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Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Zahrah the Windseeker: On a planet where technology and plants have merged, Zahrah is dada—born with vines in her hair—which is a somewhat disreputable thing to be. Then, at thirteen, she starts to float, and when her best friend convinces her to enter the forbidden forest, she has to save him from mortal danger. It was a wittily designed world, though I was expecting YA based on my own misunderstanding and got something younger than that; I will probably suggest it to my kids in a few years.
Sherman Alexie, Flight: Zits, an angry half-Indian kid who just ran away from his latest foster home, has a series of out-of-body experiences putting him in many different parts of the American history of violence. It is a life lesson book, but his raw anger and recognition that there are no simple solutions keeps most of the saccharin away. I enjoyed it.
Mildred Ames, The Silver Link, the Silken Tie: Tim and Felice, two troubled teenagers, share a therapist (though they don’t know that for a while) and start to share more than that, but Felice is being recruited by a creepy mind cult. Not very much happens, and it’s no Anna to the Infinite Power, but I can see how Ames might’ve written them both.
David Gerrold, Blood and Fire: Gerrold’s answer to Star Trek without the standard constraints—features a prominent gay couple as part of the beat-up starship’s crew; there’s also a threat of galactic genocide through a plague of “bloodworms.” The intro is kind of oblivious about why it might be weird to say “we’re going to be gay-positive and do a story that is a metaphor for AIDS where everyone might get infected and die!” But this is a decent space adventure, somewhere between the squeaky clean Space Cadet and the later Firefly/BSG reboot really corrupt and broken-down ethos.
Kage Baker, Mother Aegypt and Other Stories: I liked these a lot, much more than the last few Company books I read. Many are vicious satires either of standard fantasy tropes or of specific stories (including A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Gulliver’s Travels) and they are very, very dark, but written with a light touch that makes them darker.
Seanan McGuire, Discount Armageddon: An InCryptid Novel: Our heroine, from a family that broke away from the nonhuman-hating Covenant in order to study “cryptids” and promote coexistence with the nonhomicidal variants thereof, doesn’t really want to continue in the family business. She wants to dance! As she lives and works in NYC trying to make her dream come true, she encounters a dangerous and dangerously sexy member of the Covenant, and of course it turns out there’s another enemy entirely to fear: someone else is making innocent cryptids disappear. I really like McGuire’s (as Mira Grant) Newsflesh trilogy, and the October Daye novels are perfectly readable fantasy, but this book annoyed me because the noir-ish narration could not recognize when it had hit the punchline and needed to stop. A couple of nonrandom but representative samples: “What was the point of hide-and-seek if you weren’t allowed to dig pit traps or attack your opponents from behind? That was the first time I realized how different our home life was from everyone else’s. Everyone else wasn’t being taught to fight a war.” “Ever try to hide a gun in a competition rumba costume? It’s neither easy nor fun. The inner thigh holster that doesn’t chafe has yet to be invented by man, beast, cryptid, or Price.” (Oh, yeah, she spends a lot of time talking about being a “Price girl,” which just gave me horrific flashbacks to Gale girls and I kept wondering why she was disparaging the boys in her family by implication.) Clever aphorisms aren’t always: “Most of the time, there isn’t time to adjust to whatever’s going on before you have to deal with it. Life in our world is very sink or swim, and that’s for the best. If you can’t survive in the deep end, you should get out before you drown.” Really? If it’s sink or swim, how do you get out without drowning? Who or what is the helpful lifeguard or life preserver helping you out of the deep end in this analogy? Anyway, I will watch out for McGuire’s other stuff, but I will not reapproach this series without some indication of narrative improvement; it’s a bit of a shame since I liked the rest of the worldbuilding.
Mike Carey, Spellbinders: Signs & Wonders: Manga-size full color graphic novel about teen witches whose shit gets real just before a new girl arrives in Salem town, possibly to save the world or possibly just to die. I liked the backstory that witches are from “somewhere else,” but I couldn’t get over that eighteen-inch stretch between the bottom of the breasts and the middle of the hips that all heroines apparently have to bare these days as they twist in improbable directions. And yes, it’s not like I can avoid that with a different Marvel book (though Rachel Rising is certainly following Echo in not doing that), but the story didn’t grip me enough to keep me reading.
Sherman Alexie, Flight: Zits, an angry half-Indian kid who just ran away from his latest foster home, has a series of out-of-body experiences putting him in many different parts of the American history of violence. It is a life lesson book, but his raw anger and recognition that there are no simple solutions keeps most of the saccharin away. I enjoyed it.
Mildred Ames, The Silver Link, the Silken Tie: Tim and Felice, two troubled teenagers, share a therapist (though they don’t know that for a while) and start to share more than that, but Felice is being recruited by a creepy mind cult. Not very much happens, and it’s no Anna to the Infinite Power, but I can see how Ames might’ve written them both.
David Gerrold, Blood and Fire: Gerrold’s answer to Star Trek without the standard constraints—features a prominent gay couple as part of the beat-up starship’s crew; there’s also a threat of galactic genocide through a plague of “bloodworms.” The intro is kind of oblivious about why it might be weird to say “we’re going to be gay-positive and do a story that is a metaphor for AIDS where everyone might get infected and die!” But this is a decent space adventure, somewhere between the squeaky clean Space Cadet and the later Firefly/BSG reboot really corrupt and broken-down ethos.
Kage Baker, Mother Aegypt and Other Stories: I liked these a lot, much more than the last few Company books I read. Many are vicious satires either of standard fantasy tropes or of specific stories (including A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Gulliver’s Travels) and they are very, very dark, but written with a light touch that makes them darker.
Seanan McGuire, Discount Armageddon: An InCryptid Novel: Our heroine, from a family that broke away from the nonhuman-hating Covenant in order to study “cryptids” and promote coexistence with the nonhomicidal variants thereof, doesn’t really want to continue in the family business. She wants to dance! As she lives and works in NYC trying to make her dream come true, she encounters a dangerous and dangerously sexy member of the Covenant, and of course it turns out there’s another enemy entirely to fear: someone else is making innocent cryptids disappear. I really like McGuire’s (as Mira Grant) Newsflesh trilogy, and the October Daye novels are perfectly readable fantasy, but this book annoyed me because the noir-ish narration could not recognize when it had hit the punchline and needed to stop. A couple of nonrandom but representative samples: “What was the point of hide-and-seek if you weren’t allowed to dig pit traps or attack your opponents from behind? That was the first time I realized how different our home life was from everyone else’s. Everyone else wasn’t being taught to fight a war.” “Ever try to hide a gun in a competition rumba costume? It’s neither easy nor fun. The inner thigh holster that doesn’t chafe has yet to be invented by man, beast, cryptid, or Price.” (Oh, yeah, she spends a lot of time talking about being a “Price girl,” which just gave me horrific flashbacks to Gale girls and I kept wondering why she was disparaging the boys in her family by implication.) Clever aphorisms aren’t always: “Most of the time, there isn’t time to adjust to whatever’s going on before you have to deal with it. Life in our world is very sink or swim, and that’s for the best. If you can’t survive in the deep end, you should get out before you drown.” Really? If it’s sink or swim, how do you get out without drowning? Who or what is the helpful lifeguard or life preserver helping you out of the deep end in this analogy? Anyway, I will watch out for McGuire’s other stuff, but I will not reapproach this series without some indication of narrative improvement; it’s a bit of a shame since I liked the rest of the worldbuilding.
Mike Carey, Spellbinders: Signs & Wonders: Manga-size full color graphic novel about teen witches whose shit gets real just before a new girl arrives in Salem town, possibly to save the world or possibly just to die. I liked the backstory that witches are from “somewhere else,” but I couldn’t get over that eighteen-inch stretch between the bottom of the breasts and the middle of the hips that all heroines apparently have to bare these days as they twist in improbable directions. And yes, it’s not like I can avoid that with a different Marvel book (though Rachel Rising is certainly following Echo in not doing that), but the story didn’t grip me enough to keep me reading.