Going For Baroque

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We are living in a golden age of fantasy. Alix Harrow, Tasha Suri, and now, Hannah Kaner. I read and liked Godkiller--her debut, but A Snake Among Swans is on a different level. Godkiller was good, A Snake Among Swans is excellent. It is rich, it is propulsive. Kaner weaves an intricate web of politcal entanglements but so deftly you’re never confused about which faction is which or who is getting stabbed in the back.

When Tilde’s land is conquered, she is the last heir left. She volunteers to wed their aging, deteriorating warlord conqueror, planning to stab him in his sleep and die a martyr to the cause. Instead, she finds an old magic, and realizes that her death will only plunge her people further into the abyss of war. So she chooses to live. As she plays the delicate dance of politics in a court where her allies are few, will she become the tyrant she swore to kill?

Make no mistake, this is a dark, dark fantasy. The magic is bloody; the wars are dirty; pay attention to the trigger warnings at the beginning--Kaner is not here to play. But what a treatise on power, sacrifice, betrayal and aging. For such difficult content, this book went down remarkably easy--I was hooked and couldn’t stop reading.

Recommended for fans of The Jasmine Throne trilogy, King Lear, and all those really messed up German fairytales.

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Demon Star is a debut Science Fiction novel. And when you say it’s for people who liked Gideon the Ninth and Dune I pay attention. Those comparisons may have done the novel a disservice however. It’s a solid debut, but definitely a mixed bag overall for me with enough structural problems that I can’t give it an unqualified recommendation.

The best thing about this book is the premise, which felt fresh and hooked me from the beginning. Six gods rule over the planet, where the humans who serve them protect the population from demonic possession. Once a year, the sun is blotted out and the gods come and demand a harvest. Those who are taken in the harvest never return. Except Ysira. She was taken while pregnant with a son. She came back, and brought a demon with her. Ten years later, her son may have the chance to change the world.

The place descriptions were also a point of excellence in this novel--I felt like I could picture the Scar, the White Cathedral, and all the other wonderful environs the author pulled us through. The characters were hit or miss for me. Ysira was excellent--her arc was well drawn, and she was a fascinating character study. I enjoyed spending time with her. Neri is supposed to be quite young and I didn’t always feel that he acted in an age appropriate way. I don’t like to call characters unlikeable, but I do want to enjoy spending time with them. Jacen was a wet blanket and often I had to muscle through his chapters.

Which brings me to the main problem I had with this book. The pacing. The first half hooks you, it moves, the action is rising. But then, in the middle, it really becomes a slog. At four hundred pages, this book had some flab to lose, and I think it would have been better for it. Finally, as it is a debut, there were places where the plot got a little muddy. Secondary characters began to blur together; I lost track of what was motivating the characters, and it all just became a little confusing.

I think it’s a promising debut from an author who needed a little more polishing and a heavier editorial hand on this one.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I had found Jonathan Wiswell’s short fiction a little twee for my personal taste (it’s very high quality twee, but I’m not the right reader for it), so I was pleasantly surprised by Someone You Can Build a Nest In, and I was delighted to be given the opportunity to review an advance copy of The Dragon Has Some Complaints.

The best thing about this book by far is the narrator. A three headed dragon--each head with a distinct personality and voice, is not picking your narrator on easy mode. And Centerhead is such an absolute delight. He’s grumpy, he’s vulnerable but doesn’t want to show it; he’s a whole mood. And the other heads are just as delightful. Wiswell does a fantastic job with the relationships among them, and it’s the absolute highlight of this book. In truth, I’d have rated this book 3.5 stars, but it got rounded up for the absolute charm and skill Wiswell brings to Centerhead’s narration. (I read this digitally--I hope the audiobook narrator does this justice. If they do, it will be an all timer.)

Garrodigh is a feral and wounded dragon. He scrounges up a living in a forest, but his wounds mean he can’t fly, and he doesn’t remember how he got his wounds. He’s down to three heads, and under cannonfire, when he poses as a wounded tame dragon to con a few meals out of the humans before he eats them. But then he meets Rania, who is determined to heal him and let him fly again. As he finds his place in this new world, he’ll have to fight to keep his rider and his new friends safe.

The plot is fun, and it has its twists and turns. It surprised me a few times, but there were a few times I found the world building a little confusing or inconsistent. But the beating heart of this book was the relationship between dragon and rider, and I found myself wishing for a little more edge, like Wiswell brought to SYCBNI. The singleminded focus on dragon and rider also made some of the other characters a little blurry.

Recommended for fans of T.J. Klune, and the Dealing with Dragons series.

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I’ve been on the Rhiannon Grist train for a while now--ever since Queen of the High Fields. Grist writes lyrical, beautiful, and atmospheric horror inspired by folktales of the British Isles. Queen of the High Fields was a jewelbox of a novella--a whole world with huge characters and stakes somehow fit into a small package. The point is, I have eagerly awaited Grist’s next effort, and I was also excited to see what she would do with a little more space.

Home Sick begins with Tamsin moving to the countryside to escape her soul sucking job. But the cottage that she bought, sight unseen, is actually a duplex. 1a and 1b--and something is, off, about the woman who lives next door. As Tamsin struggles with her own mental health, and the usual stress of settling into a new life. She’ll have to worry about more than dry rot and bad electricity.

As someone who recently moved, Grist has perfectly captured the frisson of “this new house will change me into a better version of myself” but also “new space, same struggles.” Tamsin is not likeable, but she is easy to root for, and the supporting cast of characters are lively and bright.

Recommended for fans of Sarah Pinsker, Caitlin Starling, and Shirley Jackson.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️I am relatively new to reading and reviewing romance, but I was thrilled when I got the chance to read and review Alexandra Vasti’s new book The Scandal of the Summer. Alexandra Vasti has absolutely rocketed to the top of my list of favorite romance authors on the strength of her characters and commitment to having a good time. When you read a Vasti romance you know you are in good hands--she loves the genre and she will safely guide you through it, sidestepping the worst tropes and carefully selecting the best. The spice level is above “I'd listen to the audio book with my parents in the room, but below “wouldn't want to admit I read it to my parents” (which is probably a good thing because they follow this blog--Hi Mom!) [a.k.a. It’s open door, but on the tamer end of open door.]

Despite being period romances, Vasti’s works masterfully thread the needle between “it’s a modern romance, but everyone’s in puffy sleeves,” and “a woman’s place is in the kitchen.” Her heroines are going to “love” and “honor,” but obey is right out. I’ve now read every Vasti I could get my hands on (in a period of about three weeks), and I think Scandal might be my new favorite. Our heroine, a kind soul who cannot keep her mouth shut and just wants to be left alone with her art, but also wants to please everyone is so charming, and the hero, a smuggler with a heart of gold, have incredible chemistry together. By the end I felt like they were my best friends. Together they’ll face down danger, scandal, their worst fears, and maybe fall in love.

If you’re a fan of Vasti, I’m honestly not sure why you’re still reading this review instead of the book. Recommended for fans of Our Flag Means Death, Brigerton, and Jane Austen.

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Ever since I read Susan Casey’s The Underworld, I’ve been searching for that high. A book that is full of interesting information, larger than life characters, and a high stakes true story. Lightning Beneath The Sea appeared to be a follow on in that tradition. It did have all three of those things, and I enjoyed reading it, but it didn’t quite achieve the same greatness that Casey did.

Lightning Beneath the Sea tells the story of Cyrus Field, an American Businessman who, after a chance meeting, became obsessed with laying the first transatlantic submarine cable. It took him over a decade, most of his considerable fortune, and four tries.

There are a lot of bits of the story that are hang on the edge of your seat, and some of the characters (Wildman Whitehouse) are indeed larger than life, but the author devotes the same care and attention to Field’s many trips across the Atlantic, and other minutiae that are more historically relevant than narratively compelling, which makes the pacing stop and go, and prevents this book from being a truly riveting read. If you are already interested in this history, you’ll likely enjoy this book, but I’m not sure it will make a convert out of an ambivalent reader.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The Warm Hands of Ghosts was one of my absolute favorite books of 2024, so I jumped for joy when Netgalley gave me the opportunity to review Katherine Arden’s latest--The Unicorn Hunters. I jumped again when I realized that all the things I loved about The Warm Hands of Ghosts were also present in The Unicorn Hunters: a rich and vibrant historical inspired setting, a wild and ferocious magic, and richly drawn characters.

Duchess Anne of Brittany is between a rock and a hard place. France is at the door, ready to bring her home under its overbearing control. Her small army will certainly fall before the might of the French forces, and she promised her father before he died that she would never marry the French king. Maximilian of Austria has promised her protection in exchange for her hand in marriage, but Anne needs time. Time she does not have. When she conjures up a unicorn hunt as a distraction and heads into an enchanted forest, she sets in motion a series of events that will change history.

What I loved the most about this book (and Warm Hands) is how wild the magic Arden builds into her world is. It’s scary and powerful, and absolutely out of control. I also love how Anne is a strong female character without being a strong female character (tm). She’s got might and spunk, but she also loves her sister, and embroidery, and pretty dresses. This book is the complete package.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ A Fortune of Sand is a literary historical fiction novel. Unfortunately I went into it thinking it was a gothic novel. Perhaps this unfairly prejudiced the review that follows, but ultimately I thought this book was extremely average. The characterization was fine. The pacing was a little spotty, but not enough so that I got hung up anywhere.

Marjorie’s family made their fortunes making glass for windshields. Marjorie is the freewheeling youngest daughter, constantly at odds with the more straightlaced members of her family. She gets accepted to an artistic residency run by a tall dark and handsome man, and something isn’t right about it.

The best thing about this novel was the sense of place and atmosphere. Detroit in the 1920s leaps off the page. Unfortunately I kept waiting for the magic, or the whodunit to really kick off, but this book is straight literary fiction. The weakest part for me was the ending. I felt like we never got the pay off for some of the character development we spent the whole book waiting for, and I think I’d feel that way even if I’d gone in knowing it was literary and not genre.

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I had a mixed reaction to Douglas Brunt’s Rudolf Diesel biography, but it was very readable and he had picked an interesting subject. His latest, about Emmanuel Nobel (nephew to Alfred Nobel, of the prizes), is a much improved effort. Once again, Brunt has chosen a fascinating, and as he persuasively argues, under known historical figure. The fascinating story of the Nobel family carries this book--Emmanuel Nobel’s petroleum empire was built from nothing, and at his zenith of power, he was mentioned alongside Standard Oil. But when the Russian Revolution came, he lost it all, and now it’s been largely forgotten by history.

Brunt’s writing is serviceable. It doesn’t get in the way, but it won’t stir your soul. If you’re not already sold on biographies of business tycoons, this book won’t make you a convert. But if you are interested, you will be entertained.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ I am a dyed in the wool Ann Leckie fan. I’ve been around since Ancillary Justice, and Raven Tower is one of my top ten books of this century so far. Radiant Star is a solid, but not transcendent entry in her larger oeuvre. Readers who are hoping Leckie has written another classic, will find merely a very solid entry in her Imperial Radch series. In some ways, Leckie has done herself a disservice by writing two modern classics, which means a book that is only solid feels like something of a let down. Many authors would be thrilled to have written a book this innovative, poignant, and solidly plotted.

We find ourselves on Ooioiaa, a city deep underneath the ice, living in a dome, on a rogue planet at the fringes of the Imperial Radch. The local religion is focused around The Temporal Location of the Radiant Star, where mummified bodies become living saints and pilgrims queue for hours. The Imperial Radch have decreed that only one more will be allowed to join their number, and as tumult sweeps across the empire, the city will be thrown into upheaval.

I found this book more cerebral than some of Leckie’s prior work, its pacing almost reminded me of Station Eleven. However, as it is significantly longer than Station Eleven, and the prose are not as elevated, there were times when it dragged a bit. However, I enjoyed the world--the underwater city was well drawn and felt fresh. And, as always, Leckie is working with important and timely themes.

This book does have spoilers for the original Ancillary trilogy, so if that’s important to you, read those first.

It’s hard when the book is just not good. But the bottom line is, I cannot recommend The Great Houses of Pill Hill, and I’m only ready to lay about a third of the blame for that at the foot of the author. It is true that this is not a good book. The pacing alternates between manic and glacial for reasons known only to the author. The dialogue is stilted. The characters are bland. I’ll lay all that at the foot of the author. But I really want to sit the editor down and make them read the multipage scene where our heroine tries to convince a psychiatrist to pick a paint color for his office and he refuses, and make them explain to me why it made the final draft. This book reads like a first draft that the editor never touched. 

Finally, I have questions for the marketing team. This book was acquired by Soho Crime. A crime fiction imprint. This book is fundamentally uninterested in crime fiction; the author is fundamentally uninterested in writing a crime novel. It spends about as much time on modern art, Ancient Egypt, and a road trip with no bearing on the plot as it does on the mystery. But it’s marketed as a mystery novel. This is false advertising. If you go into this book expecting a mystery novel you will be disappointed. 

I will actually write a review of this book, but all you really need to know is that I am 34 years old and I stayed up an hour and a half past my bed time to finish this book. On a work night.

Some of you are already sold on this book. Here, let me try again. Corporate Samurai in Space.

Another chunk of you are probably now sold on this book. For anyone still on the fence--Fonda Lee does not disappoint. If you’re a fan of her Green Bones Saga (The Godfather but make it fantasy), you will have a great time in her new world. If you haven’t heard of Fonda Lee, welcome. Fonda Lee is one of the masters of epic fantasy working today. Not a lot of people can worldbuild like she can. Her worlds are messy, and complicated, and you can see the layers of history and culture that float just beyond the frame she’s giving you.

I also am obsessed with her character development. Lee’s characters jump off the page. They have bad days and good days and they’re flawed but also heroic. And, well, see the first paragraph. No one can plot like Fonda Lee. I thought I had this all figured out, but she still had some twists and turns up her sleeve for me. I can’t wait to see where this goes next.

Recommended for fans of Brandon Sanderson, Ghost of Yotei, and S.L. Huang.

Who hasn’t seen the Sad Beige Clothes for Sad Beige Children meme? I was excited to get the ARC of Dress Your Baby in Sage and Taupe, because I assumed that it would be a satire of a parenting book, full of laugh out loud moments. Unfortunately I was wrong--this is more serious of a parenting advice book than I expected. There’s the parody quizzes and advice columns sure, but there’s actual advice in there. This leaves the book in something of an unusual place--it's not quite as funny as I’d hope a satire book would be, and it’s a little thinner on the actual advice than I think a parent would actually want.

I also am woefully unqualified to review parenting advice books, as I do not have children, so that also leaves me, as a reviewer, in a bit of an odd spot. I can’t recommend this book to people who are simply amused observers of the sad beige mom phenomena, but I might purchase it as a gift for an expecting mother with the right sense of humor. This is more a gag gift than a reading experience.

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I apparently have carved myself out a niche reviewing nonfiction books about the deep ocean, and I’m not mad about it. I’ve been fascinated by the benthic depths ever since I wrote my ninth grade biology term paper about whale falls, so I guess if the shoe fits... My latest sampling in this microgenre is Jeffrey Marlow’s The Dark Frontier: Unlocking the Secrets of the Deep Sea. This book was a fine introduction to the state of deep sea science, but the biggest problem it has is that The Underworld exists, and if you’re a layperson asking me for a place to start learning about the ocean, I’ll point you towards The Underworld nine times out of ten and twice on Sundays.

However, if you’re someone who has read The Underworld, and are looking for your next underwater facts fix, you could both do worse and better than The Dark Frontier. The content is good on a micro-level at the beginning of the book, but the organization definitely needs some work. Marlow is an academic, and would have been served better by an editor who could keep him a little lighter and brighter, as his tone can tend towards the stuffy. Additionally, about halfway through, this book takes a hard pivot away from the deep sea, and into the conference rooms at the UN as the treaty of the high seas is negotiated. Marlow, unfortunately finds his prose lost in a seemingly endless array of conference center hallways, and the pace becomes glacial.

Ultimately I cannot recommend this to someone who isn’t already quite interested in the science, history, and environmental public policy of the deep ocean.

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As I said on my Instagram--if I had a nickel every time a personal friend published a debut novel with Orbit about a young woman in a corporate environment who was working on deals with Faerie and then messed one up and had to fix it...well I’d only have two nickels but it’s still weird it happened twice. (For those of you keeping score at home, the first entry was Juliet Brooks’ A Fae in Finance.) I joke, but the books are actually very different, and each fun in their own way.

McCarty’s entry is more traditional Fantasy fare (pun intended as Poppy, our main character, is a cook by profession), embracing and in conversation with tropes rather than satirising them. McCarty very deftly places her book in the sweet spot of having all the fun, familiar parts of epic fantasy--faerie princesses, castles, tall dark brooding men, but with just enough of a twist that your brain gets that tantalizing frisson of the unexpected.

This book goes down easy like one of Poppy’s delicious meals (seriously, you’re gonna wanna have snacks on hand while reading), and you can enjoy it as a faerie adventure romp, if you like, but I recommend giving some thought and attention to the themes and message. This book has substance and a point of view--Faeries need humans because humans have a creative spark that Faeries do not--they cannot imagine, engineer, or create. What happens in a society where that is lost? What is the difference between making something by hand for a friend because you care and love them, and doing it because handmade things are seen as a luxury product?

Recommended for fans of Tamora Pierce, T. Kingfisher, and the Food Network.

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I am a huge huge fan of Tana French, let’s get that out of the way. The Likeness is one of the books that I think might be in my DNA if you put it under the microscope. I still count that book as one of the fundamental emotional reading experiences of my life. In this newest book of hers, she’s back with Cal Hooper in small town Ireland.

I’ve been sitting here staring at this document trying to find the right words to work through how I feel about this book. It’s very hard to find any technical flaws. The plot is solid, the atmosphere is fantastic, and the sentences are high quality. This is a good book; it’s a solid book. The unfortunate problem for Tana French, is I know she’s capable of great, or even transcendent. And because there're so few flaws in the execution it’s hard for me to put my finger on what makes the Likeness or some of her other work, transcendent but keeps this simply good.

For me I think it’s familiarity. The Keeper is long, and I think the back half could definitely have been tightened up by a skilled editor. And by the end of the book, I did feel like, even though the sentences were beautiful, French had sort of run out of things to say about Cal and Trey. In French’s Dublin Murder Squad, even though there are continuities of characters, the themes and focus in each book is different. These three books are the first time she’s sort of ruminated on a single place and character. For as much as I love French, I personally hope she’s ready to move on to fresh ground.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I am not a connoisseur of vampire literature. In fact, I’m so woefully ignorant that I barely feel qualified to review Cabaret In Flames. We first meet Ariadne, our narrator, as she is a gul (vampire) doctor in Brasil. She took over her mentor Erik’s practice when he disappeared years ago. She plays midwife to pregnant vampires, pulls teeth, and tends to their elderly. But one day Quaint, a gul out of Erik’s past comes to her door, and maybe her mentor is in trouble, but can she trust Quaint?

I really enjoyed this (very) dark novella. It does not pull punches. Guls, like humans, run the whole spectrum from trustworthy and upstanding to the worst of the worst. Ariadne was rescued from the latter by Erik. One of the things I admire about this little novella is how it shows you the worst--doesn’t flinch away, but doesn’t dwell either. It’s a very deft touch from a newer author. The inter personal and character dynamics was another strong point of this novel. Pueyo introduced a very ambitious cast for a novella and each character was full and well developed.

As I mentioned, I don’t think I’m well enough read in the vampire sub-genres to comment on tropes or how a dedicated vampire fan might experience this book, but this relative noob found it a very entertaining and thought provoking read.