tldr: Wow. When Nghi Vo released her first novella, Empress of Salt and Fortune, I was blown away by her talent at the task category “putting a book together.” I know that’s a very unsexy way to describe a novella, but it applies! Empress packed so much plot, emotional insight, and character development into its 128 pages that it felt like an apotheosis of the novella form. (My use here of apotheosis will be but the first of many hyperbolic shrieks throughout this review, because I’m about as bullish on Nghi Vo’s writing as I have been about any author…
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Happy August, everybody! Somehow it’s August of 2021, which is a fact I don’t want to dwell on too much because HOW, but the good news is that it means we’ve circled back once more to Women in Translation Month! While books in translation still don’t comprise a huge chunk of my reading, I fully credit WIT Month and, more broadly, its inventor Meytal of Bibliobio, for making translated books feel less scary to me. I used to require a lot of persuasion before I’d try a translated book, and now I’m actively allured by them, especially when the authors…
Leave a CommentIt’s Friday! And not to tip my hand, but I have a favorite from among my links today, and I’m putting my favorite link first, and hopefully you too will enjoy it as I did. It’s about those mystery seeds. Remember those mystery seeds? From last year? A bunch of people started getting mysterious seeds in the mail, from China, and then it was like, aaaa, where are these seeds even coming from? Why is China sending people seeds? WHAT GIVES? The answer may surprise you. Have some links. The China seeds mystery, solved. (link) IDK maybe we shouldn’t have…
Leave a CommentFriends, a sea change has befallen Whiskey Jenny in this plague year. Not to spoil the thing I find out on air this episode, but Whiskey Jenny has made a shift! a change! from being a determined non-DNFer to DNFing books left and right. In but the last few days prior to recording this episode, she DNFed two entire books! I didn’t even know this when I proposed this topic, but needles to say I’m thrilled about it. I think everyone should abandon books they’re not enjoying. You’d all find it so cleansing! We chat about that, get a polar…
Leave a CommentI watched Loki. On one hand, I enjoyed it. On the other hand, if I were the casting department at Disney/Marvel, I would spend all my days aflame with resentment that I went to all this trouble of casting the perfect people and ensuring they all have excellent chemistry together, only to have the company chuck the whole thing out the window by trying to use six episodes to tell a full television season’s worth of stories. My frustration with Loki is partly a bigger frustration with the trends in TV. Around the time of your Mad Mens and your…
Leave a CommentOMG I am highly blessed and favored, y’all. Literally as I was writing this post, I was complaining internally about the fact that it’s the middle of July and still no second-half-of-2021 book preview from The Millions. I was like, “Forget ‘I love television,’ I’m going to use the subject of this post to bitch about the fact that the lengthy and clearly labor-intensive book preview has not dropped,” and as I was thinking about a pithy way to bitch about that, I opened The Millions to double-check and you will never guess what happened! YES THAT IS RIGHT IT…
Leave a CommentIt’s Wednesday once again, and we are all the way into summer now! I had the opportunity to speak with P. Djèlí Clark, author of the new novel A Master of Djinn, a murder mystery set in an alternate version of Cairo with magic! And djinns! We chatted about what real historians have to say about alternate history, changes in the SF genre over the past ten years, and when to stop researching for a historical novel (answer: never). It’s a great conversation about a terrific book, and I hope you enjoy! You can listen to the podcast in the…
Leave a CommentAs we ease into July, I wish everyone zero hurricanes and an adequate heat infrastructure. Because it’s been so consistently rainy here, we haven’t been getting the unbearably hot summer temperatures (though I’m sure they’re coming), but the downside to that is that the ground is going to be completely saturated so if there is a hurricane shit’s definitely going to flood. Ah, the climate crisis! So present! So little political will to protect people against the consequences wrought by a handful of rich assholes and their rich asshole companies! Is it any wonder that I retreat miserably into books…
1 CommentThere’s this moment in Flamefall, the second book in Rosaria Munda’s Aurelian trilogy, where the protagonist asks one of the leaders of a scrappy band of rebel freedom fighters what they’re fighting for. She’s like “Equality!” and he’s like, “Neat, cool, great, but like what are your policy proposals?” How many dystopian YA novels have you read where the scrappy rebels our protagonist is allied with just have the basic policy “we won’t throw you in a fiery hellpit filled with ravenous snakes like these current bastards”? Like, that is a great start and I’m all for toppling your dystopian…
Leave a CommentAnyone who didn’t read A Song Below Water last year missed a trick, and I would also like to report that I, while reading it, missed a trick. The heroine of A Song Below Water is a siren, though she dedicates a lot of energy to hiding this fact about herself. While the world is friendly to some types of magic–particularly the charming and melodical eloko, of which Tavia’s school’s resident mean girl Naema is one–they’re acutely hostile to sirens. It is no coincidence that only Black girls and women can be sirens. A Chorus Rises is a companion novel…
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