Author: katenepveu

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Osman, Richard: Thursday Murder Club, The

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I was having a lousy day and wanted something charming and comforting, so I picked up Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, which is a bestselling mystery novel set in a swanky British retirement community. I’d heard that it was funny and refreshing, and I was very willing to be pleased. I mostly was … until I thought a little more about the ending, at which point I found it genuinely distressing.

There were definitely points before the end where I raised my eyebrows, mind. I noticed very early that we were in the kind of book where the third-person narrator refuses to acknowledge a character’s race, even where the character would unquestionably notice it. This was, as I expected, a sign of a book in which nonwhite characters exist but no thought has been given to how those characters’ lives would be affected by their race.

There’s also this unlovely musing from one of the—sympathetically portrayed!—police characters:

She had arrested a shoplifter in Fairhaven last week, and when he had struggled, she had brought him down with a baton behind the knees. She was aware she had hit him much harder than she should. Sometimes you just had to hit things.

No! You really don’t!

My initial notes to myself said that the book had a core of sadness but resilience, and I do stand by that: it’s a retirement community, so a lot of people are facing mortality, especially that of their loved ones, but are still changing and learning and enjoying their lives. And I liked the mosaic effect created by the short chapters from lots of points of view, though I can see that it could easily be frustrating to other readers.

But the ending. There are two parts that really stick in my craw. The first is that it seems like it’s trying to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to morality. The second, and much worse, is that there’s a death that is absolutely a murder but that is not treated as such by either the characters or the narrative, which I can only interpret as horrific unthinking ableism.

So, unfortunately, I don’t trust the author enough to keep reading the series.

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Kingfisher, T.: Thornhedge

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In my post-Paladin’s Faith hangover, I naturally turned to the only other T. Kingfisher book I had yet to read, Thornhedge, a novella-length Sleeping Beauty retelling.

The author’s note at the end says that this is the first thing she sold to Tor, though for publishing reasons other things have come out first. And having read it, I can see why. As Kingfisher says,

[…] I would probably say that it is a sweet book, and then presumably someone would point out that the heroine is raised by child-eating fish monsters and the villain is torturing people and animating the dead, and I would be left flailing my hands around and saying, “But it’s sweet! Really!” because I am not always the best at judging the tone of my own work.

… I still think it’s sweet, dammit.

I agree with her: it is sweet. In contrast, her two books from Saga Press are contemporary supernatural horror, and then the books Tor published subsequently are secondary-world fairy-tale-quest-horror, 19th century horror pastiche, and contemporary supernatural horror again. [*] Following up the Saga-published books with a sweet short fairy-tale retelling could easily give the wrong idea about where her oeuvre was headed.

Anyway. This is Sleeping Beauty in which the imprisoning fairy shapeshifts between girl and toad, and a kind and thoughtful Muslim knight shows up having read about a cursed keep in some old books. (This is also an alternate history in which a cure for plague was found "in the Holy Land" before the Crusades happened, and Muslim refugees peacefully settled a depopulated Europe. I think it’s roughly 1100 C.E., though there’s a reference to it being more than 200 years since "Justinian’s third plague" that I was confused by for a while, as I could find the Plague of Justinian or the third plague pandemic but not both, as it were.)

There’s not a lot of surprises here, but there is a lot of decency and people doing their best, which makes this far from the worst way to spend a bit of time.

[*] Since this is the night where I recap lots of T. Kingfisher books I haven’t booklogged, those books, in the order mentioned, and what I thought of them:

  • The Twisted Ones: incredibly scary;
  • The Hollow Places: less to my taste;
  • Nettle and Bone: fucking great;
  • What Moves the Dead: I wanted it to be science fiction instead;
  • A House with Good Bones: I’ve run out of patience for the protagonist of a contemporary supernatural horror novel taking time to accept what genre she is in, which is completely unfair of me but there you go.

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Kingfisher, T.: (204) Paladin’s Faith

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T. Kingfisher’s Paladin’s Faith is the fourth book in her Saint of Steel series (a.k.a. the Paladin’s Noun series), which is itself set in the same secondary world as a few other novels, all of which I have read and none of which I have booklogged.

The novels that established this world are the Clocktaur War duology, Clockwork Boys and The Wonder Engine. [*] As I read them, I was intensely reminded of the worldbuilding in the Doctrine of Labyrinths series, for the elaborately scary possibly-sentient machines; Discworld, for the gnoles; and Chalion, for the demons. This was unfortunately distracting.

[*] They were followed by the as-yet-standalone Swordheart, which has clear hooks for two sequels.

I also do not vibe with the way that Kingfisher writes romance here—all of the books in this world are romance novels—as the principal obstacle tends to be self-loathing and low self-esteem, which gets very same-y after really not very many books. (I originally theorized that I did not vibe with the way that she wrote het romance, because I did quite like the f/f romance in The Raven and the Reindeer; but the third book in the Saint of Steel series is m/m and I had the same reaction. Maybe it’s just romance involving dudes? There’s three books left in this series and two of them will be about female paladins; one of those seems likely to be het, but I’ll hold out hope for the other.)

Anyway, that’s two paragraphs about what I find suboptimal about the books in this world and yet I have in fact read all of them. Kingfisher (who is also Ursula Vernon) does great action, humor, and competence porn (especially in her side characters), and she has a knack for the little things in the worldbuilding that make it still enjoyable even while it reminds me of lots of other things.

Paladin’s Faith is, as I’ve indicated, halfway through the seven-book Saint of Steel series, and it feels like where the series as a series really hits its stride. The Saint of Steel was a god (yes, despite the name) who called berserkers to his service, the paladins of the book’s titles. Then he died. Only seven of his paladins survived; they all now serve the Temple of the White Rat, which (as this book says) "solved problems. That was their god’s entire purview. They were staffed with lawyers, social workers, healers, and organizers." (In fact, I recommended the books on an Arisia panel about laws, lawyers, and trials.)

The first two books were connected by a secondary plot, while the third book felt more like a standalone adventure except for a last-page drop of unexpected information about the wider world. Faith doesn’t follow directly on that ending, but it brings back a character from the first book, resolves a lingering issue from the second, pointedly updates us on the status of the characters from the Clocktaur War duology, and sets up what is clearly going to be part of the series endgame. Some people have felt that this is kind of a lot for one book to do. And that’s entirely reasonable, but I actually liked it: it said to me, okay, this series is going carry across plotlines both in the short term—by having them show up in just a couple of the books—and in the long—by definitely having an overall plot for the full series, which it certainly didn’t have to. I can’t wholeheartedly love these books, but I definitely do enjoy them.

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Byatt, A.S.: Ragnarök

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Back in November, I was sad to hear of A.S. Byatt’s death. Having re-read Possession somewhat recently, at least in the grand scheme of things, I instead picked up her Ragnarök, which was written as part of a series of novellas that rewrote various myths.

Byatt chooses to tell the story of Ragnarök through the POV of a "thin child," evacuated from London during the Blitz, who reads a 19th-century book of Norse myths and revels in all their uncertainty and contradictions and distance—as Byatt herself did in her own childhood. It’s a neat way of dealing with the question of whether to attempt psychological realism, especially when the present-day reader is so far removed from the mindsets of the original audience. I’m not entirely sure I agree with Byatt (in the afterword) that a modern retelling requires personalities, but I do appreciate the clear-cut stand the book takes on this: these are myths as understood by a child who is reading from a non-modern source, and therefore there shall be none of that.

One might well find the conceit of the book a little on-the-nose, which is fair; reality is not always a defense against such reactions. It works for me. More importantly, the prose is so good that I just want to roll around it in. I wish I could analyze what makes Byatt’s prose so compulsively readable to me, because I cannot put my finger on it. But it is; I even got a quarter of the way into The Virgin in the Garden before I remembered that I don’t really like mainstream fiction.

Finally, the bit about the cow made me remember this delightful family tree by Korwin Briggs.

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Turner, Delia Marshall: Dog of the Dead

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I came across Delia Marshall Turner’s Dog of the Dead backwards: I saw a link to the short story "Stubborn stains", which is truly lovely, and thought that the novel was a sequel to it.

It turns out that the short story is actually the sequel, not the other way around. However, they both stand alone fine, so that lack of knowledge did not affect my reading experience.

What did affect my reading experience, however, is a piece of information that is literally in the book blurb but that I did not figure out until quite some way into the book. I don’t know which way I would have preferred to learn it, so I’ll let you decide. Here’s the blurb:

Middle school English teacher Martha Whitaker has finally made it to winter break, and she is not going to let anything keep her from completing her vacation chores: Not the appearance of an immense egg on her kitchen table, not her nosy neighbor Mr. Miklos, and not a crowd of former students popping up out of nowhere to ask her help.

Click here to uncollapse/collapse the spoilery part

She will certainly not allow the armies of the recently dead (or her own unexpected demise) to deter her from painting her living room and the upstairs bedroom.

Ms. Whitaker is used to staring danger in the face, calling it by its full name, and asking it if it has done its homework, and with her small army (or on her own, if necessary, because one person always ends up doing all the group work), she will […] do what needs to be done.

But either way, I did find the book ultimately difficult because the protagonist sticks so adamantly to her own goals and perspective, not listening to other people or seeking to understand what their motivations are. It is both admirable and deeply frustrating, and I don’t think the hidden bit of the blurb would have made it any better. The tight focus also means that I’m hazy on the motivations behind a significant chunk of the plot.

Basically this is a great concept, I’m glad I read it, but I did not feel in sync with it. I do recommend the short story, however, and I look forward to reading the next one.

She also has a 1990s secondary world fantasy trilogy, The Ways of Magic, which starts with Nameless Magery; anyone have thoughts on whether I’m likely to find it more congenial?

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Shikibu, Murasaki: The Tale of Genji, tr. Dennis Washburn

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In 2005, I began reading The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, with a group of friends on LiveJournal. It was great fun, but we collectively stalled out around chapter 20 or so. I tried again in 2007: I distinctly remember taking the absolute brick of a trade paperback (I was reading the Seidensticker translation) on vacation and getting to the point, about 4/5 of the way through, where the narrative jumps after the title character’s death, but running out of vacation time. (Sorry to spoil a thousand-year-old work.)

I came back to it recently because an entirely different extremely long book wasn’t doing it for me, but I was still in the mood for an extensive immersion. In the fifteen years since I’d last attempted Genji, a new translation by Dennis Washburn had been released, so I gave that a try. And (as you will have guessed from the existence of this entry) I did, in fact, finally read Genji from start to finish.

Washburn’s translation is very fluid and readable. He allowed himself to add very short cultural context within the text, which means that his footnotes are almost entirely confined to poetry references–which, by and large, I could get the purpose behind from context, so did not feel the loss of them. This was especially significant for my reading purposes because going back and forth between footnotes in an ebook is not easy; there are some ebooks that are formatted so that certain readers (such as my preferred KOReader) can display footnotes at the bottom of the page, but this isn’t one of them.

(I don’t have an electronic copy of Seidensticker, but I do of Royall Tyler’s 2001 translation, and he footnotes far more, both because of his translation choices and because he just doesn’t seem to trust the reader as much. For instance, in the first chapter, Genji’s mother dies in one paragraph, and the next says,

He [the Emperor, Genji’s father] still longed to see his son, but the child was soon to withdraw, for no precedent authorized one in morning to wait upon the Emperor. [9] The boy did not understand what the matter was, and he gazed in wonder at the sobbing gentlewomen who had served his mother and at His Majesty’s streaming tears. Such partings [10] are sad at the best of times, and his very innocence made this one moving beyond words.

Footnote 9 advises us that "After the year 905, children not yet in their seventh year no longer went into mourning for a parent, and the present of this story therefore seems to be earlier." Okay, fine. But footnote 10 says, "The death of a parent." You interrupted my reading for that? Seriously?)

Washburn’s translation was also easier for me to read because that added cultural context included a level of straightforwardness that wasn’t present in Seidensticker. To be mildly crass about it, in Seidensticker I was often unsure if the characters had actually had sex, whereas Washburn will just say, they had an affair, or, "she skillfully put him off, parrying his advances until dawn." This is truly important information, because the book’s events overwhelmingly focus on men’s sexual pursuit of women and the consequences thereof.

So while there are the occasional mildly jarring phrases in Washburn, I really do recommend it over the other two most recent major English translations.

I do not, however, recommend Genji as a novel.

It’s true that Washburn’s prose and the characters generated a surprising amount of narrative momentum! However, the suspense for me was genuinely, "How awful is Genji (or the next-generation protagonist) going to be to this woman?" As I said, the book is overwhelmingly about men’s sexual pursuit of women, but more generally, about their feelings of entitlement to access to, and control of, women, usually sexually but also just overall. The book thoroughly recognizes the distress, helplessness, and conflict that these feelings of entitlement cause in women–as do the men, very often, but does it stop them? No. (Sometimes they pat themselves on the back for not actually physically forcing the women, but they still complain to the women about how upset they are and how hard it is not to.)

And indeed this is all about cultural context; back in the day, we read an article by Tyler arguing that high-status women in Genji literally were unable to consent: "no young woman of good family could decently, on her own initiative, say yes to first intercourse." I’m raising this not for the question of how I understand the morality of the characters within their own context (though frequently Genji does understand himself to be in the wrong), but for the simple point that I hate reading about them.

For instance, there’s a long section about Tamakazura, who is the long-lost daughter of Genji’s friend and peer. Genji knew from his friend that Tamakazura’s mother moved away because she was uncertain about their relationship and that the friend wanted to find them both. He discovered the mother … and had an affair with her without telling his friend. He later discovered Tamakazura … and brought her back to his house and claimed that she was his daughter, to buy time while he (1) attempted to seduce her and (2) decided whether to tell his friend the truth, possibly so he could marry her himself, or to marry her off as his own daughter. I sped through this section, but solely because I couldn’t bear not to know how bad it was going to be.

(This is of course not mentioning the infamous early bit where he has an affair with his stepmother; finds her ten-year-old niece who is her spitting image; literally kidnaps her and raises her; and eventually enormously shocks her when he consummates the marriage that only he knew was the end goal. I suppose it’s only my own fault for having continued after that, honestly.)

Also, there are only so many descriptions of the colors of people’s clothes, the elegance of their playing of musical instruments, the beauty of Genji’s face, etc., that I personally can stand reading. I do, however, find it extremely funny that one of the next-generation characters is permanently accompanied by a miraculous "fragrance unlike any scent of this world," especially since this character isn’t flashy in his personal style: "He thus found it troublesome that even when he withdrew behind something to stay out of sight, he couldn’t remain hidden for long before his fragrance gave him away."

Anyway, if you’re going to read this, I do recommend Washburn’s translation; and it does contain sensitive and nuanced characterization that’s very impressive. It’s just that the characterization is uniformly distressing and so, unless you’re attempting to finally accomplish something you started decades ago, I wouldn’t bother.

(As a palate-cleanser, I am about a third of the way through Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book; I am also picking up another group project, this time of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It’s just started and looks a much easier lift; come join us!)

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Waggoner, C.M.: The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry

C.M. Waggoner’s The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry is set in the same world as her debut, Unnatural Magic, but stands alone perfectly well and is very possibly better, or at least, is much more smoothly paced. I enjoyed it immensely.

I like the start of the book’s blurb, so I shall borrow it for setup:

Dellaria Wells, petty con artist, occasional thief, and partly educated fire witch, is behind on her rent in the city of Leiscourt—again. Then she sees the “wanted” sign, seeking Female Persons, of Martial or Magical ability, to guard a Lady of some Importance, prior to the celebration of her Marriage. Delly fast-talks her way into the job and joins a team of highly peculiar women tasked with protecting their wealthy charge from unknown assassins.

Delly quickly sets her sights on one of her companions, the confident and well-bred Winn Cynallum. The job looks like nothing but romance and easy money until things take a deadly (and undead) turn.

(Winn is the daughter of two of the characters from Unnatural Magic. She is great and I love her. She is not, however, our POV character, because she is much too well-adjusted.)

This book is quite fun and funny, but also does a great job of being spooky, tense, and moving. A good deal of Delly’s life involves trying to care for her mom, who is addicted to laudanum, and all of that is appropriately fraught. And there’s Buttons the undead mouse who says "Bong," or more precisely makes "a deep, hollow boom, like a great bell tolling a few miles off"; he kind of encapsulates the whole range of the book, and I hope there is fanart. Finally, I very much enjoyed not only Delly and Winn’s romance, but all of the different relationships among the women on the team, who are a lovely varied and well-rounded lot. (Is it just me, or did Miss Absentia Dok practically jump up and down asking to be protagonist of another story?)

I think my only quibble is that one subplot falls off the page in the last couple of chapters, possibly to permit an unambiguously happy ending; though, to be fair, the ongoing complications of that subplot had been noted previously. Well, and I wrestled with how the book presents the morality of a significant portion of its plot, and ultimately decided that I thought it was fair; but others may differ, so if (ROT13 spoilers) znahsnpghevat nqqvpgvir qehtf sbe vyyvpvg qvfgevohgvba (/ROT13) is a hard no for you, you’ll want to give this book a pass.

Finally, the book has chapter titles, which I am a total sucker for.

Chapter 11: Wherein Dellaria Encounters an Extraordinary Quantity of Cherries, Does a Disagreeable Amount of Cleaning, and Deepens Her Involvement in Her Terrible Idea

I have no idea if these books are well-known or finding their audience, but I want them to be, so if they sound interesting, please check them out and report back.

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Suri, Tasha: Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash


In the interests of the perfect not being the enemy of the good, here are some very brief thoughts on Tasha Suri’s Books of Ambha Duology, Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash.

I’d vaguely heard of the first of these when it came out, but it was Becca’s recent blog post that made me do grabby-hands: "Highly fraught arranged marriage, terrible magical coercion, and complex rules-lawyering around binding mystical vows ensue!" Because, I mean, come on.

Anyway. These are Indian-inspired secondary-world fantasy about being raised in an empire that’s destroying your culture and ethnic group—one of them, that is, because the protagonists are of mixed ethnicity (and one of them can pass). The books are appropriately dark (do note the "terrible magical coercion" above, which I admit I kind of skimmed over in my enthusiasm about the items bracketing it), but they’re not at all grimdark. I recommend them mostly because they feature a lot of thoughtful complexity about the ways that the society is structured and how people act and react as a result; and secondarily because the central romantic relationships are a particular catnip of mine, "we are being forced together but are going to do our best to resist by being kind."

(They have led to me to think a lot about the use of ethnicity in fantasy, though. There’s such power in literalizing the metaphor into actual magic blood that is forcibly extracted to maintain empire, as these books do; but I nevertheless am reflexively uncomfortable about having that ethnicity be strictly genetically-defined, as these books also do. More is outside the scope of this blog post, and probably a con panel of its own; but it’s a thing that seemed worth mentioning.)

Finally, I vaguely gather that these were somehow associated with YA in the public mind? I don’t know how or why (they’re published by Orbit), and also I don’t object to YA in general, but if being in the YA genre would be a deterrent: they’re not.

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Harrow, Alix E.: Ten Thousand Doors of January, The

Alix E. Harrow’s debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, had been on my to-read list for a while, but I bumped it up this morning since it’s nominated for a Hugo Award. Unfortunately, I found it ultimately dissatisfying in a way that I’ll have to resort to spoilers (in a separate post) to explain.

The book did itself no favors with its opening:

When I was seven, I found a door. I suspect I should capitalize that word, so you understand I’m not talking about your garden- or common-variety door that leads reliably to a white-tiled kitchen or a bedroom closet.

When I was seven, I found a Door. There—look how tall and proud the word stands on the page now, the belly of that D like a black archway leading into white nothing. When you see that word, I imagine a little prickle of familiarity makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. You don’t know a thing about me; you can’t see me sitting at this yellow-wood desk, the salt-sweet breeze riffling these pages like a reader looking for her bookmark. You can’t see the scars that twist and knot across my skin. You don’t even know my name (it’s January Scaller; so now I suppose you do know a little something about me and I’ve ruined my point).

But you know what it means when you see the word Door.

I know I read that at least once, said "meh," and opened another book instead. If it gives you, as it did me, the impression of excessive tweeness, it is fair to say that it doesn’t carry through. This is a portal fantasy, and as is usual, also a quest fantasy, and the musings about shapes of letters recede in the face of loneliness and oppression and danger—not grimdark levels thereof, mind, but it’s not fluff either. (It remains very engaged with the power of the written word, however.)

January narrates most of the book; there’s also an interleaved manuscript for about the first two-thirds. It’s early in the 1900s in New England, and January’s father, a nonwhite man of ambiguous race, is employed by a very rich white man to retrieve "objects ‘of particular unique value.’" January’s mother died when she was a baby, so she lives her father’s employer, who successfully forces her into the mold of a "good girl" from the time she is seven until she turns seventeen, when the plot kicks into high gear.

When I finished this, my initial reaction was, "well, I appreciate populating the portal fantasy with marginalized people and gesturing at how the early 1900s sucked globally, but it doesn’t seem to be doing much with the portal fantasy besides that." Which may or may not be fair, as I’m not really up on current trends in portal fantasy; I think all I’ve read in that vein is Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart A Doorway. And a book needn’t surprise me, or be doing anything I identify as new, to be good.

But on thinking it over, the book is also—in very typical, even expected, fashion—a fantasy of political agency. And I dislike how that agency manifests in the story, because it is set in our world and is therefore making a statement that I disagree with. Ultimately, that’s my takeaway from this book, since I wasn’t in love with anything else it was doing. For more, see this post with SPOILERS.

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