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Movie review: The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Last night I watched The Miseduation of Cameron Post, a film about an 11^th grader whose aunt sends her away to a Christian conversion camp after she gets caught hooking up with a female friend. The film is set in 1993.

It’s a heartfelt film about Cameron’s resistance to being changed and her developing identity (Asked early on at camp when she started to think of herself as a homosexual, Cameron asserts “I don’t think of myself as a homosexual. I don’t think of myself as anything, really.”), but it doesn’t differ meaningfully from other conversion camp films I’ve seen. Boy Erased made me cry and this one didn’t, if that’s worth anything.

The film swings between the current moment, and flashbacks to Cameron’s relationship with Coley, the friend with whom she was caught, in ways that both show us the line of Cameron’s thoughts and also become somewhat confusing. It was unclear to me for much of the film what actually happened that resulted in Cameron getting caught. Both that experience and the letter Coley sends Cameron later make it seem like that was their first hook-up, but the flashback sections suggest they had been together several times before, which makes it unclear of those are actual memories or just Cameron’s fantasies of what could have happened (further complicated by a couple of actual dream sequences). It was not helped by the actors frequently dropping into whispers and mumbling; I missed entire exchanges because I couldn’t hear.

Either of Cameron’s two buddies at camp—Jane, a Black girl who grew up on a free love commune but whose mother recently married a conservative man whose decision it was to send Jane away (and who has been at this camp for over a year); or Adam, a Lakota two-spirit whose father recently got into politics, converted to Christianity, and demanded his child follow suit—would have made for more interesting protagonists. Cameron comes off pretty nondescript, which is exacerbated by how internalized she is, rarely speaking or expressing herself. It’s not until the end of the film where she really starts saying anything.

One thing The Miseducation of Cameron Post does do differently is that the staff at the camp lack the total, violent conviction of other conversion camp narratives I’ve seen. Some staff have that attitude, but others visibly doubt if they’re doing the right thing, particularly after some exchanges with the campers (and I maintain there’s a scene at the end where one staff member chooses to be passive in a way that helps Cameron and her pals, when he could have done otherwise). This adds an interesting tension, where it’s not just the campers asking themselves if what’s going on here is right or wrong.

The ending is pretty open in a way that’s not totally satisfying (one of those “Okay…but what now?” kind of endings) but it is a sweet final moment and it’s so easy to root for Cam and her friends, even though we just got a reminder of how little the rest of society cares about what’s happening to the kids in these camps.

This film is based off the book of the same name by Emily M. Danforth, which I haven’t read. Turns out it’s a bit of a chunker, at 500 pages, and reviews say Cameron doesn’t go to camp until halfway through, with the first 250 pages just backstory on her relationship with Coley. The film cuts out almost all of this to focus on the conversation camp narrative, which I think is the right choice, because it’s where the real story is.

On the whole, I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t stand out to me in any way.

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Book review: The Last Hour Between Worlds

Yesterday on a lovely walk through then neighborhood I reached the end of The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso. This is fantasy/action novel, set in a world in “prime” reality, beneath which sits ever-descending “echo” layers of reality. The further down you go, the stranger and more dangerous things get. At a New Year’s party, things get unexpectedly tricky when the entire party is pulled down through the echoes.

Our protagonist is Kembral Thorne, a “hound” whose job is to retrieve people, animals, and other things that are pulled or “fall” into the echoes. This party is Kem’s first step back into society after having her first baby two months earlier.

Of course, when things start going wrong, Kem can’t help but get involved. It’s her job.

I’ll say again, I do love queer lit with adults. YA is great and I’m so happy that teens today have access to so much queer lit, but online queer book recs can skew very YA. Here, Kem is very much someone at least in her thirties—she’s got a baby, she’s reached a senior role in her career, and her concerns reflect this position in her life. While she and her quasi-rival Rika have the sort of skittish interactions you might expect from people who are into each other and unwilling to admit they are into each other, they don’t reach the level of comic avoidance or overwrought drama of teens or young adults.

I liked the ebb and flow of Kem and Rika’s relationship. These are two people who already have history and have kind of already had their big, relationship-ending squabble before we even get to this party, which is fun to unravel over the course of the evening. They have some cute moments, some artificially-amplified angst, but are generally enjoyable.

The worldbuilding here is fine. It’s serviceable for what the novel is doing, but we don’t really get a look at much else outside of the party except when Kem ventures out into the echoes, which becomes increasingly less frequent as they descend. There’s some fun stuff, some spooky stuff, some aesthetic stuff.

The book pushes a little hard on maintaining the status quo when the status quo isn’t that great (I think it could have made this more believable with more discussion, but the book is really more about the action than the political debate) and I did think one character’s fate was a cop-out, especially given the former. Violent change to the system is wrong but we’ll all shrug and smile when this criminal we couldn’t nail down conveniently dies without a trial.

On the whole, I enjoyed this one, but it’s nothing earth-shattering. I put the next book on my TBR though because I do want to see what Rika and Kem get up to next.

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Book review: Cuckoo

Alright, I know it's Monday, but I wrapped up yet another horror novel last night, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Cuckoo. This book is about a group of kids in 1995 who are sent to a conversion camp, experience The Horrors, and then reunite many years later to have another crack at taking The Horrors down.

First, I have to say the decision to set a horror novel in a conversion camp is kind of galaxy-brained, because it is a place that by design is traumatizing and horrifying. This book will make your skin crawl and your eyes tear up well before the monster enters the scene. There are seven protagonists and they come from all walks of life—gay kids, trans kids, kids from Christian families, kids from Jewish families, white kids, Asian kids, Latino kids, fat kids, mentally ill kids—but they all come from families who were willing to stuff them, sobbing and kicking and begging, into the back of a van and ship them off with a bunch of strangers to be “cured.”

And then there’s the monsters.

Generally I’m not a fan of “body snatcher” kind of horror stories, in the same way I’m not a fan of conspiracy theory stories, but I think it largely works here, because this is what the families want isn’t it? For their problem child to go away for a while and come back a new person, without all those icky traits mom and dad didn’t want. For the teens, watching the queer kids around them succumb to “curing” would feel like a kind of body-snatching—who are you and what have you done with the queer person I knew?

The book is also very gross, and I mean that not pejoratively, but factually. If you have a low tolerance for grossness, this one may not be for you. The monster and its ilk are nasty galore (see minor complaint below) and Felker-Martin does not pull punches about the grossness of human existence, particularly as an angry, horny, repressed teenager in a desperate situation. The characters here puke, piss, make out in public bathrooms, masturbate amidst their sleeping peers, eat pussy during menstruation, and are generally grody in the way teenagers are grody. I think grounding the book in these bodily realities works well given the nature of the horror, which is incredibly personal and physical.

I liked the teens themselves and I felt like they represented a decent spread of attitudes and behaviors from people in circumstances both similar and diverse. They exhibit many of the kinds of irritating and off-putting behaviors you’d expect from a group of young people who’ve already learned they must hide their true selves or be punished for it.

There were a couple of things that didn’t totally land for me though. First, I think the descriptions of the monster(s) are overdone sometimes. Not because it grossed me out too much but because yes okay, we get it, the thing is nasty, it’s ugly, it smells bad, it’s inchoate; can we move on? Also, I never felt like I had a real idea of what the thing(s) looked like, despite all the descriptions.

Second, the book jacket description makes it sound like the majority of the book will be the teens as adults, returning to the horrors they faced when they were young, but two thirds or more of the book is the actual events of the conversion camp. It makes the final third in their adulthood feel somewhat rushed.

However, on the whole, I liked this book and I’d be open to reading more from Felker-Martin. There are so many moments here where you want to hug these kids and take them somewhere safe, and I enjoyed the book’s balance of the power of love with the grim reality of the cost of life.

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Book review: The Unworthy

Wednesday night I plowed through most of The Unworthy by Augustina Baztericca, translated from Spanish by Sarah Moses. This is a horror novel about a woman living in an isolated cult after climate change has ravaged most of the planet.

This was one of those books that had me going “okay just one more section and I’ll put it down” and then it was five sections later and I was still there. It just hooked me. I wanted to know more about the cult, I wanted to know more about the narrator’s past, I was so eager to see what was going to come next.

This book goes heavy on gore, mutilation, and cult abuse, so if those are not for you, you may want to give this one a pass. I found it fascinating; the world of the narrator is so grim and tightly controlled, but it’s all that’s left (as far as they know). The book also leans hard on things unspoken: things the narrator knows are so taboo she crosses them out of her own (secret) writings (such as when she wonders if maybe the earth has begun to heal); things she has forcefully blocked from her memory because they hurt so much to think of; the deep current of attraction she feels towards various other women in the cult which is easier to express through violence than sexuality.

In the claustrophobic world of the cult, it becomes so easy for the leadership to pit the women against each other, and they have grown shockingly cruel and violent towards one another in their quest for dominance (each of the “unworthy” dreams of ascending to the holier status of a “Chosen” or “Enlightened”). With virtually no control over their day-to-day, they fantasize about opportunities to punish each other, their only ability to enact their will on the world.

The hints from the beginning that the narrator questions her role in the cult create a delicious tension in the work. Her mere act of writing her experiences down is a violation of cult rules and she frequently keeps her journal pages bound to her chest under her clothes so no one will find them.

The translation was excellent, the writing flows well and Moses captures the descriptions and the narrator’s backtracking on her wording without anything becoming awkward.

The book isn’t long, but I was riveted, and I would like to read more of Baztericca’s work in the future. This was also the second Argentinian horror novel that surprised me with queerness, so another win for Argentinian horror.

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Book review: A Desolation Called Peace

A Memory Called Empire left me in such a place that I of course had to rush after the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine. In the second book of this duology, we're tackling the bomb dropped at the end of the last book: that a hostile alien force has been picking at the borders of Teixcalaanli space.

This became a first contact story, which delighted me, because I love first contact stories. The book posits another interesting philosophical question to the readers. Darj Tarats wants Teixcalaan to go to war with these new aliens, because it would likely drag on for quite some time, sucking up Teixcalaan's resources and keeping them focused on something other than colonizing Lsel Station, and might even destroy them in the end. Mahit does not want Teixcalaan to go to war with these new aliens because it would be an unnecessary and vast loss of life on both sides, and because in spite of its nature as an empire, there's so much Mahit likes about Teixcalaan, even though peace allows Teixcalaan much more time and resources to potentially conquer Mahit's home.

Book 2 breaks into a mulit-POV style, which works very well I think for giving us a 3D view of the situation when first contact is made and what happens after. Emotions, naturally, are running very high on all sides, so getting to see many characters' thoughts is helpful to understanding this house of cards.

Martine does a great job I think of presenting us with aliens that are alien, but still people. The question is whether they and the Teixcalaanli can work that out before someone does something fearful.

She also does well with layering Mahit and Yskander here. There are a few conversations Mahit has that hit so much harder now that we have a full picture of Yskander and how long the ambassador to Teixcalaan has been kicked around the Lsel council like a football as they all pursue their own best course for keeping away from Teixcalaan. Knowing that that fragment of Yskander is there, seeing the fallout of his own death and how it came about makes these conversations especially powerful.

The story is laid out gradually and builds to a believable conclusion. The ending is slightly abrupt--there's not really any denouement--but it didn't shortchange the story.

One of the perspectives we see in this book is imperial heir Eight Antidote, now 11. And he's either quite precocious, or Six Direction was a genius, which is possible. This kid's a regular Johnny-on-the-spot, but he is also a narrative tool representing a very different future for Teixcalaan than Emperor Nineteen Adze represents. He is Six Direction unencumbered by years of war and politicking; he is Six Direction without the grim, dog-eat-dog-world attitude of an adult raised by Empire. But he's also young and vulnerable; he represents a Teixcalaan that could be--but also one that could so easily be smothered in its crib, a fate Nineteen Adze is desperate to avoid.

Mahit and Three Seagrass continue to struggle, even more than in the last book, with the nature of their relationship. Three Seagrass is pure Teixcalaanli, and can frequently be insulting without meaning to, but Mahit is also primed by years of Teixcalaan's cultural chauvinism to see insult even where none was intended. I felt like they landed, by the end of the book, somewhere believable--although I would absolutely read more about them if Martine was offering!

I didn't notice this book having the issue with repetition that I found in book 1, so that was a nice improvement as well.

I was worried at the end of the last book how the story would handle this shocking, massive plot drop, but I think Martine did it very gracefully. It feels like a natural continuation of book 1 while still expanding the focus of the story. I would love to see more of this universe, but I'm also satisfied with where we've left things. There are no easy answers to what to do about Teixcalaan, but that doesn't feel unrealistic either. Well done all around!

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Book review: Affinity

I finished my second Sarah Waters book this week after devouring most of it on my flight to Texas and she has surely done it again! This book was Affinity, a much less-talked about one of her novels, which concerns Victorian lady Margaret Prior, who in an effort to overcome her grief for her recently deceased father and a mysterious illness that gripped her around that time, decides to become a "Lady Visitor" to a women's prison: someone who comes to talk with them from time-to-time. She almost immediately becomes enraptured with a young medium, Selina Dawes, doing time for murder and assault.

I don't usually like to do extensive summaries in these reviews, but I want to highlight what USA Today called "thinly veiled erotica" in this book. This book is best approached, I think, with a measure of dream logic (or porn logic, if you prefer), where things can be deeply erotic in concept that in real life would certainly not be. Nothing illustrates this better than the opening chapter of the book.

In the opening chapter, Margaret makes her first visit to Millbank prison. Waters does an excellent job of making the prison itself a terror; a winding maze of whitewashed, identical hallways inside a cocoon of pentagonal buildings set unsteadily into the marshy bank of the Thames within which Margaret immediately becomes turned around. She is passed from the gentleman family friend who first suggested she become a Lady Visitor to the matrons of the women's side of the prison, a realm populated entirely by women. As Margaret passes into this self-contained place which feels entirely removed from the rest of the world (the prisoners are allowed to send correspondence four times a year) she becomes keenly aware of the strange blurring and even erasure of the boundaries, rules, and customs of the outside world. Furthermore, Margaret is reassured over and over again that she is, effectively, in a position of power over all these vulnerable women, trapped in their cells and subject to the harsh rules of Millbank. The prison fully intends for Margaret to be someone for them to idolize and look up to, someone whose attention can make them strive to better themselves. Margaret, a repressed Victorian lesbian, is dropped into this strange realm of only women in which she operates above the rules that strictly govern the rest of them.

It is in this state, after this long journey through Millbank, that Margaret first catches sight of Selina Dawes, and is taken from the start.

The book is not heavy on plot, and some reviewers have called it dull, but I was riveted. The plot is the development of Margaret and Selina's relationship, and the progress of Margaret's mindset on the question of whether Selina's powers or real, or if she's just a very talented con artist. These are by nature things which progress gradually. Practically, it's true that not much happens: Margaret visits the prison. Margaret goes to the library. Margaret has a disagreement with her mother. But her mental and emotional changes across the book are significant.

There are also the vibes. Waters does such a good job of capturing a very gloomy, gothic atmosphere where Margaret (and the reader!) are constantly sort of questioning what's real and to what degree and there's a powerful sense of unease that permeates the entire story. It ties in so well with Selina's role as a spiritual medium and the Victorian obsession with such things; it creates a very holistic theme and feel to the book that I just sank into.

On the flip side of the erotic view of the prison we see early in the book, Waters also uses it to terrifying effect to simulate the paranoia of a closeted gay person at this time in England. As Margaret's feelings for Selina develop and become more explicit, she lives in terror that the matrons of the prison will realize that her interest in Selina is not the polite interest of a Lady Visitor in her charges. She is always analyzing what the matrons can see in her interactions with Selina and what might go under the radar; she is constantly wondering if rude comments or looks from this matron or that is simple rudeness, or a veiled accusation of impropriety. The panopticon pulses around Margaret more and more but she can't keep away from Selina even to protect herself from the danger of being caught.

On the whole, I thought this book was fantastic. I enjoyed it even more than Fingersmith. Waters was really cooking here and I've added several more of her books to my TBR, because she obviously knows what she's doing.

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Book review: A Memory Called Empire

I realized as I was approaching the end of this book that it is the third unfinished series sapphic SFF centering the machinations of an empire that I've read lately (the others being The Locked Tomb and The Masquerade). A Memory Called Empire is the first book in the Teixcalaan series by Arkady Martine (narrated by Amy Landon in the audiobook) and tells the story of Mahit Dzmare, a diplomat from an as-yet-unconquered satellite state of the Teixcalaanli Empire entering her role as ambassador for the first time--after the previous ambassador went radio silent.

For fans of fantasy politics, I highly recommend this one. Mahit enters a political scene on the cusp of boiling over and is thrown not only into navigating a culture and society she's only ever read about, but having to piece together what her predecessor was doing, why he was doing it, and what happened to him. It's a whirlwind of not knowing who to trust, what to lean on, or where to go.

Martine creates such an interesting world here in Teixcalaan and the mindset of a people who pride themselves on being artists above all and yet exist as ruthless conquerors within their corner of space. Furthermore, Mahit herself is in a fascinating position as someone who's been half in love with this empire since childhood, and yet is all too keenly aware of the threat it poses to her and her home. Mahit does well in Teixcalaan--she loves the poetry and literature they so highly prize, she's able to navigate Teixcalaanli society and see the double meanings everywhere, and she's excited to try her hand at these things. And yet--if she plays her cards wrong, it will end with her home being gobbled up by Empire, and as Mahit herself says: Nothing touched by Empire remains unchanged.

I really enjoyed her characters too--3-Seagrass stole the show for me--and they all have believably varied and grounded views and opinions, with the sorts of blind spots and biases you would expect from people in their respective positions. There's character growth and change too, which is always fun to see, and I'm excited to see how that progresses in the next book.

If I had a complaint, and it's a minor one, it's that the prose is sometimes overly repetitive and explanatory, as if Martine doesn't quite trust her audience to remember things from earlier in the book, or understand what's being implied, which occasionally has the effect of making Mahit look less intelligent than her role would demand. However, it didn't happen often enough that I was truly annoyed, and I think the book gets better about it as it goes on.

On the whole, a fun, exciting read (although it takes its time to set up--expect a slow start!) that left me actually looking forward to my commute for a chance to listen to more. Already checking to see if my library has the next book available.

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When They Burned the Butterfly

Happy Friday!

This was a weird ride, to be honest. It's a fairly meaty book -- in an alternate Singapore where gangs can channel divine powers through oath tattoos that bind them to their god, the daughter of a nouveau middle-class shopkeeper discovers her mother's secrets, her own sexuality, and how far she's willing to go for revenge -- and I found it immersive in the worldbuilding and compelling in the storylines, but the pacing is absolutely bizarre. It kind of goes about its business for 80% of the pagecount, suddenly accelerates in the next 15%, and then breaks the sound barrier to crash-land the final 5% with a resolution that feels to me almost like the author ran out of energy and just summarized the rest.

If you're craving dark f/f with plenty of violence and tragedy, it might be worth a gander -- I'm deeply curious as to whether anyone else feels (or will feel) similarly about the pacing.

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Book review: Solo Dance

Last night I wrapped up Solo Dance by Kotomi Li, translated from Japanese by Arthur Morris. This short book is about a young gay Taiwanese woman who struggles with both internal and external homophobia, and eventually moves to Japan looking for understanding.

Queer stories from other countries are always interesting to me and it’s a good reminder that progress has not been even all over the world. Much of the book is pretty depressing, because the protagonist struggled with fitting in even before she realized she was gay, and she has some real struggles. She is battling severe depression for much of the book and at several points, suicidality.

The book is touching in that the protagonist’s struggles feel real and she’s someone who is so close to having positive experience that could change her life for the better, but her luck keeps dropping on the other side each time.

I don’t want to spoil too much about the end, but while I was grateful for the overall tone of the it, it is contrived and not very believable. But I did enjoy the protagonist’s travels leading up to that point. It’s not at all subtle, and it packs a lot more plot into the final handful of chapters than the rest of the book, but it was still sweet to see the protagonist’s perspective shift a little through her engagements with other people.

I’m not sure if it’s the translation or the original prose, but the language is stilted and very emotionally distant. The reader is kept at arm’s length from the protagonist virtually the whole novel, and while we’re often told she’s feeling these intense feelings, I never felt it. It was like reading a clinical report of her feelings, which was disappointing.

This is Li’s first novel, and it reads that way. There’s a lot of heart in it, and I appreciate it for that, but it lacks a lot in technical skill. I would be interested to see more of Li’s future work, when she’s had more time to polish her ability, but I don’t regret taking the time with this one.

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Book review: Road to Ruin

I have a job again! \^o^/ This means I am back on the audiobook train and today I wrapped up Road to Ruin by Hana Lee, book 1 of the Magebike Courier duology. This is a low fantasy dystopian novel located in a place called the Mana Wastes, where protagonist Jin works as a courier transporting goods between protected cities. Jin runs a lot of odd jobs for various clients, but her most lucrative by far are Prince Kadrin and Princess Yi-Nereen. Jin has been ferrying love letters between them for three years--while hiding the fact that she's fallen in love with both of them. But everything changes when Yi-Nereen decides to run away and asks Jin to help her.

First, don't let the hokey title put you off. I started this one a bit warily, but it turned out to be quite a lot of fun! The worldbuilding is pretty light, but the novel seems aware of that and doesn't overpromise on that front. What is there serves its purpose well. It's not anything particularly novel, but not every book needs to be.

Jin, Yi-Nereen, and Kadrin are all wonderful protagonists; each of them has a distinct personality, perspective, and motivations, and I really enjoyed all of them. I was rooting for them the whole book and it was great to watch their various interpersonal dynamics unfold. If you're a fan of stories about mutual pining, this one is definitely worth checking out. However, if that's not really your speed, I didn't feel like the book spent too much time harping on about feelings we all suspect or know are requited. The romance element is definitely there, and it's a significant motivator for all three of them, but there's plenty else going on in the book too.

The book avoids falling prey either to the Charybdis of black-and-white morality where everyone who stands in the way of the protagonists is evil, or to the Scylla of "everyone is friends if we just talk things out," which is a relief after some recent reads. There's definitely a sliding scale of antagonism here, with some characters who are obstacles but not necessarily bad people, and others who run much darker.

I also enjoyed the presence of the "Road Builders." Jin and her peers inhabit the Mana Wastes, a treacherous desert wasteland where little survives and almost none of it without human intervention. They sustain themselves with "talent"--magical abilities common among humans, but becoming less common by the day--and travel along ravaged roads built by some culture who came before, about which Jin and her peers know very little. These are the "Road Builders" and are, I believe, strongly hinted at to be us. Lee keeps them a pleasant mystery humming in the background of everything else going on.

There were a couple contrivances near the end to aid a dramatic conclusion, but nothing so egregious I wasn't willing to continue to play ball with the book. Similarly, I'm on the fence about where this book leaves the relationship between the main trio, because it feels a little too much like Lee felt it was a necessary hook into book 2, but I'll reserve judgement until I've actually read book 2. And perhaps it's better that everything doesn't wrap up too neatly here.

On the whole, I had a lot of fun with this book and I will definitely read the next one.

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Book review: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Last night I finished Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a sci-fi book about a motley crew of spacefarers who "drill" wormholes to enable rapid travel across space for the diverse galactic alliance known as the GC. At the start of the book, they are offered a bid on a particularly difficult, lucrative job, and can't resist taking the bait.

This should be (another) lesson to me in not going all-in on a creator because I've enjoyed one of their works. I loved Chambers' To Be Taught, if Fortunate, and I've heard plenty of internet praise for The Long Way, so when I saw it at the bookstore recently, I dropped $20 on it readily. If I hadn't, I probably wouldn't have bothered finishing it.

First - if you picked up this book looking for the femslash, it's barely there, and it's a lot more friends-with-benefits than romance. The other two romances in the book get a lot more attention. If what you really want is F/F romance, it's not really here.

This is a character-driven book with barely a plot, which wouldn't be a problem if the characters were interesting. As it is, they are functionally interchangeable: a crew of people who are all optimistic, friendly, emotionally open, painstakingly polite, and obsessively well-intentioned (except for the one guy who's a Jerk, who exists to be a jerk whenever the scene calls for someone who needs to be less-than-fanatically-polite or there's a chance for Chambers to squeeze in another instance of his being a jerk, even when he's technically right). There is no character growth to speak of; none of these characters changes at all between the start of the book and the end. There's no complexity to anyone.

( Read more... )

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Stone & Sky

Just popping in to mention that the latest Rivers of London entry, Stone & Sky, features our talented young apprentice Abigail as a co-narrator, and she meets a very intriguing huntress while she's tagged along on a Scottish investigation. It's a very "ah, youth" kind of summer romance for sure, but I enjoyed Abigail's POV on it a great deal, not to mention the particular ways that it was tinged by their involvements in the demimonde!

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Book review: "Concerning My Daughter"

Today I finished book #11 on the "Women in Translation" rec list: Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-Jin, translated from Korean by Jamie Chang. This book is about an a widow in her mid-70s who ends up sharing a home with her adult daughter and her daughter's partner. Her contentious relationship with her daughter pits her long-held beliefs and societal viewpoints against her love for her child; simultaneously, she struggles in her job caring for an elderly dementia patient in a nursing home.

The protagonist is a person who values, above all, keeping your head down and doing what's expected of you. She does not believe in standing out; she does not believe in involving yourself in other people's problems; perhaps for these reasons, she believes the only people you can ever count on are family. This is how she's lived her whole life, and she believes it was for the best. However, this mindset puts her directly in conflict with her daughter, a lesbian activist who is fighting for equal employment treatment for queer professors and teachers in the South Korean educational system.

When her daughter, Green, runs out of money to pay rent after a quarrel with the university where she was lecturing, the protagonist allows Green and her partner Lane to move in, despite their fractious relationship.

( Read more... )( Read more... )

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Book review: "Someone You Can Build a Nest In" by John Wiswell

A+ Library is my bit where I review books with asexual and aromantic characters.

Shhh we're ignoring that I forgot to post this on Friday yesterday. Went on a weekend trip with the squad this weekend and we had to stop at the local Barnes and Noble (It's been a while since I was in one that big! Ours in my town is now in the mall, so it's quite small.) where I spent too much and picked up some things on my TBR plus my own copy of Our Wives Under the Sea. We had some downtime on the trip and I managed to finish the first of the new books while we were there. This was Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell.

I wanted so much to like this book, and not just because I was charmed by the purple-themed Barnes and Noble-exclusive cover and edging. It landed on my TBR for being an asexual romance (sapphic, if you take Shesheshen for female, which you don't have to do), and I enjoyed the plot concept. Unfortunately, I did not like the book. If I had not paid for it I probably would not have finished it. The following review is not to say it's a bad book—it has an average rating of 4.05 stars on StoryGraph based on over 6,000 reviews, so obviously people like it—but to say that it specifically had a number of things that made it a big thumbs down for me.

The Character(s): Shesheshen, asexual; Homily, asexual
Verdict: Thumbs down
Previous read: To be Taught, if Fortunate

( Full review below )

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The Incandescent

The marketing that I've seen for this book has been fairly buzzword-heavy, which I think does both it and potential readers a disservice. It's not a vibes-forward romance with "dark academia" aesthetics as the taglines imply, but rather a surprisingly grounded deep dive into the head of a brilliant, passionate, overworked and above all overproud educator -- three doors over from the hubris of Greek tragedy if anything, and firmly rooted in the complexities of being a person. As someone who loves an immersive POV, this was very much fine by me, but someone going in looking for, say, a love story might be a little disappointed: our bisexual protagonist does dally with a couple of characters and there is an endgame couple, but this is very much not the main focus. She probably spends more time thinking about pedagogy than about paramours (and I love that for her, because that's who she is).

Overall, I found The Incandescent a compelling read with a cast of engaging characters, interesting modern worldbuilding, and a very strong sense of self (heh), albeit a little oddly paced in a way I can't quite put my finger on. My recommendation is to ignore all marketing and just give it a sneak-peek read to see if it feels like your cup of tea.

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Tasha Suri's Burning Kingdoms Trilogy

The Jasmine Throne, The Oleander Sword, and The Lotus Empire

The Burning Kingdoms is an ambitious high-fantasy saga set in an India-inspired secondary world, in which an orphan priestess from an oppressed client state seeking personal and national independence, and the disgraced princess seeking support for her rebellion against her insane brother the emperor, must make common cause. This is a proper epic fantasy with court politics, battles, a doomed (or is it?) romance, dozens of side characters, multiple POVs, the lot.

There is much to like here, though I don’t think it all fully pays off in the end. In part, this is because, in my opinion, the most interesting, developed, and unique character is actually neither Priya (priestess) or Malini (princess), the nominal joint protagonists, but Bhumika, who was herself a priestess in Priya’s order, but during the final submission of their state, married into the new governing nobility. She has a kind of bone-deep pragmatism which expresses itself both in mercilessness and in mercy, and Suri maps her journey over the trilogy towards becoming a leader for a world in which all sides are able to live together with a precise, insightful hand. Meanwhile, as individuals, Priya and Malini have great moments, and their individual storylines (which spend a lot of time apart) are quite convincing as stories and as psychological portraits, but their relationship, which is nominally the core of the series, gets less persuasive with every book. Malini especially gets increasingly flattened as the series goes on, because she has to be a genius commander/coldhearted empress type while also hitting some pretty strained romance beats, and that doesn’t fit together well, particularly compared to Priya, who has more narrative space to grow without messing up the plot-engine, and Bhumika, who basically has the hero’s journey. The whole thing felt like it got a little less expansive with each book, like Suri had bitten off more than she could chew.

However, what she did manage was great. As its own thing, The Jasmine Throne is an enormously successful introductory novel for the trilogy. I loved the way religion exists in this world and in the story. You could say Malini is an atheist or anti-theist, even, while Priya and Bhumika have far more complicated relationships to their gods and the role religion can play as a tool of nationalism and in-group solidarity. Suri takes religious ritual and belief seriously in a way that is rare in SFF, and in that seriousness, she manages to use it to drive a fantastic set of emotional journeys and plot elements. You also get to see so many parts and aspects of this rich world, all described very beautifully, and while I can see how it would be confusing, I enjoy the multiple POVs scattered throughout the book which take us, sometimes very briefly, into the heads of many significant and insignificant individuals throughout the empire.

I am sad that it didn’t quite soar, but it was definitely worth the read.

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Book review: "The Once and Future Witches" by Alix Harrow

On Monday I finished The Once and Future Witches by Alix Harrow, about a trio of sisters in the American city of "New Salem" in Massachusetts in 1893 who take it upon themselves to revive witches' magic.

The Once and Future Witches dovetails historically with the movement for women's suffrage, creating some parallels between seeking the right to the vote and seeking the right to practice magic. I would have liked to have seen this carried more through the latter half of the novel, but I suppose I can see why it wasn't, particularly given it would be another nearly thirty years before the passage of the 19^th Amendment granting women the right to vote. The suffragettes played a long game.

The core focus of the novel is sisterhood, both blood and otherwise. Harrow presents a beautifully wounded and layered portrait of siblinghood in the relationship between the three protagonists: Bella, the oldest; Agnes, the middle child; and Juniper, the youngest. Raised without a mother (she passed birthing Juniper) under the thumb of their abusive and alcoholic father in rural poverty, all three girls learned early on what they would do to ensure their own survival. And while there is great love between them, there is also great hurt, and by the start of the book, the three are not on speaking terms. Harrow did a great job with the complexity here, and watching their relationships develop and begin to heal was very enjoyable.

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Book review: "The Sapling Cage" by Margaret Killjoy

Oof. Today I threw in the towel on Margaret Killjoy's The Sapling Cage because I'd rather be alone with my thoughts than sit through another three hours of this book. This is a fantasy book about a "boy," Lorel, who disguises herself as her female friend to join a witches' coven (She's a transgirl, but her journey on that understanding is part of the book, and she refers to herself as a boy for much of the story.)

First, I will say that I think Lorel is a protagonist written with love; clearly Killjoy wanted her to be relatable and sympathetic, and someone eager for a trans fantasy protag may be willing to forgive the book's many weaknesses for that. That said...

I was shocked to realize this book is not categorized as Young Adult/Youth literature. Lorel is 16 at the start of the book and she's very sixteen. She makes all the sorts of stupid, immature mistakes you would expect from a teenager, which makes her a realistic character, but also deeply frustrating to read as an adult, particularly since the first-person narration puts us right in her head. The book feels young even for a sixteen-year-old; it reads more like a preteen novel about teenagers.

The book itself feels incredibly juvenile, both in prose and in narrative. The writing is simplistic, the narrative barely there, and the worldbuilding painfully thin. The book infodumps on the reader constantly, going into detail about things that are then never relevant again and don't connect into any kind of overarching picture of what this world is like. Reads very much like the author just throwing a bunch of things she thought were cool at the reader without actually thinking about how they would impact her world or the characters in them.

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Book review: "The Tyrant Baru Cormorant"

Today I finished the latest book in the Baru Cormorant series (fourth book remains to-be-released), The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. Y'all, Baru is so back.

! Spoilers for books 1 & 2 below !

If you've looked at other reviews for the series, you may have seen book 2, The Monster Baru Cormorant, referred to as the series' "sophomore slump." I disagree, but I understand where the feeling comes from. The Monster feels like a prelude, a setting of the board, for The Tyrant. The Monster puts all the pieces in place for the cascade of schemes and plays that come in The Tyrant. They almost feel like one book split into two (which is fair—taken together, they represent about a thousand pages and would make for one mammoth novel).

If you felt like Baru was too passive in The Monster and that there wasn't enough scheming going on, I can happily report those things are wholly rectified in The Tyrant. Having located the infamous and quasi-mythological Cancrioth at the end of The Monster, Baru wastes no time in whipping into full savant plotting mode.

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Book review: "The Monster Baru Cormorant" by Seth Dickinson

The day after finishing The Traitor Baru Cormorant I had to rush over to the library to pick up book 2, The Monster Baru Cormorant, which I finished earlier today.

Spoilers for The Traitor Baru Cormorant below!

The second book of a fantasy series of any kind often bears a very difficult burden. It is most often the place where the scope of the story grows significantly. A conflict which before was local to the protagonist's home and surrounding area may expand, often to the extent of the known world. New players are often added to the cast, bigger and scarier problems and challenges arise. The protagonist may have gone up in the world, wielding new power and influence, with new responsibilities. As a result, this is where many series lose their footing; a tightly-woven book or season 1 may give way to a muddled, watered down part 2 as the writers struggle to juggle this expanded focus.

The Monster suffers from none of those things. It is the place where Baru's story expands—in The Traitor, her focus was almost entirely on Aurdwynn; it was the full field of play and outside players mattered only as they influenced events on Aurdwynn. In The Monster, Baru has become a true agent of the Imperial Throne of Falcrest, and with these new powers, the entire field of the empire is opened up for her play, and it is fascinating to watch.

In The Traitor, Baru was narrowly focused on managing the situation in Aurdwynn; everything she did was to that end. In The Monster, Baru can do whatever she wants, and we get to see her finally on the open field. Even where she flounders and flails, it's delightful to watch the machinations of her mind constantly at work. Her cleverness rows against her bursts of sentimentality to produce some impressively chaotic effects, but she is as slippery as an eel to pin down, even when her rivals think they've gotten the best of her.

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