Book 27: In An Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

There are times when I know that it's less that the books I'm reading aren't good, and it's more that I'm reading them badly. This is the fourth book in the Wayward Children series, and the second one that focuses on one character's experience before they make it to the school. The main character in the story is Lundy, and the world she found the door to is the Goblin Market. 

The entire system of the Goblin Market is built around the concept of fair value - if you ask something of someone, you need to provide them fair value in exchange, and if you're unable to, you are in their debt. The debt in this world (and in our world, if you leave) is a physical change; once you are too far in debt, you lose your humanity and become a bird. Lundy tries desperately to have her life in the Goblin Market without giving up her life at home, especially for her younger sister. But she is unable to properly calibrate the fair value required for such a thing. It is a sad story that feels extremely unfair, perhaps especially because it is a world that presents itself as being completely in balance, and I had a hard time with it emotionally. 

Grade: B

Book 26: An Unnatural Life by Erin K. Wagner

Another free Tor novella about humans and robots! This one fucked me up less regarding the pandemic, but did slightly fuck me up in terms of issues around legal rights and so forth, so it is possible that it is the world that's fucking me up rather than the fiction I'm consuming. Who could have guessed. 

This one centers on a woman named Aiya, who is a lawyer living on a space colony. She works for a program that is designed to rehabilitate robots who have committed crimes, but then she ends up representing one who has been wrongfully accused of murder. It deals with lots of questions about agency and control and who we hold responsible for various elements in society, and once again it was a story that was hard for me to engage with at the moment. But I found it very interesting overall. 

Grade: B

Book 25: Unlocked by John Scalzi

This was a free Tor download, and I've been meaning to read something by Scalzi for a while, so I thought sure! I'll give it a shot! And then discovered that it was a novella written in 2014 about a respiratory pandemic that overran the world and eventually resulted in some people's bodies no longer working, but their minds still did, so people invented a robot to interface with the people's minds to become that person out in the world, and it turns out I just cannot handle this particular story and the way politics are depicted right now! I found the things that were accurate to be just as upsetting as the things that weren't, and yeah. I have no idea how to objectively rate this, so take this grade as being more of a reflection of what I can handle reading rather than a judgment on the quality of the writing or storytelling. 

Grade: C

Book 24: In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan

Another portal fantasy! And another book I have owned for a very long time and kept waiting for the "right time" to read, for some reason, even though I have read many other things by this author that I've enjoyed. And shockingly, I enjoyed this one, too!

Elliot is thirteen when he first crosses over into the Borderlands, and discovers that in this magical portal land, there's a training camp where everyone either learns how to fight or how to engage in diplomacy. But no one is actually very interested in using diplomacy as a means of resolving disputes among humans and elves and trolls and banshees and mermaids and so forth, at least not before he arrived. He also immediately falls in love with a beautiful elf named Serene, and in hate with a beautiful boy named Luke Sunborn, who comes from a famous family of warriors. And then it's adventures and battles and multiple romances and misunderstandings and family of origin woes and found family woes and comings out and pining and, of course, a unicorn sighting. It is a delight, in other words, though I think the pacing could have been tightened up a bit in the second half of the novel, but even when things seemed to go on a bit longer than they actually needed to, I had a great time reading it. 

Grade: A 

Book 23: Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch

After meaning to read the Rivers of London series for years, I have finally begun! Turns out it's good. 

It's very interesting what my brain retained about the series from what I had heard from others. I knew it was a detective series, essentially, about a guy named Peter (correct) who was training under an experienced detective (also correct, his superior is Thomas Nightingale). But I had forgotten that it was also a supernatural series, which made the first mention of a ghost pretty exciting, and I also went into expecting a standard white English copper character, and instead Peter Grant is biracial and from North London and quite young, all of which makes him (and the first book of the series) much more interesting than I expected. 

The book reads very much like the first in a series, setting up the world and the central figures in it, and I had been more in a traditional mystery structure mood than I realized when I started reading it and so it took me a bit to get into the rhythm of the book. But in the end I enjoyed it quite a bit, and Peter is a great character, with his at times almost Jim Butcher-level over the top lusting for every female character introduced in the book my only true complaint. It's the only element of the storytelling that felt at all dated to me, but it's worth putting up with for the rest of the narrative. 

Grade: B 

Book 22: Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

The third book in the Wayward Children series! This was the one that made me realize that the second book wasn't a standalone, but was in fact a prequel/backstory sort of thing, because we returned to the school directly after the events of the first book. This story reintroduced my favorite character Kade, and added a new character named Cora who I absolutely loved. She's a fat girl who found her world as a mermaid, where her body did exactly what it was supposed to do, and it was just a really lovely depiction of what it is to be "special" and yet not fit the supposed mold of even that. These books have all been extremely thoughtful in how it approaches gender, and how children are unnecessarily shaped within a binary, and I liked how the author approached weight and appearance in a similar way.   

The plot of this one is essentially a journey through various other worlds, and it ends in a candy world with a baker at the center of it, and the whole thing felt like reading a video game in the best way, with all of them learning the logic (or nonsense) that governs the various places they traveled to. I'm excited to find out whether the fourth book in the series will return to the school, or if it will also take place primarily beyond the doors. 

Grade: A 

Book 21: Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Another mystery, but this time a modern one! However, it's a modern one masquerading as a post-WWII one, all wrapped up in an enigma, you know how it goes. 

The framing device for this book is that Susan, a book editor in modern London, has received the manuscript for the ninth and final book in the Atticus Pund mystery series, which is set in a small English village in the 1950s and has all of the trappings you would expect from this. The first two hundred pages of the book are that novel, until suddenly it stops at the end of the penultimate chapter on the cliffhanger of who's responsible for the murders. Susan doesn't have the final chapter, and neither does the CEO of the publishing house. The author, Alan Conway, must have it, except he died by suicide over the weekend...or did he?

This is a book in which we get two mysteries for the price of one, a classic whodunit in the style of Christie, and a contemporary meta mystery in which a book editor must assume the role of the detective, to varying degrees of success. It leaves you with one heck of a cliffhanger midway through the book and forces you to both abandon the pretense of the mystery you first started to read as being 'real' and then introduces a new one, which parallels and echoes the first one in interesting ways. It's not easy to keep a reader invested in both of the mysteries at once, but the author definitely pulls it off. I'm very glad I read this particular book after spending a month or two reading a number of the classic mysteries so I had a better grounding in the tropes this books swims around in. Horowitz has written a number of other books (as well as Midsomer Murders and Foyle's War and Poirot, this is a man who knows what genre he wants to write) and I'm afraid my TBR pile is about to get unexpectedly bigger once again. 

Grade: A