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Entry tags:
Fiction/poetry
Jean Lorrah, The Story Untold and Other Stories: For the Sime-Gen completists among us; a series of related happy (modulo the whole Zelerod’s Doom-impending background) stories about a Sime musician and a Gen musician who literally make beautiful music together and also are matchmates.
Meljean Brooks, Riveted: Set in Brooks’ steampunk/biologically altered Europe universe. Woman trying to find her sister without revealing the secrets of her village encounters hot guy with a mechanical arm and eye who is accidentally threatening those secrets with his explorations of Greenland. They nonetheless fall in lust, then love, and join together in the last third of the book to fight off a mad scientist’s terrible schemes. (Actually the schemes of his even more terrible son, but that’s a side note that turns out to involve the sister, by SHEEREST COINCIDENCE.) In the last third it moved briskly enough to keep my attention, but I didn’t feel the core metaphor of the heroine who wants to feel “riveted” by the presence of her man before she gives her heart; that metaphor came up a lot.
SL Huang, Zero Sum Game: Cas Russell is a young woman of color with physical superpowers tied to her incredible facility with numbers—she can shoot or jump or move perfectly to create her desired effects. She lives off the grid, doing questionable jobs and inflicting violence. A retrieval job quickly goes sideways and she’s plunged into a world of conspiracies and even scarier superpowers. The person she trusts most in the world is a similarly superhuman-seeming sociopath, though she joins forces with an upright PI and a computer geek in this particular quest. Huang isn’t as good a writer as Jacqueline Carey is, but if you want a Dark Angel/Santa Olivia-style fix, this will certainly do.
Rachel Hartman, Shadow Scale: This sequel continues Seraphina’s journey to find other half-dragons and to assist her (human) kingdom in defending itself against the rebel dragons who’ve rejected the human-dragon treaty. It’s definitely more leisurely than the first book—Seraphina travels through several kingdoms looking for others like her, and not finding what she expects (particularly, not finding lots of half-dragons who are grateful to be rescued from their situations). Seraphina’s old enemy Jannoula pops up with a fairly comprehensive plot; she’s a sociopath in a society without a concept of psychology, and she brings Seraphina pretty low before the ultimate resolution. And the love triangle—Seraphina, the prince, and the princess he’s supposed to marry—has an unusual resolution, or anyway if it’s not resolved it’s at least interestingly continued.
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric: The beginning sections of this book of poems and scripts for spoken-word pieces, with occasional artwork, are incredibly intense. They are in the second person, which for me (a white woman) created both engagement and forced a confrontation with difference: the POV kept front and center the ways in which I will never experience the racial microaggressions Rankine describes with such devastating specificity and embodied anger/disgust/wish to not have to deal with this. Although I’m not a huge fan of second person, this is clearly one of the best deployments of it. The spoken-word scripts were less powerful, most likely because the visuals didn’t entirely accompany them.
Meljean Brooks, Riveted: Set in Brooks’ steampunk/biologically altered Europe universe. Woman trying to find her sister without revealing the secrets of her village encounters hot guy with a mechanical arm and eye who is accidentally threatening those secrets with his explorations of Greenland. They nonetheless fall in lust, then love, and join together in the last third of the book to fight off a mad scientist’s terrible schemes. (Actually the schemes of his even more terrible son, but that’s a side note that turns out to involve the sister, by SHEEREST COINCIDENCE.) In the last third it moved briskly enough to keep my attention, but I didn’t feel the core metaphor of the heroine who wants to feel “riveted” by the presence of her man before she gives her heart; that metaphor came up a lot.
SL Huang, Zero Sum Game: Cas Russell is a young woman of color with physical superpowers tied to her incredible facility with numbers—she can shoot or jump or move perfectly to create her desired effects. She lives off the grid, doing questionable jobs and inflicting violence. A retrieval job quickly goes sideways and she’s plunged into a world of conspiracies and even scarier superpowers. The person she trusts most in the world is a similarly superhuman-seeming sociopath, though she joins forces with an upright PI and a computer geek in this particular quest. Huang isn’t as good a writer as Jacqueline Carey is, but if you want a Dark Angel/Santa Olivia-style fix, this will certainly do.
Rachel Hartman, Shadow Scale: This sequel continues Seraphina’s journey to find other half-dragons and to assist her (human) kingdom in defending itself against the rebel dragons who’ve rejected the human-dragon treaty. It’s definitely more leisurely than the first book—Seraphina travels through several kingdoms looking for others like her, and not finding what she expects (particularly, not finding lots of half-dragons who are grateful to be rescued from their situations). Seraphina’s old enemy Jannoula pops up with a fairly comprehensive plot; she’s a sociopath in a society without a concept of psychology, and she brings Seraphina pretty low before the ultimate resolution. And the love triangle—Seraphina, the prince, and the princess he’s supposed to marry—has an unusual resolution, or anyway if it’s not resolved it’s at least interestingly continued.
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric: The beginning sections of this book of poems and scripts for spoken-word pieces, with occasional artwork, are incredibly intense. They are in the second person, which for me (a white woman) created both engagement and forced a confrontation with difference: the POV kept front and center the ways in which I will never experience the racial microaggressions Rankine describes with such devastating specificity and embodied anger/disgust/wish to not have to deal with this. Although I’m not a huge fan of second person, this is clearly one of the best deployments of it. The spoken-word scripts were less powerful, most likely because the visuals didn’t entirely accompany them.
no subject
From your reviews, I think I am most interested in the Rankine work. Thanks much for the reviews again. Appreciated greatly.