asakiyume | Entries tagged with reviews

A Christmas story by Aster Glenn Gray that I only got to reading now, in February--but just two days until Valentine's Day, and it's a romance, so that fits! And it's very wintery where I am right now, which fits in with the setting of the story, a snowed-in chateau.

George and Nikolai have been rivals (and secret lovers) in a US-Soviet game of spy-versus-spy for 20 years, but it's December 1991 now, and the jig is about to be up for those sorts of games ... but not before the two find themselves thrown together at a chateau, rented out to a toff Englishman (he goes by the name of Biffy) who's hosting the most massive of Christmas parties there. The chateau was supposed to be abandoned; they've both come looking for compromising letters...

The touch is light and the atmosphere is comfy (so much good food!), but the mood, while never heavy, is nostalgic, with a touch of melancholy. Maybe two or three touches. But there's humor, too, as when they have a race back to the Rudolph Christmas sweater that George has been lent (all houseguests are given a Christmas sweater for the duration), and Nikolai gets there first:

George chased after [Nikolai] and tackled [him] just a hair too late: Nikolai had already flung himself on top of the sweater. They tussled briefly, George trying to distract Nikolai by kissing the side of his face. But Nikolai, giggling, slipped away like an eel, and he danced away and pulled the sweater over his head before George was back on his feet.

George gave in gracefully. “You look hideous,” he informed Nikolai. Nikolai proudly smoothed the sweater “You are grieving the loss of your pompom,” he replied, giving Rudolph’s [pompom] nose a gentle squeeze.

It's a quick read and good fun--and it had a great eleventh-hour plot twist with regard to who-all is after the letters, which I enjoyed.

The characters are so alone in this book. There's no community and no model for/of community--at all! Just people groping toward (or away from) one another on an individual basis. Evrim, the sole android ever created, Ha, the solo octopus researcher at the research site, Rustem the solo hacker, Altantsetseg the solo security agent, Arnkatla Minervudóttir-Chan (LOL, Minerva's daughter), the solo designer of the android. Eiko, the enslaved guy on the fishing ship, strives not to be solo: he actively tries to see people and build unity with them, but his efforts are mainly fruitless.

I thought this was going to be contrasted with something not-solo about the octopuses, but no. There is no octopus perspective, and the way the octopuses are "read" by the humans (and Evrim) presses them into a human mold rather than seeing them on their own terms. For example, the autonomy of octopuses' legs from their executive function gets talked about, but it never figures at all. Instead, we see the legs used for walking on (on land, even!), like human legs, and for holding weapons or gifts, like human hands. Octopuses as like us rather than different from us.

In the sense that they're living creatures, that's true. Organic life is having a hard time in this future world, whether it's octopuses or humans or sea turtles. The octopuses can kill one or two intruders in their garden, just as Altantsetseg can kill intruders in the cordoned-off zone where research is going on, but in the end, the nonhuman systems that people have built but no longer control are more powerful and not given to compromise.

So what does the future hold? Evrim is seen as better than human because they're incapable of forgetting things. And yet even within the story, perfect recall is shown as problematic. Characters talk about trauma being etched in the body and the memory. So it seems strange to celebrate perfect recall as an improvement. A solo being, able to brood over each and every thing that's ever happened to them ... brrrr, seems cold, very cold.

Huh, well that turned out more negative than I thought it would when I began writing this entry. My Goodreads review was more positive. I guess I have lots of very mixed feelings about the book. It sure has been food for thought, though.

Current Music: Ceolbeg: Johnny Cope

I'm in this issue of Not One of Us with a piece of very short flash fiction, "Freeing .33333..."

It's ironic, maybe, to write flash about a number that goes on forever, but like the narrator, I've always been fascinated by this endlessly repeating number, and a short form is as good as a long form, I suppose, to talk about something infinite.

There are several other offerings in this issue that I loved--noteworthy among them

sovay's poem "Fair Exchange," about what the dead want. (You know it instinctively, but Sovay expresses it--and what the dead would pay to get it--with wrenching clarity.)

The poem "Catch the Bus," by Zhihua Wang, is light, humorous--but its theme is about trying to fit yourself in to a schedule where *you* are the piece that has to change; *you* are the one that must adapt, and that's also a theme in the story "Loneliness and Other Looming Things," by Devan Barlow, whose protagonist is psychologically incapable of tolerating an "upgrade" that everyone around her has made or is making. Like someone with a rotary-dial landline phone in the era of smartphones, she's isolated, but the solution being proposed may cost her her only human connection. There's beautiful language on dreams in this story:

There was a oconstant bristle at the edge of my mind, like I had to remember to tell someone something ... At random points throughout the day, I started laughing, as if I remembered something funny. But I never had any idea what the joke was.

In "A Million Wings Moving as One," by Jay Kang Romanus, a changeling who can take and shed an infinite number of forms tries to find a sense of self. These lines struck me:

Outside, the humans drift under its window in an endless river. The changeling watches them, envying their lack of choice.

The poem "Protest" by Rebekah Postupak achieves a giddy-but-grim change of perspective for both the narrator and the reader--powerful!

The remaining two stories, "The World Has Turned a Thousand Times" by CL Hellisen and "Where Dead Men Come to Die" by Ed Teja, have startlingly contrasting settings--the stark semi-desert of South Africa's Karoo region in Hellisen's tale and the tropical humidity of the town of Koh Kong, in Cambodia's Koh Kong Province, in Teja's. Both are stories of transformations of sorts, and self-discovery.

Not One of Us is that remarkable thing in this digital world, a paper zine. Some of my favorite writers, like Patricia Russo and my dad, have published in its pages. Information on buying single issues or subscriptions and on submitting to it is available HERE.

I have so many saved up for this! And I'm actually writing on a Wednesday. Wohoo, win condition!

What I've just finished

A Family of Dreamers, by Samantha Nock.

radiantfracture put me onto this collection by quoting one of the poems. Samantha Nock is an indigenous poet, and her poems reflect that heritage, but also explore family relations, love, self doubt--you know: the stuff we write poetry about.

( Some quotes )

* * *

Ideias Para Adiar O Fim Do Mundo, by Ailton Krenak
This has also been translated into English (Ideas for Postponing the End of the World). Ailton Krenak is an indigenous activist from Brazil, of the Krenak people, and this very short book collects talks that he's given, including the title one. He's very, very good at reminding his listeners that there's more than one way of understanding things, more than one way of approaching problems, and that for some people, the end of the world has been happening for a long, long time. (My Goodreads review has quotes that give a feel for it)

* * *

Besty and Tacy Go over the Big Hill, by Maud Hart Lovelace
They do, and they discover a community of Syrian refugees. The more things change...

This story mulls over kings and queens in lots of different ways. Early on the girls write a letter to Alfonso XIII, who upon turning sixteen has become king of Spain. The girls tell him that they'd love to marry him but realize that, sadly, they can't, since they're not of royal blood (also they're only ten, but they don't mention that), but that nevertheless they wish him the best. And then at the end of the story they get a letter back from the royal secretary, telling them the king appreciates their thoughts! And I was thinking how much smaller the world was then--that girls could write a letter to the royal palace in Madrid, and that a palace secretary would actually answer! ... Well, assuming that that incident is based on something that actually happened in MHL's life--it might not be. But it's conceivably possible. Alfonso XIII came into his majority in 1902. Wikipedia tells me that in 1900, the human population was a much more intimate 1.6 billion. Not like our current 8 billion. Palace secretaries could write to little girls in Minnesota!

What I'm reading now

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. My approach to this has been very roundabout. I'm not a big fan of long books of serious essays, even when I should like them. So I started by just dipping in. But it's won me over, so I'm going to read it straight through.

* * *

Why Didn't You Just Leave, edited by Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin. A collection of horror stories that answer the question of why people don't just leave the haunted place they're in. Excellent so far.

* * *

Lady Eve's Last Con, by Rebecca Fraimow. A rom-con romcom in SPACE that I've only just started but is highly delightful already, with lines like this:

Ever since we got in on the luxury-liner gambit, money had been dropping into our hands like coolant from a leaky ceiling

and

It wasn't so hard to get someone like Esteban to think that you were their romantic ideal; all you had to do was present an attractive outline and leave plenty of space, and they'd fill in the rest all by themselves.

I think I can see what the end state is going to be, but I am here for the ride!

Coming Soon
Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, the next of the Betsy-Tacy books.

In the Empire, both in its home territories, centered on the Eternal City, and in its far-flung colonies, such as Aquacolonia, the port city across wide Oceanus on the continent to the west, some animals are Knowledgeable—meaning they can speak as humans do—and some are not.

Quintus Shu’al is a Knowledgeable fox. In fact, he is the only Knowledgeable fox. Knowledgeable animals are made, not born, and Quintus was awakened on the Silver Roads, special routes like ley lines that allow for non-Euclidean travel and which he has a unique gift for navigating.

Quintus wants nothing more than to know his origin story. The high priest of the God of the Hinge, Scipio Aemilanus, purports to have answers that he’ll supply if Quintus does his bidding. So far Quintus has, and the result was the loss of an entire expedition that Quintus had been leading along the Silver Roads to the gates of Hell. And now Scipio Aemilanus has managed to manipulate Quintus into leading a second expedition to Hell. Only this time Scipio Aemilanus is coming along. So too is the grief-stricken and angry Octavia Delfina, whose sister Cynthia was the head of the last expedition. And so is Walks Along Woman, a bison ambassador from the Great Northern Membership, a polity on this continent.

That’s the set-up for The Navigating Fox--it’s a *lot* of information, and although it takes several chapters to get there, it’s not slow and relaxed; it’s fast and full. That could be a detraction, but for me it had a rich-strangeness that was absorbing (Zootopia-like explanations for how things are set up to accommodate Knowledgeable animals of different sizes, for example), so it was a feature, not a bug.

From here on, a double story unfolds: the story of the first journey—the one where all the explorers were lost—and the second one. By the time Quintus reaches Hell for the second time, the truth about what happened to the first expedition has been revealed and people’s hidden motives have been made clear.

But the real interest, for me, was not in those plot happenings, but in the conversations people have on the journeys, how Quintus’s (and others’) expectations and views of reality are contradicted, or maybe it would be better to say, exposed and viewed from completely other angles.

Here’s one about time, from the first journey:

“How are things going down there?” Cynthia asked him.

“I do not know,” he said.

“Which side is winning?” I asked him.

“I do not know that, either, for sure,” he said. “Probably not yours, though.”

“I don’t have a side,” I said.

Blue shot a curious look at Cynthia Benedictus. “How long have you known this fox?” he asked.

“I can’t say I know him at all,” she said. “I hired him about two months ago.”

“I like that word,” Blue said. “Month. I like counting time like you do.”

I think my favorites, though, were the ones about the nature of Knowledgeable animals. I love, love, love that the story raised this question, turned it around it its hands, held it up to the sun and saw how it caught the light:( a number of quotes! they are all so good... )

I think you can enjoy The Navigating Fox for many things, but I do think if you go in expecting something definitive about Hell or even about Quintus’s origins, you will end up disoriented. I think that’s part of the point. Scipio tells Quintus at one point that Quintus has been asking the wrong question. I think this story is about the possibility of other questions. The story is making other observations.

One final, beautiful quote, from when the party’s raccoon cartographers have made a portrait of a voiceless bison named Fondness:

“What do you have there, mapmakers?” asked Walks Along Woman.

Loci held up the sheet. It was a likeness of Fondness. It was one of the most beautiful drawings I had ever seen.

“She does not interpret images the way you do,” Walks Along Woman said gently.

“We know this,” the twins said, speaking atop one another. Their manner was an echo of the gnomic pronouncements of the Membership.

“Then why did you show it to her?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“Because we do not convey images the way you do,” said Loci.
Or Foci. Their scents were obscured by the mass of creatures around us.

Current Music: Dani Lança & Manu Chao: Acontecer

I've been daunted by the idea of trying to do justice to Aster Glenn Gray's The Sleeping Soldier here on Dreamwidth. Somehow I did manage, finally, to say a few things on Goodreads, but when I think about writing a DW post, I think about saying more, or making it more personal, or something. And then I wilt. And that's a shame, because I love this book. All of AGG's books are fun, thoughtful tales, but this one really nails a central theme of hers, which is what friendship means or has meant for people at different points in time, and what romantic love means, and what sexual attraction is and how that fits in.

The scenario is that Russell, a young Civil War soldier, was cursed, Sleeping Beauty style, by a fairy, and has now awakened 100 years in his future, in 1965, where he's guided through his new life by Caleb, a miserably closeted gay college student. The story has plenty of the fun you'd expect from that setup, as Russell encounters the wonders of life in 1965--and also enlightens the college crowd about which things were, in fact, present in 1865 ("I know what ketchup is," he says haughtily at one point). But it also probes the grief and loss that would go with waking up 100 years in the future, and touches on how we understand history--or don't:

Caleb nodded. "It's hard for people to let go of their preconceived notions [about the past]."

"They don't really want my opinion on anything," Russell griped. "They just want to draft the whole nineteenth century into supporting what they think. As if we all agreed with each other! We had this whole Civil War, you might could remember."

And then there's that theme of friendship and romantic love, and what's appropriate to express and what's considered by society to be deviant at any given time. I knew some of this, but not much, and very little about how same-sex attraction has been understood. In fact, what little I know is mainly thanks to AGG's earlier stories. I'm humbled to say that her writing in this book made me understand the situation of a gay friend of mine (Caleb's contemporary) in new ways. On that note, I really love the character Michael in this story. What a good and patient friend.

I came across this in someone's Goodreads review of the book:

I felt sad because I honestly never knew how it was in the past (men being open with their affection to each other).

And this, from an Amazon reviewer:

I came out in my teens, in the Midwest in the mid-70s, and the novel captures that sense of isolation and self-discovery: reading The Charioteer, Giovanni’s Room etc. anything with gay characters while feeling like you’re the only gay person in the world and trying to figure out how you’ll make a life. I never would have expected this book to capture the profundity and comedy of this forgotten world so well.

Those comments say so eloquently what's important and special about this book.

... But past-meets-nearer-past moments were also great, honestly. I enjoyed the explanations of things like hot dogs ("Hot dogs are... um. A kind of sausage") and Russell's encounters with items such as escalators a whole lot too.

I'd hoped to finish this today, but I probably won't. But look for it soon! I have so many THOUGHTS.

I really love Ann Leckie's books; I've enjoyed all of them, and I gobbled this one right up and did enjoy it ... but not as much as the others. I was more quizzical about narrative decisions, etc. (I have a review here on Goodreads.)

The essay's not going to be about the book overall, though: it's going to be about the Presger Translators.

This is an imaginative and ambitious book.

What I loved most was its worldbuilding, so rich and overbrimming. It takes place in a high-tech, Pacific-centered, post-apocalyptic future. It’s a future in which people are given prosthetic irises at birth to compensate for damage omnipresent radiation would do to their eyes, and in which the Pacific islands that are protagonist Tia’s ancestral homeland now lie 10 meters underwater. Even tiny wordbuilding details are delightful, like lakescreens, films of water that serve both as communications screens (for visuals across long distances, or to display data) and as doors, or like the main Earth spaceship type—the puffer fish.

The indigenous, oceangoing peoples of the Pacific are a big part of this future, and I love that. In an interview, Cole says she wanted to portray a future in which indigenous peoples exist and are thriving, and she definitely succeeds. At the start of the story, Tia is training to work for the Global Indigenous Alliance:

She had a job to do, mapping Pacific Ocean currents for the gravity web – Kermadec Trench, Tonga Trench, Lau Basin. She had learnt to sail with the ocean rhythms, to steer the cross currents. She’d learned these skills from her grandmother, her bubu. She had trained all her life to map the ocean.

I say the book is ambitious because it tries to cover a lot. It wants to highlight Pasifika lifeways and outlooks, and does, both in how deep-space phenomena and travel are understood and also in some wonderful scenes on Earth, like when Tia is sailing a drua, a traditional double-hulled sailing ship, with her uncles. I loved how traditional and modern were blended in the creation of the drua’s sails:

Dua hauled a rickety old 3D printer into the lounge and inputted a design for multiple large exo-patch squares. The printer spat out reams of plaited exo-patches resembling pandanus matting in colour and texture, but stronger and interwoven with multiple solar power conduits. Tia sat in the long grass next to the uncles and helped sew the patches together into a triangular sail with a large hook needle.

But there’s also the through-line plot: events take Tia away from the currents of the Pacific and into deep space on a mission to rescue her older sister, Leilani, who has been lost in a space whirlpool. Once Tia is out in space, she becomes aware of dangerous, bigger stakes. ( spoiler )

And meanwhile there’s also a painful family story going on: Tia and Leilani’s mother Dani left them behind with their grandmother when they were small so she could pursue a career in the stars. Dani’s lack of involvement with Tia and Leilani is a source of pain and resentment for Tia, who firmly rebuffs her mother’s few, half-hearted attempts to reach out.

That’s not all: there’s also a love story involving an AI (referred to in this story as a ghostborg—great term—or an embod), which goes into a fair amount of depth regarding that AI’s history.

It’s a lot to weave together, and for me in some places it lurched a bit. That’s more or less forgivable, though, because the parts that you lurch to are so interesting. More bothersome for me was Tia’s relationship with Dani. We pretty much exclusively see Tia resenting and disliking Dani, so it was a bit hard for me when Tia would waver and seem to want validation from Dani or disbelieve negative information about Dani—especially seeing as Tia has never lacked for love and support from her grandmother and big sister. But maybe Cole is intending to show the power of the notion of “mother.”

Interestingly, when the ghostborg Turukawa is sharing the story of her creation with Tia, she recounts the tale of how the Fijian snake god Degei nurtured two eggs that his lover Turukawa (for whom the ghostborg is named), a great hawk, had abandoned. The hatchlings became the forebears of the Fijian people. Turukawa says

“[My creator] often pondered how people might have turned out if Degei hadn’t stolen Turukawa’s eggs. Would people have grown into different beings if their real mother Turukawa the hawk had raised them?”

This seems like a fruitful and thought-provoking way to think about Tia and Leilani’s situation, and I would have loved to have seen that parallel expanded on somehow.

I want to end, though, by returning to the imaginativeness of the worldbuilding, landscapes, and characters. If you think of stories as places where you spend time, Na Viro is a great place to spend some time. I will definitely read more from Gina Cole.

Current Music: Arne Hörberg: Fighter

A new Aster Glenn Gray novel is out today, Tramps and Vagabonds, and people, this one holds a special place in my heart. I beta read it, for one thing, but it's not just that. It's a very tender story, right in that place where friendship bleeds into romantic love and sexual attraction, and the characters are so, so finely drawn. And on top of that, it's a wonderful window onto a time and place that's fascinating: the world of young people on the road during the Great Depression. Aster Glenn Gray absolutely nails the combination of the romance of the road and the awful realities of it, without having "awful reality" crush out the romance. In the summertime, it really can be glorious. If, like me, you've ever wondered what it would be like to ride the rails, WELL HERE YOU GO. She shows hobo camps ("jungles"--probably the people who read here already know that term, but I didn't), she shows the protective/exploitive relationships that develop, and just--she's really good at showing all this without passing judgment and without giving you a sense that she's withholding judgment but boy could she lay it on you if she wanted. Things just are presented. Or okay, because you're seeing things from experienced James's point of view, you do get *some* opinions and judgments, but they're the opinions and judgments of an adolescent who doesn't even know who he is or what he's feeling or what he's going to do with himself.

And the details of 1930s middle America are just to die for. There's a scene early on where James is drawing soap art on a diner window in trade for a meal--wonderful.

And then into all that, there's what it was like to be gay in such a setting (very different from what it was like to be gay in mainstream society, but still with all kinds of nastiness and rule and hierarchies because, heh, humanity, you know?)

I'm very demanding when it comes to romance tropes: I need them to feel organic to the story (and what feels organic depends on the story: in a comedy like Enemies to Lovers, being chained together for a writing exercise feels organic! It probably woudn't in this story). So I am happy to report, they feel very organic here.

There are some emotionally intense moments that I had to read quickly through, but some readers will adore those moments most of all. And there's some surprisingly hot sex--surprising for me, that is, because I don't have any of the bits. Human desire is such a weird thing!

The book is out in e-version now, but I am pretty sure paperback will follow; it usually does.

Current Music: MARINA: Handmade Heaven

Once there was a bodyguard who was like a brother to the impetuous imperial prince he was sworn to protect. The prince fell for a breathtakingly beautiful but entirely unworldly-wise young aristocrat from a scholarly family, but when she rejected him, he turned vindictive and ordered the bodyguard to kill her. But the bodyguard had himself fallen in love with the young woman, and she with him, so they fled to the far ends of the empire. The prince--who became emperor--holds an undying grudge.

This is The Story, which the three children of Danno and Hanu (the bodyguard and young woman) learn when they get old enough to know the importance of guarding this secret with their lives. Another part of this story? That when Danno and Hanu wed, a phoenix feather drifted down to them--surely meaning that one of their future children would be destined for greatness.

Thus begins Sherwood Smith's Phoenix Feather quartet, which follows the adventures of those three children, as well as (later) the children of the vengeful emperor--not to mention a myriad other characters--merciless assassins, honorable gallant warriors and vicious outlaws, brave servants, scheming courtiers, gods that walk among humankind in disguise, elderly teachers, shop owners and other businesspeole (including publishers!), spies, brimstone miners, krakens, dragons... I am sure I'm leaving some out.

All four volumes are available now in paperback, ebook, and hardback. If you want to lose yourself in a superb saga, intricately plotted and inhabited by three-dimensional characters whom you will love (or hate) intensely, a saga that accurately captures the flavor of popular Chinese historical novels and has threads of the numinous woven through it, then THIS IS THE SERIES FOR YOU.

I love it unreservedly and hope many people discover it.

Current Music: Unicorn Kid: Wee Monsters

I adored the time I spent in the presence of the narrator of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, a man who communes with the infinite House that is his world, who takes care of so many things: recording the tides (because the House encompasses an ocean), cataloguing the statues (the House is full of statues), leaving offerings for the bones of the dead, and paying attention to the birds who share the House with him.

I knew from the beginning that we would have to learn the truth about the narrator, who reveals from the first pages that there's more to him than he himself realizes. And it's easy to see that his partner-leader in scientific endeavors, the Other, is not worthy of the high esteem the narrator holds him in.

I knew the mystery would unfold, and it did, in a satisfying fashion, but what was most important to me was how the heart and outlook of the narrator would survive that unfolding. The man who wonders this:

Is it disrespectful to the House to love some Statures more than others? I sometimes ask Myself this question. It is my belief that the House itself loves and blesses equally everything that it has created. Should I try to do the same? Yet, at the same time, I can see that it is in the nature of men to prefer one thing to another, to find one thing more meaningful than another.

The man who gathers bedding for an albatross nest, who moves the bones of the dead out of the way of flood tides, who laughs when rooks nibble at his ear to see if it's edible. The man who realizes

that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.

The sight of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not a means to an end.

I didn't worry, though--I think the narrator's calm faith kept me calm. There's a tenderness pervading Piranesi that was utterly lacking in JS&MN. How did Susanna Clarke discover it? I don't know, but I'm deeply glad she did. And I say that as someone who loved JS&MN--they're just very different stories, and that's all right: the House has many Halls, enough to amply accommodate many kinds of stories. As our narrator would--and does--observe, "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite."

PS: Between JS&MN and this, things that I perceive Susanna Clarke loves:

rain
mist
doors
thresholds
portals
puddles
reflections
scintillations
antiquities
ruins
inundations
vastness
trees that pierce
black feathers
birds
whirlwinds
rituals

The Memory Police
Yoko Ogawa

Japanese title: 密やかな結晶 [The secret/quiet/hidden crystal]
Original Japanese cover

The English title, jacket copy, and advertising totally misrepresent this novel. Yes, the memory police are present and as awful as you’d expect; yes, the protagonist, a novelist, hides her editor away, Anne Frank style. But this isn’t a novel about a dystopia or oppression—those elements are incidental. It’s fundamentally about forgetting, loss, and (because it’s the ultimate loss) death. What does it mean to remember? What does it mean to forget? When people who remember interact with people who can’t, it’s very painful—we know this from real life—but it’s a pain we embrace. If you’re going down by the minute, if you’re being diminished bit by bit, it doesn’t mean you can’t love. There’s an awful lot of resignation in this book, but there’s love too, and some characters stoutly stake out positions of hope.

R, the protagonist’s editor, who needs to be hidden because he can remember the things that have disappeared, says,

A heart has no shape, no limits. That's why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much ... My memories don't feel as though they've been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear.

To which the narrator replies, poignantly,

I don't even know what I should be remembering. What's gone is gone completely. I have no seeds inside me, waiting to sprout again. I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes. That's why I'm jealous of your heart, one that offers some resistance, that is tantalizingly transparent and yet not, that seems to change as the light shines on it at different angles."

The mechanism for the (f)act of disappearing is a little nebulous. People wake up knowing something has “been disappeared,” but in many cases it’s up to them to get rid of the thing—as with photographs, or (unfortunately for the protagonist) novels. They feel a compulsion to dispose of the items—it’s terribly sad:

The new cavities in my heart search for things to burn. They drive me to burn things and I can stop only when everything is in ashes

And when things like birds disappear, people simply stop understanding what birds are. Sometimes they can be made to remember, but it’s an arduous process and it doesn’t stick very well.

Here I need to take a brief digression to talk about fruit. Fruit disappear about a third of the way through the book:

The disappearance of fruit was much simpler. When we woke in the morning, fruit of every sort was falling from trees all over the island. A pattering sound could be heard everywhere, and in the northern hills and the forest part, fruit came down like a hailstorm.

To my intense botherment, the protagonist continues to refer to fruit throughout the whole rest of the novel—when theoretically she should barely be able to articulate the word (we witness examples of this with “hat” and “photograph”). She talks about burning a novel whose cover has a picture of fruit on it, she regrets that she can’t get strawberries for a birthday cake (without acknowledging that this is because they’ve disappeared), she smells something that reminds her of rotten fruit, and finally at one point the characters are actually eating slices of apple. What the heck?

It’s hard to believe that an editor would let this slip past—if I’d been Ogawa’s editor, I definitely would have queried this—so my best way of understanding it is that the disappearances aren’t total—that just as birds continue to exist, so does fruit—but not in a way that is reliably accessible to the characters. It’s like how sometimes you can do some processes unconsciously because they’ve become part of muscle memory, but if you try to do them consciously, you get tangled up.

In that sense, the novel is brilliant in creating in you the ragged, tattered sense that losing memories, losing your sense of the world, produces in people.

In the novel the protagonist is writing, which has some parallels with the life she’s experiencing, there’s an actual malevolent agent, a force behind the diminishment and erasure that’s lacking in the protagonist’s actual life … and in the novel we read, the memory police play a similar role. They do assuredly make existence worse on the nameless island that’s the location for the story—but they’re not the cause of the disappearances. They’re a big problem, but they’re not the central problem, which, I’d argue, is this: if you can see the end coming—your personal end, or the end of the whole world, or both—if it’s coming step by step, ineluctably … How are you going to face it? The answer the novel offers is a moving tribute to pricelessness of personal connections and the strength of weak things.

Current Music: Who'da Funk It: Dinnertime

“At the height of the Cold War, a Soviet and an American agent fall in love.”

Not only are their countries enemies, but the agents are both men, in an era when being gay was still taboo. Fans of Aster Glenn Gray know that she’s excellent at complicated and anguished love—and Honeytrap really lets her show her stuff.

She’s also in top form when it comes to another of her strengths: the intelligence of her characters. Gennady and Daniel are interested in ideas and ideals, in what poetry’s all about, what happiness is, what freedom means, or love, and they talk about all these things, and when they fall for one another, it’s for the beautiful mind as well as the beguiling body.

I completely fell for Gennady, the Russian agent—I submit by way of explanation the following conversation:

“I can still do ‘Paul Revere’s Ride,’ though not as well as you do Pushkin.”

“Let’s hear it, then.”

So Daniel stood and recited, and Gennady lay down again and listened with his head on his crossed arms. “There’s a galloping rhythm to it,” he said, enchanted. “That’s very American, isn’t it? A poetry of movement.”

“Yes,” said Daniel.

But he looked at Gennady so strangely that Gennady said, “What?”

“I don’t know. Most people aren’t interested in poetry, I guess,” Daniel said, and then clarified, “Most men, at least.”

“Poetry isn’t manly?” Gennady scoffed. “Like wearing a coat that is actually warm enough isn’t manly? Poetry is…” How to explain? “When there is nothing else, when all the world has gone mad, you recite poetry to hold things together, to give life order and meaning. The world is shaking, but poetry is steady.”

So that’s Gennady on poetry. He’s also cogent on abuse and love:

“You think that if you are afraid it should be possible to do something, to fight back or get away. But sometimes it isn’t, sometimes there is nothing to do but endure, and then people fall in love with the thing that they fear because there is no other way to protect themselves. They hope that if they love perhaps they will be loved in return. Do you see?”

And he has no patience with Shakespeare’s dictum that “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds”:

“Oh, how silly,” Gennady said impatiently. “Everything in this world alters. If love is not love if it changes, then love can’t exist.”

I realize I’m giving Daniel short shrift in this review. Daniel doesn’t have as many quotable gems as Gennady, but he holds his own in conversation, and he’s got some skills as an agent that Gennady lacks. Suffice it to say that having fallen for Gennady, I can completely see how Gennady falls for sunny, warm-hearted Daniel.

The trajectory Aster Glenn Gray traces for their love is interesting and unexpected, and I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. The only thing I’ll say is that while it might have been possible to end the story in the same year in which it began (1959), it actually spans decades. I found it rich and satisfying. I can't wait to see/hear/read other people's reactions!

Available via Amazon

The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball is a wonderful, unique story. Its protagonist, Piper, is eleven, and I think it has the potential to be a beloved favorite of readers of that age, but it's also a very rewarding story to read as an adult.

I've been calling it a time travel story, but really it's a friendship-between-times story, in that the focus isn't really on traveling through time so much as it is having a friend from a different era. Piper's friend from a different era is Rosie, who's from approximately fifty years in her past. I say approximately, because Piper encounters Rosie when Rosie is different ages, and that's part of what makes this story so very cool: for Piper, the friendship is an intense one that unfolds over three months; for Rosie, Piper is a figure in her life from the time she's four years old up until shortly before her thirteenth birthday.

My recollections of stories of friendships between times are that they progress chronologically for both parties--but why should they? And in The Time Traveling Popcorn Ball, they don't. Piper's first encounter with Rosie is not Rosie's first encounter with Piper, and Piper doesn't experience Rosie's first encounter (if you follow me) until well into their friendship.

Because of the difference in how they experience each other, they play vastly different roles in each other's lives. For Rosie, Piper is a life-long guardian and secret friend, a big sister who's better than her real big sister, a magical person who gives her glimpses of the future (iPods! the end of Communism!). For Piper, Rosie is also a secret friend, but a secret friend in a lonely, hard time, after Piper's mother has died and her father, who has been rendered a zombie by grief, has packed up Piper and her sister Angela and moved them to a new town, where live in much reduced circumstances. For Piper, Rosie is a blessed escape from all that.

Not only do the two girls have the sorts of conversational exchanges that you can count on in any Aster Glenn Gray story,** their friendship is also suffused with random, unobtrusive, delightful magic, which they discover and revel in just the way you knew you'd revel in it if you were lucky enough to find it. The magic exists without commentary or explanation and is entirely wonderful.

The end is also daring and satisfying--the eleven-year-old in me loves it, and so does the fifty-six-year-old. This book exists as a paperback! I'd love to see it get into the hands of some eleven-year-olds. But I also think there are a lot of twelve-to-seventy-year-olds (and beyonnnnnd!) who will love it.

**For example, Rosie says this at one point to Piper:

“Sometimes I think growing up is just erosion. Like we start out as igneous rocks. The volcanoes spew out magma and it hardens in the air and becomes rock. And these rocks start out all spiky and odd shaped. But then they fall in the sea and it washes away all their rough edges, and they all end up smooth at the end, all boring and just the same. I see it happening to my sister, and…” She shuddered, shaking her head as if she could shake away bad thoughts, and skipped quickly up the steps to the next porch.

And at another point, talking about books, Piper says this to Rosie:

I frowned. “I do like Charlotte’s Web,” I said. “I mean, I like the talking animals, and Charlotte, and Templeton the Rat. But I don’t get the end – I don’t see why Fern gives up the talking animals. Why can’t she be interested in both animals and boys?”

Amazon purchase link--it's the paperback, but you can switch to the Kindle version.

I finished CSE Cooney's The Twice-Drowned Saint, the first (and longest) of four novellas in the collection A Sinister Quartet, which I'm hoping to read and review in its entirety before it comes out--in two weeks or so!

I think this may be my favorite thing I've read by Claire--and I've read lots, all of which I've enjoyed. But this was just--it was a whole other level. It reaches for something really big and achieves it.

It starts out an acrobatic tale of an angelic city that's really a kind hell hole--(most of) the angels are creepy abominations who delight in human sacrifices offered them by starving refugees desperate for the safe haven the city represents in a war-torn world. OVERTONES, right?

(I say "acrobatic" because Claire has this prodigious imagination and she lets it run all over the place--it darts hither and yon like fireflies and then holds you fixed while it dances on a high wire like Philippe Petit. She's a roller coaster, but if you just let yourself ride the roller coaster, it's actually taking you to a destination.)

So the angelic city is pustular and awful, but there's more beneath the surface waiting to erupt than at first meets the eye. Our narrator, for instance is a secret saint (in this story, saints are humans who can see angels and who have a special relationship with one particular angel). And then another saint is revealed, and. Well, stuff happens. In the end I was left with the impression of Hieronymus Bosch blended with CS Lewis--in the best possible way.

Here are some quotes that run the gamut:

He'd sung to me that day, in that way angels have of singing (which was a little like having your head held under water and your feet set on fire, while being tickled)

...

Mom was born with an ineffable talent to make herself and everyone else around her believe her every lie, and if she wanted to teach me how to bake our ancestral benison cake from a recipe that didn’t yet exist, who was I, merely her daughter, to argue with her?

...

He was like a cricket some kid had poured diatomite over. He was a murderer. A fanatic for the angels. Worse, a teenager.

And the two that are words to live by:

“Weakness is killin’ someone for their bread. Strength is splittin’ your last loaf with them.” --Right? RIGHT?!

and

“it is never good for gods or angels or human-kin to forget the world beyond their walls.” --AMEN

and hell, one extra, because it's a great benediction:

“Be safe, my sister; be swift and sly!”

On the strength of this story alone, A Sinister Quartet is worth purchasing, but from the excerpts I heard the other day, the other three stories will also be wonderful. Now I'm on to Jessica Wick's An Unkindness--with ancient-ballad-level menacing faery folk.

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/949810.html

Wow, did I really go more than a week without posting? What can I say... it was a combination of actually getting paid work in (yay! relief), which kept me busy, and self-censoring of potential posts ("No, Asakiyume; you will regret it if you give in to the urge to post that).

I'm delighted that this week I'm in time to post for the Wednesday Reading meme, and I just finished a great novella, Aster Glenn Gray's The Threefold Tie, a post-Civil War love story involving Everett, his former Army buddy Jonathan (also known as Jack), and Everett's wife Sophie.

It was just wonderful. Each character was so vividly realized, so interesting, someone you'd want to become friends with and chat to at length over fresh June strawberries. (And the book is out in time for you to read it over fresh June strawberries!)

There were so many portions that I copied out because they were just *so good*. For example...

Sophie, when Jonathan says he wants to paint her:

"Oh well, as long as you make it flattering. I know I'm supposed to tell you to draw me warts and all, but after all, that's what photographs are for. I want you to make me look as beautiful as you can without actually lying."

Jonathan, describing the paintings of Vermeer:

"He paints pictures like this, kitchens with the sunlight coming in so everything seems to glow. They're beautiful. And sad ... Because it's just a moment ... Because it will pass."

Describing Jonathan's rented room:

It was so small that he fit into it like a walnut in its shell.

Everett, in a discussion about the Oneida community's habit of having public criticism of one another to prevent the build-up of grudges:

"I think it would just create new ones. Don't you think people must hold grudges over the things said to them in mutual criticism, if they think it is unfair?" --Yes Everett, I do, but Sophie has an answer for you.

And this description of Jonathan, which I've experienced from time to time, especially when it comes to angry emotions:

Jonathan had always seemed to feel emotions much more slowly than other people, anyway. In the moment he just felt stunned, and it was only long after everyone else had already felt their feelings and moved on that he began to feel happy or sad or furious.

Here, Jonathan is reflecting on a person whom Everett has dismissed as boring:

He had been sitting next to Miss Stanton all day, and his impression had been one of shyness, reserve: her indrawn breath when she at last thought of something to say, only to hesitate--and then say nothing at all, because the conversation had moved on.

And there were some really funny moments--as when Everett confesses, before marriage, to having sown some wild oats, and Sophie turns around and has some confessions of her own:

Everett had seemed bemused more than anything: the forgiveness in these conversations was generally meant to flow one way.

And after Sophie witnesses Everett kissing Jonathan, and it comes out that Jonathan has loved Sophie (and Sophie Jonathan), Everett and Sophie are having a conversation:

"I'm not jealous," [Everett] assured [Sophie]. He smiled slightly. "Perhaps a little; but only because he never loved me like he loves you. Certainly he never broke a teacup on my behalf."

He said it lightly, jokingly almost, and Sophie answered in kind. "That's not the only way to love someone," she objected. "Or if it is, then perhaps we had better revisit the question of a divorce, because you have never broken any teacups for me."

"Nor you for me," said Everett, and widened his eyes as if shocked by this realization, and they both laughed again.

And speaking of broken teacups, this scene also made me laugh:

[Miss Willcox] fixed the coffee over a spirit lamp, and rustled up a mismatched assortment of drinking vessels: a flowered coffee cup with a hairline crack, a blue teacup with the gilt rubbing off the rim, and a Turkish tea glass. "Tell me honestly," said Sophie, with a smile, "Doesn't it take more trouble to find such a charming crockery than simply buying a conventional set?"

Miss Willcox laughed. "You've caught me!" she said, and opened the cupboard beneath the window to show a set of ordinary white cups.

I just very much enjoyed spending time with the three main characters. Their distress at finding themselves unconventionally drawn to one another felt really real to me, and the process of their trying to work things out did too. The book is available both in paperback form and ebook form. I promise I haven't given away all the good parts!

Next thing I'll be reading is an ARC of A Sinister Quartet--a collection of four novels, one each by CSE Cooney, Jessica Wick, Amanda McGee, and Mike Allen. I heard them reading excerpts at some point within the past seven days, and they were all QUITE intriguing.

I really wondered how I would feel about this: there was so much to love--that it was an epistolary novel, that it was enemy agents who fall in love, that it was a time war! But I had also heard that the language was very flowery, and I have a complicated relationship with flowery language. I'm not against it by any means! I love the possibilities that the manipulation of language offer; I love metaphor, poetry, associations forged through language, all of that. But I also really crave story and purpose, and I get wearied easily if gorgeous language isn't wedded to one of those two.

Fortunately for me, This Is How You Love [*ahem* I mean Lose] the Time War, while it has only a very basic story, has a very strong purpose, which I finally managed to articulate to my satisfaction: it as an ode to seduction, challenge, love, & sacrifice. I feel like Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone said, "What if we were to write a towering love, without reservation or stinting, without nice little constraints, a love so big it encompasses all of time and space?" And then did that. Because that's what the conceit of a time war makes possible: love through the ages. The agents' love is both predestined and self-determined. They get to know each other so carefully and so passionately--but a passion that's all in words and thought and all the excesses that words and thoughts allow.

I know your solitude and poise, the clenched fist of you, the blade: a glass shard in Garden's green glowing world .... Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.

I mean! That first part reminds me of Psalm 139:

You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.

So yeah, it's a story to read for the power of the emotion and the language that captures it.

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/948671.html

Time of Daughters II
Sherwood Smith

Over my holiday I finished reading Time of Daughters II, the second half of Sherwood Smith’s novel set in the martial land of Marlovan Iasca, about a century after the time of the great hero Inda (a principal character in her teratology of that name).

Structurally, the novel takes you through a series of battles as the kingdom is threatened in different ways and directions: these are all brilliant—and harrowing. People act foolishly or thoughtlessly and have to face the full consequences. Sometimes people pull off amazing feats of survival and heroism—and sometimes these are celebrated, and sometimes they’re belittled or barely acknowledged. I was all in, emotionally. Although you continue to be involved with many characters, the through thread is most definitely Prince Connar. The story’s a battle for his soul, which in other hands might be reduced to a nature/nurture conflict or a good influences/bad influences conflict, but Sherwood’s not doing that: she’s showing **all** the things that go into making a person who they are. There’s your nature, there are the things that influence you, but there’s also when things happen, and the order in which things happen; there’s how other people reflect things back to you; there’s accident.

And other people are growing and changing too, in themselves and in their relationships with others. Nursing grudges or growing out of them is a theme. Two characters whose trajectories were interesting to watch were Fish Perenth, Connar’s personal runner, who started out his time back in Volume I as a sullen and unwilling sneak but grows quite a bit, and another is Cabbage Gannon, who starts out a bully but becomes someone who earns the love of the people he’s responsible for. Lineas remains a reliable delight whose approach to interacting with people I found myself trying to model at times. Her kindness to a deeply damaged (and terrifying) person near the end of the story brought me to tears. There are some very painful character deaths, too, which you feel particularly sharply for the pain their loss causes to others.

One thing that the book gets you thinking about is what makes a good king and how we feel about heroes. Although Connar is awful in many ways, he has the charisma that people love in a leader (he also works very hard at becoming one—he’s not a “natural,” though he has stunning good looks, and that always helps). His brother Noddy, by contrast, isn’t much at all to look at and gives an impression of being slow because he takes his time with stuff, but he’s much more the type of person most civilians would like to live under.

I look forward to my friends who are Sartorias-deles fans reading this so I have people to talk to about it.
Available from Book View Cafe (ebook only) and Amazon (ebook, paperback, or hardback).

PS Reading a story set in another world when you’re in another world is weird, very Inception-esque. You rise out of the story world and look around, and you’re still not in the world you know.

Current Music: Utada Hikaru: Passion
Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/938616.html

The Wolf and the Girl
Aster Glenn Gray

A wonderful thing that Aster Glen Gray does in The Wolf and the Girl—which she also did in Briarley—is transpose a fairy tale to a very particular time and place and make you really feel that time and place. For Briarley it was World War II England; for The Wolf and the Girl it’s pre-Revolutionary Russia—and then early-twentieth-century France.

The first part is like a Russian lacquer box—dark, jewel-like, beautiful. As a small child, Masha would be with her Babushka when older village girls came to hear Babushka’s stories and fairy tales. The older girls all went on to better things, and none more so than Raisa, who got a scholarship to university in St. Petersburg. But then Raisa fell in with anarchists and was exiled to Siberia, “which gave the good people of Kostin no end of satisfaction.”

“But they were all so proud when she went to study in St. Petersburg,” Masha protested to Babushka. “Why are they happy it ended like this?”
“Pride and jealousy are two sides of the same coin,” Babushka told her. “If you toss it up in the air, you never know which way it will come down.”

--Just the sort of insight into human nature that I’ve come to expect from this author, and the sort of thing that makes The Wolf and the Girl more than just a fairy tale wearing new clothes.

Not only has Raisa been exiled to Siberia, she’s fallen afoul of an anarchist enchantress. Wounded and bespelled, she finds her way to Masha and Babushka, and the elements of Little Red Riding Hood—transmuted to fit pre-Revolutionary Russian times—play out.

But the story doesn’t end there! There’s a whole next part—for all of us who’ve ever said, “But what comes after the ‘happily ever after’?” (Only in this case, it’s not quite a happily-ever-after—there are situations and exigencies.) And *this* part involves fleeing to France, encountering a friendly theater group, and eventually getting involved in film. There’s still an angry enchantress on the loose, too, so . . . well, it’s an exciting and satisfying ride. I recommend it highly!

It's available both as an ebook and a paperback.

Current Music: Leonard Cohen: Leaving the Table
Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/938189.html

Sherwood Smith has new novel out, Time of Daughters, in two books. Both are available now from Book View Cafe (ebook only) and Amazon (ebook, paperback, or hardback). I've just finished the first book and found it thoroughly engrossing, a real treat. People who enjoyed the Inda series may especially enjoy this duology, which takes place 100 years later, but I honestly think people who like a dynastically focused story with lots of slow-burn intrigue and character development will love this even if they've never ventured into Sherwood's world before.

The first third features some **highly** dramatic moments, including a massacre incited by ... well maybe I shouldn't say--it was pretty surprising and goes against some common tropes. Arrow Olavayir and his practical-minded (she sleuths through accounts to uncover treachery--a Marlovan Eliot Ness) wife Danet end up on the throne and start trying to weave the kingdom together again. A generous decision in those first days--to raise the bastard son of the murdered original heir as their own--will **obviously** have consequences, and watching the bundle of ambition, jealousy, and self-loathing that is Prince Connar grow is one of the big pleasures of the second two-thirds of the book. He's not very pleasant, but he's intensely loyal to his (adoptive) father and his brother, the crown prince, so while he's susceptible to flattery and manipulable, he's also got some armor against becoming a pawn. What will happen?? I'll have to read the second book to find out.

There's also a wonderful, quirky girl character, Lineas, whom I fell in love with over her appreciation for her first-ever brand-new set of clothes ("She would begin its story, unlike everything she'd always worn, which had stories before they came to her hands: a mended tear here, from when and where? Worn elbows, from doing what?"). My love was sealed when she announced "I love to study and I am very, very normal." Oh sweetie.

There are also several character who have been brought up to live as the opposite sex, and how these characters feel about this (and how others treat them when the secret comes out) is very interesting. And there's a deaf character who's betrothed into the royal family, so everyone busies themselves learning Hand--and that's cool too (and very zeitgeist-y: We've been watching Netflix's The Dragon Prince, and it has a deaf character in it too).

Anyway--I enjoyed Book 1 tremendously.

Current Music: Tim Atlas: Crime of Passion
Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/935666.html

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Entries tagged with reviews

Wednesday Reading: Deck the Halls with Secret Agents

More on The Mountain in the Sea

Not One of Us, Issue 80

Wednesday Reading

The Navigating Fox: A Review

The Sleeping Soldier

coming soon, Translation State essay

Na Viro, by Gina Cole

Tramps and Vagabonds

The Phoenix Feather Quartet

Piranesi

The Memory Police

Honeytrap, by Aster Glenn Gray

The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball

Wednesday reading

Wednesday reading: THE THREEFOLD TIE, by Aster Glenn Gray

Reading: This Is How You Lose the Time War

Time of Daughters 2

The Wolf and the Girl

Time of Daughters, Book 1