A War of Swallowed Stars by Sangu Mandanna

Posted on May 6, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This review contains spoilers for books that precede it in the series, but is spoiler-free for this book.

This is the third in a trilogy, following A Spark of White Fire and A House of Rage and Sorrow. And it had me pretty rapt, y’all. I was on the edge of my seat throughout, and I cried at the end, but in a good way, which makes me feel glad for the newly-12-year-old I’ve just gifted it to for her birthday. (I teased her that she had to wait because these books are labeled 12 and up!) The world we have come to care about over three books is in great peril, as are the relationships we’ve invested so much in. And it’s not that nobody we love is lost in this book; but it all ends in a way that feels right.

The Celestial Trilogy has featured magical weapons, gods and monsters, murderous family members, and friends where we’d least expect them. Esmae has experienced great and intense trauma, and weathered some very real depression. “I don’t know how to make my way through to the other side of it… I can’t see anything but the dark. I feel like I’ve fallen down a cold, dark hole and I’ll never get out.” Whew. But she has good friends. And she has good on her side. Hang in there, readers.

Mandanna took us through a lot in this series, but the emotional roller coaster has been well-earned, and it pays off in a big way. I can’t wait to hear what my young friend thinks. And you all.

Rating: 8 moments of eye contact.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

A House of Rage and Sorrow by Sangu Mandanna

Posted on April 29, 2024 by pagesofjulia

As I’ve decided will be my regular procedure around here, this review contains spoilers for books that precede it in the series, but is spoiler-free for this book.

Following A Spark of White Fire is A House of Rage and Sorrow, book 2 in the Celestial Trilogy by the author of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. I love it.

Esmae is still reeling from the loss of her best friend at the end of book one. Also quite painful is the fact that Rama was killed by her twin brother in a duel, as he thought he was fighting Esmae herself: not only did Rama die, but her brother meant to kill her. Esmae’s anger is beyond description. She wants to burn it all down. She is also carefully avoiding a burgeoning romance, because (I judge) she is as angry with herself as with anyone, and doesn’t think she deserves it.

She is also, however, making friends. Surly Sybilla has cracked open and become as loyal to Esmae as to Max; beloved Rama’s sister Radha has appeared on the scene and begins making her way into the group, not without hiccups. There is a small, new, perhaps fragile, but very real family of friends forming around the girl who has always mourned not having a family.

Then again, the political intrigues and betrayals surrounding her flesh and blood keep multiplying, and the revelations and bad news keep coming. Just how much can one teenaged girl go through? A House of Rage and Sorrow ends on a cliffhanger, not unlike book one; but unlike that finish, this time I had the next installment at hand. Stay tuned for book three in this trilogy.

I love that romance keeps developing (and not just for Esmae!) alongside anguish and intrigue, and a very real and believable coming-of-age arc in which Esmae tries (at least a little) to balance her rage against her better wishes for her loved ones and her wider world. I can’t wait to see where we’ll go next.

Rating: 7 lions.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

A Spark of White Fire by Sangu Mandanna

Posted on March 25, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A very fun sci fi novel and first in a trilogy. Aimed at younger readers, it still has plenty of plot and character to engage us kids-at-heart.

I’d call this ‘light’ sci fi in that the science isn’t ‘hard’ and doesn’t contribute crucially to any plot points. You might call it speculative fiction instead: political and familiar intrigues, with coming-of-age issues and romance, set in a world that is not quite like our own. Esmae has grown up in the spaceship kingdom of Wychstar, but she belongs on Kali. By winning an archery contest, and therefore winning a gods-blessed undefeatable warship, she is able to return to the home she’s never known; but reuniting her fractured family and putting the rightful heir back on the throne may be a bigger job than she’s realized.

Esmae is a teenager who’s lived most of her life appearing as an unremarkable orphan, although she also enjoys the close friendship of Wychstar’s youngest prince Rama. He’s a true and lovely friend. Secretly, she has also enjoyed training under a famous warrior named Rickard, who is bound to teach no one but the offspring of Kali’s late king. Rickard and the gods are the only ones who know Esmae’s true identity at the novel’s start.

So, like I said: speculative fiction, at the juncture of fantasy and sci fi, with political intrigue and the challenges of coming of age. Esmae’s troubles winning a kingdom may be outside the experiences of most young readers, but exploring the larger world and finding one’s place in it, struggling to find one’s truest identity, making friends and feeling attraction and navigating conflicting loyalties – all these are absolutely universal. I think it’s a very accessible story for young readers.

I read this book for my own pleasure, absolutely, but also because I was hoping to pass it on to my favorite almost-12-year-old, and for that reason I paid more attention than usual to anything that might cause concern for the younger set. There’s some very mild bloodshed, and some intro-to-sexual content: basically a quick but passionate kiss, and some reference to wanting hands on one’s body and feelings of warmth. By my standards, this is plenty appropriate for a middle schooler. I pointed these passages out to my friend’s parent, and we agreed that she’d be fine. (You know I’m not inclined to censorship, and I was reading far spicier stuff at a younger age. And sometimes confused by it! I also appreciate that this kid is doing other reading about bodies, and doing a fair amount of reading with her parents. All solid.)

Fully invested in books two and three. I’ll read more by this author, too.

Rating: 7 birds of feathers and buttons.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

Posted on February 9, 2024 by pagesofjulia

**Spoiler-Free!**

Following A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate, The Golden Enclaves wraps up the Scholomance series. I am very pleased with this conclusion and the whole series. For spoilers’ sake, this review includes practically no plot summary.

As a series finale, The Golden Enclaves takes on a lot, and involves a ton of action, ranging very widely in the ‘true’ geographic world as well as in the void and the magical spaces that populate Novik’s imagined world. A number of characters take great steps; this is indeed a coming-of-age for El, who has graduated from the Scholomance and achieved some real victories, but only to step out into a larger world where the monsters are decided not all neatly taken care of. She’s suffering some losses, not least in realizing the limits of her powers: she is one of the most powerful wizards ever, but there are still limits. We see her take less advantage of the friendships and alliances we’ve seen her form up til now, but also find news ones and/or revive some that have lain dormant.

I love about this whole series that it offers commentary on class divisions and the ethics of who gets to be safe and cared for in the world. Those themes are strengthened here, and complicated. There is a very pointed conflict of interests that she calls a trolley problem, of the highest order; El must face that she cannot (so to speak) save them all, that every choice has a cost. In the face of this frustration, she wavers, considers giving up. We have learned that El is incredibly strong and strong-willed; she doesn’t give up easily. But we have also never seen her tested like this.

I love the characters, including one or two who are still ‘rising’, coming to center stage. I love El herself so dearly; she struggles so hard with this book, even after having accepted help and friendship, and her struggles often yield some good snarky humor and fun amid the pathos. Novik has enormous world-building power, which was evidenced at the series’ start but is still at play here, because our understanding of the world (and El’s understanding of it!) must expand considerably in this book. I’d recommend her to anyone.

Rating: 8 bricks.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

How Long ’til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin

Posted on October 27, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This book took me on such journeys and brought me so much joy and enjoyment and laughter and more difficult but also rewarding feelings; I have long felt that Jemisin is a rare master, but this may be the pinnacle. I love this book. I was once mildly disappointed with novella-length versions of her world; but here she clearly perfected the short story. And I was so pleased with the wide variety of worlds we got to dip into. Every story is unmistakably Jemisin, but each is also so different. They range in the impressions they give of settings in time and in space, from recognizably referring to our world to being fairly far afield; some are set in the worlds of her novels, some stand alone, and a few closely answer another author’s work (more on that in a minute). Some, similarly, seem to fit into a timeline of our own world, while others stand apart. But they all have the flavor. I went back to immediately reread one story in particular as soon as I finished the book, and that’s a rare move.

How Long opens with an author’s introduction in which she shares her coming-of-age as a writer, her growth as a short story writer, and the struggle of being a Black woman in fantasy and science fiction, among other things. “The stories contained in this volume are more than just tales in themselves; they are also a chronicle of my development as a writer and as an activist.” For this reader, at least, it felt right to come to this collection after having read all the novels (I haven’t read all her work as published in various places, but I’ve read all the books); I felt familiar with the writer now offering a look back across those years. Such a treat. Also, I hope she lives to write many books for a long, long time more.

The first story in the collection is “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” which is quite explicitly a response to Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” This was, again, a real treat for me; I’ve read “Omelas” for a couple of classes in which I was a student and also taught it for several years, so I’ve looked pretty closely at its concepts as well as its sentences, and that was an excellent preparation to appreciate Jemisin’s strong response in both its concepts and its sentences. To match the voice and style of another writer is not ‘mere’ imitation but a serious accomplishment in itself, and this story does that well. Jemisin has a fiery answer to Le Guin’s troubled false utopia; her Um-Helat is not “that barbaric America” nor “Omelas, a tick of a city, fat and happy with its head buried in a tortured child.” She’s got a different idea, and exhorts the reader to come along, “get to work.” (The direct address comes from Le Guin, but Jemisin grasps it firmly.) I was so delighted with this opening story, I could hardly stand it.

Other favorites include “Red Dirt Witch,” “L’Alchimista,” “The Effluent Engine,” “The Evaluators,” “Henosis,” and “The Elevator Dancer” – is Orwell just this much in our society, or in my head (recently Julia), or is this an explicit play on 1984? To emphasize the range of these stories, I will attempt a few one-line description/summaries:

  • “Red Dirt Witch”: The White Lady threatens Emmaline’s family, but she knows the red dirt of Alabama, and the magic it holds, too well to go down easily.
  • “L’Alchimista”: As a professional chef, Franca has fallen far, but she can’t resist a challenge; when a mysterious stranger shows up at her little kitchen in Milan, she will discover her art holds even greater power than she knew.
  • “The Effluent Engine”: In historical New Orleans, a Haitian spy looks for technological advantage and finds also love. (Jemisin’s website calls it “a swashbuckling adventure-romance set in 1800s New Orleans with secret societies, derringers, and bustles.” Love!)
  • “The Evaluators”: Human contact with alien species is highly regulated; why is this one trade contract being rushed? Danger! (Strong hints of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood series.)
  • “Henosis”: In out-of-order chapters, a famous author is kidnapped by his biggest fan.
  • “The Elevator Dancer”: Security guard secretly, shamefully, watches a subversive act of dance.

Bonus: many of these stories are available elsewhere, linked from Jemisin’s site, if you’d care to go hunting that way.

This book has left my mind changed, and I’ve stepped away and back to it. Strongly recommend.

Rating: 10 frava roots.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune

Posted on September 1, 2023 by pagesofjulia

In the Lives of Puppets is TJ Klune’s third adult standalone novel, in a similar vein to The House in the Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door. These are the only three of his I’ve read, although there are more, and I may still get to those.

I said about Whispering Door that Klune excels at “the juncture of sweetness, fantasy, profundity, inclusivity, wisdom and pure silliness.” Puppets continues in that style. Rather than magical orphans or a magical afterlife, here we have a decidedly sadder challenge. The story begins with a lovely forest. A man (“who wasn’t actually a man at all”) approaches an old, falling-down house in the forest. He builds a life there, a crazy network of add-on treehouses and laboratories a la Swiss Family Robinson. He has a son, Victor. Flash-forward: we meet adult Victor with his two companions, a nurse-robot named Nurse Ratchet (that’s an acronym for Nurse Registered Automaton To Care, Heal, Educate, and Drill, and yes, think One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and a vacuum-robot named Rambo. Victor’s father Giovanni is still around, and much-beloved; they have a happy family, although Victor is the only human member of it. Like Giovanni, he is an inventor, builder, creator. He spends many of his days combing through the Scrap Yards, where the Old Ones deposit their detritus, some of which turns out to be useful to Victor’s little forest-dwelling family. It’s where he found Nurse Ratchet and Rambo, both of whom he’s patched up to become the wacky friends they are today. (Nurse Ratchet is forever hoping to murder someone or something, slowly, and document their agony. Rambo is crippled by anxiety, restlessness, and his ceaseless need to clean. He loves the old movie Top Hat.) One day, at the Scrap Yards, Victor finds a new potential friend, one who will change everything.

This book assailed me with literary allusions, some of them less obvious than the two I’ve named already. Epigraphs refer to Pinocchio; Victor’s first name and some other plot elements remind of me Frankenstein; the goofy-sidekick robots make me think of R2D2 and C3PO from Star Wars as well as The Wizard of Oz. Which is to say, Klune is not working with brand-new material here (nor does he think he is). The world of robots gets a decided Klune twist, though: sweet, silly, romantic, hopeful. There are a few big reveals I won’t name here. As I already mentioned, this world feels a bit less hopeful to me than the worlds of Whispering Door and Cerulean Sea. The romance felt a full step less believable to me, somehow, although I can’t quite say why – it’s not like the pairings-off in those first two novels made perfect sense in any real world, but this is fantasy. Something about this one just didn’t go off the same, for reasons I can’t articulate. Possibly (is this too obvious?) it is that difficult to write robots (or androids) as relatable humanish characters. Maybe it’s as simple as where we were left with this love affair.

I really enjoyed this read: I was absorbed, engaged, tickled, and concerned for the characters I’d come to love. It is a good book. I just think it’s less awesomely good than the two previous ones by this author that I’ve read. I will certainly buy the next standalone novel he publishes in this same vein.

Rating: 7 butterflies.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

Posted on July 3, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Book two of the Scholomance series was every bit as thrilling and engaging as book one. I love our grumpy, standoffish teddy bear of a protagonist.

El had good character development in A Deadly Education; now she’s continuing to develop as a person, both because she’s a teenager (coming of age) and because she’s made friends for the first time in her life. She’s reluctant to believe in this, because she’s endured a lifetime of trauma at the hands of almost everyone she’s ever known. Her new friends and allies do have something to gain from working with her at graduation, now that her power as a wizard is becoming more widely known, so she’s not entirely wrong to consider that this may motivate their friendship; but the reader can see better than she can that their friendship is real, too. It’s poignant to see such a sweet but enormously curmudgeonly, damaged, dear kid struggle to accept that people might actually care about her.

The privileges of class and nationality at work here, the power structures that are most invisible to those in power, and the injustice of it all, are more overtly at the center of this book. I think there are some good magical parallels to our real world here that can be instructive but also entertaining and fit neatly into the fantastical wizard-y world of Novik’s imagination, which is prodigious, by the way; this is expert-level worldbuilding. Late in the book the focus begins to move beyond the Scholomance to consider the whole world, which is clearly where book three will take us; this one ends on another final-line cliffhanger (!), so I’ll be getting there fairly quickly.

Perhaps because they were both Liz recommendations, I am reminded of the Murderbot series here, which also featured an outsider first-person narrator who is actually a loveable marshmallow on the inside but puts forward a hard, aggressively antisocial exterior. Despite being mostly rejected by their respective societies, both are driven to right the big wrongs. I do love this set-up, and I love El for being a hard-nosed, sarcastic badass.

In this installment, I actually questioned the YA label. The series does star teenagers, and deal with coming-of-age problems (therefore YA). On the other hand, it also deals with some very dark themes, heavy enough that some readers move it out of the YA category; but after some consideration, I don’t think that’s necessarily a disqualifier. It’s definitely for older kids, not least because there’s some (non-graphic) sex in this one. Maybe the line between YA and adult is blurred; certainly it depends on the reader. There’s no question that these are books for adults (hi), but I think they’re also books for young adults who are up for serious thinking on dark subjects, and some really good writing. This is a step adultward from Hunger Games, which are however very fine books in their own right. Who’s to say what kids should read, anyway? My parents didn’t seem to me to monitor my reading much, and I definitely read some stuff beyond my comprehension at a young age, and all that seems to have done is whet my fire. As ever, your mileage may vary.

Rating: 8 glaciers.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

Posted on June 2, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Another perfect recommendation from Liz, A Deadly Education is narrated by El, short for Galadriel, a wizard-in-training at the Scholomance. Her world looks much like ours, but you and I would qualify as ‘mundanes’ – people who don’t see or believe in magic. El is in school to learn spells and tricks and control, and as an independent wizard kid, possibly to earn an invitation to join an enclave. Wizards banded together in enclaves are much safer than indies like El, whose mother raised her in a yurt on a (mundane) commune in the Welsh countryside. But her mother Gwen is much beloved, a talented healer and source of all things good, while El’s affinity or tendency is toward large-scale destruction, as in mass murder. She is not a bad person: in fact she has spent her nearly three years in school working hard to keep her affinity in check, hiding the true extent of her powers, and making no friends with her eternally sour attitude. The tension within El between her natural affinity (murderous) and her value system (protective and good) is one of the central conflicts of this story.

Now the school itself: the Scholomance is full of terrors, like mals (short for maleficaria), monsters of all sorts; they live in the in-between spaces so that it’s dangerous to go anywhere alone, even to the bathroom, which is hard on a loner like El. Each year the massive, circular, magical space rotates and ratchets around so that the freshman dorms move down to become sophomore dorms, etc., and everyone gets closer to graduation, which is a euphemism for the seniors being dumped into a space filled with mals where they’ll have to fight their way out to real-world survival. Many of them won’t make it. Thus are your four years at the Scholomance taken up with working to form alliances to help you through graduation, unless you were lucky to come in an enclave kid from the start, with privileges and protections built in.

This accounts for several other intriguing conflicts within the novel: class and classism are up for debate within the enclave system. School in general is filled with petty jealousies and social politics, in ways recognizable to those of us who attended mundane high schools, and with the essential addition of life-or-death machinations re: mals and magic. There are plenty of larger questions about right and wrong and personal agency and what ends justify what means, but none of this is overtly or pedantically the point of the story: this is a page-turning, deliciously readable story of one awkward, socially ill-adjusted, fundamentally sweet but somehow also deadly teenager. El wants to secure her safe place in the world, but she really doesn’t want to hurt anybody. (Well, sometimes. She has a bit of a temper, and she does take a lot of abuse.) She also really wants friends, although she wouldn’t be quick to admit it.

It’s a great story, with some great secondary characters, including those cautiously interested in working with El, and the enigmatic oaf who wants to protect her. By the final chapters (which include some great action/battle sequences to boot) I was hooked and cheering. The last six words of the novel (!) contain a bombshell, and I cannot wait to start book two of this trilogy. Strongly recommend this one for awesome female lead characters, intrigue and world-building, fun magic, and poignant human drama.

Rating: 8 argonet teeth.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 3 Comments »

The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin

Posted on May 12, 2023 by pagesofjulia

It’s been nearly three years since I read The City We Became, and I wish I’d spent a few minutes reviewing that one first. I still felt close to the avatars of New York’s boroughs, but New York himself (he goes by Neek, as in NYC if you pronounce the Y like ‘ee’) felt less familiar, and I’d lost track of some of the rules of Jemisin’s carefully constructed world. For slightly better results, you might want to keep book 1 a little handier than I did here, but it was still a hell of a ride.

Highlights include the personalities themselves, their relationships, and the final action scene(s). I remembered loving Manny (Manhattan), Brooklyn and Bronco (the Bronx); I feel like we get to know Padmini (Queens) better here, and I really enjoyed that. I applaud Jemisin’s work with Aislyn, the bigoted Karen-in-training avatar for Staten Island; she is unlikeable but complicated enough that the reader grudgingly sympathizes, which is a feat (and an exercise in patience and empathy that some might have excused the author for not engaging in). These avatars have had time since the last book’s action to settle in to relationships among themselves in ways that are pleasing; the characters were strong to begin with but they perform best when they play off each other (true of all characters, probably). Then there are the avatars of other cities around the world: I imagine it must have been so fun to build characters for places like London, Tokyo, Istanbul, Paris, Budapest, Kinshasa, and Amsterdam… because this novel ends up in a massive showdown. In its course, we (and our avatars) learn more about the rules of the world of living cities and their great Enemy. The threat, as threats do, grows larger and then imminent, and a major brawl ensues. This series was originally billed as a trilogy, and actually I still thought it so at book’s end; it was only in Jemisin’s acknowledgments that I learned we’re done here. I do think the ending allows room for more if she finds her energies refilled, but I understand the effects of the pandemic and Trump’s evil on her intended storytelling, and (not that she needed my permission) I can grant her this ending, too.

Three years ago, when I read The City We Became, Jemisin was new to me. Now I return to this series having since read every novel Jemisin has ever written.* With this perspective, the Great Cities duology feels both familiar and very different from her other work. This one is set in the most recognizable of her fictional worlds, closest to our own real one. The characters are modern, urban, fresh and real-world-adjacent, while the characters in her other outstanding works are realistic but recognizably otherworldly. I don’t think I have a preference, but it’s a different effect. I guess for readers more reluctant to venture into proper sci fi/fantasy, this urban version might feel friendlier.

*I have not yet read How Long ’til Black Future Month?, her short story collection, which I erroneously thought comprised works by other authors that she’d collected and edited. I would have gotten around to that eventually. But it is in fact all her own work, which means I need to get there soon.

I love the action and attitude of these living cities, and Jemisin is an important figure in my lifetime of reading. Can’t wait for more – whatever she does.

Rating: 8 sticky toffee puddings.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

The New One by Evie Green

Posted on March 17, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Artificial intelligence, family troubles, love and aspiration combine for a delightfully suspenseful novel of secrets and betrayal.

In The New One, Evie Green (We Hear Voices) takes readers on a propulsive journey through grief, loss and secrets kept by those we love. This compelling novel will have readers up all night, following the tribulations of a struggling family offered a great gift–or possibly a curse.

Scarlett, the Trelawneys’ daughter, was a perfect angel–brilliant, beautiful, sweet, gifted–until she turned 13. She then becomes a terror: lying, staying out late at night, neglecting her schoolwork. “They had become a shouty family,” Green writes. “They all yelled at one another every day, and [Tamsyn] had no idea how to stop.” In near-future Cornwall, Scarlett’s parents, Tamsyn and Ed, are barely surviving in their humble camper: Ed works nights, and Tamsyn is up early mornings, “a peasant working in fields.” They subsist on stolen cauliflowers and rarely speak to each other (without shouting). Then tragedy strikes: Scarlett is left lying in a hospital bed in a coma, and Tamsyn fears she’ll never see her daughter conscious again. Just as their insurance runs out, they receive an offer that seems a mix of magic, miracle and horror: while a company called VitaNova rebuilds their daughter, the comatose Scarlett will receive the finest medical care, and her parents will be granted a fully funded fresh start in Geneva, Switzerland. Scarlett, now named Sophie (her middle name), is part human clone and part AI. She shares Scarlett’s memories and gifts, although with the traumatic past year erased, and has been augmented with a better knowledge of French and physics–and a perfect, innocent love for her parents.

Most of the story is told from Tamsyn’s point of view, with brief ventures into the perspectives of the other members of her family. Tamsyn is unsure of her manufactured daughter: this new one is so like her darling Scarlett that she’s impossible not to love. But Tamsyn grasps what Ed seems not to: their real, true, original daughter still lies unconscious, and every bond with Sophie represents a small betrayal.

The New One‘s creepy Stepford atmosphere is not to be underestimated. Readers can see what even Tamsyn cannot: Sophie understands more than she seems to, and her best interests and Scarlett’s may not align. Ed is keeping secrets. Geneva is a bit too perfect. Green’s (aka British author Emily Barr) prose is compulsively readable, her characters disarming and capable of great mystery. The New One is deliciously disturbing, engrossing and surprising at its every turn. This not-to-be-missed novel of family dynamics and what it really means to be human and to love is both pleasurably escapist and thought-provoking.

This review originally ran in the February 23, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 DVDs.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Next Page »