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

Book 29: A Heart So Fierce and Broken by Brigid Kemmerer

This is the sequel to A Curse So Dark and Lonely, only I didn't realize it was a direct sequel - I thought this was the sort of book series where each book was a take on a different classic fairy tale. But no! This book focuses on the former guardsman Grey, who has a Secret, and then a new character named Lia Mara, who is the firstborn and yet not heir to the rival kingdom, basically. And for Reasons they all unite and are sort of acting against Prince Rhen and Harper, but sort of not, and Harper's brother and his boyfriend are still sort of trying to get back to the real world, and I'm kind of mad about how much I enjoyed this book and how much I want the next book in the series, because the cliffhanger at the end of this one was extremely effective. I also think the storytelling and worldbuilding was a lot better in this book, especially once we got past the beauty and the beast direct parallels and the narrative became more of its own thing. I find YA fantasy series that have no set number of books in them to be a frustrating experience, but on the other hand this one got me, so well done.

Grade: B

Book 28: The City We Became by NK Jemisin

Boy, what a book to read during lockdown, when I was in New York and yet felt so far removed from it. It was like watching Into the Spider-Verse and having the same response of longing, of recognition, of memory.

I loved so much about this book. The premise is so interesting; I loved the idea of a physical city birth, and the idea of a midwife being necessary to bring that about. And of course with New York, there would need to be multiple people to do that, because it is a city made up of smaller cities. All of the characters were so wonderful, and my god the way that Manhattan feels about New York City is just so much of what I want in my relationships.

I also loved how completely unsubtle the metaphor of everything was. We know who the protagonists are and who the antagonists, and what the root cause of the rot is, and it gets into the culture and art and money of it all. It was such an amazing fantasia on New York, and it made me so desperate to get to the other side of this current existence, on so many levels.

Grade: A

Book 27: Me by Elton John

I read this as a companion to the movie Rocketman, which was a really compellingly told biopic of Elton John but which ends in the late eighties when he gets sober and doesn't touch on the most recent twenty years. And it's a perfectly satisfying autobiography written by someone who is willing to closely examine some aspects of his life but not all that interested in getting into others, and the pictures are great (especially when you compare the real life versions of various people to the actors who portrayed them in his movie). I also liked it as someone who had always had a very post-Lion King awareness of Elton John and his career - I knew he had been a major rock star in the '70s, but I didn't fully appreciate what that looked like, and the book was an entertaining overview of that time and who he was. He's also just done so much that there was never really a dull period in his life, for good or bad. I think it was certainly more of an autobiography than a memoir; he's rarely all that interested in digging into his experience beyond the narrative elements of it, but I enjoyed it for what it was.

Grade: B