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Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses: Mashup of Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and Tam Lin: Feyre is the put-upon third daughter of an impoverished former gentleman. When she accidentally kills a faerie, she is forced to go live in a faerie court, where she slowly falls in love with the High Lord thereof. Readable and kind to the characters in sometimes unexpected ways, but it didn’t hit as close to my narrative kinks as Maas’s earlier work.
Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap: Mosca Mye, twelve years old, full of vinegar, and possessed only of a dangerous goose as a friend, returns and gets herself in even more trouble now that she’s been kicked out of the radical city of Mandelion. Trying to escape to a place where no one knows her and her companion-by-mutual-self-interest Eponymous Clent, she stumbles into Toll, where there is a day city and a night city, and more plots than could fit in both together. It’s another well-done adventure, with a tiny little dose of Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, though without the relentless story logic of that classic.
Jillian Tamaki, Supermutant Magic Academy: Collection of comics featuring teenagers with superpowers and angst and conceptual art pieces. Some nice bits involving teenage self-absorption and attempts to figure out identity, though they probably were sharper when read one at a time than in a whole rush. Print copy of an online comic.
Claire North, Touch: Kepler is an entity that can move its consciousness from person to person, leaving the previous host with no memory of the possession. Kepler began as an ordinary human, switching only when it was murdered in the street. Over the centuries, Kepler met a number of others of its kind, as well as groups of humans dedicated to their extermination. When Kepler’s present host is murdered, it begins a search for the group responsible, and finds a horrific path of destruction. Kepler is the POV character; it professes to love everyone it possesses (many of whom, at least when it’s not on the run, are voluntary hosts compensated for their time) and to become them, insisting on use of the hosts’ names while it’s in occupancy. I never found Kepler a sympathetic monster. I suppose feeling love for your victims is better than enjoying having them torture one another, as another of Kepler’s kind does, but as exploration of the corrupting nature of the power to sacrifice others’ lives for your own, the story works.
Mira Grant, Chimera: Third and last in Grant’s Parasitology trilogy. We’ve moved past most of the zombie-like features here, because Sal spends most of her time dealing with humans or other chimeras like her, who’ve integrated their tapeworms with their human host bodies. Grant’s skills at generating dramatic situations are on display here, as are her most characteristic habits/flaws—particularly that all the characters sound basically the same and use a lot of repetitive sentence structures/repeated phrases. Plus everybody keeps quoting a made-up children’s book in ways that just got super annoying, enough so that I agreed with the bad guy’s mockery. Anyhow, civilization is in full collapse by this book, and Sal is trying to navigate among the US Army, the evil chimera who’s trying to replace humanity, and the research team (including her human lover) trying to find a way to allow humans and tapeworms to coexist. With a bit of lampshading of her improbable importance, Sal does her best to protect her chimerical family.
Harlan Coben, Caught: Exactly the kind of improbable thriller Coben writes. A TV reporter thinks she’s caught a pedophile, but when the case against him unravels—and then she witnesses his execution in front of her eyes—she begins to suspect that something more complicated is at work. The solution involves his history as well as the disappearance of a teenaged girl from the same town. The Cheetos of literature: goes down fast, not much nutritional value, fine when you really have a craving.
James S.A. Corey, Nemesis Games: The latest entry in the Expanse series splits up the four crewmembers of the Rocinante, each of them (somewhat improbably) with high importance in various events occurring across the system. Naomi Nagata goes to face an old wound in the Belt; Alex Kamal tries to make up with his ex-wife on Mars and finds that’s a bad idea, then finds his life at risk as he pokes around with Bobbi on the matter of some missing ships; Amos goes to check on an old friend on Earth, and gets caught in an enormous terrorist attack; and James Holden oversees the refitting of the ship and tries to protect Fred Johnson from internal Belter conspiracies. There’s planetary-scale death and destruction and plenty of human folly. It was very interesting to see a mother who abandoned her child portrayed as a survivor, and not just a person who deserves to be guilt-wracked forever.
Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap: Mosca Mye, twelve years old, full of vinegar, and possessed only of a dangerous goose as a friend, returns and gets herself in even more trouble now that she’s been kicked out of the radical city of Mandelion. Trying to escape to a place where no one knows her and her companion-by-mutual-self-interest Eponymous Clent, she stumbles into Toll, where there is a day city and a night city, and more plots than could fit in both together. It’s another well-done adventure, with a tiny little dose of Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, though without the relentless story logic of that classic.
Jillian Tamaki, Supermutant Magic Academy: Collection of comics featuring teenagers with superpowers and angst and conceptual art pieces. Some nice bits involving teenage self-absorption and attempts to figure out identity, though they probably were sharper when read one at a time than in a whole rush. Print copy of an online comic.
Claire North, Touch: Kepler is an entity that can move its consciousness from person to person, leaving the previous host with no memory of the possession. Kepler began as an ordinary human, switching only when it was murdered in the street. Over the centuries, Kepler met a number of others of its kind, as well as groups of humans dedicated to their extermination. When Kepler’s present host is murdered, it begins a search for the group responsible, and finds a horrific path of destruction. Kepler is the POV character; it professes to love everyone it possesses (many of whom, at least when it’s not on the run, are voluntary hosts compensated for their time) and to become them, insisting on use of the hosts’ names while it’s in occupancy. I never found Kepler a sympathetic monster. I suppose feeling love for your victims is better than enjoying having them torture one another, as another of Kepler’s kind does, but as exploration of the corrupting nature of the power to sacrifice others’ lives for your own, the story works.
Mira Grant, Chimera: Third and last in Grant’s Parasitology trilogy. We’ve moved past most of the zombie-like features here, because Sal spends most of her time dealing with humans or other chimeras like her, who’ve integrated their tapeworms with their human host bodies. Grant’s skills at generating dramatic situations are on display here, as are her most characteristic habits/flaws—particularly that all the characters sound basically the same and use a lot of repetitive sentence structures/repeated phrases. Plus everybody keeps quoting a made-up children’s book in ways that just got super annoying, enough so that I agreed with the bad guy’s mockery. Anyhow, civilization is in full collapse by this book, and Sal is trying to navigate among the US Army, the evil chimera who’s trying to replace humanity, and the research team (including her human lover) trying to find a way to allow humans and tapeworms to coexist. With a bit of lampshading of her improbable importance, Sal does her best to protect her chimerical family.
Harlan Coben, Caught: Exactly the kind of improbable thriller Coben writes. A TV reporter thinks she’s caught a pedophile, but when the case against him unravels—and then she witnesses his execution in front of her eyes—she begins to suspect that something more complicated is at work. The solution involves his history as well as the disappearance of a teenaged girl from the same town. The Cheetos of literature: goes down fast, not much nutritional value, fine when you really have a craving.
James S.A. Corey, Nemesis Games: The latest entry in the Expanse series splits up the four crewmembers of the Rocinante, each of them (somewhat improbably) with high importance in various events occurring across the system. Naomi Nagata goes to face an old wound in the Belt; Alex Kamal tries to make up with his ex-wife on Mars and finds that’s a bad idea, then finds his life at risk as he pokes around with Bobbi on the matter of some missing ships; Amos goes to check on an old friend on Earth, and gets caught in an enormous terrorist attack; and James Holden oversees the refitting of the ship and tries to protect Fred Johnson from internal Belter conspiracies. There’s planetary-scale death and destruction and plenty of human folly. It was very interesting to see a mother who abandoned her child portrayed as a survivor, and not just a person who deserves to be guilt-wracked forever.
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