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 23: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

A book club book! This is a lesbian romance that's also a detective story that happens to take place on the rings of Jupiter? So there's a lot genre tropes and narratives all kind of smashed together in it. The set up is that earth became uninhabitable, so humanity set up a space colony of sorts on the rings of  Jupiter that's connected by all of these trains. Different settlements resemble different cultures or really settings of humanity, so you have one town which feels like the old west, another area that's basically a living zoo of all of the creatures and vegetation the colonists will want to bring back to Earth when it's inhabitable again, and then there's a university which feels very Oxbridge. The story is a fun noir involving two exes, even if I could have done with more development of why they broke up and why being together now makes sense. Looking forward to reading the next one in the series and finding out where it's going. 

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 dark 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 20: You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian

The second book in her series about mid-century gays living in New York City, this one unfortunately suffers a bit from comparison with the first one, which I enjoyed so so much. But this is still delightful, just slightly less my speed.

The love story here is between a journalist who is still privately grieving the death of his boyfriend a year and a half prior, which of course is something very few people know he's going through, and a slumping baseball player who's been traded to a team that sounds suspiciously like the Mets but of course isn't. Mark gets assigned to write a series of articles about Eddie's slump, and in the process they strike up a friendship that very very slowly becomes more. It's an interesting narrative in part because both of them are out to themselves, so it's less about coming out and more about creating a community. But I found the resolutions of some of the conflicts to be more expedient than I wanted. I don't need or want historical accuracy in the form of tragedy or the threat of outing from my gay historical romance novels, but this one went a little too far in the other direction, for me. Mark also felt like a character who made more sense as a 40 year old than a 28 year old, and while that may have been intentional from the standpoint of him aging as a result of losing his partner, I kept bumping up against it. So not quite the home run of her prior book, but still a solid double. 

Grade: B

Book 19: The New Guy by Sarina Bowen

Okay, look. If you're in the market for a hockey m/m romance novel to read on a porch while you're on vacation, this is perfectly serviceable. The titular new guy is both of the main characters: one is a young hockey player who keeps getting traded to new teams, the other is a newly hired athletic trainer for the team. They meet before the season at a bar before they know who they are and almost hook up! The hockey player has an overbearing dad! The athletic trainer is a young widower with a kid and an overbearing mother-in-law! 

I was sort of hoping for more from this, but the characters don't make a ton of sense and while the daughter's not the worst kind of kid character you find in a book like this, it was still more than I really wanted. Plus I kept arguing with the sports, which is never a good sign. But again, it did its job on my vacation, so I can't complain too much.

Grade: C