Ursula

Tasha Suri's novel The Oleander Sword is the middle book in a planned trilogy that began with The Jasmine Throne. It's the kind of book that comes with maps and lists of characters from different countries, and it opens with a war, as Malini, who has just crowned herself Empress, seeks to defeat her fanatical, princely brother. But Oleander Sword doesn't sprawl across new viewpoint characters and their disconnected subplots, the way one might expect from a book in this sort of package. It's fundamentally a very focused story. Half is how Malini will balance her drive to consolidate power with her love for Priya, once a servant girl. The other half is how Priya, newly filled with magical force from the treelike yaksa she worshipped as a child, will square the demands of her own power with her love for Malini. There are sudden betrayals and the fulfillments of mysterious prophecies--the book's title, in particular, cuts in an unexpected way--but if you've read Jasmine Throne, the confrontation that Oleander Sword sets up for the final volume will not astonish you. The satisfaction is not in authorial sleight of hand, but rather in game pieces clicking into place.

Suri's fantasy novels are inspired by medieval India, rather than vague impressions of England or France, and I particularly enjoy the way that this upends fantasy conventions. Inheritance isn't driven by birth order, for instance, and the trope of the ambitious priest carries different weight.

Max Gladstone's forthcoming novel Last Exit is aimed straight at me.

Why me, specifically? When I turned forty last year, I had the following conversation with redshiftnova:

Me: I hadn't planned on having a midlife crisis, but instead I got a worldwide pandemic.
Red: YOU OVERACHIEVER!!!

This was hilarious--and it's the precise set of baggage that the characters of Last Exit carry. The age; the scholarship to an elite East Coast college (Last Exit is about Yale, and I went to a small liberal-arts college whose students prided themselves on being smarter and working harder than the Ivy League trust fund kids, but that just means the sweatshirts came in garnet instead of navy); the math degree driven by the lure of impossible things; the exhortations to save the world; the knowledge that the world is falling apart.

The world is ending; but the world has always been ending. The question is whose world, and whose world you think matters. Last Exit is an American novel, a big sprawling ensemble-cast American road trip novel, and the question of who exactly has been fucked how badly by the continuation of America is never far from the surface.

Flip things around, try the active voice: will a terrified person fuck things over, to keep America the same? Last Exit asks the question that way, too.

This is what the novel is about, in a grand thematic sense. But what happens? The story begins in New York City, as Zelda, a grown-up gay kid from small-town South Carolina, is preparing to apologize for losing her lover Sal. Instead of Sal's mother, she meets Sal's teenage cousin June. June is a veteran of the BLM protests; she has watched cops on horses try to kill her friends. She doesn't want Zelda's apology for failure. She wants to try again.

New York City has a solid weight; it knows what it is. But Zelda has a knack for going other places, and in less populated spots, or when people are looking away, she can walk (or ride or drive) to other possible worlds. Turn The City We Became inside out, and send it on the road to Amber.

Send it back to Montana, where Zelda fucked things up the first time.

Bring the team back together: Sarah (a doctor, married, a mom, an Army brat, Sarah whose sister has gone home to the reservation), Ramón (who tried to go into finance but found his soul again fixing cars), Ish (whose Silicon Valley surveillance company watches for the serpent eating the heart of the world), Zelda, and June (who looks like Sal, and isn't). Retrace the steps of the last adventure, to the Green Glass City, and the tower where they met the princess.

Meanwhile, something is following our friends: the reason that the world is ending, growing tangible. Last Exit has a lot of horror in its DNA. Things are twisted. Bodies are twisted into non-Euclidean geometries. People die.

But the scariest thing isn't non-Euclidean geometry, is it? It's other people.

Bring the team back together. It's time to save a world.

(I read Last Exit as a Netgalley ARC.)

There's a particular satisfaction I associate with long serieses of literary novels--I'm thinking of A.S. Byatt's Frederica Potter books or the Jane Smiley trilogy that starts with Some Luck--where a conflict between two people appears intractable because it's fundamental to who those people are, but slowly, over the course of many years, the people change and the world transforms around them, until at last a realization crystallizes: the old irreconcilable problem can be, not overcome, but gently set aside.

Jade Legacy is like that, but with knife fights and martial artists downing helicopters.

At the beginning of the novel, the Kaul family, leaders of the No Peak Clan and therefore informal rulers of half the island nation of Kekon, are in serious trouble. Their old enemy, Ayt Mada of the Mountain clan, is ahead of them in terms of subordinates and resources. Worse, they don't trust each other. The cheerfully ruthless Pillar, Hilo, isn't talking to his sister Shae, the clan's Weather Man and business leader. ( His wife Wen... ) The family needs everyone's skills--Hilo's warrior leadership, Shae's business acumen, Wen's personal insight, and even contributions from their cousin Anden, who has chosen not to fight with jade at all--to stand against the Mountain.

I read the first chapters of Jade Legacy slowly, balancing the bleakness of the setup against the bleakness of the real world. No Peak members swear an oath: "The clan is my blood, and the Pillar is its master." At the quarter-mark, that oath heralds a transformation: an excruciating doom I had dreaded was turned aside, and the story becomes bigger and stranger. After all, Ayt Mada might not be the Kaul family's greatest threat. Kekon is only one island. Other nations, particularly the great powers locked in the Cold-War-like Slow War, would love to take Kekon's superpowered jade for themselves. The Kauls understand that wearing jade requires honor and responsibility--there are rules to follow and balances to maintain. The foreigners just want drugged-up supersoldiers. I sped through the remaining hundreds of pages in a matter of days.

If you began the series when Jade City came out, you have some idea what Jade Legacy might offer. If you're just picking up the series now, you'll find a fantasy story sideways from the twentieth century, rather than the more common medieval-ish technologies, that doesn't center fantasy-Europeans. These are books where bias and bigotry are real but are not destiny. They contain astonishing and bloodthirsty martial arts sequences, people who excel at mayhem, people who understand that finance is also mayhem, and small children who are their own people. Come for the jade; stay for the rich, layered, inexorable sense of transformation.

(Jade Legacy officially comes out on November 30. I read an ARC courtesy of Netgalley.)

Kate Elliott writes long fantasy and space opera series that are densely packed with world-building. Servant Mage is the first installment in a new YA series. In Elliott terms, the YA part means there's only one viewpoint character and the plot develops more quickly. This novel also gestures toward a love triangle involving the heroine Fellian and two nobles of very different backgrounds, though my sense is that the series will reconfigure the YA love-triangle trope rather than leaning into it.

As Servant Mage opens, Fellian is illegally teaching a friend to read. A few decades before that lesson, a rebellion overthrew an oppressive monarchy. Because mages once served the monarchy, the new government oppresses them in turn, binding children with mage talents into service and refusing to teach them the details of their craft. A secretive group of mage Loyalists recruits Fellian because her talent completes their team: together, they make a full hand of earth, air, water, fire, and aether mages. By combining their skills, they can locate a baby who might become the next monarch--but the government's August Protector is ahead of them.

In another fantasy novel, the baby's right to rule would be unquestioned. But Kate Elliott is more interested in exploring the way inherited power shapes character than she is in justifying it. We see the damage that the Protector's government causes, but Elliott slowly shows us the other kinds of damage that the Loyalists take for granted. Fellian's loyalties lie somewhere else. By the end of the book, she's talking to her own friends and kin about what self-determination looks like. I'm very interested in seeing how this develops across the course of the series!

(I read this book as an ARC courtesy of Netgalley.)

I was given an ARC of A Desolation Called Peace, the sequel to Arkady Martine's debut novel A Memory Called Empire, and read it as quickly as I could, around the obligations of adulthood. ( This culminated in a Saturday... )

I read Charlie Jane Anders' new YA novel for NetGalley. It's coming out from Tor Teen next spring.

Victories Greater Than Death is about a girl named Tina who is a clone of a six-foot-tall purple-skinned alien general who was, more or less, her society's Jean-Luc Picard. She was disguised as a human and raised by an adoptive mother. But as soon as she figures out how to trigger the rescue beacon full of stars hidden just under her heart, she will fulfill her destiny.

If you're an adult who loved She-Ra or Steven Universe or Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, then this book is for you. If you know a tween who has read Harry Potter all the way through Order of the Phoenix and you want to give them an adventure story about being special and different and fighting evil that isn't racist and painfully transphobic, this is the book you're looking for.

But did I like it? Well, that's complicated.

Victories Greater Than Death is for people who have been told that their feelings are too much, who need to hear that even though their emotions are big and awkward and unwieldy and weird, there are people out there who care, who will value all of that huge powerful messiness and help them channel it toward good. But some of us have been told instead that our feelings are not enough, that we are distant or unreadable or cold, or just too practical to (ever) make a fuss. When I read a story that is actively didactic about the idea that Big Emotions Matter, I don't feel warm and cared for. I brace for impact. Because it's so, so easy for the message to slip from Big Emotions Matter to Your Emotions Don't.

So does Victories Greater Than Death hurt? Actually, no. Part of the reason is that it's clear-eyed and realistic about the way teenage bullying works, both when it's serious and when it's just low-key isolation. I particularly appreciated Tina's reminiscences about not fitting in at improv camp.

But also, Anders writes autistic-coded characters in a way that feels genuinely sympathetic. I've read multiple books recently with big diverse casts of characters and messages about acceptance where one of the characters was autistic, and most of them failed this test. If you have to repeat that the person your characters are accepting is strange and difficult and obsessed with incomprehensible boring things and fey more than twice, then guess what, "acceptance" might not mean what you think it does!

In Victories Greater Than Death, on the other hand, we learn in passing that Rachel struggles with social anxiety, gets tense in crowds and new places, and doesn't always like being touched, but the facts that are repeated every time she appears are that she is the! most! amazing! artist! and Tina's bestest friend in the universe!!!1!1 We see Rachel working hard to make strangers feel welcome, and then coping with the stress of having been "on" for too long. She gets a romance with a future pop superstar who makes musical robots. And her artistic talent is the key to the end-of-book triumph over evil.

In Victories Greater Than Death, Charlie Jane Anders seems to be writing a book for her younger self--a person who was weird and brave and needed to hear that dressing up in a pink sequined dinosaur suit is a good first step toward saving the world. I wasn't quite that girl, and the book I would design for my own younger self would be sideways from this one. But when Anders preaches acceptance for everyone, I believe she means it.

I read Marie Brennan's Turning Darkness Into Light courtesy of Netgalley.

This is a novel about Lady Trent's granddaughter Audrey, who is recruited to translate a sequence of Draconean tablets belonging to a private collector. The novel takes the form of diary entries, letters, translated excerpts, police reports, and so forth. I definitely classify "getting to be the first translator of an important ancient text" as an escapist fantasy; if you are in the same camp, this book will deliver good, fluffy amusement. (For reasons of literary exigency, the text itself is rather more coherent and rather less bloodthirsty than most of the ancient literature with which I am familiar).

The general villain of the story is prejudice against Draconeans, but the specific villain is Aaron Mornett, a beautiful young man who is "not a reputable scholar." Audrey's mixed feelings about Aaron Mornett are effectively and compellingly represented. I wasn't inclined to be all that patient with them as a reader, though: I've spent my fair share of time dealing with brilliant, entitled young men in the real world, and don't need to be assured that they really are that awful.

Aaron Mornett's opposite is Cora Fitzarthur, the painstaking niece of the man who collected the Draconean tablets. I hoped for a while that Audrey and Cora would fall in love: the way Audrey learns to trust her is so obviously a parallel to the way she learns distrust of Aaron. Also, I grew up on novels about the trials of being an orphan who becomes the ward to someone terrible. I would have liked to read more about Cora's tribulations, or, failing that, about her newfound expertise in volcanoes. Instead, the book ends with revelations about Draconeans, politics, and a surprising amount of violence and rushing about. (And, of course, with footnotes, which are not to be skipped.)

I received a review copy of Yoon Ha Lee's Hexarchate Stories from Netgalley.

Many of the Hexarchate Stories center on details of Cheris or Jedao's early life. They're sweet on their own, or filled with doom if you start thinking about the fates of Cheris and Jedao's families. Jedao's family menagerie often appears, including his mother's geese and a laid-back, tractable cat (I expected said cat to end up having kittens on a pile of clothes in the back of someone's closet, but apparently that memory belongs only to my childhood, not to Jedao's). Of the domestic stories, one from Jedao's older brother's point of view and another about Cheris's birthday particularly stand out.

The final story is "Glass Cannon," a novella which picks up a few years after Revenant Gun left off. Much of "Glass Cannon" is straight-up adventure, echoing the exuberant action scenes of the beginning of Revenant Gun. ( I was spoiled... )

I read Kameron Hurley's Apocalypse Nyx courtesy of Netgalley.

"It's selfish to make somebody's life or death about you. It was her life. Let her live it as she chose."

Apocalypse Nyx is a series of short stories about the protagonist of Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame Apocrypha series. Each of the first few stories describes the way Nyx met a member of her team. (There are some discrepancies in the timeline, but Nyx isn't the most reliable source.) I think the ideal reading order would be to pick this collection up after the first book: Nyx and her team are still very young, in these stories. Though none of them exactly grow wise, their relationships shift over the course of the trilogy in a way that these introductions don't reflect. On the other hand, if you miss Nyx's first team, before compromise and explosions and politics tore things up, this collection is a chance to spend time with them again.

The most unexpected story is the last one, in which we meet parrot shifters who have chosen not to be human circling around a tower, and learn that although Nyx is a terrible shot, she's genuinely good at disarming mines. Nyx is also good at staying alive, and slightly better at keeping a team alive along with her than she would like to admit. I hesitate to call her honest, but she has a weird compelling straight-line stubbornness that I keep coming back to.