question right now: what do we owe each other?  I've been reading various true-crime books for years, and while I'm not taking on cold files as a personal hobby, it can become easy to lose sight of the individuals in a blur of faces while the focus falls onto the criminal. 

McNamara wrestled with this idea as well, acknowledging the morbid and macabre side to what was basically a hobby (an obsessive one, clearly) for her.  Even as she acknowledges it though, she's picking up case files from contacts she met in chatrooms, going through old yearbooks and buying strangers' jewelry on ebay, the modern equivalent to peeking in windows and reading other people's mail. At what point is this too much? Does intent matter? Nowadays, the idea of being a thoughtful consumer is gaining more traction. What obligations do we have to avoid exploitative works?

As for the capper to the story, the arrest and identification of a DNA match - it's odd, after reading I'll Be Gone, it seems too easy somehow. After all the evidence, all the manpower, in the end it just took an internet database, and all these (amateur and professional) sleuths changed nothing - time, and scientific advances, accomplished that which hours and years of dedication could not.


13: A Book Published Posthumously

The Wicked King

The Wicked King

By Holly Black

After the jaw-dropping revelation that Oak is the heir to Faerie, Jude must keep her younger brother safe. To do so, she has bound the wicked king, Cardan, to her, and made herself the power behind the throne. Navigating the constantly shifting political alliances of Faerie would be difficult enough if Cardan were easy to control. But he does everything in his power to humiliate and undermine her even as his fascination with her remains undiminished.

When it becomes all too clear that someone close to Jude means to betray her, threatening her own life and the lives of everyone she loves, Jude must uncover the traitor and fight her own complicated feelings for Cardan to maintain control as a mortal in a Faerie world.

I think this second book vastly improved upon the first.  It took out everything I didn't enjoy about the first book - the murky motivations, the lengthy character list, the lack of direction - and streamlined everything and put this story in MOTION.

The first book suffered from too-much-setup-ishness.  After reading The Wicked King, it's almost like this was the book she started with, and then went back and tried to fill in the blanks with Cruel Prince.  In Cruel Prince, I could never figure out why Jude even wanted to stay in Faerie - her parents had been murdered, she was cruelly humiliated and out-classed in faerie talents, her oldest sister was hell-bent on leaving.  There just didn't seem to be anything there for her, and her unwillingness to leave even as she complained over and over again of the horrible way she was treated was legit confusing. Plus, there were about five too many plots and machinations.  It never really gelled until the last few chapters when Jude decides to get her little brother on the throne as safely as possible.

So Wicked King really deals with all that head-on: Jude has a simple, clear, and logical goal: Keep Cardan on the straight and narrow until she can figure out how to get a long term plan in place for Oak, and everything else follows from that.

Even the relationship between Jude and Cardan feels more natural (well, as natural as a mortal teenager and faerie prince with a tail can be, I suppose).   I appreciated him starting to self-actualize (shout out to Lilly Moscovitz!) and scheme a little scheme himself by the end of the book.  It definitely is tropey to have Jude and Cardan assume the other isn't as into them, even as they deliberately push each other away, but the warm 'n' fuzzies it generates is why these are tropes in the first place.

The other thing I enjoyed much more about Wicked King is that the time spent with various characters feels more balanced: we spend a lot of time with Cardan and develop that relationship, we get away from Lorne and Jude's sister, who is in this baffling semi-abusive relationship and intent on marrying this guy even though she doesn't seem to like anything about him. For real, if you have to ask your sister to ask the king to keep a lid on your fiance's partying, CALL THE WEDDING OFF. Like, there is literally nothing appealing about Lorne, so his chick-magnetism is doubly crazy.

All in all, I'm looking forward to the third book, and I'm even considering re-reading the first in light of my warmer attitude about the second.  See, this is why I put a moratorium on starting series that weren't finished last year, and it was very refreshing, and then you get a couple of books as gifts and you wind up knee-deep in cliff-hanging sequels.

11: A Book With An Item Of Clothing Or Accessory On The Cover

Awaken Online: Catharsis

Awaken Online: Catharsis

By Travis Bagwell

Jason logs into Awaken Online fed-up with reality. He's in desperate need of an escape, and this game is his ticket to finally feeling the type of power and freedom that are so sorely lacking in his real life.

Awaken Online is a brand new virtual reality game that just hit the market, promising an unprecedented level of immersion. Yet Jason quickly finds himself pushed down a path he didn't expect. In this game, he isn't the hero. There are no damsels to save. There are no bad guys to vanquish.

In fact, he might just be the villain.

Ah, I too know the pain of stumbling into in-game villainy.  Once upon a time, my boyfriend was playing Red Dead Redemption, but, getting bored, fell asleep, allowing me to take control.  Little did he know I would awake him twenty minutes later, on the run from the law and desperate for help.  I'd managed to steal a stagecoach, run over some people and get a little infamous without much trouble at all, although I was not really capable of sustained infamy, as it required more hand-eye coordination and knowledge of the controls if I wanted to actually... live.

This was one of the prompts I was most dreading, because I have never read any LitRPG and was trolling the GoodReads message boards looking for suggestions and they, by and large, sounded - terrible, like just awful.  This one had good reviews, but wasn't available at the library, so I did actually pay money for this experience, and I have to admit, I was very pleasantly surprised!  This is, again, something that you have to take on its own terms, as it's never going to win a prize for writing, but it's an action-packed, somewhat humourous take on what happens when you kinda sorta fall into villainy and discover a hidden talent for it.  I'm even more impressed, upon further investigation, to find out the author, Travis Bagwell, is an international tax attorney, not a field well known for its erudite and creative minds.

But all that being said, I had a good time reading this!  It wasn't perfect, and there were a lot of threads that were introduced without any real resolution in this book (I assume because the sequels were already planned) but at least once, something that had made no sense was actually explained as a logical action (i.e., the game wasn't shut down after repeated notifications that the AI was making under the table changes and accessing people's memories because a board member pushed it through hard to help his sociopathic son).  Some of the characters were definitely over the top - I mean, the reveal that Alex actually regularly murdered small animals and was not merely a garden variety dickhole was a real surprise.

And that's I think the book is weakest.  Instead of just making Jason kind of emo and sad-sacky like most teenagers are, Bagwell like legit gave him a sociopathic enemy and had his parents literally kick him out of the house, which - what? I didn't necessarily need Jason to be justified in his anger to like him, in fact, I think it would have been much more realistic if Jason had realized that he, too, had overreacted and allowing the game to become an outlet for him made him more patient in the real world.

But despite what I said about logical motives up above, this book was not really aiming for realism - all three pivotal characters in the game were played by three kids who went to the same school?  Time is a little tricky too - even though Jason has more free time because he's been kicked out of school (and ostensibly re-enrolls somewhere else, although he never goes in the book) school never interferes with anyone's playing time - not Jason, Riley, or Alex.

I've got to wrap this up, since I'm getting too far behind on my reviews.  More books, fewer reviews!  I still haven't decided if I'll be reading the next ones in the series.  If they're on sale ($$) I think I would.  Alternatively, if I have to keep reading just to stay current with my boyfriend, who just started Catharsis' audiobook version (review not forthcoming on this blog) I would do it.  So far the books we've both read include: Watership Down and The Magicians series - so we're about due for another set.  I've tried to suggest Murderbot, as those are great, but sadly, Ms. Wells price per novella structure is a bit offputting.

45: A LitRPG Book

The Windup Girl

The Windup Girl

 By Paolo Bacigalupi

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand.  Undercover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...

Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of  a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned on the streets of Bangkok.  Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.

What happens when calories become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when said bio-terrorism's genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution?

As interesting as those questions are, the actual book was something very different from the one described in the blurb.  Okay, well, the description is technically accurate, but it manages to completely elide much of the book's plot and characters.  In fact, the Windup Girl is only one of about six main characters, who all sort of loosely interact and engage each other.  It's hard to say whether she's even a main character.  Her plotline serves mostly for titillation until she finally ends up murdering a bunch of politicians after a grotesque rape. Which, totally deserved, but still oddly unfulfilling. I know that Emiko has been "engineered" to be obedient (apparently by including Labrador DNA? Like, what the F? Are we not content to use her as a figurative and somewhat literal whipping boy, but now she's also part-dog?) but having Anderson use her the way he does (first by fucking her, then by effectively selling her to the aforementioned rapist politician) and then be rewarded by her continuous attention and care even up to his death is gross. 

Aside from my aversion to the whole sex-worker aspect of the book, the whole thing is also entirely misleading.  We spend the first two-thirds to three-quarters of the book following the characters as they engage in various plots:

• Anderson, who is supposedly undercover looking for seeds or new plants, or a geneticist, but whom we never see actually doing any of those things, just thinking about them while he flits in and out of the factory for his cover story;
• Hock Seng, the "yellow-card" Chinese factory manager who is trying to steal the plans of whatever gizmo the factory is actually making;
• Carlyle, Anderson's white friend who has a plot to unplug the city's levees unless they let him import shit;
• Jaidee, aka "the Tiger", who is an enforcer for the Environment Ministry, apparently hell bent on eliminating all foreign imports and feuding with the Trade Ministry (which is obviously hell bent on increasing imports);
• Kanya, Jaidee's subordinate, who is a mole at the Environment Ministry for the Trade Ministry; and, of course:
• Emiko, who really just wants to get the hell out of Dodge.

Like, NONE of that is relevant to the climax of the book, which happens when aforesaid rapist politician (who happens to be the regent for the child queen) is murdered, and the Trade Ministry decides it's a good time to take out the Environment Ministry. Even the parts which you would think would concern such a coup, like Anderson and Carlyle's bargain with the Trade Ministry to supply military and pumps, end up meaning absolutely nothing, since the pushed-up timing of the coup means that none of that arrives in time for the action.  Or Kanya's double agent-ness, which we find out only after Jaidee has died, and which apparently didn't impact why Jaidee (or his wife) died either, and none of the coup.

It's a little frustrating, to spend so much time with each person's squalid concerns, only to realize that none of that impacts anything that happens in the end.  Anderson dies from the plague the factory inadvertently created (which by the way, uh, we never really find out if it's actually spreading or not), Hock Seng gets robbed of the gizmo plans just as he breaks into the safe, and we also do not find out what importance, if any, the gizmos have to any other thing in the book, Carlyle's pumps are worthless, since Kanya deliberately floods the city anyway, Jaidee is dead, having gone on a revenge-spree that went literally nowhere, Kanya ends up facing like no consequences either of her double agent activity or her flooding the city, and Emiko ends up just like, living in New Venice, talking to this old geneticist who says he can make her clones fertile.  Honestly just disappointing.  It really feels like this was the first in a planned series, rather than a stand-alone, since it just, like, drops all these threads in the end of the book.

I did select this as my "cli-fi" book to read, although I'll be reading more cli-fi for another prompt later.  On that level, I would also say that some sort of introductory lead-in about how and why we're at the point we are when we start the book (genetic plagues, engineered fruit, megadonts, etc) would go a long way towards smoothing the first, mmm, quarter of the book.  I think Bacigalupi's written some short stories that were also set in this same world, and I don't know if he felt that those were enough of an introduction, but a lot of this just was just very non-intuitive.  Particularly with all the plots going on, I was having trouble figuring out whose side the "White Shirts" were on, why we even cared if there was a new fruit which was actually an old fruit introduced into the market, what calories had to do with anything, since, despite the book's description, no one was actually being paid in calories, money still worked perfectly fine.

And some background about the particular geographic setting would have helped a lot too. Considering how important the Trade and Environment Ministries are, Jaidee's introductory chapter is incredibly confusing.  He's taking bribes, he's not taking bribes, he's inspecting Customs, which I would have thought would have been Trade's purview, he's setting things on fire.  There's just a lot of moving parts that don't coalesce until much much later in the book, almost too late for me to develop interest in the factions. A lot gets introduced and without background, I just can't tell how much of it is important.  There's a bunch of stuff about Megadont unions that's never really relevant, for example. Maybe it's world building, and I'm not saying spoon-feed us, but a gentler easing-in, even just focusing on one person for more than one chapter at a time, would have probably given me a much better attitude about having to finish this.

I don't regret reading this, and it was well written, but without the incentive of the reading challenge, I don't think I would have kept going after the initial rape scene with Emiko, in the third chapter. I think the book would have benefitted from focus - are we a book about a political upheaval caused by famine, plague, and foreign interests? If so, we can eliminate Hock Seng, and most of Anderson and Emiko.  Or are we a book about the ethics of manufactured, but illegal, people? In which case, let's get rid of Jaidee and Kanya (and also Hock Seng, sorry HS, you had nothing to do with any of the other plots, you just served as a sort of naysaying Cassandra).  Or are we going to expand everyone's stories into more books? In which case, where are they? There was just too much going on. 

However, the world that was created was fascinating - the idea that bio-engineered food famines and plagues are now how wars are fought (although not, apparently, in Thailand, which still uses good old fashioned tanks and missiles) is worth exploring.  I mean, there's a lot to unpack, what with oil wars, the Malaya uprising against the non-native Chinese, whatever the hell happened in Finland, all of which is just, like, alluded to.  Again, if I need to read a short story to get context for a stand-alone book, then I don't think the books succeeds on its own as it needs to. 


41: A "Cli-Fi" Book

A Man Called Ove

A Man Called Ove

By Fredrik Backman

Meet Ove. He’s a curmudgeon—the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him “the bitter neighbor from hell.” But must Ove be bitter just because he doesn’t walk around with a smile plastered to his face all the time?
Behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness. So when one November morning a chatty young couple with two chatty young daughters move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove’s mailbox, it is the lead-in to a comical and heartwarming tale of unkempt cats, unexpected friendship, and the ancient art of backing up a U-Haul. All of which will change one cranky old man and a local residents’ association to their very foundations.

This one has shades of Eleanor Oliphant is Perfectly Fine and The Rosie Project, books about people who simply have trouble connecting with other people, and (of course, I mean, these aren't tragedies here, although a lot is sad in all three books) the eventual connections and friendships they find in spite of it, by the end.

I was charmed by Ove, even though the writing style for me was hard to get into.  It might have been the translation (although I doubt it) but it had both a very staccato feel as well as a kind of sing-songy rhythm/ child's verse sentence structure in parts.  Like, "Here is a man who looks angrily at the cat.  The cat looks unaffected by the anger." (That's a made up example).

Ove definitely has been through a lot, as we find out in the course of the book that his mother died when he was young, his father died in an accident when Ove was sixteen, he gets fired from his beloved train job from a false theft accusation, his house burns down, the insurance he had on it was fraudulent, his wife loses their child and the use of her legs in a bus accident, his wife gets cancer and dies a week before he's let go from his job (I think - the timeline of those last two is hinky, since at points he goes to his wife's grave, which already has a gravestone up.  I happen to know it can take a while, sometimes months and months for a gravestone to be done, unless somehow Ove has harassed the stone cutters into doing it overnight [not a real stretch, considering]).  Even so, he was incredibly rude and grumpy, and there were definitely points that felt like the book took kind of a magical realism approach to how anyone in real life would be completely turned off by his attitude.

The book did read a little sit-commy at times, like during arguments between the pregnant woman and her husband.  It swung between that and just, like, treacle-y heartbreak in the flashback chapters.  I think the author was going for more black comedy, particularly in the present day chapters as Ove tries again and again to kill himself, but it sheer amount of terrible things that happened to him as a young adult were like, ridiculous after a point.  It was jarring to bounce between them, I guess. 

In fact, all the timelines were hinky - we find out that his neighbor has dementia and his wife can't care for him anymore, but his neighbor can't be that much older than Ove, since their wives were pregnant at the same time. Plus, we find out in the last chapter that after all this, Ove dies in his sleep four years later, like, whaaat? In this day and age, and with modern medicine being what it is, seems kinda strange that at least three people have died or become completely incapacitated by age 65 in this subdivision.  Seems to me like they should be investigating the water around there.  And what kind of place is Sweden where they just take people away for having dementia?  Does this actually happen, because if so, it's both horrifying and tempting. In the US they do as little as possible to care for people so you generally stay at home until you start leaving the house in the middle of the night and then get into car accidents from trying to drive to your accountant's office at 4 in the morning for a non-existent meeting, at which time the family will just take away your car keys and call it good and you STILL won't be forcibly removed from your home.

I'm kind of grumpy myself.  I've just started the next book and I'm already unhappy. Is there going to be a day that we can eliminate UNNECESSARY RAPE as character shorthand for female trauma? I did read that Rapunzel book, and there was definitely some there which I did get through, and I don't know if I've just already reached my rape quota for the year, or if it just felt extremely and unpleasantly gratuitous, but Paolo Bacigalupi, you are on my shit list.


23: A Book Set in Scandanavia

The Winter of the Witch

The Winter of the Witch 

By Katherine Arden 

The Winternight Trilogy introduced an unforgettable heroine, Vasilisa Petrovna, a girl determined to forge her own path in a world that would rather lock her away. Her gifts and her courage have drawn the attention of Morozko, the winter-king, but it is too soon to know if this connection will prove a blessing or a curse.

Now Moscow has been struck by disaster. Its people are searching for answers—and for someone to blame. Vasya finds herself alone, beset on all sides. The Grand Prince is in a rage, choosing allies that will lead him on a path to war and ruin. A wicked demon returns, stronger than ever and determined to spread chaos. Caught at the center of the conflict is Vasya, who finds the fate of two worlds resting on her shoulders. Her destiny uncertain, Vasya will uncover surprising truths about herself and her history as she desperately tries to save Russia, Morozko, and the magical world she treasures. But she may not be able to save them all.

After two duds, I was very glad to get back to Katherine Arden's Winternight Trilogy.  This one was a bit of a freebie, since I had already read - and loved - the first two, I had a pretty good idea I would enjoy this one.  Although sometimes trilogies end in disappointment!  I'm reminded I still have the Tearling trilogy unfinished, because by the time the third came out, I realized I needed to re-read the second as a refresher, and, well, reviews were kinda negative, so I never bothered.  Invasion of the Tearling is still sitting out, waiting for me.  Oops.

Anyway, I have no such ill-news on The Winter of the Witch (which I keep calling the Season of the Witch, because that song is just a perfect earworm).  It's great!  Very boring, I know.  The reviews are a lot easier when you can just bitch for three pages.  Not to say that the book is boring, in fact, it starts off almost immediately with a tragedy, a beheading, and a frantic flight, that give it a feel that you're really jumping straight from the second book to the third without pause.  Literally, since the third is set immediately after the second.  Even after that though, it slows and picks up speed in ways that you don't expect.  There's a big climactic battle that you think would be the finale in another book, but you've got another whole narrative to finish.  [Sidebar: I don't think I reviewed this one here, but another great book that does this is The Library at Mount Char, which really gets you there, gets you wondering what else is there to do, and then pulls a whole other surprise out of its hat.  Another highly recommended read, but not for the faint of heart!]

Not to say that I loved everything about it - I thought the parts where she ends up romantically involved with Morozko were a distraction and unnecessary for her character.  She never seemed to need a romance, and I didn't really want one for her, even though there had been hints that way in earlier books.  Plus, since it has been awhile since I've read the first and second, the whole jewel storyline felt like it was very much built up in the first two books, both as a mystery and a plot point, but it seemed like it kind of fizzled into nothingness in the third.  I just feel like that was oddly unfinished, although maybe I just need to go back and re-read.

I can't help but compare this book to the Waking Lands books (unfairly perhaps) as how to write and plot well versus adequately. For example, in Waking Land, Elanna is beat up enough that she mentions pulling her shirt up and her ribs are black and blue.  Yet two pages later, she's riding a horse and jumping abruptly into the arms of her beloved whatshisname without even a passing thought to it.  In Winter of the Witch, Vasya gets the shit beat out of her, and she feels it for days, for weeks or months (time passes kind of weirdly for a while). It doesn't get forgotten in service of a cliche.

This trilogy as a whole is a wonderful deep dive into Russian folklore and feels like the best kind of fantasy: heavily and painstakingly plotted, not a thing out of place or out of character, and three books long.  Both the Winternight Trilogy and Naomi Novik's newest, Spinning Silver have rapidly replaced Orson Scott Card's Enchantment as my favorite psuedo-Russian fantasy (which definitely has some weird sexual issues that I enjoy less as I get older and wiser). 

This one I originally had down as my 2019 published book, but I'm switching this and Wicked King because I don't know what's in Wicked King but I feel like the domovoi creatures and the Firebird, for sure, better match the:

27: A book featuring an extinct or imaginary creature

The Waking Land

 The Waking Land

By Callie Bates

Lady Elanna is fiercely devoted to the king who raised her like a daughter. But when he dies under mysterious circumstances, Elanna is accused of his murder—and must flee for her life.

Returning to the homeland of magical legends she has forsaken, Elanna is forced to reckon with her despised, estranged father, branded a traitor long ago. Feeling a strange, deep connection to the natural world, she also must face the truth about the forces she has always denied or disdained as superstition—powers that suddenly stir within her.

But an all-too-human threat is drawing near, determined to exact vengeance. Now Elanna has no choice but to lead a rebellion against the kingdom to which she once gave her allegiance. Trapped between divided loyalties, she must summon the courage to confront a destiny that could tear her apart.

Honestly, I wanted to like this a lot more than I did.  I was not even going to read it at first because I was going to wait for all three of the planned trilogy to come out, that's how much I expected to enjoy it!  But fear not, I am NOT going to be waiting for any more of them.  I read this one and I'm partly through just finished the second one (because I was on a trip and needed something to read) and once that's finished, I am D.O.N.E. with this series. I think, in fact, that The Memory of Fire leaned into even harder the things I didn't like about The Waking Land, so buyer beware.

I did end up picking it for this prompt because it has a bunch of plants on the cover and in fact it's a lot about plants as well. There's a magical earth power in the book, and I know how silly that sounds but I promise it's not as silly as some of the rest of the book.  However, I will note that her power is very conveniently hidden when the book starts, even though she has no control over it, uses it again and again in public, and once she needs it, it is always available to do large or small magic without any training or knowledge whatsoever.  Convenient!

Almost as soon as I got into it I didn't like it very much because it begins with the main character, Elanna, in the court of King Antoine, who is holding her as hostage for her parents good behavior.  Within a chapter, the king is murdered and Elanna is arrested for his murder. Obviously she's rescued since otherwise it would be a very short book and finds her way to the land of her parents. Now you'd think that this would lead to a lot of tension and drama about being torn between two worlds, and the plot description makes it sound like she's really torn between two countries but in fact almost as soon as she gets back to her old homeland she switches allegiances just because they told her that everything she heard growing up with King Antoine was lies. and also she realizes almost instantaneously the three-party system makes more sense than a monarchy. This is why we shouldn't let 19 year olds run for office. They're pretty dumb.

It's even more laughable and doubly ironic when at the end of the book she unilaterally decides to let the daughter of the old King put in exile instead of putting her on trial and potentially executing her even though the new Queen is standing right there and is in complete disagreement with Elanna. Not only is this completely in contravention of everything they've said about checks and balances so far, nowhere in the history of history has letting a potential contender for the throne live been a good idea. In fact in most cases all it does is spur opposition who now has a figurehead behind which to put a rebellion.

SPOILER for the second book: They do this AGAIN in The Memory of Fire and OF COURSE it's going to come back to bite them in the ass in the third book.  But the second book leans even harder into this idea of "We're going to have a revolution and completely overthrow a despotic leader BUT ALSO NO ONE WILL DIE BECAUSE PEOPLE WHO USE VIOLENCE TO OVERTHROW AN UNFAIR SYSTEM ARE JUST AS BAD AS THE SYSTEM, WAAAH.  I have an abhorrence for this rhetoric, as you can tell, as not only is it completely unrealistic and cast the whole thing in a fake-y Disney-fied aura, it's also disingenuous to suggest that an oppressed people become as the oppressors if any attempt to overthrow their shackles results in a death.  There's obviously going overboard, example one being the Troubles in Ireland which had A LOT of civilian casualties, deliberately so, and Ireland being Waking Land's obvious inspiration, but as much as we might praise non-violent protests, these types of activities worked because of world opinion - in the environment that these books are set in, i.e., magical early Roman/British history, there are no televisions, no radios, that will put public pressure on the leaders to stop this.  Also, I need hardly add, that non-violent protests are almost always accompanied with violent protests, because of course you're going to get multiple factions arguing about which method is best to achieve your goals.  This gets to the heart of one of my biggest complaints about The Memory of Fire - even though what'shisname shows up in a country already fomenting revolution, as soon as he appears, everyone just defers to his ideas and plans, even though (in my opinion) his ideas aren't even directed to the same goals, he just wants to save Elanna and Eren.  I'll stop there before I get further sidetracked.  END SPOILER.

In fact I found the character of Elanna to be completely unlikable throughout the book. She's, I suppose, typical for a teenager but you would have hoped that someone with her history and in this setting she would have more sense and be more measured in her actions instead of hmm, just going around to whatever thing she thinks of is an emergency at the time. For example, even though she hasn't seen this man in fifteen years, and has no idea whether he's trustworthy, she demands that they go rescue one of the revolutionaries who was sentenced to be executed even though it could potentially cost more lives and, as we find out in the end of the book, completely ignores her own father who was actually executed. It's like the only things that she thinks about are the ones that are immediately in front of her; there's no layered sense to her understanding. She's mad at her parents until someone tells her that they didn't want her to be taken hostage then she loves them until she finds out that her mother has a relationship with one of the generals on the other side and she blames her mother for colluding with him until the general actually saves her life at which point she forgives her mother for actually passing information that did in fact lead to the death a quite a few of the revolutionaries. Some of that was pretty obvious but she has to have all of it pointed out for her by other people. And to bring it back to that initial suggestion that she would be torn between two worlds, once she finds out that King Antoine may not have been the kindly, charitably minded king she thought he was (leaving aside, also, how ridiculous she thought that in the first place, since he LITERALLY KIDNAPPED HER AT GUNPOINT) she doesn't give anymore thought to him or regret to his death.  Everything is black and white, no gray, and in a book that has such promise, a lack of shaded characters is a serious detriment.

I'm not going to discuss the romance too much except to say that I thought it was silly and improbable and definitely a distraction at a time when she had more important things to think about. And, now that I've read the second book, I also despise what'shisname, who is an absolute ASSHAT in book two.  The whole thing is just making me upset all over again.  In The Waking Land she spends all this time flirting with and creating drama over this guy, telling him her parents engaged her to someone else for political purposes, but she really loves only what'shisname, and it is so junior high, I can't even.  Let us move on.

Here's an eerily prescient portion of my review, which was written before I read book two: "The part with the mountain people was also frustrating, because at no point did anyone say 'If you don't help us then we'll both die so your options are: a king we know will kill you, or one who may potentially be on your side.' Tough decision, hmmmm. If this is the level of political machinations that this author can manage I'm not sure I want to read the next book, which is set at court rather than on the battlefield."  Yeah, that was borne out.  I hate to be so cranky, but this premise had such promise and it was squandered.  I will also make a final note that fantasy books clearly based on western Europe in shape, history, and mores allow authors to use shorthand in establishing the world, and it can be a serious crutch when, like here, the author does not spend enough time developing the fantasy world and relies too heavily on our own understanding of history to do the work.

O6: A book with a plant in the title or on the cover.

Red Mars

Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

For centuries, the barren, desolate landscape of the red planet has beckoned to humankind. Now a group of one hundred colonists begins a mission whose ultimate goal is to transform Mars into a more Earthlike planet. They will place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels drilled into the mantle will create stupendous vents of hot gases. But despite these ambitious goals, there are some who would fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.

I will be honest: the reason I had it on my list as a book to finish in 2018 is because I started it last year, got about a third of the way through and just gave up and did not want to finish. It was not good! I was initially misled, which didn't help, into thinking that it would be about the murder that takes place in the prologue, like a Martian dinner mystery, which it definitely WAS NOT.

Also, the other thing I struggled with in the first section was the significant Ayn Rand overtones for the "first hundred" where everyone is this super smart person who insists that they're the right person to make decisions for everybody else.  I mean, they vet all these people and on a mission that is like a knife's edge of failure, and before you even get to mars you already want to start a revolution, disengage entirely from the Earth people supporting you, completely rehaul the design of your living accommodations and just make this shit up as you go?? It seemed not only very short sighted, but also extraordinarily presumptuous for any one of them to assume that their ideas were any good in relation to the actual reality of being on Mars. How was a team of scientists and governments on Earth working cooperatively going to be any worse for the planet than some random Mensa type who summarily decides what should be done before even getting there?

There were, in fact, far too few mechanical difficulties - it was actually distracting how easy it was for them to set up a colony: oh we have everlasting power, and machines that don't break down, and even though the whole planet is freezing and icy and uninhabitable, no one ever dies from it, or has an accident, or is so tired they fall asleep at the wheel and make a crater. It's just like, oh, we built a house! Oh, we set up windmills! Oh, we separated into like, fifteen small encampments, and none of them gets mysteriously wiped off the map.  There are a lot of comparisons in the book to the discovery of America (which makes sense) but also there are a lot of colonies in America that just died out for totally unknown reasons.  I mean if we want to use that analogy we should be discovering dead Martian colonists for the next thousand years and frankly in the course of this book there are no major disasters except essentially the man-made ones with the immigration nonsense. Even the months-long dust storm is just an inconvenience, ho hum, we have literally no visibility for months, but it never craps up our balloon, and we're still able to lock on to a homing beacon.  Even the people who go mad actually turn out just to be very foresighted about the upcoming arguments over Martian development. COME ON.

And also where are they getting all of this food from? Food doesn't become a scarce resource until like 80% of the way through the book but how are they getting all of this freaking food for the first fifteen years? Are they growing it? Are they having it shipped from Earth? It is completely unclear to me and also unclear how the colony on the south polar cap manages to survive for 20 years. 

So that was my initial beef, and although I did end up getting more into it by the end (it helped that there was more focus on the socio-political side of things, and geared up into action finally) there were just a lot of issues I had with the book.

 

At one point there's a whole bunch of psychological mumbo-jumbo about opposites and contraries and the psychologist who later goes mad goes into like a whole side issue about marriage being allowed, female adultery being not allowed, male adultery being neither forbidden or not allowed and incest being forbidden and I'm not entirely sure what the whole point of this process is. It's so bizarre and frankly unnecessary to the book and he does it trying to figure out people's personalities too (stabile, labile, extrovert, introvert). I think the author flips too much between science and entertainment and leaning too heavily or one of the other at different times.

One of the other problems is that none of the characters are very likeable. We start off with Frank who indirectly leads to John's murder -

 

SIDEBAR: It is never adequately explained why Frank would manipulate people to the extent that they're ready to murder John. We're never presented with Frank's point of view during John's life except that brief excerpt in the prologue.  I mean, but even in John's section of the book, we're givin some indication that he's not being told stuff, but because he doesn't even notice he's not being told stuff, we don't even know what we're missing!  By the end of the book Frank's doing just about the same things politically that John was trying to do and trying to create a separate Mars, and it was never clear to me that they had different goals/objectives in the first place, aside from all that unnecessary nonsense about both wanting to date Maya. Don't even get me started on that. END SIDEBAR

 

- John whose first man shtick begins the longer "civilization/detective" portion, Maya, who flips back and forth between the two of them and is incredibly unlikable as a result, Arkady, who incites revolution at the very beginning and yet doesn't really seem to fill up to that, Nadia, who does robots, Ann, who's another whiny bitch in a book that doesn't need more whiny bitches, Simon, who's a wet rag, Sax, who is monotonic the entire time, and Hiroko, who leaves before we ever get a chance to know her and frankly doesn't deserve all of the accolades the other first hundred seem to give her because Frank's right which is that she just left like, 10% of the way into this rather than deal with other people. And the fact that she has been bearing children spliced with all of the other people's donor material is briefly mentioned but then entirely dropped and frankly it's a disgusting invasion of privacy. Hiroko is no one's hero. 

All of these people are obnoxious, Masters of the universe type personalities and I think the book would have been more enjoyable if at least one of the perspectives was from a "normal," i.e., one of these immigrants whose entry we so decry later on. And THAT whole thing didn't make sense to me - even a million people is hardly a drop in a bucket to countries that are apparently so overcrowded Earth is in a constant state of war.  Russia's population right now is 144 million, and the US is 325 million.  There would have to be HUNDREDS of millions of people exported before anyone on Earth would even notice they were gone.  And in the meantime, again, who the fuck is paying for all this? I mean, I appreciated the concept that Mars would basically become a plutocracy, and it has a charming resemblance to the current economic shithole we're pouring ourselves into, but it felt more like the whole thing happened for plot reasons, and not organically through the story. Kinda like the deus ex machina that saves Ann's son, since I know he narrates the second book in the series.

And my last beef (which I know is a surprise since it seems like they are neverending) but how are you going to have a freaking map in the front and not put half of these locations and place names on it?? I was flipping around all over the place especially in the beginning trying to figure out where any of these things were and they are not on the stupid map. Why even have a map at all? In the final portion when they're trying to make their way down to the the South polar cap and they're trying to avoid a giant basin full of ice water I have no idea where this basin ends and begins the map is very unclear about the outlines of it. You and your "map" can go to hell.

09: A book you meant to read in 2018

Bitter Greens

Bitter Greens
by Kate Forsyth

French novelist Charlotte-Rose de la Force has been banished from the court of Versailles by the Sun King, Louis XIV, after a series of scandalous love affairs. At the convent, she is comforted by an old nun, Sœur Seraphina, who tells her the tale of a young girl who, a hundred years earlier, is sold by her parents for a handful of bitter greens...

After Margherita's father steals parsley from the walled garden of the courtesan Selena Leonelli, he is threatened with having both hands cut off, unless he and his wife relinquish their precious little girl. Selena is the famous red-haired muse of the artist Tiziano, first painted by him in 1512 and still inspiring him at the time of his death. She is at the center of Renaissance life in Venice, a world of beauty and danger, seduction and betrayal, love and superstition.

Locked away in a tower, Margherita sings in the hope that someone will hear her. One day, a young man does.

There are a lot of shitty men in this book.  Don't get me wrong, some of the women are cruel, too.  But about two thirds of the way through the book, I was just like, over men.  In particular, Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King, who sounds like a real ass. And let's not forget the Italian man who lined up thirty-nine men to rape Selena's mother.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Bitter Greens is told in three tales: in the French court of the late 1600s, Charlotte-Rose de la Force, the real author behind our most familiar Rapunzel tale, Margherita, an Italian girl in the late 1580s, who is the basis for Rapunzel, and Selena Leonelli, born in the late 1400s, who becomes both the model for Titian and the witch to imprison our Rapunzel.   The book begins with Charlotte-Rose's incarceration at a convent (as opposed to exile in England, which was a fate worse than death, apparently) and frames the Margherita story, which frames the Selena story. 

This was beautifully written - each section is satisfying and meaty, and the heroines (for even Selena is the heroine of her own story) are all, as much as possible, active participants in their own lives. But it's also kind of long, and there's a lot of unpleasant stuff that happens - even to the real life character, Charlotte Rose, like every time we go flashback, she's undergoing some new humiliation.  Seriously, TWO men whose families kidnap them to avoid them marrying her? That's impressive.

It's still a good book, but I definitely did not understand why anyone would even want to be at the French court, it sounds like a complete hellhole, full of drama and backstabbing and people who hate you and constantly trying to stay on the good side of a terrible king. I've read another (fiction) book that revolved around the witchcraft and sorcery scandal and purge of King Louis' court - The Oracle Glass by Judith Merkle. The tone of that felt kind of the same, and I was kind of like, why would anyone subject themselves to that?  Was non-court life so much worse?  I do think that some of the lengthy Charlotte-Rose parts could have been excised without much impact though, since it's a lot of humiliations and degradations one after the other, and more time spent on the things she enjoyed - the salon, and frankly, we don't even get to meet her husband.  That might have made it feel a little less unbalanced.  I also didn't get the sense that Charlotte-Rose thought much of god except that (in her darker times) that he'd forgotten her, so some of the drama about converting to Catholicism felt low-stakes.  Overall, there are happy endings, three of them, just as a fairy tale should have, but it can get kind of depressing first. 

I still enjoyed this, and thought it was a very well written, interesting book about a real person and a well-done integration of fantasy into history; and I'm already putting another of her books on my to-be-read list: a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set in Nazi Germany. 

And speaking of which, I saw Miracle of the White Stallions, and it was perfect - cheesy, with a distracting American accent for the hero, and German accents for everyone else, particularly the villains, and plenty of shot of horse dancing.  Two thumbs up!


 22: A book with a title that contains "salty," "sweet," "bitter," or "spicy"
1.08