System Collapse by Martha Wells

Posted on August 12, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Book 7 is, again, the most recent Murderbot book to date, but there are more on the way, we’re told, and thank goodness. This tip from Liz has been (yet again) a big winner. I took a big break between books 6 and 7 – pretty precisely three years, whew! but it wasn’t too bad to jump back in. I won’t say I recalled all the fine points of where we were and who the humans were, but I was close enough to follow along; I think I’m already a little liable, with sci fi in particular, to let some of the details of tech and even plot wash over me as I go with the general atmosphere, themes, and cleverness. The Murderbot Diaries are absolutely character-driven, with style (that is, chiefly, Murderbot’s unique, sarcastic voice and secretly-a-teddy-bear personality) carrying a good portion of the load as well. I’m way more here for Murderbot itself – its inner dialog, its anxieties and values and reluctant but absolute loyalties, its decision making and love for entertainment media – than anything that happens to it. Those events are only here to let Murderbot react and act and be its loveable self.

Murderbot is full of dryly funny observations about how inexplicable humans are. “Humans are great at imagining stuff. That’s why their media is so good.” “Not even humans know why humans do things.” It coins ‘argucussion’ for the argument/discussions its humans have. Upon conflict, one human says to Murderbot, “We should talk about this later,” and its internal narrative responds, “We probably should but we absolutely are not going to, not if I can help it.” Because Murderbot is as avoidant of its own emotions and trauma as any repressed, long-ignored, forced-to-be-self-reliant human. It is a very human SecUnit.

This edition, it is fair, may start a bit more mid-scene than usual even for Martha Wells (and this is a thing she does), and it’s been a while since I last knew where we were. Murderbot and its growing crew of beloved humans (it is reluctant to admit to this, of course, but we know it is true) and ART the sentient spaceship are in a tricky negotiation situation involving mistreated and rightfully suspicious colonists, evil corporation lackeys, and dangerous ancient aliens. There is action and fighting, and mysteriousness. Murderbot spends a fair amount of time pretending to be human, which is at least better than pretending to be a SecUnit that has not hacked its governor module (there’s a little bit of that as well). It has the opportunity to free other SecUnits, too, and that possibility and the other SecUnits’ reactions are promising for future books. I smell a sequel and I can’t wait.

Rating: 8 fictionalized documentaries!

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Maximum Shelf author interview: Michael Idov

Posted on August 9, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Following Monday’s review of The Collaborators, here’s Michael Idov: The Moment When Things Open Up.

Michael Idov is a novelist, director, and screenwriter. A Latvian-born American raised in Riga under Soviet occupation, he moved to New York after graduating from the University of Michigan. Idov has written for New York magazine and has been the editor-in-chief of GQ Russia. He is the author of Ground Up and Dressed Up for a Riot and has worked on film and TV projects including Londongrad, Deutschland 83, Leto, and The Humorist. He and his wife and screenwriting partner, Lily, divide their time between Los Angeles, Berlin, and Portugal. The Collaborators, coming from Scribner on November 19, 2024, is a lightning-paced espionage thriller.

Does this novel fit the spy thriller genre?

Michael Idov
(photo: Ilya Popenko)

I don’t think the spy thriller is a genre. I think it’s an umbrella milieu, like horror in film. There’s something about the clandestine world that works as a device for boiling down the issues that could be tackled in any genre. From le Carré’s best novels, basically great literature of British manners, to Mick Herron’s social satire, to outright farce and parody, or a post-modernist puzzle box like Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth, my favorite novel of his–the spy thriller novel has room for all of that. My goal was never to transcend or put a gloss or a spin on the thing. I love the thing itself and I wanted to do it justice. Any deviations from the formula are just things that naturally come through, dragged in by my own biography and personality, consciously and unconsciously.

Every genre offers both the writer and the reader enough elasticity that at some point the term becomes meaningless, unless it’s a very pure and formulaic example. Which sometimes, when executed well, can also be great. Readers are very savvy. They know the structure. They almost hum along with the melody, even if they’re hearing it for the first time. There is a certain pleasure in seeing every beat hit at the right moment in the right manner.

How much research did you do?

I gave myself two rules. Not being a spy, putting as much of myself into it as I could was the best hope for authenticity and verisimilitude for this book. So the rules were: at no point will any scene take place anywhere I haven’t lived myself. I wouldn’t be describing abstract cities, but specific intersections, streets, cafes. And, at no point will a character speak a language that I don’t speak. If I speak it badly, so will they. That’s why Maya’s French is so shitty, because mine is. There’s a sprinkling of Latvian and German, precisely because that’s the most I could do for the characters. But when it comes to actual research into the intelligence community–I’m lucky to have a few people in the OSINT world (open source intelligence), and this comes through in the character Alan Keegan. I am fascinated by that world, even more so than the “classic” intelligence agencies. I feel like OSINT is a force for good in the world more often than classic intelligence work.

Some things that may feel like genre inventions are taken directly out of reality. My favorite two examples: the opening is very explicitly based on the Ryanair Incident of 2021, when they called in a fake bomb threat to land a plane over Belarus, in Minsk, and yanked an opposition reporter off the plane and let everyone else go. Which led to Belarus becoming even more of a pariah state, and no international airlines fly over it since then. And the other thing that seems like a complete action-movie moment that’s entirely real is, in the fall of 2022 somebody hacked the Russian Uber equivalent, Yandex, and did send like 300 taxis to the same address, creating a traffic snarl that brought the city to a standstill. The moment I read about it, I knew I would use that real event as the climax of a car chase. There’s a huge paper trail around that incident, and people are arguing still whether this was the Ukrainians or some sort of harmless prank.

This goes to my general impetus behind the novel itself. Spy novels tend to come in two flavors: realistic and fantastic. I’m very fond of the term spy-fi that people use to describe things like the Mission Impossible movies. There is room for something that is very realistic and researched and true to the underlying geopolitical situation, but at the same time still finds room for a couple of car chases and a shootout. Because these things do happen! To prove that point, I’ve used the ones that actually have happened.

How do you stay organized for such a complex novel?

Everything has to be plotted out, structurally–as screenwriters rather unpleasantly put it, “beat out” in order to function. I have a 40-page document that’s just the chronology, down to the hour of what happens when, and how long it takes every character to move from point A to point B, and what time it is in every time zone. You have to make sure that there are no whoppers, like oh, it’s the middle of the night in New York, so you can’t describe people going to work. It is a giant Lego set.

That said, I did try to leave room to surprise myself. Oftentimes this happens when you imagine a space in minute detail, and then let your characters go in that space and surprise yourself with what your characters can do there. You build a room and then you make up what happens based on what props you’ve given the characters. Maybe this is where my movie brain took over. Okay, I have a clear view of this, wouldn’t it be cool if X did Y in these rooms.

This novel is expertly paced. What’s the secret?

Just being a fan of the genre. Imagining myself as a reader and not wanting to bore myself. When you really feel for these characters, at some point you develop a feel for when things start to drag: I’ve got maybe two more pages here before something needs to happen–as Raymond Chandler said, when you don’t know what to do, have two people burst in with guns.

This interview originally ran on July 17, 2024 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Maximum Shelf: The Collaborators by Michael Idov

Posted on August 5, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on July 17, 2024.

“When the MiG-29 swung into view, barely 50 yards portside, passenger Anton Basmanny in seat 12A didn’t feel all that surprised. In fact, he even knew the reason it was there. He was the reason…. When you were the Kremlin’s least favorite blogger, a lot could happen.” Thus opens The Collaborators, a ripping gem of a novel by Michael Idov (Ground Up; Dressed Up for a Riot) that transports readers around the world–Minsk, Moscow, London, Berlin, Los Angeles, Portugal, Morocco, and more–and through a range of geopolitical and interpersonal intrigues. Propulsively paced, and containing as much humor, romance, philosophy, and whimsy as classic spy-thriller action, this brilliant novel will charm readers and linger long after its final pages.

After beginning with the plight of the Kremlin’s least favorite blogger on board a troubled flight to Riga, Idov’s narrative jumps to an American spy at work in that capital city. “At Yale, from where the CIA recruited him, Ari Falk had been an Army ROTC scholarship student… and a Slavic literature major: half meathead, half egghead. Add a Jewish name, desperate poverty, and tense foster-kid demeanor, and the result was so difficult to parse that most peers gave up without trying.” Falk likes Riga, but his job concerns him: he may be a bit too ethical, or even sentimental, for CIA work. “Falk felt like the farmer who adopted a new shelter cat each time a coyote ate the previous one. Once you subtracted the issue of intent, he ran a coyote-feeding program.” Falk is looking for Anton Basmanny, who has not arrived as expected.

Pages later, Idov introduces Maya Chou Obrandt, an aspiring actor, daughter to a Taiwanese-American mother and a Russian-American, self-made-billionaire financier father whose death by apparent suicide has just been announced on the news–but with no body, his fate remains unknown. Idle, frustrated, she sets off to search for her missing father. “As long as she was Maya Chou Obrandt, Girl Detective, she wasn’t Maya Chou Obrandt the twice-relapsed twenty-three-year-old addict, or Maya Chou Obrandt the corpse.” On their separate but intersecting missions, Maya and Falk meet by accident at a marina in Tangier, and team up as an unlikely duo: the disaffected CIA agent and the wayward heiress, who uncover decades-old plots beyond either’s imagining.

The Collaborators features short, punchy chunks of narrative switching close-third-person perspectives between a number of characters. Anton, Falk, and Maya are joined by a Russian bagman, a British open-source intelligence innovator with no poker face, and players from various espionage agencies, all lively with idiosyncrasies and multilingual dialog. But all are not what they seem, as identities shift and allegiances come into question: a teenaged Jewish boy at a refugee camp near Rome in the 1980s exhibits commercial acumen that attracts the attention of an American spy; a striking older couple fly business class but are untraceable; Russian agents across history and an aging CIA man intersect in unexpected ways. Not all the characters whom readers will meet, and even like, survive until the novel’s end, but Idov makes every loss and gut-punch count. The action opens in 2021, but events appearing as flashbacks from the Cold War through the 1980s and ’90s strongly influence that present. Idov spins a complex plot, spanning decades and much of the globe, but it proceeds at a lively pace: beware the late-night binge read.

Idov’s many strengths include line-by-line clever riposte (“stop looking at me like I’m a talking dog,” Maya tells Falk when the latter is indeed impressed by her reasoning) and the details that make his characters individual and often lovable (a band t-shirt, a love for bad tea). Readers with an interest in the geopolitical intrigue will certainly be drawn in by modern-day plots involving telecommunications, commerce, and machinations of power, but it is equally rewarding to sink into the dramas of love affairs cut short by espionage (one character’s sacrifice is labeled Faustian by another who may face a similar choice).

Although it does excel at certain features of the espionage thriller–car chases, shootouts, and double- and triple-crosses–The Collaborators is by no means a book for genre readers alone, or even primarily. There is much to love for anyone who appreciates an engaging story, and despite its plot-related strengths–compelling pacing, adrenaline-charged action sequences–the story at heart is character-driven. Characters espouse thought-provoking philosophies and go to great lengths to navigate romances challenged by international intrigue. Despite the body count, the novel often harbors a lovely, even feel-good tone.

Idov’s intelligent, emotive spy novel is funny and sweet, as well as blood-soaked; clever and riveting in its plot twists; and focused on idiosyncratic characters first and foremost. No special expertise in Russian intrigue is required, nor even a special interest in the espionage genre. Brilliant, entertaining, rocketing, and unforgettable, The Collaborators is not to be overlooked.

Rating: 8 glasses of tea.

Come back Friday for my interview with Idov.

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Something in the Woods Loves You by Jarod K. Anderson

Posted on August 2, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A profoundly depressed poet takes to the woods and delivers a lovely, moving memoir of nature writing and mental illness.

In his 40s, poet Jarod K. Anderson (Field Guide to the Haunted Forest; Love Notes from the Hollow Tree) left his job in academia to try to survive the debilitating depression he’d mostly hidden for decades. Early on in his memoir, he describes taking a walk in the woods, quietly observing nature as he had not in some time. He communes with a great blue heron and finds that there may be solace in a place where he’d forgotten to look.

Something in the Woods Loves You describes the slow and difficult process of seeking help and getting better, in increments, and with relapses. Anderson’s journey to wellness is not and perhaps never will be complete, but he does progress, and with a poet’s sensibility and attention to language and detail, this memoir relates not only his story but also philosophies and outlooks that will be helpful to many readers. While its subject matter is undeniably heavy, Something in the Woods Loves You is frequently light and positive.

There are notes of advice, but they’re always couched within Anderson’s personal experience, which he acknowledges will not be universal. The result is a memoir of the slow passage toward improved mental health, a deeply beautiful work of nature writing, and a treatise on the underestimated connections between the human and “natural” worlds. The setting is solidly grounded in Anderson’s home landscapes in Ohio (and, briefly, Tacoma, Wash.).

Organized in a seasonal cycle, Something in the Woods Loves You opens in winter: “A white page. An elm scribbled on a snow hill. Empty space making each syllable of life more vital…. Winter is the deep breath before a song.” In that stark season, not without effort, Anderson decides to seek help. In spring (“a gentle calamity of warmth and color”), he obtains access to antidepressant medication and, after a false start, finds a good fit in a counselor trained in cognitive behavioral therapy. In summer, the depression begins to lift. Fall brings a relapse, and the lesson that life will involve ups and downs.

Something in the Woods Loves You is also structured around 20 species, which include sugar maple, morel, eastern bluebird, lightning bug, raccoon, and human. “Fieldmouse” considers toxic masculinity in Western culture, including the unwillingness to ask for help. “Crow” contemplates a balance between science and magic. These are joined by many shining, glinting details, rendered in a poet’s prose under a careful eye: great blue herons “are a mix of shaggy and angular, a blade of yellow stone dressed in flowing robes stitched from overcast skies.” With these and other scintillating observations, Something in the Woods Loves You is revelatory.

This review originally ran in the July 16, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 seeds.

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The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle

Posted on July 29, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Victor LaValle: I loved The Changeling, couldn’t make it very far into The Ecstatic, did okay with The Ballad of Black Tom. I have found The Devil in Silver quite intriguing and absorbing; I don’t guess I loved it as much as The Changeling, but it sure did take me on a trip, and I’ll be thinking about it for some time.

We begin:

They brought the big man in on a winter night when the moon looked as hazy as the heart of an ice cube.

The big man will turn out to be Pepper, and he’s being brought into the New Hyde mental hospital in Queens by a trio of detectives who couldn’t be bothered to process him into the actual jail, and instead have defaulted to a simpler drop-off scenario. This will have long-lasting consequences for Pepper, however. One of the quickest questions to arise in the reader’s mind: who among us would countenance this involuntary commitment process without coming across a little unhinged? If I am perhaps a little drunk, indignant, and arguing my absolute sanity, will I read as sane, or…? Tiniest spoiler alert ever: Pepper is not immediately released from New Hyde. However reluctantly, he makes friends (of a sort), although his assumption that they don’t need psych meds any more than he does will be tested.

Pepper is no hero, no wronged but upstanding citizen. He’s rather average, maybe a little of an underachiever or a slob, deeply unremarkable, but that’s the point – none of these qualities should have him locked up, drugged against his will, restrained to a bed for inhumane days at a time. The methods of the doctors and nurses on staff (no heroes among them, but like Pepper, regular human beings capable of small graces and big messes) aren’t the worst of what New Hyde has to offer, though. There appears to be a veritable devil housed in a secure room just down the hall. But is this antagonist truly what it appears? Just how sane is anybody? (Questions of the un/reliable narrator may arise.)

There are deeply compelling characters here, and profound pathos, crimes and forgiveness and oh so many questions. The story is fairly explicit about questioning systems: the hospital has purchased a software program for its ancient computer that is supposed to allow staff to digitize patient charts. But it bought the wrong program, instead winding up with one that is supposed to help homeowners trying to avoid foreclosure. Except that program isn’t really supposed to help homeowners, but just get them lost in a maze of paperwork until, oops, the foreclosure has gone through. “Most systems barely work, but those same systems cover their asses much more successfully.”

Pepper is our protagonist, and most chapters feature his close-third-person perspective, but select few center other characters – his friends among the patients, or the staff – and even beyond that (one memorably checks in with an enormous lone rat, and the philosophies of rats). Stories apparently pulled from the news blur the line between Pepper’s fictional world and our real one (see also LaValle’s author’s note, which I loved). Vincent Van Gogh plays an important role. This is a novel about mental illness, societal ills and broken/working systems, with horror and realism tangled up together. It’s hard to look away from, even in its most disturbing moments. LaValle is strong.

Rating: 8 butts.

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Entitlement by Rumaan Alam

Posted on July 26, 2024 by pagesofjulia

With an atmosphere that is sexy, enchanting, and unsettling, Rumaan Alam’s expert fourth novel probes concepts of privilege, wealth, value, and morality.

Rumaan Alam (That Kind of Mother; Leave the World Behind) offers a slow-burning, insidiously creepy study of money and culture in his quietly distressing novel, Entitlement.

Native Manhattanite Brooke, at 33, feels hopeful about her new job at a charitable foundation, following nine unhappy years spent teaching at a charter school. “People heard the Bronx and thought lead paint, asthma, trucks, and whores at Hunts Point,” but it wasn’t funding that was the issue, exactly. She’s not professionally ambitious so much as she yearns for a little more than she has. The new job is initially just that–until she forms a special bond with the octogenarian billionaire, the famously self-made Asher Jaffee, whose money she disburses. Brooke embraces his advice to “Demand something from the world. Demand the best. Demand it.” As she sinks into the sumptuous life Asher invites her into, Brooke becomes increasingly confident in the demands she makes of the world, sure that she is doing good and doing well. With Alam’s signature tone of building foreboding, however, the reader becomes less and less sure.

Money is at the heart of Entitlement: what money can and cannot buy; how to give away Asher’s; where Brooke can find more for herself. Her financial status is, if not perfectly secure, not uncomfortable (even if nothing like her dear friend Kim, whose trust fund runs to the unspecified millions). Meanwhile, race is a more understated part of her story. Brooke, a Black woman with a white mother and a white brother (she’s adopted), “spent most of her time with white people, who never discussed the allegiance of race, because they did not need to.” Moreover, “Brooke didn’t care to defend the fact that she felt more loyalty to an old white man than a Black woman her age.”

Her difficulties with priorities and identity are most apparent in conversations with a robust cast of family and friends, and with the woman whose humble but humming community dance school Brooke would like to fund: the older Black woman is self-assured, yet resists Brooke’s help in a way she doesn’t comprehend. “Brooke didn’t know how to phrase it. Would the money not make them happier? Wasn’t that how money worked?”

Entitlement explores the difference between “wants” and “needs” through Brooke’s contrast to the dance school proprietor, who insists she does not need Asher Jaffee’s money. Alam is ever adept and incisive with the subtle examination of interpersonal as well as systemic issues: race, class, ambition, avarice. Entitlement provides a deceptively silky backdrop for the kinds of thrillingly uncomfortable questions at which Alam excels.

This review originally ran in the July 11, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 heels.

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The Magician’s Daughter by H. G. Parry

Posted on July 22, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Liz always recommends winners, but this one is the best of the year so far.

The Magician’s Daughter is a dream of a novel about magic, family, trust, coming of age, a changing world, and figuring out what’s right (or the closest we can come) and what’s wrong. I confess I am in danger of being suggestible by the Alix E. Harrow blurb on the cover of my edition, which reads in part: “a brand-new classic, both wholly original and wonderfully nostalgic.” I read that before I read the book, so there’s a danger there. But I think she got it right: there is both the tried and true and familiar here, and something fresh and new. I loved it so much. And this may be in part the right book at the right time, but I fell into it in ways I needed to.

Biddy has only ever known life on the island of Hy-Brasil, where she lives with her surrogate father figure, a mage named Rowen, and his familiar Hutchincroft, who sometimes takes human form but mostly lives as a golden-colored rabbit. She is now about sixteen, or seventeen: they can’t be sure, of course. She’s always known the story, that she was found shipwrecked alone in a small boat, which had been very unusually allowed to drift near Hy-Brasil. Off the coast of Ireland, beyond the Aran Islands, the magical island is only detectible every seven years; to accept the small craft that bought her there as an infant has always meant to Biddy (in her secret thoughts) that there must be something special about her. She might not have magic as Rowan does, but she hoped she was meant for big things.

And so in her teenaged years, it has begun to chafe that Rowan won’t let her leave the island. And he’s been leaving himself, more and more, in his form as a raven, out all night and sometimes even returning hurt. The outside world seems to be unraveling in some way, and Biddy is ill equipped to understand or help, being without magic and forbidden and unable to travel, but change is afoot…

Eventually Biddy and the reader learn that magic has been slowly leaving the world. The British Council of mages has seen upheavals in the last seventy years (mages live a long time, and this is all easily within Rowan’s experience), and those in power just now are not necessarily doing the kind of good work Rowan (and Biddy) believe in. It is now the year 1912, and Biddy is ready to step off her island for the first time in her memory, to take some serious risks. On the streets of London, she sees poverty and exploitation as well as overwhelming numbers of people (and intriguing fashion, which she’s always been curious about). She meets some looming figures from Rowan’s past, and the character of her beloved guardian gets somewhat complicated by these new perspectives. Especially in the Rookwood Asylum for Destitute Girls, she sees suffering and injustice like she’d never comprehended. There is much wrong in this larger world, and even all the magic one could dream of couldn’t fix it all, but with magic leaving the world things are worse than they should be. What can an orphan girl with no magic of her own possibly do? But with Rowan in profound danger, Biddy will have to try.

There is a touch of the fairy tale here, a dose of historical fiction, and lots of magical fantasy elements. Parry excels at world-building and realism. I love the sense that this could all be real, that there could be little hints and strains of magic in this real world that we regular folk are just not accustomed to noticing. Mages, like the rest of us, are susceptible to jealousies and the corruptions of power. There is a strong hint at the end that the world is about to see some larger problems – and again, this is 1912, so that is very believable foreshadowing. I desperately want the sequel to this lovely, absorbing novel! And will be investigating Parry’s backlist.

I needed the escape offered by this novel at this precise time that I picked it up, and am calling it the best book I’ve read this year. Thank you again and always, Liz. (I’m typing this review on your birthday although it won’t publish for some weeks.) Hugs and magic.

Rating: 10 hairstyles.

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In the Vanishers’ Palace by Aliette de Bodard

Posted on July 19, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This fantasy novel(la) comes billed as a reimagined, queer retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Perhaps I’m just working at a great distance from that original, but it didn’t recall it strongly for me. There is definitely a young girl kept captive in a palace by a being that’s understood to be a monster, and their relationship changes. The palace itself may have some powers. I see the parallels, but would never have thought of Beauty if I hadn’t been told to.

All of which is neither here nor there and has no bearing, for me, on enjoyment of the book. (Novella? At almost 200 pages, it might be pushing novella-length – these things are so tricky to define! – but it felt that contained, to me.)

Yên and her mother live in a somber village in a post-apocalyptic world, in which creatures called the Vanishers have (yes) vanished, but their legacy lingers: mysterious viruses, illnesses, and spirits, dangers lurking everywhere. Yên has failed as a scholar; her mother has value to the village as a healer, but as her mother’s just-mediocre assistant, Yên’s future is not assured. It does not surprise her to be sold away to pay off the village’s debts, to a frightening dragon: everyone expects she will be tortured to death by her new master, Vu Côn, but it turns out that Vu Côn (who can shape-shift between human and dragon forms) has other needs. She is the mother of intelligent, willful twins. And Yên, who had been teacher to her village’s children (apparently this was not judged a value??!), finds herself with new pupils.

Vu Côn and her children live in an abandoned Vanishers’ palace, a place of disconcerting, Escheresque, physically impossible dimensions and movements. The twins, Thông and Liên, possess powerful magic, and being nonhuman, as well as the children of her master, they give Yên different challenges than she’s faced with the village children. But they are children, nonetheless, clever and respectful of their new teacher (if headstrong), and she does care for them. Her feelings for Vu Côn are more complicated, blending desire with fear and resentment, and it appears this conflict is mutual.

The dragon’s eyes were a light grey, the color of storm clouds gathering. She was looking at Yên with an expression that was half-irritation, half-hunger, as if she would gobble Yên whole, given half a chance.

And what scared Yên most? This might, in the end, be just what she longed for.

Yên is dissatisfied living in the frightening Vanishers’ palace. She misses her mother and fears for her mother’s safety in their village; she misses home and knows it is unavailable to her, as the village elders who sold her away would never allow her return. She doesn’t know where to turn. And the readers understand before Yên does that there are deeper, darker secrets in the Vanishers’ palace than she’s yet discovered. But there are opportunities, too.

It’s a curious fantasy world, offering familiar elements (as they do) of our human desires and conflicts, but always with a twist – shape-shifting dragons, sure, but also, for example: Vu Côn has a magnetic sex appeal for our protagonist, but where I’m accustomed to seeing this expressed as heat, Yên experiences Vu Côn’s dragon-body as cold, wet, briny, and very sexy in these elements. That’s a new one for me, and I don’t find it easily accessible: “sea salt and cold, tight air, and a faint aftertaste like algae,” “wet cold creeping up her skin like fingers” – slimy, even! It’s an interesting twist, and one where I have to just trust in Yên’s tastes for Yên. But that’s what fiction asks of us, in different ways, right?

This was a fascinating adventure for me, in the ways that it did and did not fit into my expectations. And in the end, it calls upon some useful universals: big thinking about right and wrong, the way we relate to lover, friend, family, and community, the yearning for self-actualization and belonging. Dragons? Sure. I find Aliette de Bodard a lively imagination and I liked this punchy tale.

Rating: 7 strokes.

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The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey

Posted on July 15, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Told in the voice of a magpie, with humor and wisdom, this unflinching portrait of nature picks at the thin veil between the elemental violence and drama of both human and animal worlds.

Catherine Chidgey (Pet; Remote Sympathy) offers a singular combination of compassion, desperation, dark humor, and slow-building terror with The Axeman’s Carnival, set in rural high-country New Zealand. The story is told through the unusual perspective of a magpie fallen from the nest and rescued by a woman named Marnie, who lives on Wilderness Road with her husband, Rob, a sheep farmer and competitive axeman. They’re “under a lot of pressure,” a refrain that contributes to a general sense of foreboding: a drought threatens their livelihood; Marnie mourns a lost pregnancy; she is isolated from the world beyond their farm. An ominous thread runs through their lives in ways that readers gradually become aware of.

The narrator shares memories of being in the eggshell, occupying the nest with his sister and brothers. “She lifted me into her pillowed palm” and a relationship begins. Marnie releases the magpie to his flock, but he chooses to return to the woman he adores; she names him Tama, and posts his pictures to the Internet, which gains Tama a following. The sheep station suffers setbacks, and Rob’s temper and drinking become increasingly menacing, even as he trains for the annual competition where he hopes to win his 10th golden axe, which will offer both the affirmation he craves and a badly needed monetary prize. Tama’s Internet fame presents a financial opportunity for the family, but also puts them in the public eye, with new risks. Tama’s view of events is curious, in both senses of the word; “that was how houses worked,” he repeatedly notes, with each strange or sinister observation.

Magpies are very smart birds. Tama relates the story with humor and wisdom. He mimics human speech and understands it well enough to communicate, and the reader benefits from his viewpoint as he describes events, with grim foreshadowing. “When I think about what happened later, I remember that day,” he says, of various small violences. “Rob honed an axe with his honing stone…. He ran the blade through the hair on his forearm to test the sharpness, and we watched his crime show about shapely murdered women with torn-off clothes who’d let their attackers in their front doors.” Rob’s temper, his taste for crime shows and murdered women, his axes and admirable strength, his jealousy and Marnie’s fear, all contribute to the reader’s trepidation of what is to come. But The Axeman’s Carnival has tricks up its sleeve, and Tama himself should not be underestimated.

This review originally ran in the June 18, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 cashews.

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The Queen City Detective Agency by Snowden Wright

Posted on July 12, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A disgruntled PI and a plot as wildly complicated as the history of the American South itself combine in this spectacular, darkly funny mystery.

Snowden Wright (American Pop; Play Pretty Blues) immerses his readers in a gritty, troubled small-town Mississippi with The Queen City Detective Agency, and introduces an indomitable protagonist.

It’s the 1980s and the country is about to reinaugurate Ronald Reagan when a small-time felon called Turnip does “a Greg Louganis off the roof” of the county courthouse in Meridian, Miss. Turnip was implicated in the murder, allegedly by hire, of a successful local real estate developer, and rumored to be involved with a mythical criminal syndicate called the Dixie Mafia that may or may not actually exist. Turnip’s suspicious death (by rooftop dive, or was it by poison?) and the murder he may or may not have helped arrange wind up entangled with cockfighting rings, domestic violence, child brides, centuries-old institutional racism and class discrimination, and much more.

Enter Clementine Baldwin (that’s Clem or Ms. Baldwin to you) of Queen City Detective Agency in Meridian, a decaying railroad town that was once the second-largest in the state. “Clem loathed this place and its vitiated nostalgia, redolent of an era when that idiot Atticus Finch thought he could win a rigged game, when you needed a tool to open a can of beer…. At least the beer cans had gotten better.” A disillusioned former cop, Clem is also a Black woman in a city, state, and nation that respects neither. She’d rather just be called a private investigator than a lady PI. For her second-in-command, she went looking for a prop: “completely useless in most circumstances, but, in hers, as handy as locking hubs on a muddy day. In other words, the prop had to be a white man. The guy needed to have hominy for gray matter….” But instead she found Dixon Hicks, “whose name said it all,” a prop who turned out to be a good partner and even a good friend.

Clem is a quintessential hard-boiled detective with entirely legitimate beefs with the world around her. She drinks too much, but who wouldn’t? Partnered with the genuinely, surprisingly good Dixon, she is a smart, courageous, flawed heroine, with plenty of dark humor and a storied past. Wright’s prose is clever and delightfully funny even while handling serious social ills. The Queen City Detective Agency is a remarkable work of Southern noir, featuring crackpot characters both silly and sinister, a longstanding history of greed and white privilege, and an unforgettable private investigator. Readers will be anxious for more featuring Ms. Baldwin.

This review originally ran in the June 14, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 rocks.

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