Ursula

Nghi Vo, Don't Sleep With the Dead.

Some years after the events of The Chosen and the Beautiful--or The Great Gatsby, which in this world is a semi-factual memoir by one Nick Carraway--dead men from the First World War are appearing on the streets of Paris, as early harbingers of a Second, and Nick is trying to figure out whether he's a real person. The case against it is that he is made out of paper. The case in favor has two parts: the man he was cut out to replace was an awful human being, and there are devils around who seem perfectly willing to bargain for his soul.

This novella is a game with voice, atmosphere, and untrustworthy narration that is going exactly where the title warns one shouldn't. Vo's writing always shines with details that give you a sense of other stories happening just outside the frame. Given the opportunity, I might have chosen to follow one of those stories--the Saint Paul cousin who either disappeared or transformed to someone three inches shorter, the ghosts of the trenches in Paris, the demon who appears as a wax model of a secretary--rather than pursuing Nick's particular charming brand of self-destruction. But that's always the question with Nick Carraway's stories: was the tragedy inevitable, or is he simply very good at not happening to act?

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. In the US, it comes out April 8.)

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.)

Nghi Vo, The Brides of High Hill.

The cleric Chih is accompanying a beautiful merchant's daughter to the rich compound on the top of a hill where her betrothed awaits. This man has had other wives, but they have all left or disappeared; if it weren't for the strange pronouncements of his possibly-mad eldest son, one could assume they had never existed. Chih is uneasy about everything, especially the fate of her charming new friend.

Vo's Singing Hills novellas always play with genre. Brides of High Hill is obviously invoking the gothic novel, nurse with too much laudanum and all. But there's another genre of creepy stories at play. One hint that something weird is going on is that Chih, who usually collects everyone's stories, can't get any of the servants to talk to them--they don't even seem to know any of the hangers-on in the merchants' retinue. It's easy to overlook these worries, when the mundane implications of the looming marriage are so terrifying; it would be fascinating to re-read this novella, assuming it never was a gothic novel.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC; in the US, it's out now.)

Lake of Souls is a collection of Ann Leckie's short fiction, divided into three sections: stories about the Radch, stories in the same universe as Raven Tower, and independent universes. The title story "Lake of Souls" (a novelette) is new; other stories have appeared in various places (as always with short fiction, some are easier to track down than others).

Leckie often experiments with point of view and different writing styles, and I enjoyed comparing the ways that individual stories emphasize one strand or another of her multitudinous interests. There's an undercurrent of horror in the Ancillary books, and some of the shorts (particularly "Footprints") bring it to the surface. "Lake of Souls" mixes gooey alien creepiness with a space-opera take on rapacious corporations that feels a lot like Murderbot or Leckie's recent short for Amazon, "The Long Game"; the aliens, as one might expect, are outstanding. "Hesperia and Glory" riffs on planetary romance; it has a nineteenth-century-style frame story with the intriguing refrain, "There is not now, nor has there ever been, a well in my cellar." I was glad to discover the layers of scheming, gamesmanship, and Breq's characteristic decisiveness in "She Commands Me and I Obey," an Ancillary-universe story I knew only by reputation. But my favorites are the Raven Tower stories: the rule that gods dare not speak a truth they cannot guarantee makes for fascinating puzzles, and I always enjoy the opportunity to explore other corners of this world.

(I read this collection as a Netgalley ARC; in the US, it comes out on April 2.)

Kelly Link, The Book of Love.

I spent a year in college listening to 69 Love Songs on repeat. This is the most quintessential queer-teenager experience I've ever had, although (a late bloomer in this respect) I was in my early twenties before I owned the album. One of the Magnetic Fields' sixty-nine songs is "The Book of Love." After half a lifetime of falling for books full of music without recognizing any of the allusions, I'm startled when I know a reference:

The book of love has music in it
In fact that's where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb
But I... I love it when you sing to me...

There you have it: The Book of Love is about music, unclearly reciprocated devotion, being nineteen, and--the book in the song was, it warns us, "written very long ago"--the weird stretched feeling of eternity. Book of Love is also the first full-length novel by Kelly Link. For some people, that will be recommendation enough on its own. For people who want to know more, or enjoy watching writerly attempts to describe the numinous reflect each other like lines of mirrors, here is a sketch of what appears.

Near the beginning of the book, four teenagers return from the dead. Two of them, David and Laura, used to be in a band. Laura's sister Susannah was also in that band. Neither she nor Laura can shake the feeling that they are backwards--that Susannah is the one who should have fucked up in an unpredictable way, like dying.

One of the other songs layered into The Book of Love is the ballad of Tam Lin. It's not a direct Tam Lin retelling, not even as close as Nghi Vo's Siren Queen, which weaves the ballad in among many other strands. However, we do meet a beautiful man named Thomas who serves a dangerous mistress. That mistress is the book's antagonist, though it's possible that Laura, who has always been a good girl--ambitiously good--is even more terrifying.

One of the characters in The Book of Love is a Black woman who had a hugely successful career writing romances about a purple-eyed redhead. Rather than settling down after one book to live happily ever after, as modern genre convention would have it, the doubly fictional Lavender Glass fled between pirate ships and Scottish castles, having one adventure after another. I don't want to imply that all the love in Book of Love is romantic--for starters, the romance writer character I just mentioned is a beloved grandmother--but I was interested in the book's take on romantic love. There's a strong measure of awe in much of it. There's also a lot of casual sex that nobody expects to last. Often these feelings exist simultaneously.

Romance novels generally assume that the romantic leads are good for each other, even if it takes them a book's worth of misunderstandings to realize it. In The Book of Love, it's always possible that the beautiful person who just kissed you might be la belle dame sans merci. That kiss might also be something that is tremendously important now, but will not matter when you cease to be nineteen; or you might be destroying a relationship that matters dearly because you assume nothing you do can matter yet. I very much admire Link's willingness to let all these possibilities exist simultaneously.

The Book of Love reminds me of another Tam Lin book, Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, which I read over and over when I was beginning to be a teenager and didn't want to be. Both books slide back and forth between hilarious and meticulously observed accounts of everyday life and supernatural danger. They're each packed with enough reference and mysterious implication to fill six ordinary novels. These are not the books you read if you want every little thing explained (unless you want to make a career from the explaining), but they are books to read more than once.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. It will be released on my birthday, February 13.)

Nghi Vo, Mammoths at the Gates.

Chih is a cleric who travels the world collecting stories with a startlingly intelligent bird for a companion. At the beginning of this novella, Chih returns home to the Singing Hills Abbey--but the abbey is strangely empty, and there are, as you might have guessed, war-mammoths at the gates.

All of Vo's books about Chih are built around the ways the same story can be told. They're always fascinating on an intellectual level, but some stories will inevitably lie closer to the heart than others. This one lies close to mine.

Returning to a place you used to call home and finding both you and it has changed is a theme that has obvious autobiographical resonance for me. But I'm also interested in the facets of this specific story, which involves memories of a person who was a beloved leader to the clerics and an honored grandfather to a pair of warriors, and the way Vo refuses to let the messages resolve into anything as simple as "This person was good" or "This person was bad" (OK, maybe there's some autobiographically resonant grief there, too). I also enjoyed learning more about those long-remembering birds, the neixin, who have been a matter-of-fact background element in many of the Chih stories, but now come to the fore.

Though many of the novellas in this series could be read in whatever order you joyfully stumbled upon them, this one does assume some existing curiosity about Chih and their world, so it might not be the right place to start. It's definitely one to look forward to, though!

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. In the US, it comes out in September.)

The beginning of Ann Leckie's Translation State is in the best tradition of romantic adventure stories. We have Enae, the put-upon unmarried relative who receives an unexpected inheritance on hir grandmaman's death, Reet, the adopted child whose birth family might have more-than-human powers, and Qven, the child of an aristocratic family drawn into danger by a charming friend. Reet isn't sure where he comes from, or why he feels a disconcerting urge to peel the skin off the people around him and see what's inside. Qven, on the other hand, is clearly alien, raised (and specially designed) to become one of the Translators who interpret human experience for the inscrutable and dangerous Presger.

It would be easy to collapse the various differences into one grand binary--to contrast human love for family with Translator coldness, or to make the Translators' strangeness a metaphor for human neurodivergence--and I admire Leckie's refusal to do anything of the sort. Enae's relatives don't care about hir, while Reet's adoptive parents love him dearly. His blunt, awkward Nana won my heart with a cynical observation on group dynamics that will be familiar to geeks the world over:

"You know how it is with clubs and such," Nana continued. "Everyone loves the idea, and they love to come to the parties or whatever, but no one wants to do the work to keep things going and make the parties happen."

I was settling in for a book balancing lighthearted tropes and acutely observed social commentary ( when the story shifted... )

Arkady Martine's Rose/ House takes preoccupations that readers of her novel A Memory Called Empire will be familiar with--a living place, the impression that a dead man leaves behind him, the seductions of intellectual fascination, the way an idea you love can cut you open--and refracts them through a different genre. Memory Called Empire and its sequel A Desolation Called Peace were adventure stories: there's a protagonist setting forth to learn more about the world, a beautiful woman, nobility engaged in elaborate plots, startling self-sacrifice, and a stack of similar motifs you might have met anywhere between Cherryh's Foreigner series and The Three Musketeers. Meanwhile, Rose/ House is a ghost story--a science fiction ghost story, with climate change and artificial intelligence and an architectural marvel in the Mojave desert all held up to the prism.

Rose/ House isn't coy about its genre. We're told early on that, "Yeah, Maritza grew up here, she knows like anyone else that Rose House is a haunt, and was glad when it was shut up inside with itself for good." The word "haunt" persists and multiplies, occasionally as the adjective commonly applied to houses, more often as that stark noun. But there are references to other genres too--casual references to carjackings for water rations, a detective who stubbornly investigates an inexplicable corpse--and I was inclined at first to read the book as a mystery. That's not the core. The core is the house itself: intelligent, inhuman, and beautifully, terrifyingly interested.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)

The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older.

I requested this book because it was by Malka Older and then slammed the download button without re-reading the marketing copy, which means I went in cold, with no conscious knowledge of the concept, length, or premise. It's novella-length; if you want to recreate my experience of reading the entire book in one joyful Friday evening of discovery, hit the pre-order button now.

Mimicking of Known Successes is the kind of book you get when a really smart person makes a list of their favorite tropes and then writes them all simultaneously. (In that sense, Aliette de Bodard's novellas are a good comparison.) To give you an example, at one point two characters visit their favorite restaurant:

Slow Burn was, most exceptionally, in the center of a small but dense wood. The owner had purchased soil, and saplings, and cultivated the fastest-growing firewood species she could find, all within her small allotted plot on Valdegeld platform. Tiny paths led through the trees to a slender building, and within the visitor found a long hearth...

There are layers on layers here: a joke about the book's central relationship, a cozy fire, an example of the crafted ecological management/historical recreation that forms the viewpoint character's career, and a reference to the platforms along rails above a gas giant that form both story setting and mystery structure.

The one major element of the premise you can't extract from this piece of gleeful scene-setting is that in addition to being a gaslights-on-a-gas-giant ecological adventure, Known Successes is a lesbian riff on Sherlock Holmes. Or maybe it's as fair to say, a queer riff. The Holmes character is clearly a woman, but for a while I thought the Watsonesque narrator's gender was deliberately ambiguous in the style of the Hilary Tamar mysteries. That was a misapprehension on my part, but the rumpled academia readings are certainly comparable to the Hilary Tamar books. You'll also find hot scones and levels of hurt/comfort you could scoop up with a spoon--and background musings on ecological disequilibrium.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)

Kate Elliott, The Keeper's Six.
Rose Lerner, Sailor's Delight.
Rebecca Subar, When to Talk and When to Fight.

These are three completely different books in completely different genres about labor organizing from a Jewish perspective.

When to Talk and When to Fight is the how-to manual its name suggests. The subtitle is The strategic choice between dialogue and resistance, and the fight it envisions is specifically organizing for social justice--in other words, the question is when to negotiate with people in power, and when to focus on building power in its own right for a movement. The discussion mixes easily memorized big-picture discussion with personal anecdote. Subar points out that most people are more comfortable with one type of tactics than the other (I'm definitely in the talking camp, by training and inclination), and this seems like a very practical sourcebook for people who, like me, are trying to become more comfortable switching back and forth.

The Keeper's Six is a fantasy novella with a lot of portal fantasy and a little bit of video game in its DNA. The tagline is about a mother rescuing her adult son, who has been captured by a dragon, but the arc is really about negotiating for his release. Along the way, Esther and her son often pause to talk about labor rights with the denizens of the dragon's hoard. Esther isn't a perfect leader; the "six" in the title is a team of people with the skills to negotiate travel between dimensions, and some of Esther's team members are frustrated with her history of prioritizing good causes over the team's needs. I appreciate the way Elliott lets characters' good and bad decisions stem from the same fundamental character traits--stubbornness and ambition come up a lot in this story, from lots of different angles.

Sailor's Delight is a queer historical romance between a naval officer and the agent who looks after his business affairs, which takes place around the High Holidays. It's not as actively focused on the process of organizing as the other books in this group, but like all of Lerner's novels, it's very interested in class and the nature of work. The importance of work is obvious in the case of the main couple, whose working relationship provides an easy social explanation for their emotional connection, but makes it hard for each to be sure that the other wants more. Two separate subplots center around women finding ways to support themselves that don't entail a conventional marriage. I love the way that Age of Sail stories mix adventure with economics, and it's fun to see how Lerner develops the economic details of daily life--though this is also a book with masses of pining and a ship called the Cocksure, if you're looking for less cerebral kinds of fun.

(I read Keeper's Six as an ARC provided by Netgalley and Sailor's Delight as an ARC provided by the author.)