Book 37: Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

I made a terrible error that I then corrected, in that I read the Murderbot novellas out of order. This is the third novella, and I read this second, but I did eventually go back and read the second one, which I'm very glad I did because of the character of ART, my favorite sentient ship.

This one is quite good as well, but it didn't fully move me in quite the same way. It feels more like a story in which Murderbot learned an important lesson about humans and their robots, and how those relationships function, and while that is important, I had a harder time with it overall. It's also the saddest in a lot of ways, though, which may be why I found it hard; it involves the death of a robot, who dies in part to save her owner, and it hurts on a number of different levels, and I just...wish it hadn't. Apparently robot death isn't something I'm handling very well during this time (along with just about everything else). I don't know. I think you should read it because all four of the novellas really build upon each other, especially when you read the novel, but it's the novella that stands out the least for me.

Grade: B 

Book 36: Foursome by Carolyn Burke

This is a biography that I picked up on a whim when I saw it at the library, and I'm not mad I read it, but I am sort of mad at what it ended up being. It's a book about the relationships between Georgia O'Keeffe and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer and art collector, and Paul Strand and Rebecca Salsbury, who were colleagues of theirs and also artists. I really enjoyed the time period explored (1900-1930s New York, primarily) and I discovered that there was a lot about O'Keeffe's biography before she went to the Southwest that I didn't particularly know. But it's this odd book that reads much older to me than it is; it was published in 2019, and yet there is so much in the way of "contemporary readers might think this suggests lesbianism or gayness or various other things but we assure you: no" commentary that I barely felt like I knew what I was reading. This is especially true when out of the four the person with the greatest modern fame is by far O'Keeffe, and so there was a certain confusion for me in terms of why this wasn't solely focused on her, or perhaps her and her husband, who played a major role in her career as an artist. I enjoyed learning more about some of the figures and times in this book, but not the actual thrust of this book, on the whole.

Grade: B

Book 35: Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore

This was a perfectly lovely historical romance that unfortunately suffers from not being written by Courtney Milan. Which sounds harsh! But it's a romance about a woman who sort of stumbles into becoming a suffragette in Victorian England, and she falls in love with a Duke, and it's a completely unacceptable match, and there's politics and banter and potential loss of virtue and discussions about what role in his life she can actually play, and all of this, and at the end all I could think was "this system is irreparably broken and I don't buy this resolution." It's an odd reaction, because I read a lot of gay historical romance novels, and I specifically love how those stories can show the way queer people did exist all throughout history, in high and low society. But I find it harder to believe in straight romance a lot of the time, because we want the good stuff without the bad stuff. We want the woman who was able to go to Oxford but is still beautiful and meets a duke but he's the good version of a duke, or a less bad one at least. But sometimes I almost prefer the historical romances that simply don't reckon with the historical realities of the fantasies. This book is quite close to hitting the sweet spot, but it doesn't actually nail it, and so I came away from it feeling disquieted, rather than charmed.

Grade: B 

Book 34: The Golden Wolf by Linnea Hartsuyker

Note: I know the author of this book socially.

The Golden Wolf!!! I think this was my favorite book of the series. Part of this is that Einar and Ivar, Ragnvald's sons by his former concubine and his wife, have such a great half-brothers relationship that you know cannot end well but is just devastating to watch as it develops. And then once you suffer through the loss that was inevitable, the life Einar manages to carve out is truly my favorite thing in the whole series. He suffers loss because everyone in this world must experience that, it is life, but he really does get a happy ending after all that, and it feels fully deserved. The final hundred pages of this book may be my favorite section of this entire trilogy. 

I wasn't sure how much I was going to enjoy a novel about The Next Generation after a fairly substantial time jump, but I shouldn't have worried: I found it really compelling, and exactly what this sort of full life cycle trilogy demanded. You need to see Ragnvald go from the young upstart to the man with grown sons who has fewer and fewer choices until the end, when he has to make the only decision he can for his family. And it is a delight to see Svanhild find Solvi again, and for that to be the right thing for both of them. 

This is a trilogy about kings that is focused on the impact those kings have on everyone else, and it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of them here, but I think the wide-angle view is the right one; we need to see the mechanisms that created King Harald's reign, and how many moving pieces had to come together in exactly the right way for him to gain and keep power. This trilogy does that very effectively. 

Grade: A

Book 33: The Sea Queen by Linnea Hartsuyker

Note: I know the author of this book socially. 

This is the sequel to The Half-Drowned King and the middle book of a trilogy, and it definitely has the job most middle books do of joining together the narrative that was begun in the first book through the overarching story. One of the results of that is a fair number of characters making choices that you wish they wouldn't, but that feel extremely realistic. After marrying Solvi and having a son, Svanhild is the titular Sea Queen, but constant conflict with her husband and a complicated voyage to Iceland leave her marriage in a difficult place. When her son dies and she leaves Solvi, I was genuinely upset, because that was the relationship of the first book that I had been rooting for. You understand why, after returning to Norway, she becomes one of King Harald's wives, but I wanted better options for her, and for her to be the Sea Queen independent of either man. 

Her brother Ragnvald is dealing with his own difficulties, mostly in the form of his relatives making questionable choices and the sons and brothers of kings continuously warring with him. It is never easy being known so firmly as the king's man as when the king makes extremely short-sighted decisions constantly. 

In many ways I'm glad I waited to read this until the third book was also out, because I think many of the narrative threads that I found frustrating in this book are dealt with and resolved in the third book in really satisfying fashion, and you feel their necessity and how right they are. You might wish the characters could make different decisions, but you never doubt that these are the ones they had to.

Grade: A

Book 32: Mirrorstrike by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

I got this as a Christmas present and didn't know what to expect from it. It's a gay futuristic retelling of the Snow Queen, with something of a love triangle at the middle, and a whole lot of extremely interesting manipulative choices made by characters. I think my main critique of it is that there could definitely have been a more deeply explored backstory and worldbuilding in general; it's a novella that could have, and perhaps should have, been fleshed out into a novel. This was especially true for me in terms of how it approached gender and identity--there was more there than got fully explored, I think. But overall I enjoyed it!

Grade: B

Book 31: The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander

This was exactly the sort of speculative fiction where I'm just not sure my brain knows what to do with the story. It's about a future involving elephants whose superior memory is used to warn people of the future about nuclear waste, and other elephants of the past who were in the circus and then used to do dangerous jobs that made people ill, and the two storylines come together. And I get the mental connections, of the constant problem of how we develop warning signals for people of the future to understand about the hazards we're creating right now, and elephant remembering pain, and the way we've harmed beings in the past, and all that. The ideas are really interesting. I'm just not so sure about this as a story. But the writing was quite engaging, and I don't think it demanded a mental conclusion from me--which is good, I suppose. 

Grade: B

Book 30: The Plantagenets by Dan Jones

It took me a solid year to read this book - I kept taking it out of the library and not managing to read it before it was due again, and then putting it back on hold. But I finally made it all the way through. I realized that I knew of the Plantagenets as a concept but had very little actual knowledge of them beyond the version of Richard II that Shakespeare told, King Richard the Lionhearted and King John via Robin Hood tellings, and Kings Edward I and Edward II via Braveheart, which whew. So it was great to read an actual history of these kings, even if on occasion it leaned a bit harder into "I know people think these kings were gay but probably they weren't" than I prefer in my popular history, given that there wasn't a lot of evidence for the assertion that certain figures weren't gay, either. Also, I had been hoping for more on the women of the era, although of course it did include a fair amount of information about Eleanor of Aquitaine. 

On the whole I thought this was a very good overview of the ruling family that spanned hundreds of years and hundreds of miles, but I do now want to read more about individual reigns in this period in order to get a bit deeper on it all. For a starting place on this era in English history, however, I think it's a great choice. 

Grade: A