The other book I finished during my voyage through the southwest was How to Love Your Daughter by Hila Blum, translated from Hebrew by Daniella Zamir. This was book [checks notes] #17 from the “Women in Translation” rec list. It’s about an estranged mother and daughter; as the mother peers through the windows of her adult daughter’s house from across the street, she ponders what went wrong in their formerly loving relationship.

How to Love Your Daughter is a cerebral kind of novel that swims back and forth between Yoella’s present, desperately reaching after the daughter who’s walked out of her life, and Yoella’s recollections of raising Leah.

The twists and turns of their relationship are subtle, almost too subtle. Both characters come off slightly neurotic, fussing about every minor interaction and seeming, to me, to invent problems where none really existed. In the end, it’s not so much a long-deteriorating relationship, which is what I expected, as it is Yoella making one decision that forever alters Leah’s perception of her.

“No one warned me my love could destroy her,” Yoella says about Leah at one point and that’s the core of it. Yoella adores her daughter, almost beyond reason. And it’s that very willingness to put Leah above everyone and everything else that eventually pushes Leah away from her, which is such a perfect tragedy.

I saw another review that said this book was both too long and too short, and I think there’s some truth to that. There are drawn out middle sections which don’t necessarily add much, but the ultimate break and subsequent efforts at reconciliation by Yoella don’t get as much room to breathe as might have benefitted them.

However, the ending is an exquisite microcosm of the tension of the whole novel, leaving you wondering about unreliable narrators and perceptions. Some people felt that Yoella gets off too easy—I would recommend rereading the section where Leah talks to Yoella about her reality/fantasy of Dennis writing her a letter.

I don’t know that either Yoella or Leah comes off as really sympathetic here, but they do come off very human, full of flaws and self-justifications and irrational reactions. And maybe sometimes it’s just human nature to create a tragedy where there didn’t have to be one.

I went out of town for my little sister’s graduation this weekend and finished two books on the trip! The first was Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, a fantasy-in-space story about a young infantry captain who has the soul of a famous traitor embedded into her mind to assist with a tricky military campaign.

I nearly had to eat crow on this book because I’ve said so many times I prefer when SFF books just dump you into their world rather than giving you an expositional primer, but Ninefox Gambit really tested my commitment to that. The first third of this book is a whirlwind of terms, practices, and concepts that not only are never explained, but for which the context is nearly nonexistent. I think you simply have to accept being confused to enjoy this one, which is why many reviews did not.

Semi-related, this may dress itself up as sci-fi, but it is fantasy. This is a magic system. A magic system that makes use of mathematics, but a magic system nonetheless. Accepting that going in will make dealing with the practical jargon much easier.

All that said, I ended up really enjoying this one, and I do plan to read the next two in the series. There’s just oodles of machinations and scheming and recontextualizations that I think are great fun and the end payoff was worth sticking with it.

As is the case with any story of this nature, our resident omnicidal traitor, Jedao, eclipses the book’s actual protagonist, Cheris. It’s just hard for our young, inexperienced infantryman to be as engaging as someone with as much history and baggage as Jedao. But I do think Cheris holds her own and doesn’t become just Jedao’s shadow. Additionally, Jedao, who is the most tactically brilliant mind the empire ever produced, gets plenty of opportunity to shine without making Cheris look like an idiot in comparison, which is a difficult needle to thread as the author. Furthermore, Cheris comes into her own more over the course of the book, which makes sense for her rapidly expanding level of experience.

Jedao is great fun to poke at and learn about, though I won’t say too much here to avoid spoilers. I hope we get to hear more from him in the next books.

Lee tees up the next book perfectly here without ending on a total cliffhanger. Nevertheless, I’ll be getting my hands on book 2: Raven Stratagem as soon as I can.