Good?

Good.

The book is E. R. Ramzipoor’s The Ventriloquists. Based on a true story, The Ventriloquists is about a small team of Belgian resistance fighters who embark on a scheme to make fun of the Nazis. That’s their only goal, make fun of the Nazis, make occupied Belgium laugh at the Nazis. Every one of them goes into the caper with the understanding that they will not survive. Except, in the end, some of them do. The lesbians survive.

I should stipulate that this is not the only virtue of The Ventriloquists — far from it. Right before I started reading The Ventriloquists, I was having a conversation with my mum about how I don’t like historical fiction. “It’s so samey,” I said. “I’m tired of reading about Nazis,” she said. “Not all historical fiction is about Nazis,” I said. “OH ISN’T IT?” said my mum, which I had to admit was a compelling counterargument. Then I came home and started reading a book that wasn’t just historical fiction but historical fiction about (resisting) Nazis, and that was the fall (in love) before which pride goeth. Ramzipoor has a wonderful narrative voice, and I was captivated by the story nearly from the first page.

The Ventriloquists is the story of a team of resisters who are tapped (by Nazis) to make a fake version of a Resistance propaganda newspaper that secretly is designed to sap the energy and will of the Resistance. But the resisters, led by the vivid and energetic Marc Aubrion, decide to do a propaganda mission of their own. They will make a spoof version of the Belgian collaborator newspaper Le Soir, which pokes fun at the Nazis, at Hitler, and the whole German propaganda machine. They have nineteen days to do it. At the end of those nineteen days, their newspaper will come out and they will all, presumably, be sent to prison camps and/or killed. Some of the caper crew are figures from real life, like Aubrion. Others, like the queer brothel madam Lada Tarkovich, are Ramzipoor’s inventions.

One of Ramzipoor’s projects in this book is to write queer heroes back into a history that works so hard to erase and deny queerness. The Ventriloquists is very centrally a story about queer resistance, which is another reason I have emphasized the fact that THE LESBIANS SURVIVE. When it becomes apparent that a particular judge, a woman called Andree Grandjean, can help the endeavor, Aubrion urges Lada to go seduce that judge. He says that if she gets Grandjean on their side, then something good will have come from her being queer. But she tells him, sternly, that her queerness is already good; and the book backs her on it. The lie is the bad thing. When Lada decides to seduce Grandjean anyway, and something good comes of it, the good outcome is queer joy, and the bad cause it sprang from was Lada’s intent to deceive — the exact inverse, in other words, of what Aubrion perceived to be valuable / shameful.

(Lada Tarkovich, by the way, is fucking terrific. If I hadn’t loved the tone and writing of this book, which I did, I would have stayed anyway, for Lada Tarkovich. In many ways, Aubrion is the star of this book — vivid, visionary, odd, kind, imaginative — but Lada is the type of character I would die for. She hides her idealism imperfectly, under prickles and pragmatism.)

On the other side of things is a gay Jewish forger, David Spiegelman, who has been forced into service for the Nazis on pain of meeting the same fate as the rest of his family. He works for August Wolff, a Gestapo officer who is responsible for, among other things, overseeing book burnings. Though he has hitherto been a good servant to the Nazi occupiers, Spiegelman secretly casts his lot in with Aubrion and the others, finally discovering a way to use his talents for mimicry in the cause of good rather than evil. He’s serious, and afraid, and angry, and he is trying to find some way — in a world that tells him over and over again that he’s unimportant — to matter.

The Ventriloquists is the story of one of my favorite types of heroism, small compared to the scope of the evil it faces, but shot through with grandeur in its belief that humans can survive and keep fighting, no matter how dark the times. It’s a story about outcasts and queer nerds who act to the utmost of their courage, intelligence, and resource to beat back the darkness for their fellow Belgians. And the lesbians survive.

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Daniel Cumberland joined the Loyal League to seek revenge: Born free, then sold into slavery by white men pretending to be abolitionists, Daniel has never recovered from the psychological scars his years in slavery inflicted. He has no interest in a new partner, let alone one as pretty and vivacious as Janeta Sanchez, a mixed-race Cuban woman. But Janeta holds secrets of her own: She is an unwilling double agent, sent to spy on the Union in order to secure the freedom of her slave-owning father.

In the hands of a less talented author than Alyssa Cole, this would have been a hard pairing to get me to root for. It was actually a hard pairing to get me to root for. Although Janeta’s position in her family has always been precarious, as the daughter of a former slave, she still plans to work against abolition. But Cole deftly shows us how Janeta’s strengths — which become clear to us and to Daniel over the course of the book — have arisen from that exact precarity. Daniel’s developing respect for Janeta’s ability to manipulate situations in her favor goes hand-in-hand with Janeta’s realization that her worldview has been deeply wrong — not just her ideas about slavery, but her ideas about herself. It’s just really, really nicely done.

The book handles Daniel’s trauma — and underlying goodness — with a similarly careful hand. Though Daniel believes himself to be weak for struggling to recover from his ordeal as a slave, the book is clear that isn’t the case. Instead, it makes the point that different people respond to trauma differently. Which is a simple point to make, but one that often goes ignored, and I appreciate Cole for bringing it to the forefront here. Daniel has begun to forgive himself by the end of this book, but it’s clear that recovery will be a long, slow process.

To the ongoing question of how one can set a romance in the midst of the Civil War, the answer continues to be “by engaging really carefully with the realities of the time period.” Our glimpses of Daniel’s past are horrifying. Cole has clearly done her research and shines a light into various aspects of slavery and the Civil War that make the book feel truly lived in. A good chunk of the plot deals with the issue of foreign intervention in the Civil War, a subject that occupied the two sides quite a lot at the time, but that I never learned about in history class. Daniel and Janeta are trying to disrupt the South’s efforts to gain European — and especially British — support, a support that much of the South believed, or hoped, they would be able to count on as the war went on.

Perhaps more important than the history — at least to me, in this political moment — are the things Cole has to say about America. Neither Daniel nor Janeta begins the book with much hope of improving the country. Daniel wants his revenge, and Janeta wants her life to go back to normal. They both discover that their previous normal was deeply corrosive to them, and that there’s more to strive for.

The past two years have shown more clearly than ever the corrosiveness of America’s status quo. Yet An Unconditional Freedom reminds the reader that America is also its people, that the most downtrodden people can still carry a spark of hope that brings light in the darkness and maybe, eventually, a brighter future.

Prepare, in short, to get emotional, not just about Daniel and Janeta, but about the country we live in and the one we hope to create.

(I received an e-copy of this book for review from the publisher. This has not impacted the contents of my review.)

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(I read another book that’s been on my TBR list for four years — The Pendragon Legend, by Antal Szerb — and learned that right now is not a good moment for me to be reading books published in 1934 with all the attendant sexism that implies. Ha ha I wanted to fling it across the room and then stomp on it, only I was reading it on my Nook.)

Glorious is the story of a girl called Easter who leaves her hometown because it’s unbearable there, and then leaves the next two towns where she works because it’s unbearable there, and then washes up in New York City just in time for the Harlem Renaissance. Easter is a writer, at a time when the world is not kind to poor black women of remarkable talent. In the acknowledgements to the book, McFadden writes that she was inspired by Zora Neale Hurston (who died in poverty) and Nella Larsen (whose writing career was derailed an accusation of plagiarism).

I read Glorious while on a beach vacation, and I recommend that y’all do the same if possible, because it’s a tough read. Easter faces unspeakable tragedy in her hometown and her family, and a subsequent chapter includes a brutal depiction of one of Easter’s friends being lynched. McFadden doesn’t shy away from depicting the realities of racial violence and hatred in the early twentieth century — neither the open violence in the South nor the more covert government interference with black activism in Harlem itself. McFadden even squeezes in a cameo from Ota Benga.

I read Glorious and We Were Eight Years in Power on the same day, and it was an unexpectedly apt pairing. McFadden depicts many of the strategies Ta-Nehisis Coates has identified for keeping black Americans in poverty and fear, all through the life of one fictional fiction-writer whose world conspires against her receiving her due as an artist. Despite the difficult subject matter, I’m very glad I read it (at last!!).

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Our hero, Thaniel Steepleton, comes home from a difficult day at the telegraph office (bomb threat, something something) to find that his flat has been broken into, the dishes carefully washed, and an elegant and expensive gold watch left on his pillow. When the watch later saves his life from an Irish terrorist bombing, he goes in search of the watchmaker, a lonely and courteous Japanese man called Keita Mori.

“But Jenny that sounds like it is about solving a bombing!” I know, I know. My primary complaint about the book is that what it is about is much more interesting (to me) and fun (for me) than a bombing mystery, but it’s set up in such a way that it’s clearly meant as a surprise for the reader. So even though I don’t care about spoilers, I thought you might. If you ask me in the comments, I’ll tell you what the thing is.

Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say that the bulk of the book is dedicated to Thaniel and the other characters figuring out what Keita Mori’s whole deal is, and then deciding how they feel about it. Thaniel is fairly sanguine; his new friend Grace, a bluestocking who must inconveniently get herself married pronto, does not care for it. I, the reader, waffled back and forth a bit and still felt unsure, at the close of the book, whether I was morally comfortable with how Mori was managing the world he lives in. Big ups to Pulley for managing a well-plotted (if slightly slow to start) book that also engages with interesting moral issues.

A minor gripe: To this fan of romance novels, Grace seemed to be filling a role in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street that is, let’s say, not my favorite romance trope. Get at me in the comments and we can talk more about it!

The post Review: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Natasha Pulley appeared first on Reading the End.

What I pictured: Sorcery and Cecelia

The primary topic of the first forty pages of Freedom and Necessity: Hegel, I swear to God. You know, the philosopher. And his concepts of idealism.

So, yeah. Me and Freedom and Necessity got off to a bumpy start.

Luckily, I was on the bus and had nothing else of interest for my eyes to rest on for the duration of the bus ride, which meant that perforce I read past the first 40 pages and on to the more interesting bits.

James Cobham, unloved son, much-loved cousin, and passionate idealist, has drowned. Or at least, that’s what everyone in England believes. When his older cousin Richard receives a letter from the supposedly dead James, his whole family is plunged into a world of conspiracy, terror, and possibly magic. (Though, if I can save you some anxiety, there’s not really any magic. There are just some people who believe in magic, as some people did in Victorian times. (And of course as some people still do now.))

If you can get past the Hegel, Freedom and Necessity turns out to be pretty great. Shortly after James’s initial disappearance, his cousin Susan sets out on a quest to find out all about his past. She’s in love with him (claim her family members; she denies it), and ferocious investigation into his murky past is the method she’s plumped upon of handling her feelings about his (supposed) death. Meanwhile, Richard — who is living in sin with yet another cousin, Kitty — sets out to find out what on earth James is up to and what kind of trouble he’s gotten himself into. The cousins are working at cross purposes for some time, though they fairly quickly realize that they’ll work better as a unit, and they start to share information. (Though they still hold back some information from almost every letter they send; these are people who love each other dearly and want to keep each other from worrying.)

Susan’s a terrific character. I love to see a female protagonist who’s exactly as brilliant and bloody-minded as her male counterpart. Susan’s too clever to be put off by James’s typical grim-faced-male-hero tactics of trying to keep her out of danger by being extremely mean to her. She sets out to discover how she can assist James with the murderous bastards (possibly several separate groups of murderous bastards) who want his head on a platter, and before too long, James finds himself depending on her aid. When he needs something done, he’s able to say, Susan, do this thing, and feel confident that it will be done. And the greatest thing is that this is a life Susan enjoys (probably more than James does).

In sum, be prepared to skim past some droning on about philosophical ideals to get to a cracking good story set in the mid-1800s. Don’t hold out for magic. Most of the schemes are actually about politics. But they’re still good.

They also read it: Here There Be Books; Tamaranth’s Creative Reading; let me know if I missed yours!

The post Review: Freedom and Necessity, Steven Brust and Emma Bull appeared first on Reading the End.

The beginning: Ah Sarah Stovell. The way she won my heart in the first place was the way she wrote about time in Mothernight. She begins Night Flower (affiliate links: B&N, Book Depository) by talking about time again:

All I’ve got now is a pile of hours, and hours ain’t what folk think they are. They ain’t certain. Measuring hours ain’t like measuring water or grain, where one pint is one pint and one ounce is one ounce. Hours are slippery. They shrink or grow, depending on who they belong to, and if you’re a body locked up in solitary confinement, then there ain’t no way round the fact that you’ll be getting the long ones.

These words belong to Miriam, a Romany girl now awaiting her execution in Tasmania. The book then jumps back to the time before Miriam was sent to Tasmania. Convicted of theft, she has been sentenced to transportation to Van Diemen’s Land to work as a laborer there for seven years. In alternating sections we have another protagonist, Rose, a well-born women turned governess, who also faces a seven-year sentence for theft. Once they reach Tasmania, the two women are both sent to work at a nursery run by a Reverend Sutton and his wife.

The end (highlight the blank spaces for spoilers): I’m curious why Miriam ends up in solitary confinement and why her soul is “for the devil”. It can’t just be because she’s Romany. It turns out she killed Reverend Sutton. And it turns out that Rose is going to (metaphorically) sell Miriam down the river. Well, I am not unduly surprised, I guess, but I did hope that Rose and Miriam were going to become faithful friends for life.

The whole: Night Flower reminds me of nothing so much as Slammerkin by Emma Donohue, another historical novel about the misery of being boxed into one version of what the world thinks you are. Even before she is convicted of theft, Miriam is generally despised for being a gypsy; and afterward, she has no hope at all. Rose tends to be given the benefit of the doubt, as an upper-class Christian woman; but Miriam, a poor Romany girl, is assumed to be fundamentally wicked.

There’s a crucial theme here that Stovell returns to over and over: In this time, in this circumstance, it is far less important what you do than what you are. Miriam and Rose have committed the same crime, but Miriam isn’t Christian, or well-spoken, and she has never been well-off; so Rose is treated better. She gets a cushier job at the Suttons’ nursery, and it’s clear the Suttons trust and like her much more than they do Miriam. Meanwhile, Reverend Sutton is known by everyone to be an awful person. There are rumors that he sells babies, and Miriam can see for herself that he frequents the brothel across the street. But this — the faults that the women know of — doesn’t matter to his position in society.

I’d have liked to see more shades of gray in some of the characters. Once you know Rose’s entire backstory, she comes to appear fairly one-note in retrospect, and the note in question is not my favorite way to portray a female character. Reverend Sutton never displays any redeeming qualities, and while Sutton’s son John undergoes change over the course of the book, you don’t really get to see the conflict that the change causes in him.

Night Flower is currently on a blog tour. The review schedule is below if you’re interested in reading other people’s thoughts on the book.

Yesterday – iheartbooks.wordpress.com

Tomorrow – www.novelkicks.co.uk

11 August – readinginthesunshine.wordpress.com

12 August – shazsbookboudoir.blogspot.com

13 August – www.mamajhearts.co.uk

14 August – dizzycslittlebookblog.blogspot.co.uk

15 August – bookswithbunny.blogspot.co.uk

Note: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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The Long Song is the story of a slave girl named July, the daughter of a slave on a Jamaican plantation and the plantation’s overseer. Taken from her mother, she becomes a house slave, serving as lady’s maid to the foolish, self-centered, and easily led Caroline Mortimer. July’s life, lasting through the Baptist War in 1831 and the (nominal) emancipation of the Jamaican slaves, is framed as a story written by the mother of a printer, Thomas Kinsman, with occasional editorial asides from Thomas Kinsman to clarify matters and make pointed remarks about his mother’s reliability.

What was very good indeed: (and I loved this) The complex depiction of racism and prejudice throughout the book. We see all different varieties of racism, from the open hatred and contempt of the overseer, to the weak-willed giving in to racism of many of the other white characters, to the pride July takes in being mulatto, rather than black. I also loved the way Levy portrayed the intense cognitive dissonance that was created for many of the characters by their situations, and the extreme ways in which they resolved it. Caroline Mortimer, for instance, causes something pretty horrible to happen midway through the book, and she deals with it by pretending that something totally different happened; this parallels July’s need to paint a happier, or at least a tidier, picture of the events of her life.

The unreliability of July as a narrator was enjoyable, as it emphasized the back and forth between the casual, slangy, careless way the character July speaks, and the very Victorian speech patterns of the narrator (whom we know to be a much older July). There were times when the narrator would tell the story one way, then pause to say that, okay, that’s not really what happened, my son wants me to tell the truth, so this is what really happened. I loved that, particularly as employed at the very end of the book, but I thought Levy could have made better use of it. I have told y’all before that I like an unreliable narrator, but what I like about an unreliable narrator is reaching the end of the book and not being sure what to believe. When July was being unreliable, it was usually made clear and corrected.

In spite of these excellent aspects, I had a hard time connecting with the characters and thus loving the book. I felt like I was at arm’s length the entire time, and I couldn’t exactly discern why that should be the case. I might have been doing it myself, self-protecting because I find books about slavery so viscerally upsetting. Or it might have been Andrea Levy’s choice of narrator, and the way that July very rarely gives the reader a glimpse of her most deeply-held emotions. As a trend, I like characters to the exact extent that they want something I can sympathize with.

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As Eleonora grows up, raised by her widowed father and stern aunt, her flock of hoopoes is a constant presence in her life. She herself is a prodigy. Her father is proud and her aunt disapproving, but the need of books is fundamental to Eleonora, and she reads everything she can get her hands on. When her father leaves their home in Constanta for Stamboul (where he plans to sell his carpets), she stows away in a trunk and ends up at the home of her father’s friend, Moncef Bey, in the midst of a magnificent city in a crumbling empire. Meanwhile, Sultan Abdulhamid II struggles to keep his empire together in spite of the terrible advice of all his useless advisers.

What can I say about this book? Of course I want to say that it came in an adorable envelope with a hoopoe seal, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the book itself. It’s a quiet book, for a story set in a tumultuous time in history and containing a number of fairly catastrophic events. Eleonora is born on the day that Russians attack her village; in the course of the book she loses her mother, and then her homeland, and Stamboul presents a whole new set of challenges for her (I won’t spoil it for you). But Eleonora is an inward-focused girl, and her reactions are quiet and contained, and hers are the eyes through which we see her life. Noisy things happen (like the Russian attack), but the book is never noisy about them. If that makes sense.

I expected The Oracle of Stamboul to be significantly more adorable, and less of a grown-up person book, than in fact it is. I liked what Lukas did with it, but I was expecting a lot more time devoted to Eleonora giving precocious, useful, and disingenuous advice relating to empire-governing matters. The ending of the book was not what I anticipated. I loved that Lukas didn’t go a predictable, sequel-baiting rout. But I would like to see a sequel, as long as it didn’t play up the magical realism any more.

The Oracle of Stamboul is on a TLC Blog Tour.Other stops on the blog tour include:

living read girl
Life Is Short, Read Fast
Melody and Words
Rayment’s Reading, Rants, and Ramblings

And coming up:

Book Sake
Jen’s Book Thoughts
Luxury Reading!

Disclosure: I received this book for review from Harper.

The post Review: The Oracle of Stamboul, Michael David Lukas appeared first on Reading the End.

The Siege of Krishnapur is about a fictional compound of British soldiers and civilians in India just before and then all during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. The main character (sort of) Fleury is a young, imaginative Romantic who has just come to India with an eye to discovering himself a wife. He is unhappy to discover that his carefully cultivated sensitivity to beauty is not quite the thing in colonial India. The Collector, governor of the town, is obsessed with his collection of marvels, many of which he acquired at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

J.G. Farrell is a funny guy. For as grim a book as he’s written, as claustrophobic and everyone’s-about-to-die a book as The Siege of Krishnapur, he writes with a quiet, wry humor that was very enjoyable. We see almost nothing of India outside of the besieged containment, so the whole book is given to us almost solely through the eyes of the Europeans. We see the Collector’s pride in the objects he’s collected, the marvels of European craftsmanship which, ultimately, they break down and use as weapons, or firewood, to keep themselves alive. One can’t help finding it fairly pointed that they fire a bust of Shakespeare out of the cannons at the attacking sepoys.

As Farrell is poking fun at the pretensions of the various characters — pretensions of beauty, of intellectualism, of scientific brilliance, of sensitivity — he also draws them with a certain degree of affection. The silly things they believe about themselves, about the British Empire, and about the Indian sepoys in the rebellion have plainly been instilled in them over years and years of British education. None of the characters is exactly sympathetic, but Farrell still makes them more pitiable than aggravating (by a thinnish margin in some cases).

I genuinely enjoyed reading The Siege of Krishnapur, but by the end I was ready to be done with it. The same quirks of character that entertained me so much at the outset were driving me crazy as I got closer to finishing. The critique of empire and its creations was there throughout, but it didn’t deepen over the course of the book. I liked the book! I don’t at all mean to imply that I didn’t. Only its events were not as exciting as you’d think they would be, which means the book lives or dies on its characters. The British characters didn’t change and grow, and without including textured Indian characters in the book, it was hard to see the impacts of empire from that side. So the whole thing fell a teeny bit flat for me. (Alas.)

This assessment has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I feel Mary Renault, and not J.G. Farrell, should have won the Lost Booker Prize. J.G. Farrell already won one! And I haven’t read Troubles, the winner of the Lost Booker Prize, but I have read The Siege of Krishnapur, and I’ve read Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven, and I thought Fire from Heaven was better. I love Mary Renault right in the face. (When I was unpacking my books after moving to my new apartment, I kept discovering more Renault books I had packed, and every time (there were four altogether), I was all, Awesome! Yay for Past Jenny! What impeccable taste and foresight that girl had!)

Other reviews:

The Evening Reader
Asylum

Tell me if I missed yours! If I did it’s not because I don’t love you!

The post The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell appeared first on Reading the End.

The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon

I checked this out on Gavin’s recommendation and because I love Alexander the Great. Your claims that he was a psychotic alcoholic have no effect on me because in my mind he is exactly the way Mary Renault writes him in Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy. The Golden Mean is about Aristotle when he comes to Macedon to tutor young Alexander. Though Lyon was clearly influenced by Mary Renault’s books, she gives a more nuanced picture of Alexander, showing a brilliant but disturbed young man who provides real heads for plays and mutilates the bodies of soldiers he has killed. Lyon uses modern language, with much swearing, and although that could have come across as stilted, it, er, it doesn’t. Hooray. Also, check out Ms. Lyon’s list of ten very good books about the ancient world.

The Magicians and Mrs. Quent, Galen Beckett

Advertised as Jane Austen with magic, The Magicians and Mrs. Quent completely failed to satisfy me. Other reviewers have noted that the book’s three sections are dramatically different in tone, the first being quite Jane Austen and the second quite Turn of the Screwy, and the third more straight fantasy. This bugged me, and I didn’t care for the characters anyway, and the world-building felt lazy. So, not a success. This was for the RIP Challenge.

The Fall of Rome, Martha Southgate

Big yes to this one. I have been wanting to read it for ages, on Eva’s recommendation, and it didn’t disappoint me. Latin teacher Jerome Washington has been the only black faculty member at a Connecticut boarding school for boys throughout most of his career. His ideas about decorum and racial equality are sharply challenged with the arrival of Jana Hensen, a longtime teacher in the Cleveland inner city, and Rashid Bryson, a young black student trying to get away from a family tragedy. Beautiful, complicated racial and family dynamics and lovely writing, multiple narrators, Latin, and a boarding school setting. I wish Martha Southgate had written fifteen more books besides this one, instead of only two. Behold this quotation, which I think is great:

“Racial integration?” He nodded. “What about it?”

“Well, I’m not against it, obviously, or I wouldn’t be here, right? But there’s some problems with it that I just want to talk to people about. How this place isn’t really integrated enough. We – I mean people like me – are just here to round out somebody else’s experience. That’s what it feels like, anyway.”

American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and the American Prison System, Sasha Abramsky

The American prison system is awful. It’s just awful in every way, what with the insanely punitive mandatory minimum sentences, and the poorly-trained guards, and the lack of care for the mentally ill, and the shortage of educational programs, and the–look, just everything. It’s awful. Sasha Abramsky is a careful, clear writer, and I defy you to read this book and not feel furious at the end of it.

Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Alan Moore is just not for me. When I read his books, I think of how much in sympathy I am with his views, and how important a writer of graphic novels he is, but I do not think, Wow, this is an enjoyable read. I more think, Wow, this is rather a slog. Wish I could be reading something more awesome. Now and then an image or a plot element will catch my eye and please me greatly, but these never last long enough to make my reading truly enjoyable. I also found the conclusion deeply unsatisfying: just a big info-dump of cackling villainy. I was fascinated, as I always am, with the way the 1980s seem to have been predicated on the assumption that nuclear war with Russia was imminent. And then the Berlin Wall came down! Miraculous! This was for the Graphic Novels Challenge, which I have already been awesome at this year but I cannot stop being awesome at it because graphic novels are worthwhile! Even when they are not my particular cup of tea.

Glimpses, Lynn Flewelling

Glimpses is a collection of Nightrunner short stories, with lots of fan art. It was sent to me as an e-book by Reece Notley of Three Crow Press, for which much thanks. These are stories that fill in the gaps in Seregil’s and Alec’s history: how Seregil came to be Nysander’s student, a small glimpse of Alec’s life with his father, and like that. If you are a fan of the Nightrunner series, and do not mind lots of graphic sex (I admit I can be slightly squeamish this way), you should check this out. To me, the nosy girl who wants to know exactly how everything went down, this short story collection is an excellent addition to the Nightrunner world. Lynn Flewelling has a light, amusing way of writing, and I always enjoy spending time with her characters. But if you are a stranger to the series, do yourself a favor and read Luck in the Shadows and Stalking Darkness first.

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