Yoon Ha Lee, Extracurricular Activities: Short story featuring Shuos Jedao before all that unpleasantness, back when he was merely an incredibly dangerous operative working in smaller-scale intelligence. Jedao leads a mission to rescue an old friend from a rival government and finds something different than he expected.
KJ Charles, The Price of Meat: If you get it. That is, the title is a Sweeney Todd reference, though in fact Sweeney is not the cannibal here, despite the presence of a Johanna in need of rescue from the lunatic asylum. The story is set in an alternate London with a section—the liberty—in which the queen’s law does not run; in order to secure help getting her beloved Johanna free from the asylum, our heroine goes undercover at Sawney Reynard’s barbershop, which backs up against the liberty and into which many men have of late disappeared. I didn’t quite get the point of having Sweeney Todd be a separate historical figure here (I suspect weird IP anxieties).
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Flowers of Vashnoi: Ekaterin investigates the remediation of a radioactive portion of the Vorkosigan lands and finds more than she expected, which is saying a lot since she expected to find glowing butterbugs that had been modified to eat radioactive material. A nice little story about small successes and failures.
Diane Duane, The Levin-Gad: Tales of the Five #1: I would have to reread the entire old series to fully get this story about one of the members of the titular goddess-touched group, but it was nice enough anyway. While other members of the family are otherwise occupied, a human goes to a bar in search of the Dark, much to the dismay of the barkeep.
Karen Healey & Robyn Fleming, The Empress of Timbra: Book One of the Hidden Histories: Fantasy in which two half-siblings, both recognized by their noble father though he didn’t marry either of their mothers (it’s that kind of society), have to use their wits and magical talents to survive a lot of palace intrigue that would like to kill one and put the other on the throne. I enjoyed it, though I could have done without the extended epilogue that is a parody of academic writing and treats the events of the main book as possibly apocryphal vestiges of a poorly understood past.
K.D. Edwards, The Last Sun: Rune is the sole survivor of the massacre of his House (and of a gang rape, to which there are a couple of fragmentary but intense/graphic flashbacks) who ekes out a living doing various magical retrieval jobs. The one that opens the book ends with him in custody of a traumatized seventeen-year-old, and then his semi-employer sends him on a job searching for another noble, who turns out to be (a) a hottie and (b) caught up in a very deadly plot. There is a lot of worldbuilding—this is all going on in what remains of Nantucket after the Atlanteans transferred a lot of their magic and a bunch of stolen buildings there in the wake of a war/disaster that destroyed Atlantis; they have Houses that track the Tarot Arcana and Rune’s the heir coming into Arcana power; they have cellphones as well as sigils that can store spells and that form the basis of Atlantean wealth; and I haven’t even mentioned Rune’s bonded Companion human. It’s a lot, but I enjoyed the heck out of it.
Vivian Vande Velde, Never Trust a Dead Man: Slight fantasy about a nebbishy, near-stalkery guy who is falsely accused of murdering his romantic rival, locked up to die with said rival’s corpse, and then self-indentured to a witch who promises to help him figure out the real killer in return for years of service. This ends up with the spirit of the dead guy in a bat disguised as a bird, with our hero disguised as a local girl. Basically everybody in it is a creep.
Martha Wells, The Cloud Roads: Moon doesn’t know what he is, only that he’s not like the other groundling races he’s met in his wanderings, and in his shapeshifted flying form he physically resembles the predatory Fell that like to tear the other sentient races apart for food and fun. After he’s discovered and left to die by his latest community, he’s rescued by another Raksura (which it turns out is what he is), but things don’t get a lot better. Moon is traumatized and distrustful, and many of the other Raksura he meets don’t trust him right back. It’s a good adventure story with a dash of found family, especially by the end, but there is a fair amount of biological determinism tied up with the different shapes and magical abilities of the different Raksura, if that’s not your thing.
Tags:
- au: bujold,
- au: charles,
- au: duane,
- au: edwards,
- au: fleming,
- au: healey,
- au: lee,
- au: vande velde,
- au: wells,
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