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Holly Black, The Darkest Part of the Forest: Hazel and Ben are the children of neglectful but not ill-intentioned artists, who live in a town touched by Faerie. Ben possesses great musical gifts from a fairy, but he won’t use them—not since they went to Philadelphia so he could be trained and everything went very wrong. Hazel and Ben used to hunt monsters with Hazel’s sword and Ben’s music; now Hazel kisses boys she doesn’t like instead of the changeling boy she does and thinks she’s lost her chance to save the town, and Ben goes on bad dates with boys from out of town. Then the elf boy in the glass coffin wakes up … Entertaining take on old fairy tale tropes.
Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway: At a home for troubled children whose troubles stem because they traveled to fantasy worlds, came home, and were roundly disbelieved, Nancy arrives with the same aim as every other inhabitant—to return to where she was happy, a human servant to a dark lord. Not every child’s world is the same; some are logical and some chaotic, some just and some wicked; and each returnee has a certain amount of damage. Then someone starts killing the inhabitants. This very short and enjoyable book was about being kicked out of the place you thought was home, and about the terrible uncertainty of not knowing whether you’ll be able to get back.
Zen Cho, Sorceror to the Crown: Zachariah was bought out of slavery as a child and raised by the Sorceror to the Crown to prove to the Sorceror’s British compatriots that Africans could do magic; now he’s the Sorceror to the Crown, though prejudice against him leads to whispers that he was responsible for his patron’s death. Meanwhile, Prunella Gentleman, raised in a school for suppressing magic in respectable young ladies (since witchery is all right for peasants, but not for well-bred women), has great magical gifts and a legacy from her parents that suits her ambition, which is to become wealthy and powerful--no matter who she has to steamroll to do it. There are some horrifying elements, but mostly this is a delightful mix of Austen and Susannah Clarke, with rather more acknowledgement of racial prejudice (Prunella’s heritage is Asian Indian).
C.A. Higgins, Lightless: Two thieves with terrorist connections break into a top-secret research spaceship run by the all-knowing, tyrannical System. As the engineer tries to fix whatever they did to the ship’s computer, which is making it behave erratically, an inquisitor interrogates one of the thieves. She knows that he’s her best lead to the terrorist leader, and if she doesn’t get good information out of him, her career and probably her life will end. If you like reading about good people (and some bad ones, like the inquisitor) who are loyal to bad institutions, and don’t mind a bit of extremely convenient plotting, this is a good read.
Mike Carey et al., The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship that Sank Twice: Prequel to a series. Tommy Taylor is the hero of a Harry Potter-like series, and also the name of the author’s son. The author deliberately blurs the boundaries between them—son supposedly conceived on the same night as the novel, born on the publication date—apparently to imbue him with some sort of magical significance, for ends he considers sufficient to justify great cruelty. That’s the frame story; we also get Tommy Taylor’s origin, in which he’s orphaned and raised among magicians, but lacking in magic despite his great heritage. And then danger comes to town… I wasn’t too interested in the book-within-the-book, but the series idea held my interest.
Mike Carey & Peter Gross, The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity: Tom Taylor is famous for his connection to Tommy Taylor, the hero of his father’s best-selling fantasy books, but he insists he’s not Tommy. When some supernatural baddies disagree, and at the same time a young woman provides evidence indicating that he’s not Taylor’s son and might be a scammer, his life gets worse than the con-crud it already was. In some ways less interesting than the prequel, but I will probably read more.
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake: Postapocalyptic novel in which Snowman, lone human survivor (as far as he’s aware), superintends the Crakers, genetically altered humanoids designed by his best friend Crake to be without sexual jealousy, aggressiveness, disease, art, or writing. Snowman invokes the teachings of Oryx, who was their guide before the apocalypse destroyed humanity. Oryx was also his lover back when he was Jimmy, and Crake’s, and also the recipient of Jimmy’s fetishization of her feminized and racialized suffering (to the extent that it’s relatively clear that Jimmy’s memories of seeing her first on a kiddie porn site, and later in the news as the rescued victim of a sex slaver, are not accurate). Atwood is, as always, a beautiful writer (there’s a moment where Jimmy says that exposure to the average intelligence of people made him understand why serial killers sent clues to the police). The narrative switches between Snowman’s present eking out survival with the Crakers and Jimmy’s past as an enabler of the corporatized alteration and destruction of the planet. By the end, I was more depressed than at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, though I think the novel is supposed to end ambiguously, and I guess I got out what I put in.
Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway: At a home for troubled children whose troubles stem because they traveled to fantasy worlds, came home, and were roundly disbelieved, Nancy arrives with the same aim as every other inhabitant—to return to where she was happy, a human servant to a dark lord. Not every child’s world is the same; some are logical and some chaotic, some just and some wicked; and each returnee has a certain amount of damage. Then someone starts killing the inhabitants. This very short and enjoyable book was about being kicked out of the place you thought was home, and about the terrible uncertainty of not knowing whether you’ll be able to get back.
Zen Cho, Sorceror to the Crown: Zachariah was bought out of slavery as a child and raised by the Sorceror to the Crown to prove to the Sorceror’s British compatriots that Africans could do magic; now he’s the Sorceror to the Crown, though prejudice against him leads to whispers that he was responsible for his patron’s death. Meanwhile, Prunella Gentleman, raised in a school for suppressing magic in respectable young ladies (since witchery is all right for peasants, but not for well-bred women), has great magical gifts and a legacy from her parents that suits her ambition, which is to become wealthy and powerful--no matter who she has to steamroll to do it. There are some horrifying elements, but mostly this is a delightful mix of Austen and Susannah Clarke, with rather more acknowledgement of racial prejudice (Prunella’s heritage is Asian Indian).
C.A. Higgins, Lightless: Two thieves with terrorist connections break into a top-secret research spaceship run by the all-knowing, tyrannical System. As the engineer tries to fix whatever they did to the ship’s computer, which is making it behave erratically, an inquisitor interrogates one of the thieves. She knows that he’s her best lead to the terrorist leader, and if she doesn’t get good information out of him, her career and probably her life will end. If you like reading about good people (and some bad ones, like the inquisitor) who are loyal to bad institutions, and don’t mind a bit of extremely convenient plotting, this is a good read.
Mike Carey et al., The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship that Sank Twice: Prequel to a series. Tommy Taylor is the hero of a Harry Potter-like series, and also the name of the author’s son. The author deliberately blurs the boundaries between them—son supposedly conceived on the same night as the novel, born on the publication date—apparently to imbue him with some sort of magical significance, for ends he considers sufficient to justify great cruelty. That’s the frame story; we also get Tommy Taylor’s origin, in which he’s orphaned and raised among magicians, but lacking in magic despite his great heritage. And then danger comes to town… I wasn’t too interested in the book-within-the-book, but the series idea held my interest.
Mike Carey & Peter Gross, The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity: Tom Taylor is famous for his connection to Tommy Taylor, the hero of his father’s best-selling fantasy books, but he insists he’s not Tommy. When some supernatural baddies disagree, and at the same time a young woman provides evidence indicating that he’s not Taylor’s son and might be a scammer, his life gets worse than the con-crud it already was. In some ways less interesting than the prequel, but I will probably read more.
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake: Postapocalyptic novel in which Snowman, lone human survivor (as far as he’s aware), superintends the Crakers, genetically altered humanoids designed by his best friend Crake to be without sexual jealousy, aggressiveness, disease, art, or writing. Snowman invokes the teachings of Oryx, who was their guide before the apocalypse destroyed humanity. Oryx was also his lover back when he was Jimmy, and Crake’s, and also the recipient of Jimmy’s fetishization of her feminized and racialized suffering (to the extent that it’s relatively clear that Jimmy’s memories of seeing her first on a kiddie porn site, and later in the news as the rescued victim of a sex slaver, are not accurate). Atwood is, as always, a beautiful writer (there’s a moment where Jimmy says that exposure to the average intelligence of people made him understand why serial killers sent clues to the police). The narrative switches between Snowman’s present eking out survival with the Crakers and Jimmy’s past as an enabler of the corporatized alteration and destruction of the planet. By the end, I was more depressed than at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, though I think the novel is supposed to end ambiguously, and I guess I got out what I put in.
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