Category: A+ Reviews

Review: The Way Home by Peter S. Beagle

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews> D Reviews
Review: The Way Home by Peter S. BeagleThe Way Home: Two Novellas from the World of The Last Unicorn (The Last Unicorn) by Peter S. Beagle
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy
Series: Last Unicorn #2
Pages: 208
Published by Ace on April 4, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Better World Books
Goodreads

One brand-new, long-awaited novella, and one Hugo and Nebula award winning novella, both featuring characters from the beloved classic The Last Unicorn, from renowned fantasy writer Peter S. Beagle.
Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn is one of fantasy's most beloved classics, with millions of copies in print worldwide.
Beagle's long-awaited return to the world of that novel came with "Two Hearts," which garnered Hugo and Nebula awards in 2006, and continued the stories of the unicorn, Molly Grue, and Schmendrick the Magician from the point of view of a young girl named Sooz.
In this volume, Peter S. Beagle also presents for the first time "Sooz," a novella that sees the narrator of "Two Hearts," all grown up and with a perilous journey ahead of her, in a tender meditation on love, loss, and finding your true self.

My Review:

I picked up The Way Home because I absolutely adored The Last Unicorn when I finally read it for the very first time back in January. So I had high hopes for The Way Home. Very, very high.

Those hopes were, unfortunately, only partially met, and I’m more than a bit sad about that.

The Way Home is not a single story as The Last Unicorn was, although it is set in the same world. Rather, this is two stories, the previously published Hugo Award winning novelette, “Two Hearts”, and the new and more recently written novella “Sooz”.

Sooz is the protagonist of both stories. In “Two Hearts”, she’s a nine-year-old girl, but by the time of her own story, she’s seventeen and on her first solo adventure as part of her passage into adulthood.

I have a lot, and a lot of good things, to say about “Two Hearts”, but less and not so much about “Sooz”. So I’m going to start at the end, with “Sooz”.

As a story – as opposed to the character – “Sooz” did not work for me. While I was not expecting a happy ending, as this world tends toward bittersweet on the happiness scale, I was expecting this story to feel like it was part of the continuum from The Last Unicorn through “Two Hearts”, which features Sooz as a child, to Sooz’ own story.

But it didn’t.

It’s very much a coming of age and finding your identity story, and a story about learning that your parents – and yourself – are not exactly who you thought either you or they were, and dealing with that knowledge. It’s also a quest story, as Sooz takes herself off to the Fae Lands to find the lost sister that she never knew she had.

As a story, it felt like the themes had been dealt with before – and dealt with better. Beginning Sooz’ journey with a gratuitous – but at least not overly graphic – rape scene did not endear me to the rest of the story. Sooz was already experiencing plenty of angst, her rape read like piling on for no good reason except that she was a lone female and had to experience all the dangers of that state possible.

I’m up on a soapbox, I know. Because it just felt like sloppy storytelling. There is the potential for plenty of angst in the female experience, even in fantasy, without raping the audience surrogate. (I’ll climb down now before the soapbox gets any taller.)

I dragged myself through “Sooz” in the hopes that it would get better. I’m not sure whether I didn’t feel like it did or just couldn’t get the awful taste out of my mouth (so to speak)

But I want to end this review on a higher note than I started, so let’s switch to the book’s opening story, the award-winning “Two Hearts”.

Where “Sooz” read as if it was barely connected to the world of The Last Unicorn, “Two Hearts” read like a combination of coda and swan song to the beloved classic. It’s the ending that the reader knows was out there, somewhere, at the end of The Last Unicorn, both dreaded and inevitable and so, so right.

Young Sooz’ village is being ravaged by a griffin who has graduated from taking sheep and goats to snatching children. The king has sent increasing numbers of men at arms to slay the griffin, but to no avail. Sooz runs away to fetch the king himself to take care of her people, who are, of course, his people. Along the way she runs into Schmendrick the Magician and his partner, Molly Grue. It’s been a LONG time since Schmendrick and Molly have been to the castle to see their friend, King Lir, so they decide to escort Sooz on her way.

The years that have passed lightly over the magician and his partner have not been kind to the purely human King Lir, and neither has Lir’s lifelong devotion to the unicorn Amalthea. But he rouses himself for one last quest, one last job that he knows is his and his alone. He goes with his friends, and Sooz, to slay the griffin.

“Two Hearts” is a beautiful story because it fits right into the world of The Last Unicorn with all of its lyrical language and utter heartbreak, and sits right on top of the pillar of “don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened”.

I got a little weepy anyway. The ending is the right ending, the necessary ending. It’s the perfect swan song for an immortal hero in a mortal’s body.

In short, “Two Hearts” is a marvelous, if heartbreaking ending for the beloved classic, The Last Unicorn. “Sooz” read like more of an afterthought, or an attempt to get the lightning back in the bottle one last time.

So the Escape Ratings on this book are very much split. “Sooz” was a dragging D of a read, while “Two Hearts” was a tear-spattered A+.

Review: The Cleaving by Juliet E. McKenna + Giveaway

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> blog tours> book reviews> Giveaways
Review: The Cleaving by Juliet E. McKenna + GiveawayThe Cleaving by Juliet E. McKenna
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: Arthurian legends, fantasy, historical fantasy, retellings
Pages: 400
Published by Angry Robot on May 9, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Four women, four destinies – the future of King Arthur's court…
A new, feminist retelling of the Arthurian legends
The Cleaving is an Arthurian retelling that follows the tangled stories of four women: Nimue, Ygraine, Morgana, and Guinevere, as they fight to control their own destinies amid the wars and rivalries that will determine the destiny of Britain.
The legendary epics of King Arthur and Camelot don’t tell the whole story. Chroniclers say Arthur’s mother Ygraine married the man that killed her husband. They say that Arthur's half-sister Morgana turned to dark magic to defy him and Merlin. They say that the enchantress Nimue challenged Merlin and used her magic to outwit him. And that Arthur’s marriage to Guinevere ended in adultery, rebellion and bloodshed. So why did these women chose such dangerous paths?
As warfare and rivalries constantly challenge the king, Arthur and Merlin believe these women are destined to serve Camelot by doing as they are told. But men forget that women talk. Ygraine, Nimue, Morgana and Guinevere become friends and allies while the decisions that shape their lives are taken out of their hands. This is their untold story. Now these women have a voice.
Juliet McKenna is an expert on medieval history and warfare and brings this expertise as well as her skills as a fantasy writer to this epic standalone novel.

My Review:

The story (or legend, or myth, or history) of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table is one of those “tales as old as time.” Whether one considers it a myth, or a legend, or a bit of fictionalized or fantasized history, there’s something about the story that speaks to generation after generation, and has since Sir Thomas Malory compiled his now-famous Le Morte d’Arthur back in the 15th century.

A compilation which was itself based on an earlier popular “history”, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th century History of the Kings of Britain. All of the elements we now recognize as part of the Matter of Britain, King Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, Lancelot, the castle at Tintagel, the sword Excalibur and his final rest in Avalon are all in that 12th century tale, just as they are in this 21st century reimagining, The Cleaving.

Some stories, and some characters, are so profoundly immortal that they must be reinterpreted for each generation and the story of King Arthur is one of those tales. Each generation has reinvented the “once and future king” for over EIGHT centuries so far.

There’s no sign of that stopping any time soon. Rather the reverse. The Cleaving, with its gritty medieval setting and its female-centered perspective on the deeds and misdeeds of the arrogant and autocratic and all-too-frequently abusive men they were supposed to serve and obey, shows the reader a somewhat more-plausible version of a story we all believe we know and love. The Cleaving tells another, rather different side to a legend and makes it all that much more “real” and even believable by that telling.

And it’s going to inform and inflect (or possibly infect) the next generation of tellers of this beloved tale. As it so very much should.

Escape Rating A+: The Cleaving is a compelling conundrum of a book. On the one hand, the story of King Arthur and his knights has been told, and retold, over and over, to the point where it forms one of the foundational tales of western literature along with a considerable number of the archetypes therein.

But very much on the other hand, in order to be considered a good book right now, The Cleaving has to be, and very much is, considerably more than merely a rehash of a story we already know. So it has the hard work of being a book where readers will already know how the story ends, while needing to tell its familiar story in a way that is fresh and new and will appeal to the audiences of its time and not just play on the nostalgia of those already familiar with the story.

The Cleaving succeeds in dancing on that very high and narrow tightrope by telling the story from the perspective of the women who usually exist as mere ciphers in its background while the men perform all the deeds of derring-do and conduct all the important business of their realms.

What The Cleaving does with the familiar story doesn’t change the story nearly as much as an earlier explicitly feminist and fantastically magical version – Marion Zimmer Bradley’s ultra popular The Mists of Avalon – did. Rather, The Cleaving takes that original story of men doing manly things and shows it from the perspective of a group of intelligent, influential women who performed as society forced them to in public – while maintaining their own thoughts and their own council behind the scenes.

It’s a portrait that feels more realistic to a 21st century reader without stretching the bounds of anachronism. These women were expected to manage complicated households, oversee large budgets for those households, keep everything running smoothly whether their lords were in residence or not – and even act in place of those lords when they were away – as many often were.

That level of intelligence and capability can’t be faked for very long at all without being found out. On the other hand, public subservience is easy to fake just by schooling one’s expressions and keeping one’s mouth shut except to be agreeable and above all, meek. It would require getting used to the sensation of swallowing one’s own tongue rather a lot, but it can be done. Especially in front of men who would be inclined to believe it anyway.

So in public they all seem meek, mild and accepting of the inevitable. Because the abuse they suffered, whether physical or emotional, was inevitable. Their choices were few. But in private, they mitigated what damage they could. Even if it wasn’t nearly enough.

So Uther, with Merlin’s connivance, rapes Ygraine while wearing her beloved husband’s face. With Merlin’s connivance, the child of that rape becomes king. With Merlin’s connivance, a whole lot of things happen that probably shouldn’t. (There’s a possible interpretation of this version of the Arthurian legend as Merlin interfered with a whole lot of things that he should have left well enough alone and karma is a bitch.)

Because of the way the story plays out, and just how much the queens are influencing events when the men are too busy pillaging to pay attention, even though we know how the story ends we don’t know how it gets there, and it keeps the reader turning pages to learn what is different and what remains familiar when told from a formerly hidden point of view.

Based on this latest variation of these seemingly eternal legends, we’re clearly not done with Arthur yet. Is it possible that this is what was truly meant by that sobriquet, “the once and future king”?

~~~~~~ GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

Thanks to the publisher, Angry Robot, I’m giving away one copy of The Cleaving to one lucky US or UK commenter on this tour!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Review: The New Guys by Meredith Bagby

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: The New Guys by Meredith BagbyThe New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel by Meredith Bagby
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: history, nonfiction, science, science history, U.S. history
Pages: 528
Published by William Morrow & Company on February 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The never-before-told story of NASA's 1978 astronaut class, which included the first American women, the first African Americans, the first Asian American, and the first gay person to fly to space. With the exclusive participation of the astronauts who were there, this is the thrilling, behind-the-scenes saga of a new generation that transformed space exploration
The story of NASA's Astronaut Class 8, or "The F*cking New Guys," as their military predecessors nicknamed them, is an unprecedented look at these extraordinary explorers who broke barriers and blasted through glass ceilings. Egos clashed, ambitions flared, and romances bloomed as the New Guys competed with one another and navigated the cutthroat internal politics at NASA for a chance to rocket to the stars.
Marking a departure from the iconic military test pilots who had dominated the space program since its inception, the New Guys arrived at the dawn of a new era of space flight. Teardrop-shaped space capsules from Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo gave way to the space shuttle, a revolutionary space plane capable of launching like a rocket, hauling cargo like a truck, and landing back on Earth like an airliner. They mastered this new machine from its dangerous first test flights to its greatest achievements: launching hundreds of satellites, building the International Space Station, and deploying the Hubble Space Telescope.
The New Guys depicts these charismatic young astronauts and the exuberant social and scientific progress of the space shuttle program against the efforts of NASA officials who struggled to meet America's military demands and commercial aspirations. When NASA was pressured to fly more often and at greater risk, lives were lost in the program's two biggest disasters: Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003).
Caught in the crosshairs of this battle are the shuttle astronauts who gave their lives in those catastrophes, and who gave their lives' work pursuing a more equitable future in space for all humankind. Through it all they became friends, rivals, lovers, and ultimately, family.

My Review:

Just as Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff set its portrait of the original astronaut class, the Mercury Seven, into its time and place in the history of the space program and the 1950s space race that preceded it, The New Guys performs a similar service for the 1978 astronaut class, the 35 astronauts recruited to help design, build and crew the Space Shuttle.

The concepts behind the books may be similar, but the people they follow were very, very different, both by design and because of the events of the intervening decade, the tumultuous 1960s, when the civil rights movements took hold and gained more ground than anyone could have imagined in the 1950s.

At the same time, there’s something similar in the two groups, that both were willing to sit “on top of an enormous Roman candle…and wait for someone to light the fuse,” as Wolfe said about the group of astronauts he portrayed. That most of the fuel for that Roman candle sat next to rather than directly under the Space Shuttle at launch doesn’t change the unstated point in that quote, that sometimes that Roman candle might just explode instead of providing liftoff – and that every astronaut who sat atop or beside it knew it.

Because it had happened before – and might happen again.

But before the disasters that marked the waning days of the Space Shuttle program, Challenger and Columbia, first there were the years of endless testing, of heady excitement, of competition to be the first as well as the camaraderie of being part of the most glorious dream that humanity ever imagined. The journey to leave this “big blue marble” in order to see its beauty and its fragility from the black of space.

The astronaut class of 1978, “The New Guys”, “Thirty-Five New Guys (AKA TFNG)” or “Those F*cking New Guys” as they were dubbed by the old hands, were recruited for the express purpose of making the “final frontier” seem like a possible dream for everyone, and not just restricted to a few white men who could qualify to be military test pilots.

This is their story. The story of a dream given form. But also the story of the personal costs to those who dreamed that dream – and to their friends and families. And underlying the good and the great, the firsts and the glory of it, there’s a hidden uncurrent of an organization and a country who cared more about the costs and the potential financial benefits than they did about the lives of the people sitting on or by that Roman candle.

Escape Rating A+: I loved this. Truly, seriously, I just loved it. And even though the eARC version I read did not include the pictures, I could still picture more of it in my head than seems possible.

But I do need to confess that I have a soft spot in my heart for the space program and books about it and I always have. So I expected to love it and was NOT disappointed. Howsomever, if you plan to read the book after reading this squee of a review, do get a copy with the pictures. Also, be advised that this is a much quicker read that it would seem from the stated length. The notes are EXTENSIVE.

All of that being said, what made the book work for me was that it was a view from the inside of something that I always wanted to be inside of but would never have had the chance. At the same time, because of the time period the story covers, it sheds light on some darker parts of the history I lived through from the 1970s and into the 2000s.

And there certainly were dark places, even before the shadows left behind by the Challenger and Columbia disasters – the causes for which are not glossed over here. Instead, the deep dive into the reasons behind both made me cry – because neither needed to happen and yet were inevitable because of situations that could have been predicted and corrected long before either explosion.

But a big part of what made this book so absorbing were the stories of how many of the individuals in this particular class of astronauts came to the point where they applied for the program, and how their perspectives were affected by the situations they came to the program from. Six of the new astronauts were women, one of whom was Jewish. Three of the men were African American, one was Asian American. In other words, 10 out of those 35 new astronauts were people who would never have been permitted into the selection process before this class, and faced bigotry and resentment as well as intense scrutiny along with all of the personal and professional stress that came with becoming astronauts.

Their stories felt real in a way that previous astronaut stories may not, because there were finally people that more of us could identify with.

But this book also contains those huge hard places, as it pokes and prods its way into NASA’s overall culture, the frequently terrible economics of the times when the Shuttle Program was at its peak, and how those factors played into the Challenger and Columbia disasters. Those sections are frustrating, infuriating and heartbreaking at the same time. It’s a rough read but so very necessary to set the whole story in its proper context.

The story of The New Guys takes the TFNG from their earliest dreams of space to the ends of their careers. But there’s a wider context to the story of the space program as a whole, placing this book in the center between the machismo of Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and the end of the era as told in Leaving Orbit by Margaret Lazarus Dean.

In conclusion, if you ever dreamed of becoming an astronaut, if you ever wondered what it would be like to go through the intensity – and occasionally insanity – of that program, The New Guys will give you a taste of what it was like for someone you might have been inspired by – or aspired to be. If you are looking for a dive into the causes of the Challenger and Columbia disasters that is accessible to both the layperson and the layperson’s tear ducts, this book will make the whole mess human, comprehendible and utterly frustrating and infuriating at the same time.

The New Guys is a book to touch both the heart and the stars.

Review: The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose UtomiThe Lies of the Ajungo (Forever Desert, #1) by Moses Ose Utomi
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy
Series: Forever Desert #1
Pages: 96
Published by Tordotcom on March 21, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Moses Ose Utomi's debut novella, The Lies of the Ajungo, follows one boy’s epic quest to bring water back to his city and save his mother’s life. Prepare to enter the Forever Desert.
A Library Journal Best Book of the Month! They say there is no water in the City of Lies. They say there are no heroes in the City of Lies. They say there are no friends beyond the City of Lies. But would you believe what they say in the City of Lies? In the City of Lies, they cut out your tongue when you turn thirteen, to appease the terrifying Ajungo Empire and make sure it continues sending water. Tutu will be thirteen in three days, but his parched mother won’t last that long. So Tutu goes to his oba and makes a deal: she provides water for his mother, and in exchange he will travel out into the desert and bring back water for the city. Thus begins Tutu’s quest for the salvation of his mother, his city, and himself.
The Lies of the Ajungo opens the curtains on a tremendous world, and begins the epic fable of the Forever Desert. With every word, Moses Ose Utomi weaves magic.

My Review:

The Lies of the Ajungo is a story that reads like a myth, and is also a story about mythmaking, sitting comfortably at the intersection of fable and fantasy and making the reader uncomfortable in its stark descriptions of how easily people can be led to believe a lie – and the lengths that the powerful will go to maintain it.

If those people are desperate enough and if their oppressors are both ruthless and clever. Very, very clever.

Tutu grew up under the incessant drumbeat of the oppressive, repressive, depressive mantras about his city. A city that has come to be known as ‘The City of Lies’. But Tutu is too desperate to let those endlessly repeated phrases keep him from his quest to be a hero for his city and find water to save his city and his mother. Mostly, to save his mother.

What he finds on his trek through the Forever Desert is that everything that has been said about his city is a lie, and that the name is the biggest lie of all.

He finds friends and companions. They help train him to become a hero – and he helps to train them as well. And they all believe in each other – because they are all from ‘The City of Lies’ and nothing about any of their cities is what they thought. Or were taught. Or believed.

They find the truth, a truth that has the possibility of setting their cities free of the lies told by their conquerors.

If only the rest of their people can set aside all the lies they have been told and tear down each city’s Palace of Lies.

Escape Rating A+: I loved this when I read it last year for a Library Journal review, and I loved it just as much when I reread it last week. It’s an awesome and thoughtful story and I don’t think I can do it justice, but I’m going to try.

The story begins as a tragic but rather typical epic fantasy-type quest. When Tutu sets out he’s the young hero, the chosen one, setting out to save his people. We’ve seen this story before, and if it had continued in that vein it would have been beautifully written but not necessarily special beyond that.

And that’s where it takes its turn into that something special, as Tutu gets a big chunk of his naivete blasted away, learns that his quest has a cost, and discovers that he and his city are not alone. That a heinous crime is being committed, and committed in such a way as to inflict maximum cruelty at minimum cost to as many people as possible.

Which is when the story shifts from epic quest for water to even more epic quest for justice. The truth sets Tutu and his companions free, even as it grieves them for everything that all of their peoples have lost over the centuries, and just how terribly they have all been betrayed.

What made this even more fascinating is that there’s no magic involved in any of it. There’s no Sauron or Palpatine. No monster and no supervillain. It’s just people behaving very, very badly and other people being at first terribly gullible and eventually just terribly downtrodden.

While Tutu learns, to his cost, that both sides are invested in maintaining that narrative, whether because they want to keep the power they have illicitly gained or because they can’t bear to have their illusions destroyed of simply because they’ve just drunk way too much of the ‘kool-aid’ and can’t let go of their beliefs.

It’s possible to read The Lies of the Ajungo as merely the epic quest it first appeared to be. But the more one thinks about it, the more the sand of that desert blows into the cracks of that initial interpretation. It’s a story that stuck with me the first time I read it, and it’s still sticking this time as well.

I always love a good story that also makes me think, and The Lies of the Ajungo is most definitely that. I highly recommend this quickly read fantasy that will leave you with a long book hangover of was and would be and might have been and might yet be kinds of thoughts.

The Forever Desert is a place that is more than capable of holding multiple legends, but when I read The Lies of the Ajungo last year it seemed as if those stories would remain untold. I’m very happy to say that is no longer the case, and a second story from the Forever Desert, The Truth of the Aleke, will be published this time next year. A story which sounds every bit as beautiful, harrowing and yes, legendary, as this first one.

Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka OlderThe Mimicking of Known Successes (Investigations of Mossa & Pleiti, #1) by Malka Older
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: climate fiction, mystery, science fiction, space opera, steampunk
Series: Investigations of Mossa & Pleiti #1
Pages: 176
Published by Tordotcom on March 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Mimicking of Known Successes presents a cozy Holmesian murder mystery and sapphic romance, set on Jupiter, by Malka Older, author of the critically-acclaimed Centenal Cycle.
On a remote, gas-wreathed outpost of a human colony on Jupiter, a man goes missing. The enigmatic Investigator Mossa follows his trail to Valdegeld, home to the colony’s erudite university—and Mossa’s former girlfriend, a scholar of Earth’s pre-collapse ecosystems.
Pleiti has dedicated her research and her career to aiding the larger effort towards a possible return to Earth. When Mossa unexpectedly arrives and requests Pleiti’s assistance in her latest investigation, the two of them embark on a twisting path in which the future of life on Earth is at stake—and, perhaps, their futures, together.

My Review:

The Mimicking of Known Successes throws steampunk, mystery, climate fiction and planetary colonization into a blender with a soupcon of dark academia, a scintilla of romance and just a pinch of Sherlock Holmes pastiche to create a delightful story that leans hard on its central mystery and the push-pull relationship of its puzzle-solving protagonists.

It’s also a wonderful antidote to the recent spate of darkly corrupt academia. Or at least provides a much needed light at the end of some recent deeply dark tunnels in that genre. (I’m looking at Babel and both The Atlas Six and yesterday’s book, The Atlas Paradox.)

That light is in the characters, Investigator Mossa and her once and likely future lover, Scholar Pleiti. Neither of whom can resist a mystery. Or, as before and now again, each other.

The mystery begins, not with a dead body as such stories usually do, but with a missing one. It’s assumed that Scholar Bolien Trewl jumped, or was pushed off the platform at the last station on the end of the line around the gas giant moon these refugees from Earth have settled upon.

There is literally nothing else to do at that station except wait for the next train back inward, visit the four buildings on the platform, or drop off into the gas-wreathed planet below. The missing scholar isn’t still around, he didn’t board the next inbound train, so that leaves suicide or murder by plummet.

But that conclusion doesn’t make sense to Inspector Mossa. The pieces don’t add up. But those same pieces definitely lead her into temptation. The missing man was a Scholar at Valdegeld University, as is Mossa’s former flame Pleiti. Who might be of assistance in this investigation. Or the coincidence may just be an excuse to find out if the flame still burns.

As it turns out, more than a bit of both. And the game is most definitely afoot.

Escape Rating A+: This was a re-read for me. I reviewed The Mimicking of Known Successes last year for Library Journal, but I loved it so much that I kept referring to it in other reviews that I couldn’t resist giving a much longer review here.

So here we are.

At first, it was the setting that grabbed me. Mossa’s trip to that very remote station gives the reader a terrific introduction into the way this world both works and doesn’t, along with a taste of the marvelously steampunk-y nature of the whole thing.

Trains, the trains are so delightfully retro, while the planetary location is anything but. It’s not exactly a surprise that in this future view of the solar system, Earth is a painful and pined for reminder that humanity totally screwed the pooch of their home planet. Humanity is in exile, and seems caught between those who have settled down to make the most of their new home and those who are working towards a return.

That the divide reflects the town vs. gown contention that marks many college towns is just an added fillip to the whole. It’s the University that is devoted to a return, even as they spawn committees and arguments and delays and endless studies focused on the optimal way to go about it.

A process that the victim seems to have been at the heart of. As is Pleiti.

While the setting is fascinating and new, the details of academia that resemble the reader’s present provide a grounding (so to speak) a point of reference and congruence, and a whole lot of dry wit, particularly from Pleiti’s insider perspective.

As the story is told from Pleiti’s first-person perspective, we’re inside her head as she observes just how much her own profession obfuscates the important things and sweats the small stuff all the damn time.

Which lets the reader understand why Pleiti has let herself be drawn into Mossa’s investigation. It’s not just the rekindling of an old flame, it’s the need to work on something that has concrete and immediate effects that can’t be reduced to a footnote.

Even though Mossa and Pleiti nearly are reduced, not so much to a footnote as to a smear of grease on a cracked launchpad as the conspiracy and the mystery reach their explosive conclusion.

I initially picked this one up for its SF mystery blend, a combination that is having a marvelous moment right now. (If you want more of this combo, I highly recommend Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty, The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal and Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson along with John Scalzi’s Lock In.)

What grabbed me and kept me sucked in, TWICE, was the introduction to this quirky colony and its Sherlock and Watson investigative duo as they pursued the mystery to its surprising end. What kept me smiling and even chuckling all along the way were Pleiti’s wry observations of the familiar world of academe wrapped inside an utterly fascinating but not nearly so familiar setting.

When I first read The Mimicking of Known Successes last fall, it seemed to be a standalone book and I was a bit sad about that because I loved the characters and their world and the way they work together in it. So I was really pleased to discover that Mossa and Pleiti will return in February, 2024 in The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles. I’m looking forward to finding out what that title will mean for their relationship and their necessary investigations.

Review: Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-StaceFirebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, science fiction
Pages: 416
Published by Gallery / Saga Press on May 4, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

Like everyone else she knows, Mallory is an orphan of the corporate war. As a child, she lost her parents, her home, and her entire building in an airstrike. As an adult, she lives in a cramped hotel room with eight other people, all of them working multiple jobs to try to afford water and make ends meet. And the job she’s best at is streaming a popular VR war game. The best part of the game isn’t killing enemy combatants, though—it’s catching in-game glimpses of SpecOps operatives, celebrity supersoldiers grown and owned by Stellaxis, the corporation that runs the America she lives in.
Until a chance encounter with a SpecOps operative in the game leads Mal to a horrifying discovery: the real-life operatives weren’t created by Stellaxis. They were kids, just like her, who lost everything in the war, and were stolen and augmented and tortured into becoming supersoldiers. The world worships them, but the world believes a lie.
The company controls every part of their lives, and defying them puts everything at risk—her water ration, her livelihood, her connectivity, her friends, her life—but she can’t just sit on the knowledge. She has to do something—even if doing something will bring the wrath of the most powerful company in the world down upon her.

My Review:

Firebreak isn’t about the game. Not that there isn’t one, and not that Mallory and her best friend Jessa aren’t playing it, but the story in Firebreak is not really about the game. Especially not to the degree that Ready Player One is about the game and the puzzle about the ownership of the game every bit as much as it is concerned with the near-future dystopia in which the story is set.

But they do have something in common – in both stories the game is the opiate of the masses that keeps people from thinking too hard or too long about all the many, many ways in which they and their worlds are totally and epically screwed.

Mallory and Jessa, and every single person they know in Old Town, outside the walls and checkpoints of New Liberty City – where all the elites live – is a survivor of the corporate wars between Stellaxis Innovations and Greenleaf Industries.

The war may have mostly devolved into an uneasy peace interrupted by intermittent skirmishes, but when the war was going hot and heavy mechs and artillery were everywhere, everyone lost family, friends, loved ones, homes and livelihoods. Most of their friends are the ONLY surviving members of their families.

Stellaxis controls water, and Greenleaf controls food. Living in a Stellaxis controlled area, with 9 people crammed in one room of what used to be an old hotel, they queue up every day for their meager water ration and work three, four or even six jobs to pay for rent, food and everything else.

An everything else which includes the in-game credits and items needed to stream their participation in the game BestLife. Which is, ironically, a simulation of the corporate wars.

Mal and Jessa’s gaming stream gets them just enough credits and in-game items to keep them going – albeit barely and on a shoestring. So Jessa jumps at the chance of a high paying sponsor – no matter how skeevy and weird the arrangement seems to be.

Mal is a whole lot more skeptical – but then Mal is just plain skeptical of people in general.

That would-be sponsor turns out to be, not even a small-time corporation, but instead a locked-out conspiracy theorist who might just have the parts of a key that leads to the largest and most dangerous Pandora’s Box of all time. A box that holds the biggest and dirtiest secrets that Stellaxis Innovations has buried in the deepest, darkest subterranean levels of their vast corporate complex.

Literally.

The truth might set Mal and Jessa and everyone they know, free of the corporate oversight that controls their every waking moment. Or it might get them all killed. Slowly by dehydration and kidney failure. Or as quickly as a bullet in the head.

Escape Rating A+: It’s not about the game. It’s about the world that the game lets everyone escape from while packaging and selling the war – and every control and draconian measure that goes along with it – to everyone at the same time.

Firebreak is the story of someone who has spent her life keeping her head down and putting one foot in front of the other, always on the brink of exhaustion, dehydration and starvation – just like everyone else she knows.

At 20ish, Mal is just barely old enough to remember a time before, that life didn’t used to be like this. She’s part of the last cohort to know that there used to be a better way – but she’s too tired and downtrodden to do anything about it.

So the story here is about Mal waking up and trying to do the right thing, or at least a potentially right thing, before it’s too late.

Once she sees the evidence that at the center of the war that Stellaxis has merchandised and sold to everyone is an unforgivable crime, she realizes two things. That someone has to do something. And that that someone is going to be her. Because she can’t unsee what she’s seen and she can’t unknow what she knows and she can’t let it go.

Because she might have been one of the orphaned children who got sucked in, brainwashed, genetically engineered and spit out to be the supersoldiers that sell the merchandise that funds the war. For as long as they live.

The story in Firebreak is about a scrappy, scared, struggling attempt by one “little” person to make a world-spanning corporation take just a tiny bit of responsibility for the evil that they’ve done. An evil that they bring fully to bear on anyone who lifts even a corner of their penthouse suite rug to see just how much dirt got swept underneath it.

Mal is naive, skeptical, and very definitely punching way above her weight class. A fact that is brought home to her with extreme brutality, over and over and over. But she can’t stop trying to do the right thing – even when so much of that attempt goes totally wrong.

In the end, we’re not sure she’s succeeded. And we’re really not sure it’s going to last. But her journey, every heartbreaking, pulse-pounding, sweat-dripping moment of it, keeps the reader on the edge of their seat until the very last page, hoping that there’s just a tiny bit more.

Firebreak is not nearly as much like Ready Player One as the blurbs might lead one to believe, because it’s not about the game at all – meaning that you don’t need to be a gamer or any memory at all of any era’s pop culture iconography.

The way that Firebreak DOES link to Ready Player One is in the way their dystopian settings do – or mostly don’t – work for most of the people who live in them. The world of Firebreak reads like what would have happened to Wade Watts’ world in RPO if Wade had lost the game and the evil corporation had taken over the OASIS. Possibly blended with just a bit of the dystopian setting of Veronica Roth’s Poster Girl with its conspiracy theories, mega-corporation spin doctoring and propaganda, and particularly the shared secrets at the hearts of their power structures.

Firebreak is an absolutely compelling read – with more than a touch of ominously prescient chill – from beginning to end. When I finished it I really wanted just a bit more – and that more is almost here.

A Firebreak prequel novella, Flight & Anchor, is coming in June. I know I’m going to get my heart broken all over again, but this is one of those times when I’m absolutely there for it.

Review: Nightwatch by M.L. Buchman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Nightwatch by M.L. BuchmanNightwatch (Miranda Chase NTSB #12) by M L Buchman
Format: ebook
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: action adventure, political thriller, technothriller, thriller
Series: Miranda Chase NTSB #12
Pages: 370
Published by Buchman Bookworks on February 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

As the Arctic melts, the fabled Northwest and Northeast Passages are opening. But are they opening to war?
A Chinese freighter attacked. A sabotaged passenger jet crashed in Quebec. And high overhead an E-4B Nightwatch, America’s fortress-in-the-sky, sees all.
With nations shifting to high alert, Miranda Chase lands once more in the midst of the fray. But first she must fight battles of her own. Can she conquer the emotional chaos her autism unleashes amid the loss of her past? In time to save her team? —And avert the disaster playing out under the Northern Lights?
A tale of high adventure, airplanes, and espionage.
"Miranda is utterly compelling!" - Booklist, starred review“Escape Rating: A. Five Stars! OMG just start with Drone and be prepared for a fantastic binge-read!” -Reading Reality

My Review:

The tragedy of the Northwest Passage in the 19th century was that it wasn’t there. It was so firmly believed that expedition after expedition sailed for the Arctic, determined to trace a route that would traverse the ocean north of Canada and cut shipping time between Europe and Asia. Many explorers gave their lives in search of a route that did not exist, or in search of others whose lives had already been lost in that search.

Fast forward to the 21st century, when Nightwatch takes place. Today, the tragedy of the Northwest Passage is that it IS there.That once-impenetrable passage opened to ships without the need of an icebreaker late in the summer of 2007. Its mirror-image, the Northeast Passage (AKA Northern Sea Route) in the Arctic waters off the Russian coast, opened in 2009. From an ecological standpoint, this is a tragedy. Climate change is melting the polar ice pack. The predictions of where all that water will end up is currently the stuff of disaster movies, but coastlines will be under threat in the decades to come.

But every cloud is supposed to have a silver lining – in this story it’s a silver lining that seems to contain yet another cloud within it.

With the ice pack in retreat, regularly scheduled commercial shipping over these Northern routes will be increasingly viable, and therefore profitable, shortcuts for freight shipments around the world. Cargo shippers will be thrilled at cutting miles, fuel costs, time, and personnel costs for all of their goods.

But someone’s ox is about to get gored. It is inevitable in the long run, but in the short run they have a shot at staving off that evil day. All they have to do is make the experimental attempts at northerly freight routes seem dangerous, or unlucky, or if the saboteurs are lucky – even both.

They’re not. No plan survives contact with Miranda Chase – not even a plan involving container barges and submarines. Particularly not after one of those subs takes a potshot at the plane she’s flying in.

Escape Rating A+: I’ve been a fan of Miranda Chase from her very first investigation in Drone. While her team has gotten bigger – and scattered a bit – and the stakes in her investigations have gotten considerably higher – this series is consistently among my favorite reads. This twelfth entry in the series absolutely continues that streak of winners.

This one begins in three places – which is entirely fitting as it has three tracks that eventually crash into one. Nearly literally.

A Chinese container ship is in the midst of navigating that Northeast Passage, heading for a record breaking run and a promotion for its captain, when it is forced to drop speed and sacrifice that record because one of its screws (read as propellers sorta/kinda) has developed a fault.

Actually, it’s been encouraged to fail by a missile launched from a mysterious, and mysteriously nearby, submarine.

On practically the other side of the world, near Knowlton, Quebec, Miranda’s friends and teammates Jeremy and Taz are investigating the crash of a small passenger jet that seems to have been sabotaged – by one of its passengers. Who was himself sabotaged, and just so happens to be a high-level agent for the CIA.

While Miranda and her completely stressed out partner Andi Wu are on their way to SEATAC to pick up Andi’s high powered and highly stressFUL mother – at least from Andi’s point of view. Andi’s certain that her mother is still disappointed in her for choosing a military career instead of the legal one that her family had all planned out for her.

The cargo ship’s captain and his crew are all alive but he’s rightfully concerned about the reception he’ll receive from his superiors when he finally reaches port.

Taz is both frustrated and peeved because she’s a fan of mystery fiction in general and Louise Penny’s marvelous Chief Inspector Gamache in particular. (As am I) Jeremy doesn’t understand just how badly she wants to visit all of the local sites dedicated to her favorite detective. But the more she and Jeremy dig into this crash, the less likely it is that she’ll have any time to be a tourist.

While Miranda and Andi fly back to Spieden Island with Andi’s mother Ching Wui simmering in the passenger compartment – only to see that the entire island is on fire. Miranda’s home, her private hangar, her vintage airplanes, all her mementos of her life’s journey so far – all are lost. She panics and nearly crashes the plane she’s flying in her extreme distress.

From these three very disparate starts a compelling, page-turning, supercharged story emerges. The injured CIA agent and the dead passengers lead Miranda and her team to multiple plots from the ouster of the current – and always nefarious – head of the agency to that no-longer-speeding cargo ship to a plot to scuttle a high level conference at the edge of the Arctic to discuss – you guessed it – the potential for using that Northern Sea Route in order to get around the long transit times and ever increasing prices of traversing either the Panama or Suez Canals.

But as much as this investigation turns out to be about following the money – tensions are so high that multiple countries are on the brink of war. It’s up to Miranda and her team, with a whole lot of help from her friends, allies and even one or two downright frenemies, to put all the pieces together before it’s too late.

Miranda Chase always delivers. Nightwatch is yet another compulsively readable chapter in her ongoing adventures! I’m already looking forward to her next investigation.

One final note, as much as I love the Miranda Chase series, it added just that little something extra that Taz’ part of the story was a bit of a love letter – or at least a bit of fannish appreciation – towards Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache series. Her part of the story isn’t just set in Gamache’s stomping grounds, but several of the characters, including Taz herself, are big fans of Gamache’s as will be many of the story’s readers. (For those like Jeremy who are not familiar with the Chief Inspector, the series begins with Still Life and it is marvelous and thoughtful and just a terrific set of beautiful mysteries. Just don’t judge the books by either its TV series or its movie.)

Review: Where Shadows Dance by C.S. Harris

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Where Shadows Dance by C.S. HarrisWhere Shadows Dance (Sebastian St. Cyr, #6) by C.S. Harris
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr #6
Pages: 342
Published by Berkley, New American Library on March 1, 2011
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

How do you set about solving a murder no one can reveal has been committed?
Regency London, July 1812.
That's the challenge confronting C.S. Harris's aristocratic soldier-turned-sleuth Sebastian St. Cyr when his friend, surgeon and "anatomist" Paul Gibson, illegally buys the cadaver of a young man from London's infamous body snatchers. A rising star at the Foreign Office, Mr. Alexander Ross was reported to have died of a weak heart. But when Gibson discovers a stiletto wound at the base of Ross's skull, he can turn only to Sebastian for help in catching the killer.
Described by all who knew him as an amiable young man, Ross at first seems an unlikely candidate for murder. But as Sebastian's search takes him from the Queen's drawing rooms in St. James's Palace to the embassies of Russia, the United States, and the Turkish Empire, he plunges into a dangerous shadow land of diplomatic maneuvering and international intrigue, where truth is an elusive commodity and nothing is as it seems.
Meanwhile, Sebastian must confront the turmoil of his personal life. Hero Jarvis, daughter of his powerful nemesis Lord Jarvis, finally agrees to become his wife. But as their wedding approaches, Sebastian can't escape the growing realization that not only Lord Jarvis but Hero herself knows far more about the events surrounding Ross's death than they would have him believe.
Then a second body is found, badly decomposed but bearing the same fatal stiletto wound. And Sebastian must race to unmask a ruthless killer who is now threatening the life of his reluctant bride and their unborn child.

My Review:

Once upon a time, back in 2005, author C.S. Harris created a character who was the epitome of the typical Regency romance hero, tall, dark and brooding, handsome and aristocratic, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars and damaged by his service, plagued by dark thoughts and even darker secrets.

Then she invested him with a desire, bordering on compulsion, to investigate the darker corners of the society he by rights should sit on top of, and set him on a course to balance the scales of justice no matter the position of whosoever gets crushed by their weight.

Thus began the Sebastian St. Cyr historical mystery series with What Angels Fear, defying expectations from the very first page.

I was hooked back in 2005, and devoured the first five books in the series as they were published. Until, as so many things do, the series got caught up in the black hole of “so many books, so little time” and I stopped following until I was asked to review the eleventh book in the series, When Falcons Fall, for Library Journal in 2016.

And I was hooked again.

I always intended to go back and read the ones I missed, but we’re back at that “so many books, so little time” thing again. This year I’ve decided to make a deliberate effort to read at least the earliest books on my various wishlists, and the gaps I left in reading this series appeared on every list.

So I’ve returned to Regency England and Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, as he reaches the turning point in his life that all those later books in the series presented as a ‘fait accompli’ In 1812, Where Shadows Dance, that thing is just at the beginning of being decided as political factions in Britain are debating just how many of their own fronts they must defend as they determine which – if any – of their allies to aid in the ongoing war with Napoleon.

Amidst all the political turmoil, Devlin’s friend and former comrade-in-arms and current Scotland Yard pathologist (such as that job is in 1812), Dr. Paul Gibson discovers that someone has passed off a murder as a heart attack when he conducts an illicit autopsy on a body he’s not supposed to have, from a source he’s not supposed to know, committing a crime he can never admit to. All he knows is that the young and very dead Foreign Service agent on his autopsy table is the victim of a murder that someone seems to have been desperate to cover up.

Gibson knows one other thing – that his friend Devlin can be trusted to find the truth about the case – no matter how many people in high places are determined to cover it up.

Escape Rating A+: This turned out to be the perfect book to serve as a return to an earlier point in the series. Devlin is facing a personal crossroads, as he has been forced to set aside both the dreams and the defiances that marked his earlier life. He’s about to turn a new page and is aware enough of that to begin a consideration of how his own life has to change – changes that have been made manifest by the later books that I have already read.

Very much at the same time, and part of what continues to fascinate me in this series, is the way that the author weaves an intensely felt sense of the time and place in which Devlin lives with a historical setting filled with conflict and change that becomes both background and foreground to a murder mystery that satisfies readers who are there for the whodunnit.

This story takes place in 1812, a date that should sound familiar to any American reader as U.S. history named a war after it. From our perspective, the War of 1812 might be the only history we remember from that year, but from a British perspective, particularly at the time, the possibility that the U.S. might be itching for an opportunity to invade and take Canada wasn’t the biggest threat on the horizon.

That position was very much reserved for Napoleon Bonaparte, with whom Britain was still most definitely at war. As was most of the rest of Europe. Britain is in negotiations with seemingly all of Napoleon’s enemies, including the Ottoman Empire, Sweden and particularly Russia. Some in Britain want to send troops and/or money to all of the above, while many are more cautious about opening a second front just in case those pesky Americans get too obstreperous about the continuing seizure of American sailors by the British Navy.

The political maneuvering is in the background of the story when Gibson discovers that the body he intended to open up in order to learn more about heart disease turns out to have already been opened up by a stiletto to the spine. That the young cadaver worked in the Foreign Service and seems to have been in those frantic negotiations up to his neck is just the barest hint of the shenanigans that Devlin eventually uncovers – one confusing, conflicting piece at a time.

What makes this series – and this particular entry in it – continue to work for me is its combination of very effective elements. Not just Devlin, but all of the people who populate his slice of Regency England are utterly fascinating and most importantly feel like whole and wholly real, people. Even though I know they (mostly) weren’t. I still feel for them and with them and care about them. Or occasionally hate them – just as Devlin does.

The portrayal of the historical period feels spot on. My own studies brushed on this era a bit, but not nearly enough to catch inaccuracies in the details. It still feels right, to the point of sensing the cobbles under my feet and smelling the stink of Gibson’s utterly inadequate mortuary.

And I love the way the known historical conflicts of the time, both in government in England and in the wider world, are neither ignored nor brushed aside but instead inform every aspect of the mystery and give it depth and substance. All while a murder is committed, the crime is investigated, and evil gets its just desserts even as the story acknowledges that there are plenty of other – and often worse – evils afoot in that wider world that Devlin has yet to deal with. If he can.

Those are the elements that keep me turning pages while I’m reading one of Devlin’s investigations, and keep me coming back for more. So I absolutely will be back, both for my continuing explorations of those books I missed, and for Devlin’s latest investigation in Who Cries for the Lost, coming this April.

Review: The Magician’s Daughter by H.G. Parry

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Magician’s Daughter by H.G. ParryThe Magician's Daughter by H.G. Parry
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: coming of age, fantasy, historical fantasy
Pages: 400
Published by Redhook on February 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A young woman raised on an isolated island by a magician discovers things aren’t as they seem and must venture into early 1900s England to return magic to the world in this lush and lyrical historical fantasy. 
It is 1912, and for the last seventy years magic has all but disappeared from the world. Yet magic is all Biddy has ever known.   Orphaned as a baby, Biddy grew up on Hy-Brasil, a legendary island off the coast of Ireland hidden by magic and glimpsed by rare travelers who return with stories of wild black rabbits and a lone magician in a castle. To Biddy, the island is her home, a place of ancient trees and sea-salt air and mysteries, and the magician, Rowan, is her guardian. She loves both, but as her seventeenth birthday approaches, she is stifled by her solitude and frustrated by Rowan's refusal to let her leave.    One night, Rowan fails to come home from his mysterious travels. To rescue him, Biddy ventures into his nightmares and learns not only where he goes every night, but that Rowan has powerful enemies. Determination to protect her home and her guardian, Biddy's journey will take her away from the safety of her childhood, to the poorhouses of Whitechapel, a secret castle beneath London streets, the ruins of an ancient civilization, and finally to a desperate chance to restore lost magic. But the closer she comes to answers, the more she comes to question everything she has ever believed about Rowan, her own origins, and the cost of bringing magic back into the world.
For more from H. G. Parry, check out:
The Shadow HistoriesA Declaration of the Rights of Magicians A Radical Act of Free Magic
The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

My Review:

The story of The Magician’s Daughter is a case of not just two great tastes going great together, but three great tastes combining to form a delicious and occasionally bittersweet treat of epic proportions.

It begins as a coming-of-age story. Biddy is just 16 when we first meet her. Or she is finally 16, an age when she may not yet be an adult but she is certainly no longer a child, and no longer believes childish things.

It’s 1912 in her version of our world, and the situation has been going to hell in that handcart for 70 years. Because nearly all of the magic has leaked out of the world. Or has been closed off from the world. Or has been used up by the world.

Which is one of the central questions of the whole story.

But Biddy has grown up on the legendary, mystical, nearly-mythical island of Hy-Brasil off the coast of Ireland. An island that was, once upon a time when the world was new and magic was abundant, a fortress of the Tuatha Dé Danann in their nearly-endless war with the Fomorians.

Hy-Brasil still has a bit of magic left, the magic that keeps the island lost in fog and protects Biddy and her guardians, the wizard Rowan and his familiar-spirit Hutchincroft. The island protects them, but it also restricts them. At least it does Biddy, who sees her father-figure leave the island every night in search of more wisps of magic while she is forced to remain behind.

While Rowan’s excuses for why she cannot go to the mainland become more and more threadbare. As do most of his explanations about why the mainland is dangerous and what is going on in the world. The mask that Rowan uses to hide his very real worries about the fading of magic and the reasons behind it no longer conceal his fears or his hopes.

But it’s those fears that come true first, when the forces of the powerful, grasping Mages’ Council that he fled 70 years ago entrap him at last. And Biddy is forced to grab the reins of what little magic she can in order to spring him from their trap.

Which is when Biddy learns that she should have been much more careful about what she wished for. Rowan doesn’t merely let her leave the island, he deliberately removes her from its protections and seemingly sets her out as bait for his enemies.

Along the way, Biddy learns that the world is not remotely like what she dreamed of when she read all the books in the island’s vast library. It is much darker and infinitely more dangerous. And it holds secrets from her even as it exposes the secrets that Rowan has been keeping all her life.

The magic of the world is gone, leaving the world a dark and dismal place. Rowan has the glimmer of the hope of a plan to bring it back. All he needs to do is break open the magical secret that has been hiding, literally, in Biddy’s heart.

If he can find the way. If Biddy still trusts him enough to let him after all the secrets he’s been keeping from her for so long. And if they can keep one step ahead of the forces arrayed against them – even if they have to sacrifice everything along the way.

Escape Rating A+: At the top, I said this story encompassed three great tastes that go great together. The obvious is Biddy’s coming-of-age story. This is also very much a found family story – and a charming one at that. And it’s a power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely kind of story hidden under an almost gothic tale of politics and traps and plots and creatures straight out of the pages of the darkest of dark fantasy.

What makes Biddy’s coming of age story work so well is that she begins as a clean slate. She literally has not been in the real world and has no clue what it’s like. So we see her 1912 through the eyes of someone who had no idea what to expect and who has no built in “but we’ve always done it that way” set of blinders. She knows that so much of what she sees is just plain wrong even if she doesn’t know how to fix it. And she’s aware of the privilege that Rowan and Hutchincroft raised her in. Not a privilege of material things, and not even a privilege of always knowing where the next meal was coming from because that wasn’t always true, but the privilege of knowing that she was loved and that she could explore the island and any thought or idea she might have gathered from books or dreams or observation. And especially the privilege of safety at all times, until that safety was shattered at last.

The found family aspect of this tale is both sweet and bitter. Rowan and Hutchincroft see Biddy as their child, their daughter, even though they did not make her and did not bring her with them because they had any obligation to her. Instead, this is a love that grew over time, and care, and arguments, and impatience and rebellion and mending skinned knees and testing boundaries. And it’s a love that endures even after Biddy learns that Rowan has been keeping gigantic secrets from her about pretty much everything.

And then, on top of that beautiful foundation, there’s the story about magic going away and power corrupting. There’s always a question in Rowan’s mind, and in the reader’s mind as well, as to whether the decline in magic was natural or was caused by human activity. (Now that I think about it there’s a parallel to the climate change arguments I didn’t see as I read the book.) Coming out of that question about a natural decrease versus a man-made one there’s a follow-up question about whether the best use of the remaining magic is to hoard it so that it can be used for the ‘greater good’ – and who gets to define THAT – or whether the magic should be set free to help as it wills for as long as it can.

But if it is a human-made problem, should they hunt for a human-made solution, whatever that might be? Which is where all those questions about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely come sweeping in on the wings of some truly horrible little flying monsters – and go out on the feet of one frightened young woman who is willing to sacrifice everything for the people she loves.

From beginning to end, an utterly charming story that makes the reader fall in love with its characters and their compelling need to fix their broken world.

One last thing that isn’t related but kind of is. As I read The Magician’s Daughter it reminded me of Freya Marske’s Last Binding series, whose first two entries are A Marvellous Light and A Restless Truth, which are both utterly charming and lovely. The world of the Last Binding is not bereft of magic the same way that the setting of The Magician’s Daughter is, but both are set in alternate pre-World War I Englands in which there is a Mages’ Council that is well down the path of the ends justifying the means because of the power corrupting. So if you’re a fan of one you might very well fall in love with the other, as I most certainly did.

Review: Junkyard War by Faith Hunter

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Junkyard War by Faith HunterJunkyard War (Shining Smith #3) by Faith Hunter
Narrator: Khristine Hvam
Format: audiobook
Source: purchased from Audible
Formats available: audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, urban fantasy
Series: Shining Smith #3
Length: 6 hours and 35 minutes
Published by Audible Audio on December 8, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

It’s find retribution or die trying in Shining Smith’s ultimate challenge, from the author of the “Jane Yellowrock” and “Soulwood” series.

Shining Smith and her crew have obtained the weapons they need to rescue one of their own from the grips of their mortal enemy, Clarisse Warhammer. But to mount an assault on her fortified bunker, they have to cobble together an army of fighters.

That could be the biggest battle of them all.

Shining will need to step back into the biker world she left behind to broker an uneasy peace, then lead rival factions into a certain death trap. Can Shining take Warhammer down without having to compel more and more people to do her bidding? And will her feline warriors, the junkyard cats, remain loyal and fight alongside her? Or will Shining have to become something and someone she hates, so that vengeance can finally be hers?

My Review:

“Bloody damn!” as Shining Smith would say. Bloody damn this was a wild ride in Shining’s sidecar. I meant brain – although occasionally also sidecar.

Because Shining’s post-climate-apocalypse AND dystopia is run by the biker gangs – or at least Shining’s little corner of it as well as her mental landscape are. Shining herself is famous and infamous – in equal measure – among the Outlaw Militia Warriors as ‘Little Girl’ – one of the first female ‘made men’ in that fiercely misogynistic culture.

When Shining was literally a little girl her daddy sent her inside the carapace of one of the enemy’s giant ‘mamabots’ with a nuke strapped to her back. Those mamabots were crawling, rolling factories of nanobots designed to infect and kill anyone or anything they came across. They were helping the enemy to conquer the West Coast of the U.S. one klick at a time.

Shining expected to die in that bot – and she very nearly did. Instead, she came out changed, infected by the bots’ poison and transformed by her own exceedingly stubborn will into the human equivalent of the mamabot – a queen constantly emitting a poison that turns anyone that touches it into her thrall.

Including the ever-increasing crew at her junkyard. Especially the cats. Her Cats, who have a queen of their own who is probably the person truly running the place.

But Shining is not the only human queen, because every true hero – especially if that’s not remotely what they want to be – creates their own archenemy – or the other way around. Clarisse Warhammer targeted Shining all the way back in Junkyard Cats, sending the dead body of her best friend back to her junkyard in the trunk of a rusted out car.

Shining has been gunning for Clarisse ever since.

Junkyard War is the final showdown between Shining and Warhammer, the culmination of every single thing that’s happened since the opening of Junkyard Cats. Shining has pulled every string, coaxed every friend, bribed every enemy she has in order to bring enough firepower to bear to have the best chance possible of crawling out alive after sending herself into the lair of someone much worse than that first mamabot.

This time she doesn’t even have a nuke. What she has this time is better. She has friends. And, more importantly, particularly from their point of view, she has the Cats.

Escape Rating A+: I picked up the audio of the first book in the Shining Smith series, Junkyard Cats, three years ago when the audio was all there was. And did I ever wish there was more.

I got that more in 2021’s Junkyard Bargain, and that still wasn’t enough of Shining Smith, her totally FUBAR’d world, or especially her telepathic battle cats who have probably been running things for a lot longer than Shining either knows or wants to think about.

It’s been a long wait but here we have the climax – sometimes in multiple senses of that word – or Shining’s story in Junkyard War. And I have to say that it has SO been worth the wait.

But it has been a hell of a wait because the three books in the series aren’t so much separate books as they are chapters in a continuing saga that now reads like it has skidded, heart first, into a WOW! of a conclusion.

Which means two things. First, the books pile layer upon layer building Shining’s world, so you really need to start at the beginning in Junkyard Cats. Fortunately, the first two stories, Junkyard Cats and Junkyard Bargain are both available as ebooks as well as audio, and they’re fast, compelling reads.

Second, this does feel like an ending, after an edge-of-the-seat thrilling battle that literally plucks at the heart – because the whole series has been told from Shining’s jaded, world-weary, all too often jaundiced and misanthropic point of view. So when she’s directing her friends, her people and the Cats around an ever changing battlefield and worrying over every single one we’re right in there with her, both because Shining’s voice is so singular and wry, and because the narrator who brings her to us, Khristine Hvam, has done a consistently excellent job of embodying Shining through this entire riveting series.

As this story ends, Shining is confronted with something she’s never really had before – the power to choose her own future. There could be new stories in Shining’s world from this point, but they’d be fundamentally different from what came before. So this is at least a break but also quite possibly as close to an HEA as Shining will ever get considering the state of the world she inhabits.

Either way, it’s a wild ride and a total rush and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Whether or not you’ll feel the same way probably relies on whether or not you are able to fall into Shining’s voice because you see everything from inside her head. I loved riding her journey with her but your reading and/or listening mileage may vary. I hope it doesn’t because she’s one hell of a character experiencing a fantastic and utterly absorbing story.