Reread: Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay

This is, to the best of my recollection, the first book that I've reread that I read for the first time after I had started this blog. So here are my thoughts about it from 2016. 

I don't disagree with any of my thoughts or conclusions, although it took me longer this time around to vibe with the ensemble cast nature of the story. I have also actually been to some of the places that inspired this book now, namely Venice and Ravenna and Dubrovnik, as well as Greece, and that along with other books I've read about the region have deepened my appreciation of many of the themes of the book. I still cried, again mostly from relief, but also from recognition and the feeling of being home in this book. I don't think it will ever be my favorite GGK novel, but it's in conversation with so many of them that it exists within those books now, too. It enriches all that came before, and I expect it will do the same for those that come after. 

Grade: A

Reread: The Last Light of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay

Sometimes there's a book that does something intentionally and you know why it did it conceptually and you're still like yes but please give this to me???? And that is how I feel about this book and the lack of a map at the front. 

Every other book that GGK has written has a map at the start. It grounds you in this shared universe that he's created, which is essentially a fictional Europe and Middle East and North Africa that he can play with freely. And this book is about the version of Britain and the Vikings in 9th century or so, and I understand why the lack of a map reflects the mists and unknown glens and so on and so forth, but I would like to have my narrative bearing!!! 

Anyway. I love this book very much; many of Kay's books are about fathers and sons, and legacy, and above all else how chance encounters and timing changes the course of history, but this one has some of the most affecting scenes and develops those themes in ways that continue to stay with me. It's a book I reread hoping that I've misremembered some things about, so I don't have to experience that pain again, but by the end I'm so happy with where the story goes that I've accepted going through that pain. And there's a lot of hope in that. 

Grade: A 

Reread: Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay

I got stalled in this reread about 75% of the way through - I got to the point when it all begins to fall apart in the way that it simply has to fall apart, and weirdly I found it tough to experience this time around!! But I finally did, and it was as devastating and ultimately satisfying as it ever is. 

This book was the reason I specifically traveled to Ravenna to see some mosaics in person, which was one of the greatest experiences of my life. It gave me some of the language to explain why art and storytelling matter so much, even when (especially when) the world around us feels like it's imploding. And I find it comforting to know that humans have always just been trying to live our ordinary lives while greater machinations happen around us, and that there's still joy to be found in moments even during so much cruelty and terror. 

Grade: A 

Book 15: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

A book club book! This is a charming fable that felt like it was an old fairy tale that I had somehow never heard of before. There's a river that has two giant willows on either side of it, and a land called Arcadia north of those willows, and two sisters who are part of the family that has sung to the willows that enables the roots to create and build grammar. It's a bit metaphorical! The first twenty pages of this novella are basically entirely without characters and plot! But once it gets going, I found the story really lovely, and the liminal spaces it explored to be deeply meaningful. I did wonder whether this was a story that began as a short story and then got filled out a bit, because it felt like there was a lot that went unsaid, and I couldn't entirely tell whether that was a story choice and whether that was a function of the size of the story. But all in all, I enjoyed this quite a bit!

Grade: B

Book 14: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

Sometimes books that are a cross between two different genres sound great but end up not quite jelling. And then other times you get a book like The Tainted Cup, which manages to create a whole fantasy world with giant sea creatures that invade a country and then set a compelling murder mystery inside it, with a classic eccentric detective and her beleaguered assistant who doesn't always know exactly what's going on or how important they are. 

It's just a really good read! I read the whole thing on a couch at a vacation house with my girlfriend and two friends and a very cute dog, and honestly what an ideal weekend. Can't wait to read book 2!!

Grade: A  

Book 11: The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond

One of my best friends got married a few months ago, and she gave a selection of books to each person in her bridal party based on their tastes. This is one of mine, and I definitely know why I got it: a female knight! an inventive narrative structure! lesbian subtext! and a whole bunch of twists and turns and prophecies and betrayals. It's a novella that feels like it could be the launching pad to a full novel or series, because there's so much more of the world left unexplored and it ends at a place that is clearly kicking off something new. 

The titular fireborne blade is in the lair of a dragon named the White Lady, who can't be killed by a (male) knight. So following in the footsteps of Eowyn, the knight Maddileh is determined to force the other male knights to allow her to also be a knight by killing the White Lady and bringing back the blade. She has a squire who's fairly incompetent and the support of a couple of mages (official and hidden), and then the whole thing takes a turn! I read this in one sitting and it was just a very nice way to send an evening. 

Grade: B  

Book 5: Dark Heir by CS Pacat

I finally made it to the sequel of Dark Rise! And it was both exactly what I'd hoped for/expect while somehow being a bit less than the sum of its parts, unfortunately. 

The whole book is built around the tension that Will knows who he is deep down but none of his friends do, and if they did know, they'd immediately turn against him. And that's a pretty good central tension to a story, but either I've simply read too many of these kinds of stories at this point or the book didn't quite hold the tension as well as I'd like it to, because the moment of his reveal didn't quite hit for me. This is partly because James is on his own journey that's separate from Will's path, but it's one that's less about discovering who Will is and more Will continuing to somehow always be a step ahead of him in terms of accepting their intermingled destiny. I don't know! I get why Will is like oh noes he only loves me because he thinks I'm NOT the big bad and/or because he doesn't realize that the collar is linking him to me because I'm that guy, but I thought by the end of this book we might actually get to the next stage of it. I wanted more actual juice in the central relationship of the story. 

This may also be because so many of the other characters felt sidelined to me. This is a classic second book/movie in the trilogy issue, where the main crew gets sent off on their own journeys before finally coming back together at the end, but as a result I felt cut off from Violet and the whole Lions plotline and Elizabeth dealing with Visander. 

Having said all that, I think it was a much more coherent book than the first one, and I am still looking forward to the final book of the trilogy because I do think it'll probably land the plane pretty well. I think I just wanted a bit more tropey nonsense from these books and less lore. 

Grade: B

Book 25: The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

Book club book! This novella has a setup that's pretty classic: two children, the daughter and son of the ruler of a land, have gone into a forest that humans do not escape from, and the ruler asks a woman who has been there before to retrieve them for him. But the specifics throughout the story are much more complicated than the standard telling: the ruler is the Tyrant, who has caused the death of the woman's mother and father, and while she did succeed at bringing a child back before, the child never recovered. This is a request that Veris cannot refuse, and if she fails, it will be mean the death of her village and the only family she has left. 

This was a very easy read that pulled me right along, and it's a story that doesn't hold your hand overexplaining things, which I really like as a narrative choice and also fits the sort of arbitrary world both within and without the forest. Bad things happen, in the woods and in the village and in the larger world, and all you can do is keep going. (It is possible that I am bringing something of my own mood to this story in the second week of November 2024.) I could have done with an ending that gave me a few more answers or even just hints for the direction of the future, but I don't think that's what the author wanted, so fair enough! Ambiguity isn't always a flaw, even if I could do with a bit more certainty right now. 

Grade: B

Book 24: When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

A novella that's a fable! About what happens when three tigers who are also sometimes humans want to eat you but will wait until after they've heard a story. Cleric Chih has to tell the version of the story that humans tend to tell, and then the tigers tell them their version. It's a story within a story that I enjoyed a lot, even if I'm not entirely sure what I was supposed to take from it, in the end. 

Grade: B

Book 22: Fire and Blood by George R. R. Martin

So about halfway through the second season of House of the Dragon, I decided that I really wanted to just read the 'history' that the show was based on, because I was tired of only sort of understanding who all the characters were and also I wanted to know in advance what the bad things were. The show has the same problem that most prequels do, which is that it's the story of how the world arrived at the terrible situation that the main story starts in, so it's inherently tragic and we know where the story has to end up. But I've been enjoying the show, and I'm a big fan of the style of book that Fire and Blood is; I love a fake narrative historical book, which cites differing accounts and tells us what happens but can't actually confirm why they do. 

The first thing to note is that the book is extremely long and dense - the story arc that the show is based on doesn't even start for two hundred and fifty pages, and then it continues for another two hundred, more or less. I did enjoy the first parts of the book, though, which is essentially the equivalent of the Norman Conquest, an event that I know sufficiently little about to not be bothered by how much (or how little) GRRM is lifting from real history. But then I finally got to the part of the story that's been adapted, and I discovered almost immediately that I vastly prefer the show to the book, and think that basically every story change that has been made for the show improves upon the narrative immensely. 

This is in large part because the book's narrative has no use for women at all. And it's arguable that this is because the entire conflict is about that cultural bias: the succession battle is kicked off by one generation choosing between a female heir and a male heir, and then the next generation has to go through the same thing, only the second time around everyone fucking dies (because, as I said, it's a tragedy). Twice the rightful heir (by birth order) is denied because of her gender, and that's just how things are because men in the fake middle ages, am I right, and look sometimes I want my fiction to make me mad I guess. But what all of the women characters are lacking in the book is any MOTIVATION for why they do anything. We are told what happened but not really why, either the delay or the unreasonable action or whatever, and this isn't me wanting characters to behave rationally and being mad that people don't always do the logical thing. That's fine! That's truthful both in fiction and reality! People make bad choices or don't succeed because of the dumbest things all the time in history. I actually really like stories that acknowledge that sometimes a letter gets delayed because of the weather and it completely alters the trajectory of millions of lives, for better or for worse. 

What I don't like is a story that due to its incomplete view of characters or whatever tells me that things happen with no explanation for it at all. I'm not mad it's a tragedy; I knew what I was getting myself into. I'm just mad that honestly for the first time in my experience of reading GRRM's books, it felt like the worldview of misogyny etc. was just the explanation for everything, without the redeeming quality of getting to be in the point of view of various female characters with a diverse range of interests and abilities and failings. I don't regret reading the book because I do have a much firmer grasp on what the show is doing, and I actually enjoyed the sections that aren't about the characters in the show's narrative much much more than those sections, but boy. I finished the second season of HotD after I read the book, and it continued to diverse significantly, and I can only hope it continues to do so for however many more seasons they have to tell the whole story, because we all deserve better. 

Grade: C

Book 21: Dark Rise by C.S. Pacat

In soccer commentary, there is a classic terribly overused cliche that when one team is dominant for one half and the other is dominant the other, it's been a "game of two halves." Usually you can't divide books so neatly in half, but in this case I spent the first half of the book attempting to figure out how I would have restructured it to actually make it compelling and engaging, and then the second half I was hooting and hollering. So! A book of two halves it is. 

This is a story about Will, an orphan in early 19th century London whose mom died trying to protect him from evil doers and who discovers a secret magical underbelly to the whole society and blah blah blah you have probably read a YA fantasy before. That's part of the problem with the start of this story: it's extremely derivative and yet it also has pages and pages of exposition to get the reader through, but I can't say that I ever felt grounded in the setting. This is partly because the secret magic brings him to a hidden place that's out of time, since the Stewards (a secret society and a name I cannot keep in my head for longer than two minutes) has been training to prevent the rebirth of the Dark King for ages, so they feel much more King Arthurish than Regency, to say the least. The first two hundred pages has about ten pages of actually interesting stuff, and then it quickly shifts away to explain how good the good guys are, but when it's revealed that actually they've been doing some pretty questionable stuff in the name of being good, actually!, it's not really a surprise because we have no investment in the good guys. So up until this point: basically a C! Not something I'd want to read a second novel of!

However. We then arrive at the kidnapping of the most perfect and powerful and (most importantly) beautiful blond twink that Will has ever seen, for super honorable reasons we swear, and suddenly the whole thing kicks off and the second half of the book is a jam. I can't say that the book is particularly surprising--I started texting friends who had read it with predictions and I was pretty darn accurate--but I don't mind that at all, and certain scenes did make me honk like a goose. So! If you're willing to skim your way through 200 pages of setup to get to the actual emotional heart of a story at the beginning of a trilogy, I highly recommend this, and that especially goes if you've read the Captive Prince trilogy and know the kind of tropes this author is into. If you're wondering if that still applies to this, boy howdy does it. 

Grade: (C + A)/2 = B  

Book 18: The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

A book club book! Which was also already on my list of things I needed to read, but this gave me the nudge I needed to actually read it. Unusually for this author, it's a standalone novel and also one that I think is probably New Adult rather than YA. It takes place in Spain post-Ferdinand and Isabella and focuses on a young servant named Luzia who is hiding both her family's Jewish faith in an era when anything other than public Catholicism was outlawed and her magical abilities. Her magic is discovered by the mistress of the household she works for, and a powerful noble who has a mysterious assistant wants to train her and present her in court for his own gains. 

The story unfolds more slowly than I was expecting, and then suddenly it opens up completely and takes a lot of turns. It's the third historical book about the Iberian peninsula that deals with religious identity and persecution and magic that I've read, so I was very much in the bag for the overall themes of the story, and when the narrative pace picks up it's pretty thrilling and ends up taking turns with various characters that I didn't expect and found extremely gratifying. It also made me want to pick up her adult fiction series again, which I bounced off of a bit the first time I tried it. But now I think I'm ready for the particular kind of edge she approaches stories with. 

Grade: A   

Book 17: How to be Eaten by Maria Adelmann

This was a book that was recommended by a podcast I listen to, and it sounded interesting enough for me to give it a shot, so I did! The setup is pretty interesting: it's a modern retelling of various folk tales that all basically serve as cautionary tales for women, all having to do with their relationships with men. One woman dates a tech billionaire and narrowly avoids being killed like all of his prior girlfriends; another goes on a reality tv dating show and doesn't fully realize that she's the villain; and then there's a little red riding hood taken to its implied end. They all meet at a support group that's set up by someone mysterious, who has his own agenda, and they all discover new things about themselves. 

I wanted to like this more than I did; it's not a bad story, but it's not one that felt particularly fresh or challenging for me, and a lot of it read like a bunch of MFA short stories that had gotten stapled together into a novel. But I think it's worth reading, even if I was hoping it would arrive at someplace a little less expected in the end. 

Grade: B

Book 16: Nimona by ND Stevenson

My sister wants to show me the movie version of this and had also given me the graphic novel last Christmas, so it was finally time! This was a fascinating example of me having a sense of what the story was about and discovering that I was incorrect, but not being mad about it. I thought it was about a girl with two dads, and instead it's about a monster who adopts a supervillain and has to deal with his arch nemesis. Those two ideas overlap, for sure, but I think part of the joy and revelation in this book is where the story goes versus where you think it will. Anyway Nimona is right and everyone should know it!!

Grade: A  

Book 9: White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

Hey, I finally read a good book in 2024! I've been meaning to read some of this author's short stories for years, and then my book club chose this collection for our first read of 2024 and I had a great reason to. These stories are all inspired by or in conversation with folk stories or fairy tales, but I enjoyed even the ones paired with stories I didn't previously know. It is such a pleasure to read short stories written by someone who knows exactly what they want to do with the form, and how to craft a complete story in that length that never feels like it's a prologue to a novel that may or may not be written in the future. The stories float along and her character voices are distinct and lovely. Some of the stories left me with a strong feeling of narrative resolution, while others were more of a vibe, and I enjoyed them all. Link has just released her first novel, and I'm looking forward to picking that up soon as well. 

Grade: A

Book 34: The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

A book club book! This is a vampire-esque story set in modern England, only instead of them surviving on human blood, they eat--you guessed it--books! The story centers on Devon who is on her own and caring for her son, a particular kind of book eater who eats people's brains if they don't have access to a medication. The narrative alternates between following them in the present day and her childhood and young adulthood showing us how they ended up there, and the specific cultural institutions she's fighting against to survive and raise her son. 

There's also a whole plot about the women of each family being controlled and married off in order to strengthen family lines, and the difficulty they have with breeding because women can only have two (at most) children before they become infertile, and a whole lot of nonsense society construction around all of this. The narrator is well-aware of how nonsense it is, because it's not as if the patriarchy is a sensible system, but it's also not exactly an uplifting story. There was a lot to chew on (heh) in this book, but it never quite coalesced into something greater than the sum of its parts, for me.

Grade: B  

Book 33: Briarley by Aster Glenn Gray

This is a lovely queer Beauty and the Beast retelling, in which the standard beauty's father ends up in the cursed house with the beast instead. It's set during the early days of WWII on the south coast of England, and the beast in this instance is actually a dragon. There's not much more to say about the plot than that; if you know the original fairytale, the queer version of it is fairly straightforward, but the writing is brisk and draws you in, and the ending satisfies. A good read for a cold evening under a blanket. 

Grade: B

Book 32: The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

Note: I know the author of this book socially. 

Man, I knew going into this book that it was going to go in directions I wasn't expecting, and boy did it. This is the final book in the Scholomance trilogy, and it also picks up immediately after the end of The Last Graduate. El has made it out of the Scholomance, and now she has to attempt to deal with the aftermath of the escape and whatever is happening outside of the Scholomance, and neither of those processes go at all how I was expecting. This trilogy engages with and subverts so many of the magical universe tropes and archetypes, and it does so knowing exactly where that should lead. There are three separate reveals in this book that made me gasp and stare off into the middle distance, and the commitment to the worldbuilding and no easy answers is really incredible and frankly rare. I loved how complicated it all is, and how satisfying I found the ending both in spite of and because of that. 

Grade: A 

Book 31: The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

Note: I know the author of this book socially. 

For some reason, after I read the first book I took months and months to pick up the second one, I think in part because I knew that once I read the second one I would then immediately need to finish the trilogy, and I wanted to save it or something? I definitely end up putting off doing some things because otherwise I won't 'savor it' or something, and it's not my favorite habit! What is my favorite, however, is this book! 

The Last Graduate takes place immediately after A Deadly Education ends, so now El and her friends are in their final year in the Scholomance and are staring down the barrel of the final gauntlet. Plus the school is now attempting to kill El and a flock of freshman she's unexpectedly in charge of in all new ways, and something weird is going on with Orion!!! This book is a great example of a narrative arc following the internal logic of worldbuilding and then attempting to actually address it, with fantastic tension and development, and it's also a story that as soon as things start to feel like they're going well, you get nervous because that means a rug is about to get pulled, and boy does it. A perfect middle novel of a trilogy. 

Grade: A

Book 29: The Armored Saint by Myke Cole

This is a fairly standard speculative novella about a young woman in a village who needs to find her inner Joan of Arc to stand up to oppressive strictures of the Emperor, and specifically the Order, a band of consecrated men who travel from village to village hunting out wizards. She and her father are on the road when they ride by, and they threaten her father because she doesn't want them to ruin his paper, and that sets them both on a path where they have to hide from the Order and eventually fight back. 

I enjoyed this fine while I was reading it, but the longer I sit with it after the less it lands. Heloise is described as being nearly a woman grown during the first scene, but I kept reading her as much younger, and in general something about the world building didn't quite work for me. Not a bad way to spend an evening, but there are also much better imo. 

Grade: C