Imagine my surprise when Pet is the gentlest of reads. Admittedly it’s dealing with a really hard issue — child sexual abuse — but it does so with such hope and tenderness. When I say that Pet is a kind read, I mean that its author is kind to its characters, and its characters are kind to each other. There’s a fundamental belief that everyone is trying their best and deserves the benefit of the doubt on that account.

But, okay! What’s the book about? Pet is set in a community called Lucille that has solved all of its problems. Lucille used to be like our world, with lots of suffering caused by not caring about each other, but Lucille had a revolution in the last generation and got rid of all that stuff. How exactly they managed such a revolution is not explained, as Pet is in setting more parable than futurefic. Jam, who rarely speaks and often signs, has two loving friends and a supportive school environment, and everything is hunky-dory until she bleeds on one of her mother’s paintings and a creature called Pet emerges from the drawing into the world. It explains to Jam that there’s a monster at her friend Redemption’s house, and that it’s a hunter come to find and destroy that monster. Jam doesn’t understand how that can be, given that the angels of the revolution got rid of all the monsters. But Pet insists that it’s so, and enlists Jam’s help to find who the monster is.

The good: I loved the setting, and it truly was a balm to me to read a book in which everyone is careful and gentle with each other. When Jam’s not ready to discuss something with her parents, they don’t push; when she knows that Redemption is angry with her, she gives him space to be angry. If you know me, you know that I love boundaries, and Pet prioritizes respecting people’s boundaries. Lucille is also a wonderfully diverse world, with different languages and cultures bumping frictionlessly into each other; though Lucille has excellent medical care (we learn that Jam didn’t run into any problems getting medical care to support her gender transition as a small child), it’s unlike many fictional utopias in that it doesn’t vaunt the elimination of disability as a marker of utopia. On the contrary, Jam’s excellent librarian, Ube, uses a wheelchair to get around.

I also, predictably, am in strong favor of raising awareness about child abuse, especially child sexual abuse — which is implied to be part of what’s going on in Redemption’s house. Pet is one of a small number of YA books that talks about child sexual abuse as it actually happens, including the likelihood that victims will be met with skepticism if they report what’s going on. We also see Jam go to the library to learn from reputable sources about what it looks like when a child is being abused. Yay for research!

The not-so-good: I don’t like parables, and Pet is extremely a parable. This is a personal preference thing, obviously, because Pet isn’t trying and failing for nuts-and-bolts worldbuilding — Emezi’s making a choice here to write a parable. I’m saying parable not to suggest the book is didactic, although it is a little, but more to say that it spends more time in the realm of symbolism than your average bear. I do not personally enjoy this type of thing. (Would allegory be better to say than parable here? I don’t know. One of those!)

My other main criticism — and I wondered if this was a result of wanting the book to be YA and aging up the protagonist to come closer to the age group that the genre mostly aims at these days — is that Jam is supposed to be fifteen, and she reads to me a lot younger than fifteen. (Redemption does, too, but Jam’s our POV character, which makes it extra-noticeable.) I don’t know exactly how to quantify this, but I felt it strongly throughout my reading of the book, that not only does she seem younger than fifteen, but she’s treated younger than fifteen by the adults in her life. I kept thinking she was twelve or even ten, then flipping back to the start of the book to double-check. Did anyone else feel this way?

Despite this book not being a perfect fit for me, I still admired it as a book and Emezi as an author, and I’m excited for whatever they’re going to do next. (Hopefully not a parable/allegory thing, oh dear, those are really not for me.)

Note: I received this e-galley for review consideration from the publisher, via Netgalley. This has not influenced the contents of my review.

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The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter is the story of Mary Jekyll, who discovers hints among her father’s papers that there may be a reward on offer for information leading to the apprehension of murderer Edward Hyde. Left without money upon the death of her parents, Mary follows the clues (with the help of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson), only to find that her father had far more secrets than she ever dreamed. Along the way, she meets the daughters of other scientists like her father, women created as monsters who now must make their way in the world.

Because it’s Theodora Goss, of course, the narration can’t be straightforward: The conceit of the book is that Catherine Moreau is writing the story, while all the other major characters interject their comments as she goes along. Mary’s newfound younger sister, Diana, is particularly fractious as regards things like symbolism or metaphor or Catherine assuming she knows what other people were thinking as they were having their adventures. I obviously loved this, although your mileage may vary — it’s a fun way to make an already metafictional story even metafictionaler.

If you are in search of deathless literature that delves deeply into the commonalities among the many books that inspired it, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter may not be your jam. And it’s not trying to be; it’s trying to be exactly what it is: a fun, sweet, weird, fantastical story about the monster girls — existing and imagined — of literature and the found family they create together. If your Labor Day plans involve any sort of lazing about comfortably with a glass of wine in your hand, I commend Theodora Goss to your notice. The sequel, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, came out last month and promises (over 700 pages of) metafiction, adventure, and delight.

PS I went to my first con this past weekend! Are y’all proud of me? I got a sticker that said it was my first ever WorldCon, and it was a wonderful experience where I met many amazing humans. Much recommended!

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Okay. Here’s the premise. Bear with me for a bit. When Paxton was a kid, his town was hit with what’s now known as Transcription Divergence Syndrome, which killed some of the inhabitants, left others (including Paxton) untouched, and entirely rewrote the biology of the rest. Paxton’s close childhood friend, Deke, is an argo, with enormously lengthened bones; the friend whose funeral Paxton returns for at the start of the book, Jo Lynn, became a beta, a bald parthenogenetic species; and his father, the one-time hellfire preacher to the town, is a charlie, grotesquely fat and evidently capable of producing a hallucinogenic substance the town’s mayor calls the vintage. Everyone who remains in the town of Switchcreek belongs to one of these three strange species, or clades.

My impression of Daryl Gregory so far is that he is all about logistics. He’s good with the particular, often creepy, detail. Here’s one for each clade:

• Deke gets stopped by the cops incredibly often, even when he’s not doing anything. It’s just because argos are huge, and you can tell from the road that a huge scary guy is in the car. Cops don’t care for it, and they make up reasons to stop Deke when he’s driving.
• Someone says that “loving mother” is the highest–and basically the only–compliment that the (hyper-fertile) betas give.
• “Blisters erupted over the skin of [the aging charlie’s] belly: tiny pimples; white-capped pebbles; glossy, egg-sized sacs. The largest pouches wept pink-tinged serum.”

Yeah, that last one happens. If you can believe it, it only gets ickier from there. As in Pandemonium, Daryl Gregory doesn’t shy away from body horror. The blisters on Paxton’s father’s stomach produce the vintage, and Paxton immediately becomes–I’m legit shuddering as I write this–addicted to it. If you can think of a way for that to get any grosser, by all means share it in the comments.

The problem with the first half of The Devil’s Alphabet is Paxton. He’s not enough of an outsider to Switchcreek to be a good surrogate pair of eyes for the reader, and what he wants is too poorly defined to make me want it for him. Also, his being addicted to a substance that oozes out of blisters on his father’s body is just too yucky.

The real meat of the story–to me–is the mayor, a charlie whom Paxton calls Aunt Rhonda. She’s the Mags Bennett of Switchcreek, savvy and ruthless, but her commitment to the financial and physical security of Switchcreek and its people is obvious. Halfway through the book, TDS strikes a town in Ecuador; the urgency of finding out the risk factors and causes of TDS returns to Switchcreek; and for the first time, the story had real stakes. When Rhonda gets in a room with the researcher who’s doing the most research into TDS, and they start talking about what they can do to protect their town from legal and medical intrusion, that’s when I started to feel the same excitement I felt when I was reading Pandemonium.

Which, yes. That is a long time to wait for the story to get good.

“I don’t believe this,” the reverend said. “That all this could happen by chance.”

 

The doctor bristled. “I’m not going to argue with you about whether this is an act of God.”

 

“That’s exactly what you’re doing,” the reverend said.

 

Rhonda rapped the table with the underside of one of her rings. “Ladies. It doesn’t matter whether God did it, or a virus, or quantum Santa Claus.”

 

“Of course it matters!” the reverend exclaimed.

 

“Elsa, hear me out. It doesn’t matter what we think, it only matters what the government thinks, and what the public thinks. Because that’s what’s going to decide if they quarantine us again.” She looked around the table. “You saw what I saw. Doctor, your friend Preisswerk bailed out when he was asked about the quarantine. Obviously they’ve talked about it. And if public opinion turns, then sooner or later they’ll have to isolate us. That’s what I’d do in their shoes.”

 

The reverend made a disgusted noise. “Of course you would.”

 

“Yes I would. Elsa, the only reason they dropped the quarantine last time is because it stopped spreading, and because the babies hadn’t started arriving. Now it’s started again, and they know those people will start breeding too. We’re not disease victims anymore, we’re a race–three races–and from another universe, of all things.”

What is good sci-fi about, my friends? VALUES. Why else would I like it so much? And would I watch a show about Rhonda arguing about values and ferociously bending Switchcreek and the American government to her will? I sure damn would.

I wouldn’t watch is a show about Paxton. Paxton is boring. When the story shifted back to Paxton, I lost interest and just missed Rhonda. I didn’t care about what happened to Jo–Paxton didn’t care enough to make me care–and I cared absolutely zero about whether Paxton was going to break free of his addiction to the vintage. The book broke into awesomeness now and then (whenever it ditched Paxton for someone else’s viewpoint), but overall it was kind of disappointing.

HOWEVER. My feelings of excitement about Daryl Gregory as an author are unchanged. I thought Pandemonium was great, I thought The Devil‘s Alphabet had a lot of potential to be great, and I am on board to read anything Daryl Gregory wants to write for the foreseeable future.

Cover report: Meh. The cover’s the same in Britain and America, and I could live without it.

affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository

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The beginning: A man called Wil is abducted from an airport by two men he has never seen before, men who are convinced that he knows a secret they desperately need. Meanwhile, a sixteen-year-old street kid called Emily is recruited by a mysterious organization whose members learn to control others with something that looks like a combination of persuasion and magic words.

The end (spoilers in this section only; highlight the blank spaces if you want them): This ending really made me work for the information I wanted, which is another way of saying I wish I’d read a physical copy of this instead of an ebook. I had to flip around to find out what I wanted to know. Turns out it’s a good news/bad news situation. Bad news is, Eliot dies. Good news is, the bad guy gets defeated and the surviving good guys (Emily and Harry) live happily ever after (ish). You can’t win them all.

The whole: I’m struggling to figure out what to say about Lexicon (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) apart from how fun it was to read. As a straightforward thriller type book, as a delightfully convincing conspiracy theory type book, it is so stylishly, effortlessly fun and cool that I looked forward to my subway rides just because I knew I’d get to read it then.

Balancing two storylines of whose connection the reader is not sure is a challenging proposition, and Barry rises to it wonderfully. At the beginning, Wil’s storyline is nonstop action, with Wil and his captors struggling to get out of one car-chase situation after another. Emily’s storyline gives the reader some breathing space while filling in some blanks about who these “poets” are, what they do, and–eventually–why their organization might be collapsing in on itself. When Wil and his kidnappers have time to slow down a little, Emily’s story picks up, and it’s her fate you’re following most breathlessly.

As an end-reader, it pleased me that Barry tips his hand early about the relationship between Emily’s story and Wil’s, but if you are all about suspense maybe you will mind that. I think even if you figure out early on what’s happening, there’s still plenty of mystery to keep you turning the pages.

Has anyone read anything else by Max Barry? Are his other books as much fun as Lexicon?

Cover report: American cover wins! It does more at conveying the tone of the book, with all the words and the weirdness about words.

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