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Entry tags:
Fiction
Phillip Margolin, Supreme Justice: A conspiracy surrounding state secrets threatens the life of a Supreme Court Justice and her clerk (the star of an earlier book by Margolin). Aside from the ludicrous premise at the center—a conspiracy involving whether or not the Supreme Court will grant cert on a particular case—the factual minutiae are surprisingly accurate. Too bad they’re delivered, assembly-line style, every couple of pages. Infodumps are hard!
Sarah Rees Brennan, The Demon’s Covenant: Sequel to the highly recommended The Demon’s Lexicon, this book switches POV to Mae as she struggles to protect her magician brother Jamie and reconnect with the brothers Alan and Nick, whose own magical issues are pretty extreme. I loved it, although there were places where the moving parts were pretty obvious (you have to give Mae a reason to hear this conversation! You have to give the protagonists a reason not to kill the bad guy right now and solve all their problems!)—on the other hand, that’s vastly preferable to having those things not narratively justified. Mae’s organizational/planning skills are perhaps more commented on than actually present, but Mae herself is extremely likeable and her confusion over the various hot guys available to her (or unavailable) is plausibly teenaged-hormone-inflected. And both Alan and Nick are intriguing/hot; family loyalty abounds. Warning: ends in pretty serious cliffhanger territory. I’m looking forward to what happens next.
Jeremy Love, Bayou, vol.1: In 1933, Lee Wagstaff’s best friend is a white girl. This turns out to be a real problem, especially when the girl first loses her precious locket to the swamp and then disappears, leaving her sharecropper father in danger of being lynched. Lee, stubborn and protective, sets out to free him, encountering dangerous magic along with some help from a swamp monster, Bayou. I loved the bloodhound monster in its Civil War uniform but overall thought that it was a little too YA for my taste.
Fumi Yoshinaga, Ōoku: The Inner Chambers, vol. 3: Finishes out the story of how the first female shogun came to be acknowledged as such, with plenty of reproductive politics—there needs to be a Tokugawa heir, after all. I now want to go back to what happens a couple of generations later.
Sarah Rees Brennan, The Demon’s Covenant: Sequel to the highly recommended The Demon’s Lexicon, this book switches POV to Mae as she struggles to protect her magician brother Jamie and reconnect with the brothers Alan and Nick, whose own magical issues are pretty extreme. I loved it, although there were places where the moving parts were pretty obvious (you have to give Mae a reason to hear this conversation! You have to give the protagonists a reason not to kill the bad guy right now and solve all their problems!)—on the other hand, that’s vastly preferable to having those things not narratively justified. Mae’s organizational/planning skills are perhaps more commented on than actually present, but Mae herself is extremely likeable and her confusion over the various hot guys available to her (or unavailable) is plausibly teenaged-hormone-inflected. And both Alan and Nick are intriguing/hot; family loyalty abounds. Warning: ends in pretty serious cliffhanger territory. I’m looking forward to what happens next.
Jeremy Love, Bayou, vol.1: In 1933, Lee Wagstaff’s best friend is a white girl. This turns out to be a real problem, especially when the girl first loses her precious locket to the swamp and then disappears, leaving her sharecropper father in danger of being lynched. Lee, stubborn and protective, sets out to free him, encountering dangerous magic along with some help from a swamp monster, Bayou. I loved the bloodhound monster in its Civil War uniform but overall thought that it was a little too YA for my taste.
Fumi Yoshinaga, Ōoku: The Inner Chambers, vol. 3: Finishes out the story of how the first female shogun came to be acknowledged as such, with plenty of reproductive politics—there needs to be a Tokugawa heir, after all. I now want to go back to what happens a couple of generations later.