Format: audiobook

Review: The Dead Take the A Train by Richard Kadrey and Cassandra Khaw

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Dead Take the A Train by Richard Kadrey and Cassandra KhawThe Dead Take the A Train (Carrion City, #1) by Cassandra Khaw, Richard Kadrey
Narrator: Natalie Naudus
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, horror, urban fantasy
Series: Carrion City #1
Pages: 391
Length: 12 hours and 59 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Nightfire on October 3, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Bestselling authors Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey have teamed up to deliver a dark new story with magic, monsters, and mayhem, perfect for fans of Neil Gaiman and Joe Hill.
Julie Crews is a coked-up, burnt-out thirty-something who packs a lot of magic into her small body. She’s been trying to establish herself in the NYC magic scene, and she’ll work the most gruesome gigs to claw her way to the top.
Julie is desperate for a quick career boost to break the dead-end grind, but her pleas draw the attention of an eldritch god who is hungry for revenge. Her power grab sets off a deadly chain of events that puts her closest friends – and the entire world – directly in the path of annihilation.
The first explosive adventure in the Carrion City Duology, The Dead Take the A Train fuses Khaw’s cosmic horror and Kadrey’s gritty fantasy into a full-throttle thrill ride straight into New York’s magical underbelly.

My Review:

If someone told me that the Miskatonic River had sent a tributary (or a tentacle) down from Innsmouth to Manhattan, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. At all. The eldritch horrors of this book are VERY eldritch indeed, but it’s the human monsters that really make this story scream.

Besides, as a couple of the book’s characters remark, if the eldritch monster had actually BEEN Cthulhu it would have been much easier to deal with. Instead, Julie Crews and her ‘Scooby gang’ are stuck between the rock of The Mother Who Eats and the hard place of a fake archangel who thinks they have the chops to eat Mother. And certainly plans to scoop up Julie and her friends to pave the way.

But that’s not where we start. Where we start is most definitely at the human dimensions. Julie Crews is a down-at-heels, down-on-her-luck magic worker with plenty of brass, always willing to deliver a kick in the ass, with a knack for surviving stuff that no one should even know about, let alone throw down with.

So we begin with Julie, taking a job she knows she shouldn’t touch with someone else’s bargepole, from her lying, cheating, stealing ex-boyfriend. The one who trashed her and her reputation, stole credit for jobs that she did, and used that credit to slither his way onto and up the corporate ladder at the primo magical legal firm, Thorne & Dirk. (I always wanted it to be ‘Thorne & Dick’ and you probably will too.)

But the job pays real cash money, albeit not enough and under the table, and Julie needs that money to make her rent and pay for her many illicit, illegal and expensive habits – like cheap booze, epic amounts of drugs and high-quality magical equipment.

Her life has already gone more pear-shaped than the average person would expect to survive – and Julie doesn’t. Expect to survive, that is. People who do the kind of work she does and take the kind of damage she regularly takes don’t live to see 40. Or even 35. She’s the last and ONLY survivor of her class from magical training. And Julie’s 30th birthday is coming up fast.

What she doesn’t expect is for her best friend Sarah to show up at her door with one packed bag, a whole bunch of new verbal and physical twitches and dark shadows under her eyes that deserve their own zip code.

What neither Julie nor Sarah ever admit is that they are each other’s ‘one that got away’, or would be if either of them had ever womanned up and actually asked. They’re better together, always have been and always will be, whether they define that together as besties or roommates or the love of each other’s lives.

Something that they’ll have to test ALL the limits of, to hell and back (literally), when Julie’s ex and Sarah’s ex decide to fuck with them in entirely different ways at the exact same time. Putting Julie, Sarah, their friends and ALL of New York City into the crosshairs between the claws of a creature straight out of the Cthulhu Mythos and the many, many mouths of the Mother Who Eats.

Escape Rating B+: First and most importantly, this is your trigger warning that The Dead Take the A Train is a bloody, gory, gruesome reminder that urban fantasy as a genre is the uncanny child of mystery and horror, much like the uncanny babies being born in yesterday’s book, A Season of Monstrous Conceptions.

Meaning that, yes, while there’s a mystery at the heart of this story, there’s a monster or two – or ten – chewing that heart with their fangs as blood drips down their chin. Or chins, however many they just happen to have.

To the point where the horror elements go so far over the top that they come down in a splat of blood and viscera on the other side.

Second, for the first half of the story, both Sarah’s ex-husband Dan and Julie’s ex-boyfriend Tyler were so full of smug, self-congratulatory, evil, white dudebro entitlement that I just couldn’t hack listening to their perspectives. They both exhibited the kind of asshattery that is all over the news and if I wanted to listen to that there are entirely too many real places for it these days.

Which means that I switched from audio to text at that halfway point. I was finding the story compelling – if sometimes gross to the max – but every time the narrator retched out one of their perspectives I wanted to scream. I’ll confess that I gave up too soon, because just as I switched to text the dudebros started getting what they deserved and that was awesome.

While I fully admit that the above may be a ‘me’ thing and not a ‘you’ thing, the relentless drumbeat of just what terrible excuses for human beings Dan and Tyler were nearly threw me out of the story entirely, and that’s absolutely the reason this is a B+ and not any higher. Your reading mileage may vary.

Howsomever, the narrator, Natalie Naudus, is one that I absolutely love, and she does a terrific job of voicing stories that feature last-chance, hard-done-by, bad luck and worse trouble heroines, just like Julie Crews, who would be able to stand, scarred but never broken, right alongside similar characters that Naudus has voiced, like Opal Starling in Starling House, as well as Emiko Soong in Ebony Gate, Zelda in Last Exit, and Vivian Liao in Empress of Forever. (Also Charlie Hall in Holly Black’s Book of Night, but I read that one entirely in text.)

As much as the first half of The Dead Take the A Train drove me around the twist, when the story hits that second half it hits the ground running hard towards a slam bang finish. Along the way we have Julie’s slightly otherworldly ‘Scooby gang’ coming together, with teasing clues to American Gods-type backstories to come, the set up of an almost impossibly compelling magical version of NYC with hints of The City We Became with even more blood and guts and eldritch horrors, and, to cap it off in a blaze of glory, a fulfillment of one of Shakespeare’s most famous sayings (from Henry VI, Part 2 if you’re looking for a hint.)

The Dead Take the A Train is the first book in the projected Carrion City series by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey. There’s certainly plenty of carrion to pin a horde of stories on. If this first book is a taste of what’s to come, I can’t wait to see what I’ll be reading next – absolutely with the lights on!

Review: Under the Smokestrewn Sky by A. Deborah Baker

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Under the Smokestrewn Sky by A. Deborah BakerUnder the Smokestrewn Sky (The Up-and-Under, #4) by A. Deborah Baker
Narrator: Heath Miller
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, portal fantasy, young adult
Series: Up-and-Under #4
Pages: 195
Length: 4 hours and 48 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tordotcom on October 17, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The end of the improbable road.
Since stumbling from their world into the Up-and-Under, Avery and Zib have walked the improbable road across forests, seas, and skies, finding friends in the unlikeliest of places and enemies great in number, as they make their way toward the Impossible City in the hope of finding their way home.
But the final part of their journey is filled with danger and demise. Not everyone will make it through unscathed. Not everyone will make it through alive.
The final part of the enchanting Up and Under quartet reminds us of the value of friendship and the price one sometimes pays for straying from the path. No one’s safety can be guaranteed under the smokestrewn sky.

My Review:

We have come, at last, to the final chapter of Zib and Avery’s journey into and hopefully through the Up-and-Under. It’s a journey that has taken them from their ordinary and mundane homes – even if Zib’s and Avery’s definitions of ordinary and mundane are entirely opposite to one another – and sent them along the Improbable Road on an equally improbable journey through every single one of the elemental kingdoms in the Up-and-Under.

They’ve picked up friends along the way. And, even if they haven’t changed physically along their way, they’ve certainly changed quite a bit on the inside – just as they’ve changed the lands they pass through on the outside.

Even though, as their quest winds closer to its end, this particular part of their journey sees Avery backsliding rather a lot into the boy he was at the beginning. A boy who couldn’t quite wrap his logical and orderly mind around the immutable fact that the Up-and-Under was entirely mutable from beginning to end, that things absolutely did not work there the way they did back home in America. And that the way things did work in the Up-and-Under might not be what HE was used to, but just because things were done differently did not mean things were wrong or ridiculous.

It’s Avery’s bit of stubborn backsliding that pushes the story off the Improbable Road and into their very last set of adventures in the Up-and-Under. Adventures that will have a much bigger impact than any of them imagined when they began.

Because for every great change there are great consequences, and the time has come for someone to pay them. Whether or not anyone wins this last throw of the dice, someone is going to have to lose.

Escape Rating A-: I’ve enjoyed Zib and Avery’s journey through the Up-and-Under, so as a treat for this final entry in the series I decided to try it in audio. I still loved their story, but the audio wasn’t quite as much of a treat as I was hoping it would be.

The voice actor was terrific at differentiating the characters’ voices, but one of those characters is the voice of the narrator who is telling the story to us as the audience. Because of the nature of the series, that its protagonists are predominantly young adults or not quite that old the storyteller character took on an arch tone that arched so very high that it arced all the way over into condescension – which led me to switch to text at the halfway point. I liked the storyteller’s voice a LOT better inside my own head.

However, whether in text or in audio, Under the Smokestrewn Sky is the story that brings the journey through the Up-and-Under to its ending, and it’s a story full of surprises and costs and consequences – as it should be.

No matter the age of the protagonists, this has been the story of an epic fantasy quest that combines bits of Narnia with elements of Wonderland. Zib and Avery have been brought to the Up-and-Under to fix what’s gone wrong there, while for Zib and Avery the quest is to find their way home. It’s not going to end in a big battle between good and evil, because those concepts aren’t exactly the same in the Up-an-Under as they are back home. Instead, it’s a quest to put the out-of-balance back into balance – even if some of what they see looks like evil to Zib and Avery’s – especially Avery’s – eyes.

And, even though Zib and Avery are still children, this has been an adult journey which has to carry adult consequences for someone. A someone who might be either Avery or Zib – even if that doesn’t feel fair. Because part of the lesson Avery has to learn is that fairness doesn’t enter into the big answers to the big questions nearly as often as his life so far has led him to believe that it should.

Readers who started at the beginning of this journey in Over the Woodward Wall will probably not be surprised at how all the big questions that were asked at the beginning of the story get answered at its end. But following Zib’s and Avery’s journey to get there has been fantastic!

Review: Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Starling House by Alix E. HarrowStarling House by Alix E. Harrow
Narrator: Natalie Naudus
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, Gothic, horror
Pages: 320
Length: 12 hours and 26 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on October 3, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

I dream sometimes about a house I’ve never seen….

Opal is a lot of things―orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier―but above all, she's determined to find a better life for her younger brother Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two things: bad luck and E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth century author of The Underland, who disappeared over a hundred years ago.

All she left behind were dark rumors―and her home. Everyone agrees that it’s best to ignore the uncanny mansion and its misanthropic heir, Arthur. Almost everyone, anyway.

I should be scared, but in the dream I don’t hesitate.

Opal has been obsessed with The Underland since she was a child. When she gets the chance to step inside Starling House―and make some extra cash for her brother's escape fund―she can't resist.

But sinister forces are digging deeper into the buried secrets of Starling House, and Arthur’s own nightmares have become far too real. As Eden itself seems to be drowning in its own ghosts, Opal realizes that she might finally have found a reason to stick around.

In my dream, I’m home.

And now she’ll have to fight.

Welcome to Starling House: enter, if you dare.

My Review:

They’ve been telling stories about Starling House and the woman who built it, Eleanor Starling, since Eleanor first came to Eden over a century and a half ago. Some of those stories are even halfway true – but it doesn’t matter because no one in Eden has ever cared about the truth if that truth made them the least bit uncomfortable.

They’ve been telling stories about Opal and her mother Jewel since the day they came to town, too. And even though her mother drowned a decade ago, they’re still telling stories about her too. But mostly, they tell stories about Opal, and most of those are halfway true, too.

One of the stories that no one tells about Opal, because she never reveals truths about herself to anyone at all if she can help it, is that she’s more haunted by Starling House than anyone else in town – because the rest of them just complain about the eyesore, and the bad luck it brings to Eden. While Opal has been dreaming that Starling House was HERS, and has been dreaming those dreams since she was a little girl whose only even somewhat permanent address has been Room 12 at the Garden of Eden Motel since her mom brought her and her little brother Jasper to Eden.

Opal never knew that her mother brought them back to the only home that Jewel had ever known. At least, not until Opal lied, cheated, and inveigled her way into a job at the broken down and dilapidated Starling House. A job that looked to rival Hercules’ task of cleaning the Augean stables.

But Opal doesn’t care. Because Starling House seems to want her there – even if the current Starling, Arthur, claims that he doesn’t. But the house is true because it needs her, and Arthur is lying because of the same damn reason.

While the vultures that have always circled Starling House see Opal’s lies and secrets as a lever they can use to finally pry their way into a place where their dreams will come true.

Someone should have been careful what they wished for, because they’re about to get it.

Escape Rating A-: Starling House sits at the confluence of the River of Dreams and the Stuff of Nightmares, at the four-way stop between the darkest of dark fantasy, outright horror, the angstiest of angsty romance and power corrupts, catty-corner to the Inn of No One Believes the Truths that Women Tell because it’s inconvenient for their wallets, their consciences or even just their privilege.

At first, it’s Opal’s story, a story that is considerably more honest from the confines of her own head than it appears to anyone on the outside, but Opal lies like she breathes – especially to herself. Sometimes she even does as good a job of convincing herself as she does everyone else, but there are always cracks in the facade in her own head. Even if she can’t admit it.

The only love and the only weakness that Opal will admit to is her younger brother Jasper. She will do anything – and everything – to get him safely out of Eden. Because he’s been the only sunlight in her world since their mother drove her car into the river and drowned. And Eden is slowly killing him. Not just his spirit, although probably that too, but literally. Jasper has asthma, they have no health insurance and sometimes not enough for groceries, and the power plant has never met an environmental regulation that they haven’t bribed someone to let them off the hook for. The air is toxic and the whole place is a cancer cluster and Jasper needs to be somewhere else – even if Opal can’t make herself go with him

But Opal also has a weakness for Starling House and the children’s classic, The Underland, that the house’s first owner wrote from within its walls. Starling House captures her dreams, and she can’t resist following those dreams in waking life.

Which is where this story catches her and drags us all down to Underland with her.

Starling House takes all the elements of a gothic romance; the dark and creepy house concealing secret rooms and family secrets, an uber angsty romance between star-crossed would-be lovers both believing they’re not worthy of redemption, adds in myths and monsters from the depths of the imagination, sets it in a hard-scrabble, hard-luck town and then takes the whole story through a metamorphosis when the truth quite literally sets everyone – or at least everyone worthy – free.

Even if more of those people than would ever have imagined at the beginning of this descent into dreams choose to take their hard-won freedom and spend it in that same hard-luck town that might just have won a freedom of its own.

So, even though the angst of the romance sometimes goes way over the top, described in overblown language of desire and denial – at least within the confines of Opal’s head – and if the monsters and the myths turn out to be relics of bad choices and just desserts, the story of Opal, and Arthur and Eleanor descending down into Underland takes the reader along for the wildest of wild rides. Often in the wake of the Wild Hunt itself.

And even if some of both Opal’s and Eleanor’s secrets become obvious to the reader very early on, the journey is still well worth taking with them.

I took this journey in audio, with Natalie Naudus as the most excellent narrator. As a narrator, she seems to specialize in heroines who think that everything is all their fault and that they have to do it all alone, and her voice made me think of her other characters, Emiko Soong in Ebony Gate, Zelda in Last Exit, and Vivian Liao in Empress of Forever. Opal is a fine addition to that illustrious company of women who stand on their own two feet but ultimately get by with a little help from their awesome, kickass friends.

I loved the author’s Fractured Fables, A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended, so I’m looking forward to her next book whenever it appears. I already have Natalie Naudus’ next narration in my TBR/TBL (To Be Read/To Be Listened) pile in The Dead Take the A Train.

Review: Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Shadow Speaker by Nnedi OkoraforShadow Speaker (The Desert Magician's Duology, #1) by Nnedi Okorafor
Narrator: Délé Ogundiran
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: African Futurism, climate fiction, fantasy, science fiction
Series: Desert Magician's Duology #1
Pages: 336
Length: 10 hrs 28 mins
Published by DAW, Tantor Audio on September 26, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Niger, West Africa, 2074
It is an era of tainted technology and mysterious mysticism. A great change has happened all over the planet, and the laws of physics aren’t what they used to be.
Within all this, I introduce you to Ejii Ugabe, a child of the worst type of politician. Back when she was nine years old, she was there as her father met his end. Don’t waste your tears on him: this girl’s father would throw anyone under a bus to gain power. He was a cruel, cruel man, but even so, Ejii did not rejoice at his departure from the world. Children are still learning that some people don’t deserve their love.
Now 15 years old and manifesting the abilities given to her by the strange Earth, Ejii decides to go after the killer of her father. Is it for revenge or something else? You will have to find out by reading this book.
I am the Desert Magician, and this is a novel I have conjured for you, so I’m certainly not going to just tell you here.

My Review:

Peace bombs. A phrase that only makes sense in the context of the future history of the world that leads to this story, as told by the chaotic trickster the Desert Magician about the coming of age of the titular Shadow Speaker, Ejii Ugabe, and her friend, the rainmaker Dikéogu Obidimkpa. It’s their story, but the Desert Magician is the one bringing it to us. Also messing with them and it at the same time.

The Desert Magician is not exactly a reliable narrator – but then trickster avatars seldom are. After all, the story is more fun for them if they get to mess with the protagonists a bit. More than a bit. As much as they want.

As Ejii describes the world in which she grew up, the Earth as it exists after the ‘Great Change’ brought about by those Peace Bombs, it’s not hard to think that the event was as much of a eucatastrophe as it was the regular kind. A whole lot of things seem to be better. More chaotic, but better. Certainly the climate has improved, even if entire forests sometimes spring up overnight, while the technology imported from other, more advanced worlds has made living with the remaining extremes considerably easier.

None of which means that humans are any better at all. Whatsoever. Because humans are gonna human. But it does mean that there are more possibilities, both in the sense of seemingly magical powers and animals, and in the sense of more opportunities for more people to rise above their circumstances – even if some people are still determined to fall into the traps laid by theirs.

Which leads the Desert Magician to Ejii’s story, and leads Ejii to Jaa, the great general who swept into Ejii’s village of Kwàmfà and struck off her father’s head with her sword, setting Jaa and Ejii on a collision course that will either save the world – or end it.

Shadow speaking, the ability to hear the voices of the spirits, is one of the many gifts that have arisen after the Great Change. Ejii is the shadow speaker of the title, and at fifteen is just coming into her power. A power that is telling her to follow Jaa to a great meeting of the leaders of the worlds that have merged into one interconnected system as a result of the change.

Jaa is going to the meeting to start a war in the hopes of preventing worse to come. Ejii has been tasked with finding a way to make peace. Neither task is going to be easy – and only one of them is right. The question is, which one?

Escape Rating A-: This version of Shadow Speaker is an expanded edition of one of the author’s out-of-print early novels. The original version of which, also titled Shadow Speaker, was a winner or finalist for several genre awards in the year it was published, as a young adult novel. Which it still both is and isn’t.

It is, on the one hand, aimed at a young adult audience because its protagonists are themselves in that age range, being merely fifteen when the story begins. As a consequence of their age, both Ejii and Dikéogu clearly still have a lot of growing up ahead of them in spite of the life-changing and even world-altering experiences that have led them to undertake this journey.

At the same time, Ejii at least is very much on the cusp of adulthood, and this is a journey that forces her to make adult decisions about, with no sense of hyperbole whatsoever, the state of the world. Howsomever, a good chunk of what she brings to those decisions has the flavor of the naivete of youth, particularly in the sense that the world SHOULD be fair, people SHOULD do the right thing, and that if only people would communicate honestly a peaceful solution SHOULD be within reach.

It’s not that she doesn’t know the world and the people in it are often stupid, self-centered, greedy and downright mean, it’s that she hasn’t yet been jaded enough by her experiences to truly believe that there can’t be a better way. Even though her personal experiences thus far in her life have seldom shown it to her.

Dikéogu is not nearly as mature as Ejii is. He whines a LOT. Not that his complaints aren’t justified, but it’s so very clear that he still has a lot of growing up to do and that expresses itself in a kind of ‘pity poor me’ whining that gets hard to take – particularly in audio as he’s voiced in a higher pitch to distinguish his speech from Ejii’s. Which works very well indeed as characterization while driving me personally nuts as I find high-pitched voices jarring. (I recognize this is a ‘me’ thing and may not be a ‘you’ thing, but if it is also a ‘you’ thing, you have been warned.)

While the Desert Magician is presenting this story, he’s not an omnipresent presenter. We see the story through Ejii’s perspective except at the very beginning and end. She is the person we follow, although the story is not told from inside her head. Rather, the story unfolds around her and her actions, and we only see what she sees and know what she knows and get as confused as she does at what she doesn’t.

Which means that while the narrator, Délé Ogundiran, does an excellent job of standing in as Ejii’s voice, that may not be true for the second book in the duology, which will be Dikéogu’s story. Hopefully by the point in Dikéogu’s life when that story takes place, his voice will have dropped.

As much as Ejii comes of age and into her power through her riveting adventures in Shadow Speaker, her world and all the worlds that have become interconnected as a result of the ‘Great Merge’ that was part and parcel of Earth’s ‘Great Change’ also have a great deal of maturing to do – or at least negotiations towards that goal – as this first story ends. Whether the merged worlds will survive that change or destroy each other is part of the subsequent story in this duology that I’m really looking forward to seeing. Or hopefully hearing.

Dikéogu’s story may have started here but his true coming-of-age-and-into-power story, Like Thunder, is coming just after Thanksgiving. And I’ll be very grateful to read it – or hopefully have it read to me like Shadow Speaker – over the holidays.

Review: Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Into the Riverlands by Nghi VoInto the Riverlands (The Singing Hills Cycle, #3) by Nghi Vo
Narrator: Cindy Kay
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy
Series: Singing Hills Cycle #3
Pages: 112
Length: 2 hrs 21 mins
Published by Tantor Audio, Tordotcom on October 25, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Wandering cleric Chih of the Singing Hills travels to the riverlands to record tales of the notorious near-immortal martial artists who haunt the region. On the road to Betony Docks, they fall in with a pair of young women far from home, and an older couple who are more than they seem. As Chih runs headlong into an ancient feud, they find themselves far more entangled in the history of the riverlands than they ever expected to be.
Accompanied by Almost Brilliant, a talking bird with an indelible memory, Chih confronts old legends and new dangers alike as they learn that every story-beautiful, ugly, kind, or cruel-bears more than one face.

My Review:

The entire Singing Hills Cycle is a story about stories; the collection of them, the interpretation of them, and especially the way in which that interpretation changes over time as those stories fade in and out of conscience and memory.

Cleric Chih has come to the Riverlands to learn what the Riverlanders themselves have to say about the many, many martial arts legends that once walked the Riverlands, only to find themselves in the middle of one.

Or perhaps two. Or even an infinite number of interpretations of the very same one.

Chih, with their friend, mascot and memory recorder, the neixin bird Almost Brilliant, are on the road to Betony Docks, intending to wind their way home to Singing Hills to deliver their report of the stories and legends they have found along their most recent journey.

It’s who they are. It’s what they do. It’s what Singing Hills is all about.

Chih sees the opportunity to travel with the young martial arts master Wei Jintai, her sworn sister Mac Sang, and the middle-aged couple Lao Bingyi and Mac Khanh as a way of traveling the rather dangerous road through the Riverlands in somewhat greater safety while taking the opportunity to hopefully learn some new stories to take home.

However, the stories come to life – and death – as they travel into the lands of the Hollow Hand sect of bandits, thugs and marauders. The Hollow Hand is supposed to have been wiped out long ago, and the martial heroes who did the wiping, Wild Pig Yi and Gravewraith Chen, are assumed to be long dead.

But legends never die. Sometimes they don’t even fade away. They just become different legends. Over and over and over again. Even as they hide in plain sight and boss everyone around.

Escape Rating A+: At first, Into the Riverlands seems as if it’s a play on the Canterbury Tales, with Cleric Chih taking the place of Geoffrey Chaucer himself (who, come to think of it, by certain definitions was himself a ‘cleric’). Into the Riverlands is a journey, and every person in the party has at least one story to tell. It’s Chih’s duty to record those stories – not to become a part of one themselves.

Which most definitely doesn’t stop that from happening anyway.

It’s pretty clear from the beginning of their trip that Lao Bingyi and Khanh are more than they seem – a devoted middle-aged married couple where the wife knows everyone and everything and can’t stop from bossing people around and telling them all about themselves, while her husband is a man of few words who indulges her every whim.

And that portrait is manifestly true – while still only being one face that they wear. It’s who people expect them to be at this point in their lives. But it’s not who they have been, or even who they ARE. Those are faces they reveal only in part, and only when they must.

It’s only when the crisis comes upon them – or they come upon it – that Chih gets a glimpse of those true faces, and even those are masks that conceal one or more truths that they are not ready to reveal – if they ever will be.

It’s as though Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien, the protagonists of the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, had managed to survive their tragic story and outlive their legends into middle age. If they had, or if their tragic ending was either smoke and mirrors on their parts or literary license on the part of some chronicler, they might have become Mac Khanh and Lao Bingyi. And perhaps they did.

Certainly Lao Bingyi lies at the heart of a whole host of tales that Chih gets the barest glimpse of and is informed in no uncertain terms that it’s all they are entitled to get. That the story is hers and not theirs and NOT the Singing Hills Abbey’s.

And that’s the right ending of this tale, which was lovely in the telling even if a bit nerve-wracking for the participants in the doing.

But, as I said in last week’s review of Mammoths at the Gates, throughout the Singing Hills Cycle Chih has been moving steadily from the periphery of the story to the center of the narrative. Their own story is in Mammoths at the Gates, and it was marvelous to finally see their perspective on their own world rather than merely being a witness and recorder to others.

I read Into the Riverlands before it came out in 2022 for a Library Journal review and loved it at the time but didn’t take the opportunity to write it up for Reading Reality while it was still fresh in my memory. After re-reading Mammoths at the Gates last week in the same circumstance, I wasn’t ready to leave Chih’s world and decided to take a trip back through audio. It seemed appropriate as the stories that Chih records are stories that they are being told and I wanted to experience them the same way.

I’m very glad I went back, as Into the Riverlands made an excellent audiobook, thanks to the expert narration of Cindy Kay. And the story had added depth and meaning after reading Mammoths at the Gates and exploring the neixen birds in general, and Almost Brilliant in particular, in a story that better showcased her talents and personality. On the whole I enjoyed this book even more the second time around, to the point where it’s making me think I might want to pick up the audiobooks for the first two books in the series, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, and go all the way back to the very beginning!

One final note in reference to the ‘neixin’ and the audiobook. The thing about reading without hearing the words is that you learn how to spell words like ‘neixin’ without knowing how they sound. Listening to an audiobook is the reverse, in that you hear the word without knowing how it’s spelled (which can be frustrating when writing a review!) ‘Neixin’ does not sound at all like I thought it did, and I’m glad to sit corrected.

So reading/re-reading the Singing Hills Cycle has been lovely, and I’m already looking forward to the next book in the series, The Brides of High Hill. But listening to the story, as I think it’s meant to be told, has been a delight.

Review: Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Starter Villain by John ScalziStarter Villain by John Scalzi
Narrator: Wil Wheaton
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: publisher, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, superheroes
Pages: 272
Length: 8 hrs 5 mins
Published by Audible Studios, Tor Books on September 19, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Following the bestselling The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi returns with Starter Villain, another unique sci-fi caper set in the strangest of all worlds, present-day Earth.
Inheriting your mysterious uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might imagine.
Sure, there are the things you'd expect. The undersea volcano lairs. The minions. The plots to take over the world. The international networks of rivals who want you dead.
Much harder to get used to...are the the sentient, language-using, computer-savvy cats.
And the fact that in the overall organization, they're management...

My Review:

It’s a truism that “dogs have owners, cats have staff” and in that context, Charlie Fitzer is absolutely the staffer for ‘his’ cat, Hera, and her newly adopted kitten sister Persephone. In fact, Charlie is more Hera’s pet than she is his, something that he is forced to become all too aware of as Charlie’s situation sinks its teeth into him – figuratively and even literally.

As the story begins, Charlie is so far down that he can’t even see ‘up’ from where he’s standing. He’s a journalist without a job because journalism is dying. He’s divorced. The dad he spent the last several years taking care of is dead, and Charlie is living in his dad’s house but only owns one quarter of said house – while his three siblings want him OUT so they can sell it. He wants to buy a local bar so he can get out of substitute teaching and maybe build a life again.

And his great uncle Jake just died, which Charlie only knows about because he used to be a finance journalist – and a good one – and he still can’t resist listening to the finance news. He’s not expecting a legacy from Uncle Jake because Charlie hasn’t seen Uncle Jake since he was FIVE and barely remembers the man nearly 30 years later.

But Uncle Jake, who Charlie always believed was a parking lot magnate – which he was – was also something else. Something Charlie gets more than a glimpse of when he attends Uncle Jake’s funeral and one of the other attendees attempts to stab the corpse.

Uncle Jake was clearly not just in the parking lot business. And now, neither is Charlie. Which is how he discovers that Hera isn’t just a cat, and that truth is not only infinitely stranger than fiction – but that it downright inspires it in ways that Charlie could never have imagined.

At least not until he found himself mediating labor disputes between the management of the not-exactly-secret, über high-tech, super villain headquarters that Charlie himself is now in charge of and a pod of genetically engineered, super-intelligent and seriously pissed off dolphins who are planning to go on strike.

Escape Rating A: Charlie starts out Starter Villain in WAY, WAY over his head. Part of his charm is that he never loses sight of that fact. He’s always aware that he hasn’t got a clue, and isn’t likely to get one any time soon, and is secretly panicking about it every other minute. Which is a big chunk of why we like him and end up rooting for him so hard, because his inner voice is asking the same questions that a lot of us would be asking in his place.

The setup of Charlie’s world is hilarious and frightening AF at the same time. So much of what happens is utterly silly and bizarre, but with Charlie as our window into this universe we get to secretly giggle – sometimes guffaw – and Kermit-flail in panic right along with him. What makes it work is that the only thing about the over-the-top-ness of it all that Charlie takes seriously are the murders and death threats – which are legion. The trappings of wealth and power are hollow – at least as they apply to him – and he takes all of it with a grain of salt and a look behind the curtain.

So Starter Villain starts out looking like a short course in how to become a supervillain in a few, not so easy, morally ambiguous lessons, only for both Charlie and the reader to ultimately learn that they’ve been outvillained every single hilarious step of the way – and so has everyone else.

There are a couple of niggles that kept this from being an A+ grade, and one that almost put it over the top anyway, because in the end I had an absolute ball with Starter Villain, and not just because of the cats. Although they certainly helped – in exactly the way that cats always do.

The early part of the story is a really hard read – pretty much right up to the point where ‘Tobias the Stabber’ tries to stab Uncle Jake’s corpse to make sure the old man is really dead this time. It’s hard because Charlie is just so far down during that first part of the story, and circumstances continuously hammer that point home to both Charlie and the reader to the point where it feels a bit like ‘piling on’. That’s probably intentional, but it still makes that first part a bit more of a slog than I generally expect from this author.

Speaking of whom, the other niggle that is not a ‘me’ thing but may be a ‘you’ thing is that Charlie is very much the author’s avatar in this one. The bleed through from the author’s public persona to Charlie’s character is obvious. I like the author’s public persona, I’ve been to a whole bunch of his readings and events and often read his blog, Whatever, for his signature brand of giggles, snark and well-thought-out malleting. But I recognize that he’s an acquired taste. I’ve been rather thoroughly infected, and clearly so have a lot of others or his books wouldn’t make the New York Times Bestseller list on the regular. But if you’re not at least neutral to that taste, Charlie Fitzer may not be your jam. If so, I think you’re missing out but YMMV.

The thing that almost put Starter Villain over the top into an A+ anyway is that this is my second ‘read’ of Starter Villain. The first time around, I read it for a Library Journal review, which turned out to be Starred Review and the SFF Pick of the Month that month. So I did love it but that first bit was just hard. (I liked Charlie too much to enjoy watching him suffer – especially from inside his own head.)

This time around I was able to listen to the audiobook (THANK YOU TOR BOOKS!), narrated by Wil Wheaton of Star Trek: Next Gen fame. Wheaton is channeling the author’s public persona so hard and so well that I nearly caught myself checking a couple of times that it really was him and not the author himself – who does do an excellent job of reading his own work at conventions and on book tours.

But all of the above means that, as the character reads like an avatar of the author’s public persona, and the actor is excellent at channeling that same voice, the reading feels almost seamless, like we’re directly in Charlie’s head the whole time and Kermit-flailing right along with him.

In short – which I realize I haven’t been AT ALL – this means that you really, really need to read Starter Villain – especially if you like cats and are sure they’re the ones really in charge of you, your house, and pretty much everything else in the world. And if you have or can create an opportunity where listening to this book in audio will work for you, make it so because it’s even better in audio.

Review: Prophet by Sin Blache and Helen MacDonald

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Prophet by Sin Blache and Helen MacDonaldProphet by Sin Blaché, Helen Macdonald
Narrator: Jake Fairbrother, Ryan Forde Iosco, Charlotte Davey
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: espionage, mystery, science fiction, thriller
Pages: 480
Length: 17 hours and 1 minute
Published by Grove Press, Recorded Books on August 8, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Daring, surprising and superbly plotted, this is a fresh, thrilling page-turner from a dynamic new duo in genre fiction
Your happiest memory is their deadliest weapon.
THIS IS PROPHET.
It knows when you were happiest. It gives life to your fondest memories and uses them to destroy you. But who has created it? And what do they want?
An all-American diner appears overnight in a remote British field. It's brightly lit, warm and inviting but it has no power, no water, no connection to the real world. It's like a memory made flesh - a nostalgic flight of fancy. More and more objects materialise: toys, fairground rides, pets and other treasured mementos of the past.
And the deaths quickly follow.Something is bringing these memories to life, then stifling innocent people with their own joy. This is a weapon like no other. But nobody knows who created it, or why.
Sunil Rao seems a surprising choice of investigator. Chaotic and unpredictable, the former agent is the antithesis of his partner Colonel Adam Rubenstein, the model of a military man. But Sunil has the unique ability to distinguish truth from lies: in objects, words and people, in the past and in real time. And Adam is the only one who truly knows him, after a troubled past together. Now, as they battle this strange new reality, they are drawn closer than ever to defend what they both hold most dear.
For Prophet can weaponise the past. But only love will protect the future.

My Review:

From the opening of Prophet, two things are immediately clear. Sunil Rao and Adam Rubenstein are both FINE, and the situation they are in is already FUBAR.

Whatever is going on – which neither they nor the reader know yet – Adam and Rao are both Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic (and) Egotistical (although Rao is way more of the last than Adam) and the world is already Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. FINE and FUBAR to the max, both of them and all of it.

In other words, they’re both hot messes and not a single thing that happens in Prophet helps either of them get any better.

Pretty much the opposite, in fact.

Calling Sunil Rao a human lie detector isn’t nearly enough of a description. It is TRUE, which matters a lot because that’s what Rao, as he prefers to be called, really does. He can tell when someone or something is true. Which explains why Rao gets called in – and out of a psychiatric institute after a suicide attempt – to the sight of something that so clearly does not belong even as he’s staring at the manifestation of it.

Come to think of it, Rao’s ‘gift’, for lack of a better word, also explains the psych hold, as well as why his work partner/keeper, Lt. Colonel Adam Rubenstein, has been brought in to make sure that Rao doesn’t go off the rails, again, no matter how much the situation they have been dragged into might justify it.

And that’s where both the thriller and the SFnal aspects come into this story. Prophet isn’t a person, there is no one predicting the future. And it’s not ‘profit’, which is what I first thought when I heard the title and hadn’t yet seen it in print.

Although, that’s for select definitions of both of those things, as there is a cabal that intends to make profit on Prophet in the long run, and they do believe that they can control the future with it. They’re oh-so-far off base on both counts.

Prophet is a drug. It’s an attempt to weaponize nostalgia. Which would be one hell of a power IF the side effects could be dealt with. At least the side effects that are a bug and NOT an actual feature. (As we already know because it’s already sorta/kinda happening IRL)

But Prophet isn’t exactly what anyone thought it was, and Rao’s special talent isn’t exactly what anyone has been led to believe, while Adam’s motivations for letting himself get roped into this FUBAR are not what anyone who thinks they are in charge of the whole thing has any reason to have a clue about.

Which leads to this story about finding those clues, the truth about Prophet, who thinks they’re behind it and what actually is. The truth about what Rao can really do. The truth about who Rao and Adam really are. The truth about the relationship between them that they have spent years trying to hide from themselves and each other.

And especially the truth about the nature of the universe, which is not a place that anyone would have predicted this story would go – but is oh-so-utterly fascinating once it gets there.

Escape Rating A+: The thing about Prophet as a story is that it is damn difficult to categorize. It’s kind of like Michael Crichton and Robert Ludlum had a book baby, and as wild and crazy as that thought is the whole thing still needs a lot of midwives and stepparents to get a glimpse at just how much is packed into the story.

But still, that’s a start. (It’s also a clue that any expectations that Prophet will have any resemblance at all to co-author Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk are going to be thoroughly disappointed.)

At first it all seems a bit SFnal, of the laboratory school of science fiction – much like Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain. Prophet is created in a laboratory, and tested in a more-or-less scientific fashion. Or at least a scientific fashion for scientists who had their ethics surgically removed – which would also be science fiction. (We hope, we really, really do!)

But the way the story works is as a kind of mystery/thriller, particularly of the spy thriller school. Which is interesting because espionage fiction is usually about governments spying on other governments and that’s not what’s happening here. It’s not even, exactly, corporate espionage. Although it’s not exactly not either. (There are a LOT of things in Prophet that are not exactly what they seem but not exactly not what they seem, all at the same time.)

It’s more that Adam and Rao are kind of but not exactly undercover within the organization that is working with Prophet, playing with things they don’t understand, and trying their damndest to figure out what the hell is going on.

Which leads to the mystery. At first it’s the mystery of what created a 1950s era, American-style diner in the middle of the English countryside in a literal instant with someone actually watching the whole time. And what keeps happening to the people who get exposed to Prophet, whether accidentally or on purpose. Mostly on purpose.

Along with the mystery of why Adam Rubenstein is immune and Sunil Rao can safely extract it from people who have been exposed. It’s all a puzzle and a mystery and Adam and Rao become deeply invested in solving it – because they must.

Mixed in with ALL of that, and it’s a lot, is the relationship between Rao and Adam that is, that isn’t, that might be, that can’t be, and that is always more and different than anyone thinks it is. Which includes themselves. And quite possibly, the multiverse.

The inability to figure out what box Prophet falls into will drive some readers bananas. Certainly it gave the reading group that recommended it to me a whole bunch of very mixed reactions because it’s not easily defined. They collectively liked it and were not sure about it at the same time.

What carries the story, and carries the reader through the story, is the ever-evolving, often hidden, always on the verge of heartbreak relationship between Sunil Rao and Adam Rubenstein. They are not who they appear to be – not even to each other. Their histories are both shared and opaque to each other. And they’re both so FINE (in the sense of the acronym) that they are on the edge of mutually assured destruction almost all the time. And yet, they’re always on the same page and always have the same goals, even if it doesn’t seem that way at first, not even to them.

If the reader falls for them and their relationship, and I did, the story is an absolute WOW from beginning to end. An end which still manages to be a bit deus ex machina in spite of the reader being able to see it coming a mile away AND the way that it’s not the deus that saves the day. It’s the machina.

I listened to this one all the way to the end, and the readers were terrific every step of the way, even when they were voicing each other’s characters because the story is told in three, sometimes dueling, first person perspectives. This is the kind of first-person narration I love listening to, because the readers were so good and the story so compelling and the characterization, both in the text and in voice was so very much each of them individually that I really did feel like I was in their heads. Which made for an awesome listening experience.

One of my ongoing frustrations with multiple narrators in audiobooks, as much as I utterly love the style and how much it adds to the storytelling, is that while the list of narrators is credited, it’s seldom detailed into precisely who narrates whom. In this particular production, I believe that Jake Fairbrother ‘played’ Rao and Ryan Forde Iosco took Adam’s part, but I can’t be 100% certain of that in the way that I’m sure that Charlotte Davey voices Veronica, the absolutely psychopathic researcher in charge of Prophet R&D.

To sum things up, Prophet is absolutely bonkers in the best of all possible ways. If you like laboratory-based SF, the implications of the story are fascinating. If you love espionage fiction, especially if you miss it and wonder how those kind of stories are going to be told post-Cold War, this is a fantastic exploration of who might still be spying on whom and why. And if you love a good bromance/buddy thriller, especially one that has the potential for more, Prophet could be your jam across the board, and even better in audio.

It absolutely, positively was mine.

Review: Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name? by Norma Dunning

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> C Reviews
Review: Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name? by Norma DunningKinauvit?: What's Your Name? The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter's Search for her Grandmother by Norma Dunning
Narrator: Norma Dunning
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Canadian history, history, memoir
Pages: 184
Length: 6 hours and 4 minutes
on August 1, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the winner of the 2021 Governor General's Award for literature, a revelatory look into an obscured piece of Canadian history: what was then called the Eskimo Identification Tag System
In 2001, Dr. Norma Dunning applied to the Nunavut Beneficiary program, requesting enrolment to legally solidify her existence as an Inuk woman. But in the process, she was faced with a question she could not answer, tied to a colonial institution retired decades ago: "What was your disc number?"
Still haunted by this question years later, Dunning took it upon herself to reach out to Inuit community members who experienced the Eskimo Identification Tag System first-hand, providing vital perspective and nuance to the scant records available on the subject. Written with incisive detail and passion, Dunning provides readers with a comprehensive look into a bureaucracy sustained by the Canadian government for over thirty years, neglected by history books but with lasting echoes revealed in Dunning's intimate interviews with affected community members. Not one government has taken responsibility or apologized for the E-number system to date -- a symbol of the blatant dehumanizing treatment of the smallest Indigenous population in Canada.
A necessary and timely offering, Kinauvit? provides a critical record and response to a significant piece of Canadian history, collecting years of research, interviews and personal stories from an important voice in Canadian literature.

My Review:

The title of this book is a question, because that’s how this author’s journey began. While it begins as a reclamation of identity, what that attempt leads to is a search for it – or at least, and with full irony as becomes apparent during the telling – a search for a very specific piece of government documentation that was intended, not to confirm but rather to deny the lived essence of an identity it was designed to repress if not, outright, erase.

That search for proof of her mother’s, and as a result her own, Inuit heritage led the author, not just to a multi-year search but also to a second act career in academia, exposing the origins and the abuses – whether committed out of governmental malice or idiocy – of a system that may have been claimed to be a system for identifying the Inuit population, but was truly intended to colonize them, divide them, and ultimately erase the beliefs and practices that made them who they were.

So on the one hand, this is a very personal story. The author had learned only in adulthood that she was, herself, Inuit. It’s a truth that her own mother refused to talk about as long as she lived. But when Dunning decided to apply for enrolment in the Nunavut Beneficiary program, she opened up the proverbial can of worms, discovering long-buried secrets that had overshadowed her mother’s life and the lives of all Inuit of her mother’s generation and the one before it. A history that was as poorly documented as her mother’s life and identity.

It’s a journey that began with a hope, middled with a question that turned into an obsession – even after that hope was answered – and led to the author’s search for a history that was long-denied but that needed to be brought into the light.

Reality Rating C: Kinauvit? is a combination of a personal search for identity with the intricacies of searching in records that were an afterthought for the government that recorded them, administered them and was, at least in theory, supposed to serve the people those records concerned but that the government obviously didn’t understand a whit. But the story of that personal search is mixed, but not terribly well blended, with a scholarly paper about the history of the Canadian government’s treatment and suppression of the Inuit peoples over whom the government believed it held sovereignty.

The two narratives, the author’s personal search and the scholarly paper that resulted from it (her Master’s thesis for the University of Alberta) both have important stories to tell, and either had the possibility of carrying this book. The issue is that the two purposes don’t blend together, but rather march along side-by-side uncomfortably and unharmoniously as they are entirely different in structure and tone to the point where they don’t reinforce each other’s message the way that they should – or was mostly likely intended that they should.

This book contains just the kind of hidden history that cries out to be revealed. But this attempt to wrap the personal journey around the academic paper results in a book that doesn’t quite work for either of its prospective audiences.

I listened to Kinauvit? in audio, which generally works well for me for first-person narratives, which this looked like it would be. Also, sometimes an excellent reader can carry a book over any rough patches in its text, especially for a work with a compelling story or an important topic that I have a strong desire to see revealed. Kinauvit? as an audiobook had both of the latter, a search that was compelling, combined with a deep dive into historical archives which is absolutely my jam, resulting in a true story of government neglect and outright stupidity.

But it is very, very rare that authors turn out to be good readers for their work unless they have some kind of performance experience. In all of the audiobooks I have ever listened to over the past three decades, I can only think of one exception to serve as an exception.

In this particular case, the author recites the book as though she was delivering the academic paper that forms the core of the book. But this publication of the work was not intended to BE an academic paper. The audience for this work would be better served with a narrator who is able to ‘voice’ the book, to use a narrative style imbued with the flow and the cadences of a storyteller.

The dry recitation that I listened to blunted the impact of the personal side of the story while the inclusion of the words “Footnote 1”, “Footnote 2”, etc., when one of the many, many footnotes occurred in the text was jarring to the point that it broke this reader out of the book completely. That the footnotes themselves consisted of the simple reference to the place in the source material from which the quote was drawn added nothing to the narrative but made its origin as a scholarly paper all too apparent.

In the end, this book left me torn. I wanted to love it. I was fascinated by its premise, and remain so. It’s important history and not just Canadian history. The truths that the author uncovered deserve a wider audience and more official recognition than has been achieved to date. But this vehicle for telling those truths doesn’t do them justice, even though justice is exactly what is needed.

Review: Wild Spaces by S.L. Coney

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews
Review: Wild Spaces by S.L. ConeyWild Spaces by S.L. Coney
Narrator: Nick Mondelli
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: coming of age, horror
Pages: 122
Length: 2 hours and 28 minutes
Published by Dreamscape Media, Tordotcom on August 1, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Robert R. McCammon’s Boy’s Life meets H. P. Lovecraft in Wild Spaces, a foreboding, sensual coming-of-age debut in which the corrosive nature of family secrets and toxic relatives assume eldritch proportions.
An eleven-year-old boy lives an idyllic childhood exploring the remote coastal plains and wetlands of South Carolina alongside his parents and his dog Teach. But when the boy’s eerie and estranged grandfather shows up one day with no warning, cracks begin to form as hidden secrets resurface that his parents refuse to explain.
The longer his grandfather outstays his welcome and the greater the tension between the adults grows, the more the boy feels something within him changing —physically—into something his grandfather welcomes and his mother fears. Something abyssal. Something monstrous.

My Review:

Wild Spaces is the story of one boy’s coming of age. It’s the story of a summer that sharply divides a young man’s life between ‘BEFORE’ and ‘AFTER’. And it’s the story of something straight out of Lovecraft Country oozing its destructive way out of a cave on the coastal plains of South Carolina to wreak havoc on that boy and everyone and everything he holds dear.

On its surface, on the surface of the murky water that hides a monster, this is the story about the summer the boy’s grandfather came and outstayed his welcome. It’s about the summer that destroyed the family’s idyll and particularly the boy’s idyllic childhood.

It’s obvious to everyone, the boy, his parents and even his dog, that there’s something not right about his grandfather and this visit. In this summer of his 12th birthday, the boy is aware enough of his family’s dynamic to see that the advent of his grandfather is destroying them from the inside, fractured peace by broken piece.

The boy trusts his parents to fix things – as adults are supposed to do – as they’ve always done. But they don’t. And he can’t. He can’t even articulate what’s wrong, even though he knows the old man has broken something important within them all.

And then it’s too late.

Escape Rating B: Wild Spaces is a story about creeping dread creeping creepily along until it overwhelms the story, the family at its center, the soul of the boy at its heart and the life of the dog at his.

The dog, Teach, who may be the hero of this story because he’s the only character referred to by name, dies at the end, so take this as a trigger warning. Even more triggery, the first time the boy thinks his dog is dead, he isn’t, which makes the point where the dog really does die just that much more devastating at a point where the entire story has become a howl of devastation.

For a story that isn’t normally in my wheelhouse, I ended up with a whole lot of thoughts about the whole thing – sometimes as I was listening to it with no good way to write stuff down.

The narrator did an excellent job of adding to the creeping creepiness because his reading was in what felt like what would be the boy’s slight drawl of cadence. This was, on the one hand, perfect for the story and for being inside the boy’s head, and on the other, it drove me bonkers because I wanted things to happen faster – which leads to this being one of the few audiobooks where I raised the narration speed a bit.

I wanted things to go faster because it was obvious what was coming. That creeping horror is part of the story, it’s supposed to work that way, but I had reached the point where I was shouting at the adult characters to wake the eff up and stop effing up and get the old man out because it was obvious that he was bent on destroying them. And even worse, that they knew it and weren’t doing anything about it – because family.

The old man didn’t have to become a sea monster – which he does – because he is already a monster in human form and would have been a monster if he hadn’t transformed. It was also super obvious that he was trying to groom his grandson to become a monster just like him. Which could have been true and horror-filled horror with or without the actual transformation.

Which leads me straight to the boy transforming into the monster his heredity has doomed him to be. Which still could have been a metaphor for puberty, and going from last week’s Shark Heart, where a man turns into a Great white shark straight to this book, where a boy in the throes of puberty turns into a monster straight out of the Cthulhu Mythos (don’t all teenagers turn just a bit into monsters as puberty ravages them?) was a segue I just wasn’t expecting.

So if you’re in the mood for a short coming-of-age story that will drive you crazy and scare the crap out of you in a slow creeping kind of way, this might be your jam. I was more than interested enough to finish it – and I’m still thinking about it because damn! – but it’ll be awhile before I pick something like this up again. Not because this wasn’t good as what it was, but because it confirmed for me yet again that it just isn’t my reading wheelhouse.

Review: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Thornhedge by T. KingfisherThornhedge by T. Kingfisher
Narrator: Jennifer Blom
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, fairy tales, fantasy, retellings
Pages: 128
Length: 3 hours and 43 minutes
Published by Tor Books on August 15, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

From USA Today bestselling author T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge is an original, subversive fairytale about a kind-hearted, toad-shaped heroine, a gentle knight, and a mission gone completely sideways.
There’s a princess trapped in a tower. This isn't her story.
Meet Toadling. On the day of her birth, she was stolen from her family by the fairies, but she grew up safe and loved in the warm waters of faerieland. Once an adult though, the fae ask a favor of Toadling: return to the human world and offer a blessing of protection to a newborn child. Simple, right?
If only.
Centuries later, a knight approaches a towering wall of brambles, where the thorns are as thick as your arm and as sharp as swords. He’s heard there’s a curse here that needs breaking, but it’s a curse Toadling will do anything to uphold…

My Review:

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess who was cursed by an evil fairy godmother to prick her finger on a spinning wheel’s spindle and sleep for a century – along with everyone else who inhabits that castle. This isn’t that story. That’s the story that was made from this one, when the truth needed to be spindled in order to make the story fit a more conventional mold.

Because in all the stories, evil is supposed to be ugly and anyone beautiful must be good. Which is what makes it a story, because in truth, evil often wears a very pretty face – all the better to hide the rot within. But that’s not the way the story is supposed to go – so it didn’t.

The truth, or at least this version of the truth – is considerably different – as the truth generally is.

Toadling has watched seasons change and years pass beyond counting, guarding the thornhedge that surrounds the darkling woods that encase the decaying castle where the beautiful princess sleeps a troubled, enchanted sleep. Once upon a time, Toadling was human. Once upon a time, she might have been that princess.

Once upon a time, she made a terrible mistake that put her exactly where she is, standing guard, doing her sometimes human, sometimes toad-like best to perform her self-imposed duty of keeping the princess safe – and keeping everyone else safe from the princess.

Just as Toadling is almost, almost sure that all knowledge of the lost princess and the crumbling tower has slipping out of time and mind of the rest of the world, her sanctuary is invaded in the kindliest and most annoyingly frustrating – at least for Toadling – way possible. The knight Halim has a burning need to solve the mystery. If there’s a princess imprisoned in the crumbling castle, he’ll certainly rescue her – after all, he is a knight – if not either a very good or very successful one. But his primary motivation isn’t the princess, it’s solving the puzzle.

Which, in the end, he does. Just not the way that Toadling feared. Or even worse, hoped.

Escape Rating A: Thornhedge is a fractured fairy tale. In fact, Thornhedge and A Spindle Splintered are fractured versions of the same fairy tale, that of Sleeping Beauty. But they have been fractured along very different fault lines.

It’s because they start with different questions. A Spindle Splintered asked whether there were ways for Sleeping Beauty to escape her destiny, and what would happen if she tried, and then proceeded to play out those variations across the multiverse.

Thornhedge goes back to the beginning of the story and asks a fundamental question about why it was necessary for the princess to be ensconced in that castle so thoroughly in the first place. The answer to that question sets the fairy tale entirely on its head but also makes the story considerably more interesting.

Instead of a ‘fridged’ heroine who gets top billing but does nothing to earn it, we get a lovely story about friendship and duty and guilt and spending a lifetime making up for someone else’s mistakes and cleaning up after someone else’s messes and finally, finally participating in your own rescue.

Because this isn’t really the Sleeping Beauty story at all, but in a totally different way than Sleeping Beauty wasn’t actually Sleeping Beauty’s own story.

Instead it’s a story about friendship and guilt and learning to be – not who you are supposed to be, but who you really are. That the lesson turns out to be just as much for Halim the Knight as it is for Toadling the fairy is just the teeniest, tiny part of what makes Thornhedge such a lovely read.

Or in my case, reread. I read this for a Library Journal review a few months back, and loved it as I do all of T. Kingfisher’s work, but not quite as much as I did Nettle & Bone. Listening to it now brought all the best parts back – particularly the perspective of the princess turned Toadling in her frustration, her longing, and her utterly justified anger at everything that brought her to this pass. Including herself.

The way in which she rescues herself, and Halim, and finally gets the future she wants now and the home she wants later, was beautiful. As is Toadling, even if neither the reader nor Halim notice it at first. Because this is Toadling’s story, and she’s the heroine, and heroines are supposed to be beautiful. So she is, and so is her story.