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April

13 - The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling 14 - End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland by Haruki Murakami 15 - City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett 16 - East of West: The Apocalypse, Year One by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta

May

17 - Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle 18 - Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera 19 - The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine 20 - Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

June

21 - Cinder House by Freya Marske 22 - The Starlit Wood (ed. Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe) 23 - What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher 24 - Umineko WHEN THEY CRY Episode 1: Legend of the Golden Witch by Ryukishi07 and Kei Natsumi 25 - The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar 26 - Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky 27 - The Summer War by Naomi Novik

I picked this up off the strength of a friend’s review (though it took me long enough to). Mohamed has been slightly hit-and-miss for me – I got Beneath the Rising after really liking hearing her speak at a con, but didn’t care for it, then picked up The Butcher of the Forest a couple years later and adored it. Having now read this, I can probably set Rising aside as an outlier and just call myself a fan – rushed and somewhat weak final act aside, this was a really excellent book.

In a fantasy-World-War-Two sort of setting, Alefret is the founder and former leader of the Varkal Empire’s pacifist movement. ‘Former’ because the book opens after he has been imprisoned for some time, arrest after a ‘friendly’ bomb killed many of his friends and left him short a leg. After months of intermittent interrogation and torture livened up by being used as a test subject for experimental regenerative therapy (it seems to be working on him, having killed every other subject), he finds himself visited by a general with an offer – a chance to help finally, bloodlessly end the war that’s driven the nation around him to ruin. All it will take is helping engineer the victory of the empire which has been torturing him, and trusting implicitly in the bloody-minded fanatic who will be accompanying him.

The first two-thirds of this book are essentially a twisted quest narrative. Two odd bedfellows, thrown together by circumstance and forced to travel together despite intense personal antipathy, because only by cooperating can they hope to end the apocalyptic war that has already killed millions and reduced the nation to ruin. It’s just that in this case instead of bonding and forming an intense, fire-forged friendship as they learn to appreciate each other’s virtues, Alefret spends the book having it reinforced at every opportunity that his minder is exactly as bad as he thought, if not worse. That he has humanizing quirks and moments of sentiment doesn’t mean much when he tries to kill almost everyone they meet who isn’t in uniform. It’s a well-done dark twist on the formula.

The cast expands when they reach the army camp and then – especially – the enemy’s flying capital city. Even though none of them are given the same depth and nuance as the two leads, the book does a really excellent job making each of them feel distinct, sympathetic and human. Which is pretty core to the whole artistic project, so I’m very glad it managed to pull it off.

The primary theme of the book is, to summarize, ‘being a committed pacifist sucks so fucking bad, is incredibly hard, and when things get tough basically no one appreciates it. This all goes triple in wartime.’ Refusing to kill or hurt people doesn’t win Alefret any clean victories or lead to the easy redemption of his enemies. It doesn’t even leave him with much of an aura of moral authority or the serenity of a committed ideologue. He spends the book suffering for his cause, despite the world presenting no end of arguments for justified violence (mostly in the form of murdering his travelling companion in his sleep). His wrestling with the temptation is a real highlight, as the book manages to avoid feeling too didactic in either direction here.

I absolutely adored...99% of the setting, probably. early-20th-century-adjacent fantasy with pillbug-tanks and medical wasps with drug-bearing stings and flying fortress-cities is an aesthetic I fell for instantly, and the book manages to get across the perspective of someone who lives in this world but has never had much formal schooling or reason to be instructed on the theory of how things work wonderfully (and so minimizes unnecessary exposition well). Mohamed apparently researched the Eastern Front of WW2 somewhat extensively while writing this, and it does pay off in how well she depicts the apocalyptic desolation left behind the lines in every direction, and the impenetrable fog of war that leaves even high-ranking officers (let alone Alefret) with only the vaguest idea of what the state of play is. I also appreciate that, despite that inspiration, the book is not in any way a fantastical allegory for WW2 and – with the exception of Varkal being a warmongering, expansionist empire that has at last bitten off more than it can chew – there arebasically no 1:1 analogues anyway. Med’ariz – while being clearly morally preferable to Varkal in basically every other way – actually being much more enthusiastic about eugenics was I thought a nice touch. Alefret realizing that in this glorious, prosperous and beautiful flying city he would have been euthanized at birth was a well-done beat.

Unfortunately – though perhaps unsurprisingly for a story drawing heavily on the Battle of Stalingrad for inspiration – the book did not do a very good job sticking the landing. The whole finale felt rushed, cramped and full of incredibly convenient coincidences to make it come together, the actions of several pivotal characters don’t make much sense, and the setting clearly warps and distorts to make the action ending the war even possible (and even then, I don’t think it really justifies it). The big but incredibly last minute revelations that this is secretly one of those ‘lost sci fi colony effort with lost technology instead of magic’ settings felt both bathetic and (except for the subplot about how the flying city works which literally didn’t need to be there except for this payoff) basically needless. All of which are black marks against the book, but I can’t really find it in me to blame it too hard for failing to come up with a way to end an industrial total war between militarized states through pacifist activism.

This was another book I picked up largely on account of being nominated for a Best Novel Hugo. 700-page tomes that start with multiple rather generic-looking fantasy maps otherwise being something I rarely have much enthusiasm for these days. This was, at absolute minimum, an incredibly different read than I went in expecting from those traits – nothing I really fell in love with, but something I finished without resenting the amount of time spent reading it. Though I’m not sure I’m invested enough to keep reading through two more books of the same length, especially since the plot now seems to be leaving the entertaining intrigue and mystery behind for something a bit more generic epic fantasy.

The book is set on the great palace-island where the imperial court resides full-time and the seven great monasteries all maintain palaces housing various high administrators. Neema Kra, a common-born genius archivist and historian, is the emperor’s High Scholar and pet nerd and held in universal contempt by roughly the entire rest of the court. As the emperor’s scheduled abdication approaches, her cherished plans to spend the next decade following him into retirement and writing his official biography fall apart before her eyes – first by an old rival appearing with a dirty secret from their school days that would end her career, and then the suspiciously convenient murder of that same rival the night after she aggravated the Emperor and humiliated Neema in front of the whole court. Forcibly volunteered to replace her as one of the contestants for the throne, Neema has to split her time between competing in various horrifically dangerous trials and investigating a murder that only grows more suspicious and conspiracy-laden with each new thing she learns.

Which is still a woefully incomplete summary and ignoring several very important plot threads. My irritation with the book’s length aside, it’s not as if it doesn’t use the pages.

But of those many plot threads, the mystery is probably the most important, and is in any case definitely the strongest. It is very entertainingly twisty and full of onion-ish reveals in a way I always appreciate for a story which actually has the time to space them out. Most of the clues even seem fairly earned and arrive without too much obvious twisting of circumstance for narrative convenience, even! As often occurs in stories with layers upon layers of dark secrets and nested reveals, some fairly consequential actions by characters near the heart of the mystery do become rather difficult to justify once you discover their actual deal and motivations – something the story resolves by steadily sanding away every interesting personality trait and bit of apparent nuance the main villain has in favour of pure self-aggrandizing evil and having a prophecy to follow as the story goes on. Which isn’t exactly elegant, but it does at least get the job done and minimizes the number of people with the problem. I just dislike it turning out that someone acted the way they did because a vision told them to rather intensely as a big character-defining reveal.

Which is a shame, because for most of the middle half of the book said villain actually seems to be a really interesting character with some compelling internal contradictions. Most of the main cast is at least entertaining and usually even interesting, though I found the book’s sense of humour as conveyed through several of them very hit-or-miss (and with a bad habit of repeating the same jokes several more times than they could really sustain). Aside from some (unusually justified, admittedly) miscommunication-induced melodrama I even found the romantic subplot pretty fun and the two leads’ dynamic more endearing than insufferable.

There are plenty of side characters that are much less memorable, or are just a plot device with 1-3 bullet points of personality, but that’s inevitable in these sorts of projects. Especially when it’s supposed to launch a trilogy and needs to introduce and set up characters for thousands of pages down the line.

Nothing that is really going to wow or amaze with its originality or the sublime beauty of its execution, but it got me through the book. The most striking (positively, anyway) thing about the whole story is actually the narration – the regular sections that switch from fuzzy close-ish third person around Neema to the incredibly opinionated internal monologue of the Raven, the patron deity who spends most of the book fluttering around Neema and trying to prod her into carrying out the will of the gods. It’s an angle I wish the book had leaned into much more, really (though the comedic side of the narration was already wearing a bit thin).

As for the other main plot threads – well, the whole operatic family tragedy and intertwining attempts at revenge for a horribly murdered princess a decade before was in principle great but a bit underbaked and could have used a bit more clarity and focus. Still, using the entire prologue to set up what clearly seems to be the start of a heroine’s epic fantasy ascent to greatness only for it to be a brutal fakeout whose consequences echo through the whole book was lovely, possibly the single best idea in the whole thing.

The tournament to determine the next Emperor on the other hand...

The most succinct (if uncharitable) way I can put it is that this whole very prominent and important plot thread feels like a YA novel that was hastily polished and punched up to qualify as adult fantasy. The way emperors are decided makes no sense whatsoever except as a way to justify such high-stakes fantasy tournament trials. The politics of the empire as a whole (both the dynamics of the imperial court and what we see of different power centres across the empire and how they interact) make no sense at all as soon as you start thinking about them. Which would be mostly fine, if so very much of the story didn’t occur directly adjacent to those elements and keep inviting me to notice what paper-thin ISO generic fantasy worldbuilding they are. Even the great revelations and magic set pieces of the finale feel like something from a high school D&D campaign.

Picked semi-randomly out of the list of books I already have out or on hold at the library (I have a problem), but all near the front of the list for prioritization.

Kyrie remains my favorite of the older generation and it really isn't close.

This was the last novella nominated for a Hugo this year on my list. Not at all one I would have read without the commitment to read everything shortlisted for the award, and in this case for good reason. Newitz is apparently a very successful journalist and author in a few different fields, but the name meant absolutely nothing to me before I opened this. Rather, this is very clearly cozy found-family fiction of an incredibly blatant (not to say formulaic) kind, which is very rarely to my taste. As, indeed, this wasn’t.

Automatic Noodle is set in the ruined and rebuilding San Francisco after a bloody war won California’s independence from the United States, and concerned with the robotic staff of a ghost kitchen whose owner stopped paying rent or utilities on no notice. Knocked out of power-saving stasis during a light natural disaster, they find themselves as forgotten by their ‘employer’ as the restaurant around them. So, with some light fraud and the benefit of a system that doesn’t really give a shit as long as bills are paid, they take ownership of the little restaurant for themselves and set out to make some food they can be proud of and that someone might actually enjoy enough to be a repeat customer. There are then a variety of subplots as each main character overcomes their trauma and learns to trust their found family, their amazing noodles are the subject of an astroturfed anti-robot campaign, the restaurant is turned into a welcoming and vibrant community space – you get the idea.

Which is one of my main complaints with the book on a structural level, really. There are just far too many subplots and individual character arcs stuffed into a novella for a single one of them to get any time to breathe. Most of the main cast is lucky to get two scenes establishing and progressing through their arcs before it’s all neatly resolved through the power of found family and a job where you can express yourself. The result feels more like reading the summary or overview of a story than the thing itself – the book would have been incredibly well-served to cut the ensemble or at least some of the other subplots.

On which note – I accept that any story which is outright marketed as cozy isn’t going to have much in the way of high-stakes emotionally brutalizing conflicts. But given that, I really don’t understand why the book spends quite so much time placing large and sinister-looking guns on various mantelpieces only for them to never actually come up again. The very first chapters of the book establish that the robots are only quasi-free second-class citizens, and their ability to run the restaurant in their own right is entirely the result of bureaucratic indifference and neglect. It also establishes that vigilante anti-robot mobs are a real and physical danger that it’s reasonable to worry about. Neither of these things ever actually matters in the slightest. Which is deeply unsatisfying on a storytelling level, and also just a confusing use of very limited and viciously fought-over wordcount.

The conflict-aversion is doubly odd because it isn’t as if this is an entirely utopian or even especially fluffy and positive setting. The San Francisco of the book is something of a bombed-out and half-rebuilt ruin, the war of independence against the rest of the US ended roughly five minutes ago with many refugees and much bad blood, and California itself is full of hypocritical and byzantine restrictions on and discrimination against both robots and those refugees (including the token human major character). The world is chock full of death, misery and structural oppression – but by truly stupendous luck it only ever presents itself to the protagonists and their noodle shop in the form of setbacks that demoralize someone for precisely long enough to require coming together and opening up to each other for comfort and support. For a despised and discriminated-against minority, the book’s robots manage to get through the entire plot without encountering a single actual bigot (even the online review bomber who’s the closest thing the book has to a villain turns out to be a cynical CIA psyop trying to destabilize California. This really doesn’t actually matter).

The book is not even slightly subtle about using ‘robot’ as a broad metaphor for various kinds of structural oppression, with each different character using it for a different one. Which is a proud and storied sci fi tradition that I really can’t hold against it, though I do wish it was a bit less blatant at a few points.

Which is, I suppose, part and parcel with how impossibly Californian this is. Or not even just Californian. This is a book dedicated – without a trace of irony or cynicism – to the city of San Francisco in all its grandeur, and has almost precisely the worldview and commonsense assumptions you would guess from knowing just that fact. It’s a bit charming, often insufferable (the real villain of the story is the future’s answer to Russian bot farms on twitter? Seriously?) and always kind of fascinating.

This is the second (or the third and fourth, if you go by volumes instead of episodes of content) part of the famous visual novel’s manga adaptation. Of eight, which means that at my current pace of ‘start the next episode when I’ve written the review of the last one’ I just might manage to finish this whole project before there’s snow on the ground. Impossible to say if the time commitment is worth it at 1/4 of the way through – and this absolutely needs to be read as a complete series – or if it’s even potentially worthwhile for people who don’t make terrible time management choices when picking what to read next. I am enjoying it so far though, and this episode was a substantial step up from the first in basically every respect. So I’m hopeful.

The plot of the episode is the same as the first – the bloody, horror-filled weekend at the Ushiromiya estate that ends with every living soul upon the island brutally murdered or vanishing into thin air – but a different iteration of it, with different characters receiving more or less focus and events progressing in very different ways to the same ultimate end. This is ostensibly for the benefit of the version of Battler from the first episode, now watching events from outside reality with Beatrice as she toys with him and tries to make him admit the supremacy of her magic.

Though really that’s far less striking than the shifts of focus and POV that don’t necessarily have anything to do with changes to what happened as opposed to just showing us all the vital information Battler was too unlucky or oblivious to notice the first time around. For example, we spend positively luxurious amounts of time without Battler being on screen at all, following characters I actually like and am interested in.

Okay, that’s unfair – Battler himself is actually far more tolerable and interesting this episode, at least in the final chapters. But the quality of the character writing in general is just leagues better than before, with Shannon especially being the de facto protagonist of the first arc or two and doing an absolutely incredible job of it. Even Beatrice is far more of a character than a vaguely murderous plot device this episode, even if that character is so far mostly ‘cackling sadistic evil sorceress’. Give her a new wardrobe and no one would bat an eye at her turning into a giant snake to try and eat Conan.

On which note: in addition to murder mystery and occult horror, this is apparently also a shounen battle manga? It’s apparently well-known and in fact one of the more memetic things about the whole property, but man I was really not prepared for Shannon and Kanon to start doing supernatural martial arts and fighting summoned demons. The Ushiromiya heirs and their kids really are just utterly oblivious about the help, I guess. Thankfully the action scenes here are short enough not to overstay their welcome (I have a fairly low tolerance for drawn out back-and-forth punch/slash-ups) and manage to be fun here.

Despite the number of horrific and gory murders in episode one, this episode also much more of a horror story in the latter chapters. Or, at least, much more horrifying. Which is part and parcel of Beatrice being more of a character here and the story leaning much more enthusiastically into the eldritch and occult, but still. Beatrice really luxuriates in the potential to do cosmically sadistic and fucked up shit with time loops.

The art of this episode is more or less (though often leaning towards less) the same style as in episode one, but apparently most episodes have different illustrators? Whatever the exact cause, I found the art more striking and often easier to follow than in episode one. The character design of the non-Beatrice witches does feel like it clashes a bit with everyone else, but I suppose that’s intentional, otherwise this feels like a strict improvement over the previous volumes.

The witches themselves have a fairly clear plot device function, but at the moment I’m waiting to see if and how they start meshing into the actual story. And if future episodes can avoid becoming insufferably self-aware and meta about it, I suppose.

Picked this up because I generally like Vo’s work and the library happened to have a copy. Despite the high fantasy setting and aesthetics, it’s probably closer to her urban fantasy/magical 20th century works in tone and feel. Which is not at all a complaint – I genuinely enjoy those books, and I thoroughly enjoyed this as well.

Vitrine is a demon, though of the less malicious and more soft-hearted variety. The city of Azril is her beloved and her masterpiece, carefully and discreetly shaped over centuries from dilapidated pirate haven to glittering metropolis – wild and decadent and absolutely, positively teeming with every sort of delightful sin. So much so that some invisible line is crossed or limit breached – the book absolutely refuses to give an exact cause – and a choir of angels descends from on high to reduce it to a field of salt and ash. Helpless to stop them, Vitrine can at least put all her rage into a curse on a particularly unlucky angel, barring him from Heaven and trapping him in her orbit until she releases her hold. Something she’s often less than happy about, as she grieves amid the ruins for years on end. It’s only as generations pass, and through both their efforts something new begins to grow and flourish in the ruins of Old Azril, that her hatred begins giving way to something more ambiguous.

This is a shamelessly sentimental and introspective story, and a bit of a dreamlike one at that – it’s about Azril and the slow romance with the angel as well, but the heart and soul of the story is Vitrine and her emotions. Going by the afterword, this was written as a lockdown project and – while it was simultaneously the least obvious about it and by far the best of those I have yet read – it is not hard to see the feeling of the world collapsing beneath your feet and processing the losses in near-total isolation animating it.

As a dramatic, exaggerated study of grief, the book works very well. The mythic-feeling prose and register suits the tone and subject nicely, and Vitrine’s internal monologue is more emotionally affecting than the vast majority of things I’ve read recently. My only complaint is that I wish Vitrine had been allowed to be a bit uglier and less sympathetic in her wallowing. She’s tempted to lash out and do something cruel or destructive from despair or rage at the idea of old Azril being forgotten at several points, but the only really questionable things she does on the page are all directed at her angel. It feels a bit oddly squeamish, given how exaggerated the story’s emotional palette is and the fact that she’s literally a demon.

This is I suppose probably best called a romantasy novella? Because there is absolutely a slow-burn (insofar as it can be, given the page count) enemies-to-lovers angel-and-demon romance that makes up the spine of this book and is the core of its ending, but it’s still intertwined with a broader plot and only secondary so far as themes and emphasis go (the fact that Azril will always be Vitrine’s first and greatest love is even kind of key to the whole climax). Hardly my wheelhouse, but the romance more or less landed as far as emotional beats went, and was even compelling at points. I’m not quite sure where I land on the complete lack of any actual conversation about the whole city-destruction thing – in a sense it feels accurate that any sort of continuing relationship after one party’s horribly wounded another does involve talking around it and politely acting like you’ve forgotten after a point. But I do find it rather unsatisfying, especially insofar as you treat the angel as an actual character. Being an active participant in massacring (at minimum) tens of thousands is treated almost as a given for him, something he had no thoughts or feelings about and which occurred before he was any actual moral agent, but which he still inherited the moral debt for. You could do something where angels really are divine automata and it’s only Vitrine’s curse that made him a person, but the book doesn’t, really, and the result feels superficial.

The other way it tracks that this was a pandemic book is that its dearly in love with crowds, cities, festivals, and the great heaving mess of humanity in general. The actual meat of the narrative is a twinned history of Azril, both it’s first rise to greatness and the new city which grows up in the ruins of the old. The snapshots of each city we get across the generations are more tourist guide than urban planning study, but I am one of roughly ten people in the world who think ‘fantasy city urban planning case study’ sounds like a fun read so I can hardly blame the book for that. Those snapshots are vivid and compelling, and do an excellent job selling a living (or dying) city that you could easily fall in love with.