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dragons and nightingales
Quick thoughts on a couple of books I've been meaning to review.
Moniquill Blackgoose, To Shape a Dragon's Breath.
This is a delightful alternate history involving resistance to colonialism, chemistry, and dragons. It's my favorite discovery from 2020 Hugo voting. The nuances of power and the self-centeredness associated to power are very well observed. In particular, though he's only a minor character--the story belongs to a young woman named Anequs from the island of Masquapaug and her dragon--I was fascinated by the jarl. One of the prices of doing a lot of historical re-creation is spending a lot of time around men who are pretending to be Viking kings, and I very much appreciated the precision with which Blackgoose renders a man who is genuinely (by his own standards) a wise and effective ruler, and yet is incapable of creating justice.
Ben Aaronovitch, The Masquerades of Spring.
A music-loving Englishman in early 1920s New York is visited by his old schoolfellow Thomas Nightingale. This is P.G. Wodehouse pastiche. The last time I read a novel actually written by P.G. Wodehouse that was set in New York, I reached the horrifyingly racist interlude in the middle of it while stuck on an airplane. That makes it tricky for me to relax into a story that's mostly about a nice feckless Bertie Wooster clone and his much cleverer boyfriend from Harlem rambling around the city enjoying jazz. On the opposite tack, there is a sad lack of aunts; I feel all Wodehousian prose is improved by a suitably forceful aunt. However, it's clear that Aaronovitch is enjoying himself greatly, and is perhaps particularly enjoying (after many volumes of fantasy police procedural) writing a book where the cops are the bad guys. There's also canonically asexual Nightingale, if you're interested in canonically asexual Nightingale.
(This novella comes out from Subterranean Press on September 30, at least in the US. I read it as a Netgalley ARC.)
Moniquill Blackgoose, To Shape a Dragon's Breath.
This is a delightful alternate history involving resistance to colonialism, chemistry, and dragons. It's my favorite discovery from 2020 Hugo voting. The nuances of power and the self-centeredness associated to power are very well observed. In particular, though he's only a minor character--the story belongs to a young woman named Anequs from the island of Masquapaug and her dragon--I was fascinated by the jarl. One of the prices of doing a lot of historical re-creation is spending a lot of time around men who are pretending to be Viking kings, and I very much appreciated the precision with which Blackgoose renders a man who is genuinely (by his own standards) a wise and effective ruler, and yet is incapable of creating justice.
Ben Aaronovitch, The Masquerades of Spring.
A music-loving Englishman in early 1920s New York is visited by his old schoolfellow Thomas Nightingale. This is P.G. Wodehouse pastiche. The last time I read a novel actually written by P.G. Wodehouse that was set in New York, I reached the horrifyingly racist interlude in the middle of it while stuck on an airplane. That makes it tricky for me to relax into a story that's mostly about a nice feckless Bertie Wooster clone and his much cleverer boyfriend from Harlem rambling around the city enjoying jazz. On the opposite tack, there is a sad lack of aunts; I feel all Wodehousian prose is improved by a suitably forceful aunt. However, it's clear that Aaronovitch is enjoying himself greatly, and is perhaps particularly enjoying (after many volumes of fantasy police procedural) writing a book where the cops are the bad guys. There's also canonically asexual Nightingale, if you're interested in canonically asexual Nightingale.
(This novella comes out from Subterranean Press on September 30, at least in the US. I read it as a Netgalley ARC.)
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There are so many characters who could be the protagonist of their own books, and each of those would be a different mood and genre!