A+ #BookReview: The Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy Sivinski

A+ #BookReview: The Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy SivinskiThe Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy Sivinski
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, cozy mystery, historical romance, historical fantasy
Pages: 336
Published by Atria Books on October 1, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

A cozy and uplifting debut novel about three clairvoyant sisters who face an unexpected twist of Fate at the bottom of their own delicate porcelain cups.
Ever since the untimely death of their parents, Anne, Beatrix, and Violet Quigley have made a business of threading together the stories that rest in the swirls of ginger, cloves, and cardamom at the bottom of their customers’ cups. Their days at the teashop are filled with talk of butterflies and good fortune intertwined with the sound of cinnamon shortbread being snapped by laced fingers.
That is, until the Council of Witches comes calling with news that the city Diviner has lost her powers, and the sisters suddenly find themselves being pulled in different directions. As Anne’s magic begins to develop beyond that of her sisters’, Beatrix’s writing attracts the attention of a publisher, and Violet is enchanted by the song of the circus—and perhaps a mischievous trapeze artist threatening to sweep her off her feet. It seems a family curse that threatens to separate the sisters is taking effect.
With dwindling time to rewrite their future and help three other witches challenge their own destinies, the Quigleys set out to bargain with Fate. But in focusing so closely on saving each other, will they lose sight of themselves?

My Review:

The Crescent Room Tearoom serves well-to-do ladies with considerably more than just tea from its turn-of-the-20th century location on Chicago’s bustling State Street, already the home of Marshall Field’s and Schlesinger & Mayer.

The Quigley sisters, Anne, Beatrice and Violet, serve slices of the future along with tea, pastries and finger sandwiches. They are witches, and they are all gifted with the ability to tell the future – just like their mother before them.

Like much of Chicago’s magical community, the Quigley sisters hide in plain sight, operating their tearoom just outside the edge of the city’s burgeoning magical district, dispensing true fortunes and sage advice under the guise of gossip, amusement and ladies’ fripperies.

Of course the magical community knows the truth about the Quigley sisters, the triplet daughters of the most gifted seer the Chicago Coven had seen in generations. A woman who gave up her place in the Coven to marry her mundane soulmate, knowing that their lives would end in tragedy.

Because her gift of seeing the future could also be a curse.

A curse that seems to have passed to the sisters now that they have grown up. Their joint operation of the tearoom has given them safety, security and companionship. At least until they discover that they are cursed to lose it all – and that it seems as if the leaders of the Chicago Coven are complicit in that curse.

Just as the curse drives a wedge in their contented companionship, setting them each on paths that pull them away from the shop and from each other, the Coven sets them three seemingly impossible tasks that must be met by an even more impossible deadline – or they will destroy the shop and cast the sisters out of the community.

It’s obviously a plot. If the curse doesn’t get them, the Coven will – and vice versa. Unless, like their parents loving but much too brief happiness, the curse is not really a curse after all.

Escape Rating A+: It’s the way that the whole, entire story does a complete heel turn that makes it work – because the story isn’t AT ALL what the reader thinks it’s going to be at the beginning.

First, I loved the setting. Chicago is still one of my favorite cities, and it’s always seemed magical to me. Part of the reason I loved the Dresden Files series so much – back in that day – was that Harry’s Chicago was ‘my’ Chicago, just with more magic. It’s also a part of what made Veronica Roth’s recent When Among Crows work so well, because it seemed just so downright likely that there’s a magical community hiding in plain sight.

Which is the case in The Crescent Moon Tearoom. This is definitely turn-of-the-last century Chicago, when State Street was already ‘that great street’. The gigantic downtown department stores were still new and celebrated and it was fun to read about Marshall Field’s back in that day, because the building is still something special a century plus later. (I had to look Schlesinger and Mayer up because the store didn’t last but the building did – as Carson, Pirie, Scott.)

Returning to the story – because it’s a wonderful story to return to – what I loved about The Crescent Moon Tearoom was the way that the reader is led down a primrose path, multiple times, making the reveal at the end just that much cozier and more heartwarming.

Because I have to admit that as the story was going along, I wasn’t all that sure about the cozy fantasy label. At first, it reminded me a LOT of Small Town, Big Magic, in that the heroine is cursed, her powers are gone, and the local coven leadership is manipulative to the max and evil to the core. And that’s at the point where the reader thinks the purpose of the story is to reveal the coven’s machinations and thwart their plot.

That it turns out to be entirely different – and much better, more heartwarming and considerably more interesting into the bargain – was the ending I stayed up until 4 in the morning for – and I’m so very glad that I did.

The Crescent Moon Tearoom is the author’s DEBUT novel, and it’s simply fantastic in all of the meanings of that word. The one and only, teeny-tiny, even slightly negative thing I could possibly say about it is that this book does not read like the first in a series. I could be wrong. I’d LOVE to be wrong. But even if I’m right about this book, I will absolutely be on the lookout for her next!

#BookReview: What We Sacrifice for Magic by Andrea Jo DeWerd

#BookReview: What We Sacrifice for Magic by Andrea Jo DeWerdWhat We Sacrifice for Magic by Andrea Jo DeWerd
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fantasy, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 304
Published by Alcove Press on September 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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Perfect for fans of Practical Magic and The Lager Queen of Minnesota: a coming-of-age novel following three generations of witches in the 1960s, this enchanting and heartwarming debut explores the importance of family and the delight and heartbreak of discovering who you truly are.

It’s 1968, and the Watry-Ridder family is feared and respected in equal measure. The local farmers seek out their water charms, and the teenagers, their love spells. The family’s charms and spells, passed down through generations of witches descending from the Black Forest, have long served the small town of Friedrich, Minnesota.

Eldest daughter Elisabeth has just graduated high school—she is expected to hone her supernatural abilities to take over for her grandmother, the indomitable Magda. She’s also expected to marry her high school sweetheart and live the rest of her life in Friedrich. But all she can ask is, why her? Why is her path set in stone, and what else might be out there for her?

She soon discovers that magic isn’t the only thing inherited in her family. That magic also comes with a great price—and a big family secret. The more she digs, the more questions she has, and the less she trusts the grandmother she thought she knew. Who is Elisabeth without her family? She must ultimately decide what she’s willing to sacrifice for her family, for their secrets and their magic, or risk it all to pave her own way.

Navigating the bittersweet tension between self-discovery and living up to familial expectations, What We Sacrifice for Magic is a touching look at coming into one’s own.

My Review:

The Age of Aquarius might have dawned in the rest of the world, but 1968 in tiny Friedrich, Minnesota seemed like it would be no different from the year before, or the year after. The witches of the Watry-Ridder family had been doing their very best – and occasionally their damndest – to make sure that life in the town they held under their protection stayed protected and pretty much the same.

Helped by the fact that it was a teeny-tiny farming community and change came even slower to those sorts of towns than it did to the big cities – and a few well-placed memory charms helped with the rest.

But 1968 was the year that Elisabeth Watry-Rider graduated high school – and was expected to settle down in Friedrich, marry the boy she’d been dating for two years, and take up the reins of her family’s magical power – reins that had been firmly held in the iron grip of her grandmother Magda since long before Elisabeth was born.

No one has ever asked Elisabeth what she wants. Not that she hasn’t always enjoyed the attention of being Magda’s favorite, and not that she hasn’t pitied both her mother and her younger sister Mary, whose powers seem to be considerably less than her own.

As Elisabeth feels the walls closing in, she envies them both their freedom from the strait-jacket of the family legacy. She begins to ask questions about why she is the one who must give up all her freedom, while everyone around her has choices. Choices that the formidable Magda took from her when she was too young to even have a voice to protest with.

Before the bars of her prison of expectations clang shut for good, Elisabeth publicly defies her grandmother, accidentally sets fire to half the town, and flees into the night. Clawing out just a little tiny space of time to see who SHE wants to be when she grows up.

It’s the making of her – even as it breaks the back of her family and shatters the community’s faith in their powers. But some things are made to be broken, and some family secrets have to be exposed before the light of hope and possibility can have a chance to heal what’s – and who’s – been torn apart.

Escape Rating B: If Hazel Beck’s Witchlore and The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradel had a book baby, with Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic serving as either the midwife or the fairy godmother – or both – that book would be What We Sacrifice for Magic.

The title manages to tease the story without giving it away, and it’s a doozy but not in the way I expected, which leads back to those books I think contributed to its DNA.

Even though Lager Queen isn’t a book about magic, it is a story about family secrets and family rifts in a similar setting to What We Sacrifice for Magic with similar family dynamics. It’s a story about family traditions carried on by the women of the family, and the stresses and strains of a family heritage and business that is jealously guarded instead of shared.

Hazel Beck’s Witchlore and Ann Aguirre’s Fix-It Witches have similar witchy elements in that an older generation of witches is doing its damndest to control who gets power in ways that are detrimental to pretty much everyone involved – which is definitely paralleled by the story of What We Sacrifice for Magic.

The third element here – and one that didn’t get quite enough attention for this reader – is that late 1960s setting. The past is another country, they do things differently there, and that feels particularly true of the way things were before all of the social revolutions of the 1960s. The world was changing faster than small towns or formerly dominant institutions were able to keep up with – and Elisabeth’s coming of age felt like it was on the cusp of that but it wasn’t as much as this reader might have liked.

At its heart, this is a story about the family ties that bind and strangle, and the ballast of family expectations that may be great for the town but has turned out to be pretty catastrophic for the women who are supposed to bear its burdens. I felt for Elisabeth’s need to escape, I just found myself wishing that she hadn’t felt the need to take on so much guilt for having done so, and was glad to see the family start to heal when the dark secrets were finally exposed to the light.

#BookReview: The Ghost Cat by Alex Howard

#BookReview: The Ghost Cat by Alex HowardThe Ghost Cat by Alex Howard
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cat stories, cozy fantasy, historical fantasy, historical fiction, magical realism
Pages: 272
Published by Hanover Square Press on August 27, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

A charming novel for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold and How to Stop Time , following a cat through his nine lives in Edinburgh, moving through the ever-changing city and its inhabitants over centuries
Early morning, 1902. At 7/7 Marchmont Crescent, Eilidh the charlady tips coal into a fire grate and sets it alight. Overhearing, Grimalkin the cat ambles over to curl up against the welcome heat and lick his favorite human's hand. But this is to be his last day on earth…before he becomes the Ghost Cat.
Follow Grimalkin as he witnesses the changes of the next 120 years, prowling unseen among the inhabitants of an Edinburgh tenement while unearthing some startling revelations about the mystery of existence, the unstoppable march of time and the true meaning of feline companionship.

My Review:

Grimalkin is dead, to begin with. (The opening line to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a gift that just keeps on giving.)

Grimalkin is a house cat, in fact THE house cat, at 7/7 Marchmont Crescent, born in 1887 and dead at the rather battered age of 15 in 1902. The thing about Grimalkin’s death that makes the story work is that the cat gods, in the person of Cat-Sìth who comes to visit Grimalkin upon the occasion of his death have to admit that they’ve fallen down on the job. As a cat, his spirit if not his body is entitled to nine lives, and he’s been shorted out of eight of them.

Something must be done in redress.

Grimalkin is given a choice even if the full measure of it isn’t clear to him at the time. He can go to his eternal sleep – or – he can have his eight remaining lives as a ghost cat. He’ll be able to experience the world, but generally not affect it – at least until his final three lives. He’ll be granted two more lives to ‘stay’ as he did in his first, corporeal life, three lives to ‘stray’ and three lives to ‘play’ as a poltergeist.

He’ll get to see how his human, Eilidh, is doing even if he won’t be able to actually be with her. He’ll get to see how the place he lived is getting on over the years. He’ll experience a bit of the world as it changes. But only for one day in each life.

His body will no longer feel pain, and he’ll be incapable of being harmed. But harm to the body isn’t half as painful as harm to the heart and the soul. There will be times when the world will have moved too fast for him to cope with. There will be occasions that will break his heart. There will be times when he’ll want to give up and go to his final, eternal catnap right meow.

But he’ll also have a few opportunities to change the world – not in a big way – but in small and important ways to make sure that a person or two gets EXACTLY what they deserve. Whether what they deserve is salvation – or damnation.

In Grimalkin’s case, the old saying proves to be absolutely true. “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.”

Escape Rating B: First, let me admit the obvious. I’ve been picking a lot of books with cats recently because I miss Lucifer something fierce. Each person deals with their emotions in different ways – for me it’s books.

(The above comment does not apply to Junkyard Roadhouse. I’ve been following that series for four years now and would have grabbed that audiobook the minute it arrived no matter when it came. The series is totally awesome. Review coming later this week.)

Pivoting from my digression, I also have to say that I’m glad I read this AFTER the trip to Glasgow and not before – even though this is set in Edinburgh. There are a few things – like the ubiquitous presence of IRN BRU – that just had a bit more immediacy and resonance after such a recent trip to Scotland – and Britain more generally – than they would have before.

As a story, The Ghost Cat feels like a timeslip story mixed with quite a bit of magical realism as well as a touch of the musical Cats and just a hint of the cat wizards in Diane Duane’s The Book of Night with Moon.

I loved Grimalkin as a character, even though his particular existence conflicted with the laws of the universe in ways that are detailed in the rather long Reviewer’s Note at the end. Grimalkin the cat displays the feelings that we all hope that our companion animals have for us, specifically that he has chosen his person and loves her unconditionally. His primary motivation for accepting the option of ghost lives is to follow her through the years – not understanding the heartbreak that will inevitably follow.

What makes him interesting to follow is the way that he dips into time – rather like Brigadoon – but at much shorter intervals. He gets to see just a bit of the changes in the world, and it’s particularly poignant that he is present for both Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation AND the announcement of her passing. Also a tad ironic, as at her coronation he assures himself that she’ll be just a ‘flash in the pan’ compared to the eternal Victoria who was Queen for his entire life – and of course he’s so very wrong about that.

But right about many other things – not so much about eras and the increasing pace of life and what appears to be its equally increasing lack of civility and manners – but rather about his insights into the hearts of people. Human nature, for good or ill, doesn’t change all that much over a mere century or so.

In the end, Grimalkin’s story is a lovely little collection of observations and snippets, grounded in a bit of the author’s life, however fictionalized – and with additional magic. It’s a charming slip through the high points of a century, as seen through the often floor-level eyes of one very intelligent – but ultimately soul-weary – cat.

If, like this reader, you’re looking for a story that will reassure your heart and soul that the cats who leave us behind love us even from the Rainbow Bridge or wherever it is they go next, Grimalkin’s story may also serve as a bit of a balm to a wounded heart.

Reviewer’s (REALLY LONG) Note on feline genetics as applied to Grimalkin, the tl;dr version of which is that Grimalkin is genetically impossible and the story didn’t cover that over with even a bit of handwavium.

The ‘ghost cat’ of the title, Grimalkin, is very explicitly described as a rather prolifically reproductive tortoiseshell tomcat – and that is an actual, honest-to-goodness contradiction in terms. Due to the peculiarities of feline genetics as they apply to coat color and gender, tortoiseshell and calico cats are nearly always female. It is possible, but very rare for a male tortie or calico to be born – only a 1 in 3,000 or .033% chance. (That’s not 33% or 3%, that’s 3 one hundredths of one percent. In other words, the chance exists but it’s TINY.) And due to the genetic anomalies that allow this to happen, male tortoiseshell and calico cats are always sterile.

Now and very much on the other hand, the book of The Ghost Cat definitely falls into the category of magical realism – meaning that magic could make Grimalkin exactly what he is in the story. In the Victorian Era, when Grimalkin was born, science and the ‘Cat Fancy’ hadn’t yet figured much if any of this out, although detailed observation would have led to a conclusion that male torties were rare indeed. Howsomever, the cat gods or deities or powers-that-be or whatever that magic black cat with the white heart marking was could easily have known just how special Grimalkin was and commented upon it – as that cat spirit did so many other things. A mention would have taken care of the incongruity and kept it from tripping me – and probably other readers who are even slightly familiar with cat genetics – out of the story every time Grimalkin’s appearance was detailed.

I understand completely the desire for Grimalkin to possess both a tomcat’s machismo AND a heaping helping of tortitude, I just needed a bit of handwavium (or plot armor) to get there that wasn’t present in the story.

Your reading mileage, or percentage in this case, as always, may vary.

#BookReview: Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid

#BookReview: Lady Macbeth by Ava ReidLady Macbeth by Ava Reid
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Gothic, historical fantasy, historical fiction, retellings
Pages: 320
Published by Del Rey on August 13, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Ava Reid comes a reimagining of Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare’s most famous villainess, giving her a voice, a past, and a power that transforms the story men have written for her.
The Lady knows the stories: how her eyes induce madness in men. 
The Lady knows she will be wed to the Scottish brute, who does not leave his warrior ways behind when he comes to the marriage bed.  
The Lady knows his hostile, suspicious court will be a game of strategy, requiring all of her wiles and hidden witchcraft to survive. 
But the Lady does not know her husband has occult secrets of his own. She does not know that prophecy girds him like armor. She does not know that her magic is greater and more dangerous, and that it will threaten the order of the world. 
She does not know this yet. But she will.

My Review:

This is another story we think we know.. We certainly do know how it ends, thanks to the Bard and “ Out, damned spot! out, I say!” although we usually get it wrong and misquote it as “Out, out damned spot!”

But do we really know anything at all? Shakespeare certainly played fast and loose with any history he got near, whether for dramatic license or to please the current monarch or, if at all possible, as much of both as he could cram into four acts.

Lady Macbeth observes King Duncan (Lady Macbeth by George Cattermole, 19th century)

Lady Macbeth, as a character in the play, comes off as an evil, villainous, witch – whether she actually practiced witchcraft or not. But was she really – and whether or not she was, how would Shakespeare know?

Because as much as we tend to think that all the past is just jammed together in a big ball of timey-wimey bits, the reality is that FIVE CENTURIES separate the historical Lord and Lady Macbeth from Shakespeare’s dramatically licensed interpretation.

In other words, he didn’t actually know a damned thing and neither do we, making his version entirely fictional and this book a thoroughgoing reinterpretation of that well-known fiction. This is a case where we don’t even know what we think we know.

So what do we have here? Lady Macbeth, the book in the hand and not the play in the mind, is part of the phenomenon of telling – or rather reinterpreting – a well-known story from the perspective of a female central character. A character who was either silent or just hard done by  in the male-centric version that put a man in the center of a story that may not even have been his in the first place – and didn’t bother to reckon with the restrictions and assumptions that hedged around women’s lives.

This Lady Macbeth, while she is certainly a schemer, is mostly scheming for her own survival in a world that makes her the property of her scheming father until he sells her to her murderous husband.

To put it another way, she’s doing the best she can to stay alive with the tools she has – her beauty, her position to a VERY limited extent, and the reputation her father has created for her as a powerful witch.

Which she might very well be, after all.

Escape Rating B+: I picked this one up and surprised myself by getting immediately stuck into it and couldn’t put it down. So definitely tick off the box for compelling. At the same time, I had the feeling that I’d read this one before. Not exactly this book, but something very much like it in its reinterpretation of a familiar character, and its female-centric but not feminist perspective.

(If you’re wondering – as I was – it reminds me of The Nightingale’s Castle by Sonia Velton, which gives Countess Bathory a similar treatment. Also, her portrait of Lord Macbeth reads like it owes a lot of its physical description to Henry VIII of England – which was just a bit weird. Plausible based on the limited information about the historical ‘King Hereafter’, but still odd to read.)

On the one hand, what makes this work is that we’re inside Lady Roscille Macbeth’s head, so we see her motivations and her mistakes, and intimately understand why she does the things she does. At the same time, we see her inexperience and naivete, because the poor girl is only 17 and a stranger in a strange land at that, when she is forced to marry Lord Macbeth.

One thing that her perspective emphasizes very clearly is that his is the power, not hers, no matter her reputation. Her choices are always circumscribed by his complete power over her very existence. He has all the choices – at least at the beginning. Towards the end it’s his previous acts that constrain those choices, not hers.

(Her angst over the things she has done, and their effect upon her ‘soul’ may go on just a bit too long for 21st century readers as it certainly did for this one. The past is another country, they did things differently there.)

In the end, she was the dagger, often, but he was always the hand wielding it, which is not at all what the play would lead one to believe. And has led most readers and viewers, over the centuries. Seeing that possibility, that perspective, through the eyes and mind of that dagger, kept me riveted to the story – as if at knife point.

#BookReview: The Nightingale’s Castle by Sonia Velton

#BookReview: The Nightingale’s Castle by Sonia VeltonThe Nightingale's Castle by Sonia Velton
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fantasy, historical fiction
Pages: 320
Published by Harper Perennial on July 30, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

In the vein of riveting historical novels such as Hamnet and Circe—with a touch of Dracula—a propulsive, feminist reimagining of the story of Erzsébet Báthory, the infamous sixteenth-century Hungarian aristocrat known as the “Blood Countess”, who was rumored to have murdered hundreds of peasant girls and bathed in their blood.
In 1573, Countess Erzsébet Báthory gives birth to an illegitimate child. Secretly taken to a peasant family living in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, the infant girl is raised as their own. Years later, a young woman called Boróka—ignorant of her true history—is sent to join the Countess’s household.
Terrified of the Countess’s murderous reputation and the brutally cruel women who run the castle, Boróka struggles to find her place. Then plague breaches the castle’s walls, and a tentative bond unexpectedly forms between the girl and the Countess. But powerful forces are moving against the great lady whose wealth and independence threatens the king. Can the Countess trust the women seemingly so close to her? And when the show trial begins against the infamous “Blood Countess” where will Boróka’s loyalties lie?

My Review:

The name Erzsébet Báthory (or Elizabeth Bathory as it’s often anglicized), invokes one hell of an image. An image that literally belongs in Hell, that of a depraved serial killer who literally bathed in the blood of her victims to maintain her youth and beauty. Countess Bathory, popularly known as the “Blood Countess”, lives in infamy as a kind of pseudo-Dracula if not an actual vampire – although some popular tales even go that far.

That is not the person at the heart of The Nightingale’s Castle. Instead, this reimagining of the life of the infamous alleged serial killer takes an entirely different approach to a historical figure we all think we know.

And thereby, as the saying goes, hangs a tale.

The Nightingale’s Castle begins with young, naïve, reluctant Boróka, press-ganged into the Countess’ service, arriving at the castle to find that the castle is just a castle and not the house of supernatural horror that the reader imagines it will be.

What she finds instead is a place where the upper servants and overseers are cruel and malicious, and the Lady of the Castle, the Countess herself, is wealthy beyond a poor orphan girl’s dreams, but also a bit cool, entirely distant, and not really involved in the day to day running of her castle.

As it turns out, Bathory is much too busy dealing with other matters. She’s wealthy, powerful, and well educated, a force to be reckoned with in spite of her gender because of that same wealth and the lands she controls.

Land and wealth and titles the widowed Countess holds alone – much to the dismay of both the Church and the Crown. Which is where all her problems begin, and her independence eventually ends.

Portrait of Elizabeth Bathory

Escape Rating B: This was totally, utterly, absolutely not what I was expecting. Because I was expecting blood and gore and horror – in other words, the popular image of Bathory. What I got instead was the picture of a woman who was a part of her time – and was punished for not knowing her ‘place’.

Instead of following the lurid ‘female serial killer’ story, or the even more scandalous Dracula variations, the author took a dive into the actual history of Countess Bathory to discover that there wasn’t a whole lot of either of those versions of her crimes in circulation at the time she actually lived.

Not that there weren’t plenty of rumors, because she was a woman who held power in her own right and historically that never goes well, but not the truly crazy stuff. There were deaths in her castle over the years, but not more than can be explained by life in the mid-1500s. The documentation for her ‘show trial’, where the fix was clearly in, contain a few off the wall allegations of the “I heard someone else said that” kind – which aren’t exactly evidence of much of anything.

So instead of the “Blood Countess” we have a powerful and intelligent woman as the victim of a conspiracy to take her wealth and her property by accusing her of, essentially, witchcraft. And wasn’t that at the heart of so many witchcraft trials?

It’s easy to fall into this interpretation, because it makes so much more sense than the popular image. And we’ve seen it before. Bathory’s situation reminded me a lot of many of the more even handed portrayals of Anne Boleyn, who also wasn’t guilty of the crimes of which she was accused, but was very much in the way of some powerful people who wanted her out of their way.

The Nightingale’s Castle also – and even more surprisingly – brought to mind Josephine Tey’s classic mystery, The Daughter of Time, in its similar historical reinterpretation of Richard III and Shakespeare’s equally lurid condemnation of that king for the murder of his nephews – a historical figure whose purported villainy is not supported by documentation that was written at the time – only through much later accounts from people who had their own axes to grind.

While this reinterpretation doesn’t hold up entirely in its details, the idea of it, that so much blood and dirt accreted around Bathory’s name because she was a woman who stood up to be counted, because she refused to keep to her place and hide her intelligence and acumen behind a man, rings considerably truer than tales of bathing in the blood of virgins.

A+ #BookReview: The Price of Redemption by Shawn Carpenter

A+ #BookReview: The Price of Redemption by Shawn CarpenterThe Price of Redemption (Tides of Magic, #1) by Shawn Carpenter
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: adventure, fantasy, historical fantasy
Series: Tides of Magic #1
Pages: 368
Published by Saga Press on July 9, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

A debut female-led swashbuckling fantasy following powerful sorceress and sea captain Marquese Enid d’Tancreville as she is forced on the run where she meets a vast cast of characters perfect for fans of Patrick O’Brian’s beloved Master and Commander series.

Despite her powerful magic, Marquese Enid d’Tancreville must flee her homeland to escape death at the hands of the Theocratic Revolution. When a Theocratic warship overtakes the ship bringing her to safety, Enid is spared capture by the timely intervention of the Albion frigate Alarum , under the command of Lt. Rue Nath.

The strange circumstances make for an odd alliance, and Enid finds herself replacing Alarum ’s recently slain sea mage. Now an officer under Nath’s command, Enid is thrust into a strange maritime world full of confusing customs, duties, and language. Worse she soon discovers the threat of the revolution is not confined to shore.

My Review:

When it comes to fictional settings, the Napoleonic Wars are a gift that just keeps on giving. Admittedly, that giving is in the context of the thing about adventures being terrible stuff that happened to someone either long ago, far away, or both. In the case of The Price of Redemption, very much of both.

Because the war between the Ardainne and Albion is absolutely a rehash of the Napoleonic Wars, with Ardainne serving at the post-Revolutionary French complete with their own version of a revolution, and Albion, naturally, sailing in for the Brits holding the line to protect their status quo.

Which is when this particular take on that old conflict gets fascinating, fantastic and utterly magical. Because Ardainne’s Theocratic Revolution throws a religious crusade on top of the class warfare, and marries fanatics straight out of the Spanish Inquisition to Madame Defarge cackling at the feet of Madame Guillotine.

The equivalent of the sans culottes in this world’s Revolution hate and kill mages every bit as much and often as they do aristos – made much simpler for VERY bloody meanings of the world simple – by the fact that so many of the aristos ARE mages who have been using their magical power to increase their political and socio-economic power for centuries.

Ardainne, just like France, was ripe for some kind of plucking. Our story begins with Marquese Enid d’Tancreville, running before the wind and away from the Theocrats (just call them Rats because EVERYONE does) now in charge of the Revolution, on an Albion merchant ship that is outmanned and outgunned but nevertheless rescued in the nick of time by Captain Rue Nath and his outclassed frigate, the Alarum.

Once the smoke clears, Nath is victorious but in need of a replacement Magister – meaning Ship’s Mage – as his previous ‘Spells’ died in the recent skirmish. Enid needs a better protected way to Albion, so that she can offer her services to people who are at least doing something about the filth that has taken over her beloved homeland.

Nath and Enid strike a win-win bargain – she’ll become his temporary new Magister, he’ll convey her and her worldly goods to the place where she intended to go, and in the meantime the Alarum will at least be able to fight if another Rat ship finds them on the open sea.

And thereby, as that very old saying goes, hangs an absolutely marvelous tale of wooden ships, iron men and women, deeds of derring-do and dastardly betrayals from within.

Escape Rating A+: The Napoleonic Wars absolutely are the gift that keeps on giving, at least in the fictional sense. You’ve even seen and or read plenty of stories that used it as a base – even if some of those stories hide the base pretty well.

But one of the most respected AND popular ‘spin offs’ from this particular war is the Aubrey and Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian that begins with Master and Commander, where Jack Aubrey is in the exact same position as Rue Nath – he’s the commander of a ship, called ‘Captain’ by courtesy while in command, but whose true rank is Lieutenant. The journey of the first book in both series is for the ‘Captain’ by courtesy title to make ‘Post’ – to be commissioned as a Captain by rank and clamber onto first rung of the ladder to the Admiralty.

Both the Honor Harrington series by David Weber and the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik used Aubrey and Maturin as their jumping off points, taking their inspiration from the Napoleonic wars into SF (Weber) and fantasy (Novik, but with dragons).

One of the things that the Aubrey and Maturin series did extremely well, that is absolutely a part of The Price of Redemption, is the way that the story takes the reader through the perspective of a previously (land)lubberly point of view character – Enid here and Maturin in the original series – and uses their instruction by beautifully descriptive but still fascinating details to draw the reader into the arcane mysteries of the sea.

The story, the part that keeps the reader frantically turning pages, is, on the one hand, the story of the plucky underdog – in this case Albion – fighting the mighty empire of Ardainne. On the other hand, it’s a very intimate story about one man’s fight to protect his crew, his career, and his country against all comers – particularly the forces arrayed against them all. And on the third hand, possibly the one on the rudder steering this ship, the story of a woman desperate to find a new place in the world – one from which she can strike a blow at her own enemies, find a new perspective on what she left behind that brought her and her country to this terrible pass, and a help create a future that she can live on, and with, and into.

It’s marvelous and riveting and a compulsive page-turner every single league of its way. That this story is not over yet, that there are two more books on the horizon for this cast and crew, is the absolute best news any reader could possibly receive.

A+ #BookReview: Ivy, Angelica, Bay by C.L. Polk

A+ #BookReview: Ivy, Angelica, Bay by C.L. PolkIvy, Angelica, Bay by C.L. Polk
Format: ebook
Source: supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: ebook, emagazine
Genres: fantasy, historical fantasy
Pages: 51
Published by Tor Books on January 17, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKobo
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When Hurston Hill is threatened by a suspiciously powerful urban development firm, Miss l'Abielle steps up to protect her community with the help of a mysterious orphaned girl in this charming follow up to "St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid," featured on LeVar Burton Reads.

My Review:

This was intended to be my review of Ivy, Angelica, Bay as the next in my series of Hugo nominee reviews. And it will be.

Howsomever, when I looked at the author’s website I discovered something marvelous. That this novelette is the follow-up to St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid, a short story that was published in February 2020 at Reactor Magazine, formerly known as Tor.com. Even better, the short story was read, in full, by Levar Burton on his podcast, Levar Burton Reads. (Which I highly recommend, not just this story but the whole beautiful thing!)

I loved Ivy, Angelica, Bay. I needed something short to listen to at the end of a long week. And thereby hangs the proverbial tale, so this review ended up being a bit of both.

Both of these stories are about the price of magic, which is really about that combination of being careful what you wish for because you might get it, the way that the magic ring always comes with a curse, and that having a thing may not be so pleasurable as wanting it – referring back to last Friday’s book just a bit.

St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid is the setup for Ivy, Angelica, Bay. The young, unnamed, first-person narrator of St. Valentine may be the adult in Ivy, or may be one of her many predecessors as the magical – and magically adopted – Miss l’Abielle. That we don’t know – although we don’t really need to – in Ivy does make me curious about how the magic at the end of that first story worked out – but that’s just my curiosity bump itching.

The story in St. Valentine is a coming of age and into power story. It’s also a bit of a story about selfishness – as coming of age stories are wont to be. But it also foreshadows both the narrator’s desire to keep what is hers – no matter the cost and no matter how benevolent she might be in that keeping – and the way that the magical power in these stories is maintained and passed on.

You don’t have to read or listen to St. Valentine in order to get stuck right into Ivy, but I’m glad I found it because listening to it was marvelous and it made the story I’d just finished that much deeper.

In Ivy, Angelica, Bay we get a story that reminds me a LOT of two of Leslye Penelope’s recent books, The Monsters We Defy and Daughter of the Merciful Deep, in that both are centered around protecting black communities from, let’s call it economic encroachment although that’s not all of what’s happening. The Monsters We Defy hits more of the same notes as Ivy, as both stories feature young black women as magical practitioners who protect their communities but also assist individuals who are willing to pay both a magical and a mundane price for that assistance. And that all too often the magical price is much too high.

But there’s also more than a bit of T. Kingfisher’s forthcoming A Sorceress Comes to Call in Ivy – as that turns out to be exactly what happens in both cases. The surprise is that in Ivy, there’s more than a bit of, of all surprising stories, The Velveteen Rabbit.

Escape Rating A+: Consider that rating for the overall experience as well as for all the parts that are combined into this whole. At this point I’ve read four of the six nominees for this year’s Best Novelette and I’m at the “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” point for selection and I still have two to go.

What makes these stories work, but particular for Ivy, Angelica, Bay because it has a bit more time and heft to it – also that St. Valentine has done a bit of its setup for it – is the way that it combines its elements and then tells its story through its protagonist, the current Miss l’Abielle, so that even though we don’t know her name  we still feel the horns – and thorns – of all of her dilemmas.

She is charged with protecting her community – but that charge has just fallen on her shoulders fully at the death of her mother. She’s spent too much of her magical energy in recent weeks and months keeping her mother on this side of death’s door – and now the price of that keeping has come due. Maybe even past due.

And she’s a bit desperate and a lot heartsore and easily gulled by a likely story – to the point where she nearly brings about the downfall of all she holds dear. A catastrophe that is made all that much clearer to the reader as she dives into what has gone wrong and we see who will pay that price – and is already paying – if she falls. Because the community will fall with her.

Her salvation – and theirs – comes in the most unlikely form. Which is where that Velveteen Rabbit hops into the story in a way that is surprising, delightful and perfect. And still requires a price to be paid – but one that the Misses l’Abielle and their community can bear more than well enough to continue the fight for another day.

Grade A #BookReview: On the Fox Roads by Nghi Vo

Grade A #BookReview: On the Fox Roads by Nghi VoOn the Fox Roads by Nghi Vo
Format: ebook
Source: supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: ebook
Genres: fantasy, historical fantasy, urban fantasy
Pages: 38
Published by Tor Books on October 31, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKobo
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A new novelette from Hugo Award-winning author, Nghi Vo!
While learning the ropes from a crafty Jazz Age bank robber, a young stowaway discovers their authentic self, a hidden gift, and that there are no straight lines when you run the fox roads. . .

My Review:

Unlike the popular image of the infamous Bonnie and Clyde, “Chinese Jack” and “Tonkin Jill” didn’t ENTER banks with guns blazing. That didn’t mean they didn’t EXIT that way, but the guns weren’t the point.

Jack and Lai were merely following the rule laid down by their contemporary Willie Sutton, they robbed banks because that’s where the money was. Even if the kind of small-town banks that the Chinese duo robbed had a lot less of the green stuff and a lot more of other kinds of paper than either of the robbers would have liked.

That’s where the third member of this duo turned trio enters the picture, a young Chinese-American girl who stows away in their getaway car intending to steal back the deed to her parents’ store from one of the “Jack and Jill’s” earlier scores.

A seemingly magical deed that will re-open the store as soon as the deed is laid down on the ground it belongs to.

The question is whether that stowaway wants to go back to belonging to it, to being the girl their parents want them to be, prim, proper and most of all – obedient – or whether that girl wants to undergo more than one transformation – robbing banks, driving getaway cars, getting to see the big, wide world, living as a man instead of the woman that fate originally intended.

All things are possible on the magical, mysterious, ever-changing fox roads that travel no known path and go in no known direction except for the will and the whim of anyone who is on the run from a hard chase and desperate enough to drive fast and trust to fate.

Escape Rating A: This is one of those stories where my only complaint is that I wanted just a bit more than I got. Every single bit of this one is terrific, but I wish it had qualified as a Hugo nominee in the Novella category (between 17,500 and 40,000 words) instead of as the Novelette it is (between 7,500 and 17,500 words). Not that I actually WANT more options in the Novella category because it’s going to be a really hard choice for me.

On the Fox Roads is one of those book baby situations, where it feels like it owes some of its DNA to several books I’ve read – and probably more that I haven’t – but at the same time is still a thing of itself meaning that the blend creates something new and marvelous.

Bonnie and Clyde in a photo from around 1932–33 that was found by police at an abandoned hideout

In this particular case it reads like it owes something to, first of all, the real Bonnie and Clyde, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, both in the way that Jack and Lai operate and in the setting, small-town America during the Great Depression just as Prohibition is about to change everything.

But the story also has a bit of The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo in that one of the characters is a fox masquerading as a human, who is someone with a somewhat different set of morés and values than the human narrator and the fox’s human partner Jack.

And then there’s that third element, the fox roads themselves, which read a lot like the roads to alternate realities traveled by the magical muscle car in Max Gladstone’s Last Exit.

Those impressions were what I brought into this story, what I got while I was reading it was considerably more, as the narrator has the opportunity to try out a much different life than they thought could possibly be available to them as a young Chinese-American woman in racially-stratified 1930s America.

The way that the magic mixed into the heady brew of the story and swept it off down mysterious roads and sometimes equally mysterious and magical cities blended the whole delicious melange into something delightful and unexpected and yes, magical.

To the point where I’m oh-so-grateful that this got nominated for the Hugo, because I’m not much of a short fiction reader and probably wouldn’t have found this otherwise. But I’m glad that I did, even if it does make my Hugo voting that much harder.

#AudioBookReview: To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X Chang

#AudioBookReview: To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X ChangTo Gaze Upon Wicked Gods (Gods Beyond the Skies, #1) by Molly X. Chang
Narrator: Natalie Naudus
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: coming of age, dystopian, epic fantasy, historical fantasy, science fiction, space opera
Series: Gods Beyond the Skies #1
Pages: 368
Length: 10 hours and 41 minutes
Published by Del Rey, Random House Audio on April 16, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

She has power over death. He has power over her. When two enemies strike a dangerous bargain, will they end a war . . . or ignite one?
Heroes die, cowards live. Daughter of a conquered world, Ruying hates the invaders who descended from the heavens long before she was born and defeated the magic of her people with technologies unlike anything her world had ever seen.
Blessed by Death, born with the ability to pull the life right out of mortal bodies, Ruying shouldn’t have to fear these foreign invaders, but she does. Especially because she wants to keep herself and her family safe.
When Ruying’s Gift is discovered by an enemy prince, he offers her an impossible deal: If she becomes his private assassin and eliminates his political rivals—whose deaths he swears would be for the good of both their worlds and would protect her people from further brutalization—her family will never starve or suffer harm again. But to accept this bargain, she must use the powers she has always feared, powers that will shave years off her own existence.
Can Ruying trust this prince, whose promises of a better world make her heart ache and whose smiles make her pulse beat faster? Are the evils of this agreement really in the service of a much greater good? Or will she betray her entire nation by protecting those she loves the most?

My Review:

I picked this up because I had the opportunity to get the audiobook from Libro.fm, saw that the narrator, Natalie Naudus, is one of my faves, looked at the summary and thought to myself that this had terrific possibilities and figured I’d be in for a decent if not outright excellent listening/reading time.

It was not to be. It was not to be so hard that I bailed on the audio at the 30% mark and it’s not the narrator’s fault. Really, truly, seriously, it’s not her fault. Natalie Naudus, as always, does a great job with the first person perspective of a protagonist who is expected to be kickass or at least grow into that role. (In this case, it may have been a bit too good of a job, as it felt like I was right there with her in a story where I’d have much preferred to be at a remove or ten.)

That decent to excellent time is not what I got. What I got for that first 30% felt like torture porn, and experiencing that neverending torment from inside the character’s own head was literally more than I could take. To the point where, if you’ve followed my comments about the book I flailed and bailed on that set nearly a whole week of reviews off-kilter, you’ve found it. This was it.

And damn was I surprised about that.

So I flailed, and bailed – also ranted and raved (not in a good way) – but in the end I finished in text. Because when I looked at the text to see where I stopped the audio, to figure out if the situation got redeemed at all, I learned that in the very next sentence – which of course I couldn’t see in the audio – the thing that nearly made me turn this book into a wallbanger in spite of a) the potential for having to replace my iphone and b) I was driving – didn’t actually happen.

Not that the character and I hadn’t already been tortured plenty at that point. But it was enough to bring me back if only to find out whether the situation got better – or worse.

The answer, as it turned out, was both.

Escape Rating D: If The Poppy War and Babel had an ugly, squalling bookbaby, To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods would be it. I loved The Poppy War, but had deeply serious issues with Babel which pretty much sums up my feelings about To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods in a desicated, unsightly, possibly even poisonous nutshell.

And that requires some explanation. Possibly a whole lot of it.

This story sits uneasily on a whole lot of crossing points. It’s right on the border between YA and Adult AND it’s at the intersection of historical fantasy with science fiction as well as at least hinting at being a romantasy – which it absolutely is not in spite of those hints in the blurb – even as it turns out to be post-apocalyptic and utterly dystopian in ways that are not hinted at anywhere at all.

And it’s torture porn. By that I mean that the entire first third of the story focuses on a protagonist whose entire life seems to be made of various axes on which she is ground, tortured and punished.

She’s female in a society that makes her property of the male head of household – in a line where those men squandered the family fortune on gambling and drugs one after another. She has magic powers that make her a target for people who want to use her gifts until those gifts use her up – and people who want to destroy her where she stands for a gift that many deem anathema.

Her entire world is under the boot heel of an overwhelming empire – in this I believe the story is intended to reference the Opium Wars and their oppressors are intended to stand in for the British Empire even if they are called Romans.

That her sister is addicted to a substance named “Opian”, provided by the Romans and engineered by the Romans to bring their society down even faster adds to that resemblance as well as to the protagonist’s torture.

That she’s 19, her sister’s and her grandmother’s only real support, and that her cultural conditioning has her blaming herself for everything wrong in their lives – including the invasion by the Romans before she was even born – is just terrible icing on an already unsightly cake overflowing with oppression and self-flagellation.

Ruying, her family and her whole entire world are in deep, deep trouble with no way out that anyone can see. I got that. I got that LONG before the story didn’t so much come out of the mire as it did finally start sloshing through the muck to the even more epically fucked up political shenanigans that are at the heart of everything that’s gone wrong for Ruying’s people.

Once the story finally, FINALLY started to reveal what was really happening and why and how, the situation got more interesting even as Ruying wallowed even more deeply in her personal angst and kept right on torturing herself every literally bloody step of the way.

At the very, very end, after all the blood and gore and guts and not very much plot movement forward, the story finally shows a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel, reveals that the light is an oncoming train, and at least displays a glimmer of a hint of action in this book’s sequel, titled either Immortal the Blood or  To Kill a Monstrous Prince, which will be coming out this time net year.

This reader, at least, has no plans to be there for it. I’ve been tormented enough. Your reading mileage (and/or listening mileage) may vary.

A- #BookReview: How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub by P Djèlí Clark

A- #BookReview: How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub by P Djèlí Clark"How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub" by P. Djèlí Clark in Uncanny Magazine Issue 50, January-February 2023 by P. Djèlí Clark
Format: ebook
Source: supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, ebook
Genres: historical fantasy, short stories, steampunk
Series: Uncanny Magazine Issue 50
Pages: 26
Published by Uncanny Magazine on January 3, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKobo
Goodreads

The January/February 2023 issue of Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine .

Our landmark Issue 50, a double sized issue! Featuring new fiction by Ken Liu and Caroline M. Yoachim, Mary Robinette Kowal, P. Djèlí Clark, A. T. Greenblatt, A.M. Dellamonica, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Sarah Pinsker, E. Lily Yu, Marie Brennan, Christopher Caldwell, John Wiswell, and Maureen Mchugh. Essays by Elsa Sjunneson, John Picacio, Annalee Newitz, A.T. Greenblatt, Diana M. Pho, and Javier Grillo-Marxuach, poetry by Neil Gaiman, Terese Mason Pierre, Sonya Taaffe, Betsy Aoki, Theodora Goss, Ali Trota, Abu Bakr Sadiq, Elizabeth Bear, and Brandon O'Brien, interviews with Ken Liu and Caroline M. Yoachim by Tina Connolly; interviews with Eugenia Triantafyllou, E. Lily Yu, and Christopher Caldwell by Caroline M. Yoachim, a cover by Galen Dara, and editorials by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, and Meg Elison.

My Review:

The title of this story is the title of the manual that Trevor Hemley receives along with the rather expensive ‘Kraken egg’ that he’s purchased from an advertisement in the back of a magazine. Which all sounds utterly dodgy when you think about it for even half a second – but Trevor Hemley didn’t. Think, that is.

All Trevor thought about was the possibility of fame and fortune, of finally proving to his wealthy father-in-law that he was worthy of the hand of the man’s daughter – even though he already had that hand, along with a lovely home and a secure position all provided by his wife’s father.

Which of course made him feel all that more looked down upon by his wife’s family and their wealthy connections.

So a kraken. Or rather a plan to hatch said kraken in his bathtub, reveal the existence of the long-believed either mythical or extinct kraken to the world, and reap the rewards that Trevor felt were his due. After all, in Trevor’s Victorian Era, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, fantastic discoveries were being made around the globe by Englishmen of science and daring, and the sun never set on an Empire that reaped the benefits of all the countries to which it believed it was bringing enlightenment while raping their economies and destroying their cultures.

But England is unassailable from without – as history has proven time and again. Which does not mean that it can’t be conquered – or that vengeance can’t be delivered upon it – from within. One crate and one bathtub at a time.

By a monstrous and rapacious creature – in fact a whole horde of them – with appetites as large as empires.

Escape Rating A-: The whole of this story is considerably greater than the sum of its parts, which is merely one part of what makes it so much fun and so thought provoking at the same time.

On the surface, it’s a bit of a funny story about a man whose reach has very definitely exceeded his grasp, as well as a bit of a morality tale about the parting of fools and their money, combined with the message that anything that sounds too good to be true generally is and that people generally get conned because they’ve conned themselves first.

But those messages were delivered in a thrashing of tentacles and teeth which Trevor Hemley certainly deserved. What gives the story its shiver of horror mixed with delicious righteousness is the way that Trevor is merely a part of the deliverance of those messages to a much wider and even more deserving ‘audience’.

Because it’s not really about the kraken after all. Even though it still is. And it’s the double-barrelling of the story, that it’s both the tongue-in-cheek tale of a man who does something really, really stupid and pays for it, AND it’s a story about colonialism where the colonizers get more than a few tentacles of their just desserts.

The title of this is marvelous, eye-catching and true in more ways than one – much like the story it represents. However, that title isn’t the only reason I picked this up yesterday – but it is one of the reasons that I picked it first out of the Hugo Packet for this year’s awards – which leads me straight into the other reasons I chose to read this story to round out a week that’s had a whole lot of ‘meh’ in it.

As a person with at least a Supporting Membership in this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, I have voting rights for the Hugo Awards. In order to be informed about exercising those rights, the Awards committee compiles a packet of ebook versions of as much of the nominated material as the publishers will give them. That packet became available this week and I immediately downloaded the lot.

A lot that included this story by P. Djèlí Clark, whose previous work I have very much enjoyed, and in the case of the whole, entire Dead Djinn Universe (A Dead Djinn in Cairo, The Angel of Khan el-Khalili, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 and the utterly awesome A Master of Djinn) absolutely loved. While there are no djinn in this story, dead or alive, I was still up for some of his work because I knew it would be a gem whether or not it had received a Hugo nod.

All of which is to explain that many of the works that have received Hugo nominations (including another story from this very issue of Uncanny Magazine!) will appear in reviews here over the coming weeks. Based on the works that I have already read, plus this first foray into the nominated shorter works, it’s going to be an excellent year for the Hugos no matter which stories ultimately go home with rockets!