#BookReview: When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

#BookReview: When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John ScalziWhen the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: humorous science fiction, science fiction
Pages: 336
Published by Tor Books on March 25, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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From the New York Times bestselling author of Starter Villain comes an entirely serious take on a distinctly unserious subject: what would really happen if suddenly the moon were replaced by a giant wheel of cheese.
It's a whole new moooooon.
One day soon, suddenly and without explanation, the moon as we know it is replaced with an orb of cheese with the exact same mass. Through the length of an entire lunar cycle, from new moon to a spectacular and possibly final solar eclipse, we follow multiple characters -- schoolkids and scientists, billionaires and workers, preachers and politicians -- as they confront the strange new world they live in, and the absurd, impossible moon that now hangs above all their lives.

My Review:

You might be thinking that the title seems familiar. Or that it’s doing to you what it did to me and is giving you an earworm. It IS familiar. The whole line is, “If the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore”. I’m even hearing it in Dean Martin’s voice as it was one of his biggest hits and my parents certainly played the music of the Rat Pack around the house when I was growing up.

It’s also more than a bit of a pun for this whole entire book – especially the ending – as the moon hits pretty much everyone on Earth in the eye all the way through.

There are a lot of funny and or fanciful stories where the Moon is made of cheese. Usually green cheese – which works if the word green means “new” instead of the color. Wallace & Gromit travel to the moon to sample some of that cheese in A Grand Day Out. Wallace clearly hopes it’s his beloved Wensleydale – but sadly it’s not.

It may seem like I’ve digressed, but I’m not sure that’s true, considering the book. From a certain point of view, When the Moon Hits Your Eye could be said to be a series of digressions – or one whole entire digression. It’s certainly a series of vignettes, a month-long collection of slice of life stories all wrapped around a single, cheesy premise.

“What if the moon suddenly turned into cheese?” Not just the actual moon, but all the moon rocks carefully protected in museums and laboratories all over the Earth, right along with their point of origin.

Because that’s what happens in this book. It’s not about the science of how it happened – because no one can figure that out. At all. It’s about the reaction. All the reactions – including the reaction of the cheese itself.

Which is going to be absolutely moon-shattering – and potentially earth-shattering as well. But that’s not the point. The point is the human reaction to the cheese reaction to a fundamental change in the composition of the whole entire universe.

And it’s not good. But it is, frequently and often and wryly and ruefully, utterly hilarious.

[cover of Redshirts by John Scalzi]Escape Rating B: I ended up with a GINORMOUS cheese-wheel of mixed feelings on this one. I’ve read a fair bit of this author’s work, and let’s just say that Moon reads like a stellar reason why I’ve always said that Scalzi is a bit of an acquired taste. If you enjoy his authorial voice – it’s on full display in Moon. If you don’t, this isn’t going to change your mind.

The Scalzi story that Moon reminds me of most is Redshirts, which is as much meta as it is story and drove me a bit bananas in the reading of it. According to the author’s afterword, thematically Moon is part of a conceptual but not actual series that includes The Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain, in that all three stories “share a similar conceit of ‘Everyday people dealing with an extremely high-concept situation, in contemporary settings’.”

Which circles back to the idea that this isn’t REALLY about the moon suddenly turning into cheese. It’s about the human reaction to the moon becoming cheese. And, because humans are gonna human no matter the circumstances, that reaction is frequently hilarious.

To the point where I frequently laughed so hard I shook the bed and had to go read someplace else so my husband could sleep.

That hilarity is possible because the story is carefully set so that it’s not a tragedy as a whole – although it could have been. And the one documented death that does occur – well let’s just say that a Darwin Award nomination would have been a fitting outcome and leave it at that.

Where all of this reader’s mixed feelings come into this review is that the one thing I wish Moon had that it absolutely doesn’t is any hint of causality – not even of the casual handwavium variety. It’s not just that the people in the story don’t know why it happened – because that’s true in the whole entire 1632 series by Eric Flint and THAT still works. (1632 has some EXTREMELY flimsy causality, but it’s enough to get the reader over the hump and into the story.) It’s that the reader doesn’t know either. Not why it happened and not why it stopped. It could have all been a mass hallucination – which gets argued decades after the fact – AS IT ABSOLUTELY WOULD.

Which gets back to my mixed feelings. The story in the middle, the days in the life of the people in the world who were dealing – or not – with the moon having turned into cheese, were fantastic and funny and real in all of their human reactions to this insane thing that was happening. But that marvelous middle ends up feeling like a tent without even the flimsiest tentpoles of causality to keep it upright. I enjoyed it as I was reading, but it fell flat to the ground at the end.

So even though I’m a teensy bit disappointed even though my sides still ache from laughing, I would still recommend reading When the Moon Hits Your Eye to anyone who loves the author, a good, needs a good, sustained belly-laugh (and don’t we all these days), or especially a combination of the two.

A+ #BookReview: The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison

A+ #BookReview: The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine AddisonThe Tomb of Dragons (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #3) by Katherine Addison
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, fantasy mystery
Series: Cemeteries of Amalo #3, Chronicles of Osreth #4
Pages: 352
Published by Tor Books on March 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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Thara Celehar has lost his ability to speak with the dead. When that title of Witness for the Dead is gone, what defines him?
While his title may be gone, his duties are not. Celehar contends with a municipal cemetery with fifty years of secrets, the damage of a revethavar he’s terrified to remember, and a group of miners who are more than willing to trade Celehar’s life for a chance at what they feel they’re owed.
Celehar does not have to face these impossible tasks alone. Joining him are his mentee Velhiro Tomasaran, still finding her footing with the investigative nature of their job; Iäna Pel-Thenhior, his beloved opera director friend and avid supporter; and the valiant guard captain Hanu Olgarezh.
Amidst the backdrop of a murder and a brewing political uprising, Celehar must seek justice for those who cannot find it themselves under a tense political system. The repercussions of his quest are never as simple they seem, and Celehar’s own life and happiness hang in the balance.

My Review:

Once upon a time, I picked up the first book in this series because its central character, Thara Celehar, was instrumental in enabling The Goblin Emperor Maia to ascend his throne – alive and in one piece.

The Goblin Emperor is a story of high-stakes political drama and low-places skullduggery, the battle of a reviled outsider to assume the ultimate insider’s position as Emperor. Which he does, in part thanks to Celehar.

But Celehar himself is not a political operative. He’s not even an insider of the religious hierarchy that he himself inhabits as a prelate of the deity Ulis, and more importantly in his calling as a Witness for the Dead.

A calling which has gifted him with the ability to literally speak to the spirits of the recently departed, to help them pass on by carrying out their final wishes, by getting justice for those who have been wronged by the ones they left behind – and by, if necessary, forcing the spirits that have refused to leave to GO.

But in the previous book, The Grief of Stones, in the process of sending on a ghoul who has refused all previous attempts to get it to cross over, Celehar achieves his aim, stops the series of murders that the ghoul has perpetrated – but loses his gift in the trauma.

As this story opens, Celehar is reckoning with that loss of purpose, as he does not know what to do with himself without his duties. He’s also more than a bit worried about his living situation, as his income depends on him doing a job he literally no longer has the ability to perform.

While this uneasy situation settles – even if Celehar doesn’t – his superior in the temple hierarchy has given him an assignment as a sort of ecclesiastical troubleshooter in the city he once served.

The thing about Celehar, as modest and utterly self-effacing as he is, is that he’s an excellent troubleshooter because he’s such a magnet for trouble that it can’t resist finding him no matter what duty he’s ostensibly performing. Which is precisely what happens in The Tomb of Dragons, as in the midst of carrying out his duties to his archprelate he is kidnapped and literally tossed into a witnessing that is so deep and so vast it has the potential to topple the empire itself.

Thara Celehar has vowed to witness for 192 murdered dragons before the Emperor himself. Unless, of course, Celehar gets murdered first.

Escape Rating A+: I’m in a bit of a conundrum, as this series FEELS – emphasis on FEEL – like a cozy fantasy mystery even though the things that happen – especially the murders and the politics and the political murders – aren’t all that cozy. I think it’s that Thara Celehar is a very cozy and comfortable sort of person – in spite of just how uncomfortable he often is within himself.

I think that Celehar is what makes the series feel so cozy because he’s honestly just going about his day, doing his job, living his small life. It’s just that the way he does his very best to get his tasks done – no matter how seemingly mundane they are at the outset, feels safe and comfy because that’s what he’s looking for.

Even though, as this story begins, he’s really worried about what will happen to him if his calling doesn’t come back. So we feel for him.

But as he goes about his day and his work and getting dragged out of his rooms by his friends who won’t let him wallow by himself, things just seem to happen to him. Often big, huge, empire-shattering things. Nearly always in spite of himself.

As much fun as it is watching Celehar navigate ecclesiastical bureaucracy and 50 years of dead red tape – and it is surprisingly absorbing and, well, comforting – the center of this story is the case that he is literally dropped into, where he’s pushed down a mineshaft and ends up witnessing for all those dead dragons.

The initial circumstances are harrowing, but it’s the way that Celehar handles those circumstances that literally and figuratively calls back to his small but significant contribution to The Goblin Emperor – as well as bringing the emperor himself, Edrehesivar, back to the story in person.

The dragons’ case is groundbreaking, heartbreaking, and potentially as deadly for Celehar as it has already been for the dragons themselves. The easy thing would be for Celehar to pretend his conversation with the dead dragon never happened – but his conscience and his honor won’t let him do that.

It’s his quiet courage, his need to do the right thing, that gives this story both its tension – as that decision is contested on all sides – and its heart and soul as he perseveres in spite of the forces arrayed against him.

That his steadfastness is rewarded made The Tomb of Dragons the perfect ending to The Cemeteries of Amalo series. But if it turns out that this is not an ending after all, this reader would be thrilled to return to the world of The Goblin Emperor with Thara Celehar again. And again.

Grade A #BookReview: Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow

Grade A #BookReview: Picks and Shovels by Cory DoctorowPicks and Shovels (Martin Hench, #3) by Cory Doctorow
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: financial thriller, historical fiction, science fiction, thriller
Series: Martin Hench #3
Pages: 400
Published by Tor Books on February 18, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow returns to the world of Red Team Blues to bring us the origin story of Martin Hench and the most powerful new tool for crime ever the personal computer.

The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant--what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money--but for now he's an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever, one we now take completely for granted.

When Marty finds himself hired by Silicon Valley PC startup the Three Wise Men to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who've founded a competitor startup, he quickly realizes he's on the wrong side. Marty ditches the greasy old guys running Three Wise Men without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Magenta Women's Enterprise. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by the predatory business practices of Three Wise Men and set out to beat them at their own game, making better computers and driving Three Wise Men out of business. But this optimistic startup, fueled by young love and California-style burritos, has no idea the depth of the evil they're seeking to unroot or the risks they run.

In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.

My Review:

When I picked up Red Team Blues two years ago, it looked like a standalone. I absolutely LOVED it, but I just didn’t see how it could ever be more than a one-off. Forensic accounting just isn’t all that exciting – but the story did an excellent job of playing into that assumption. To the point where forensic accounting in general might not be all that thrilling, but the situations that Martin Hench gets himself into while doing his job certainly are.

That Marty is a terrific raconteur telling his own story made the whole thing work – and work WAY better than I expected. But I still expected it to be a one-off. Two books later, it’s pretty clear that I was wrong – and I’m glad about it.

The Martin Hench series reads like it’s been written backwards. That first book, Red Team Blues, took place in the present. The second book, The Bezzle, turned the clock back to 2006, when Marty was very much in his prime. (Meaning that this books takes place before either of the others and a new reader could start here and be just FINE.)

This latest book, Picks and Shovels, goes all the way back to the beginning. This is Marty’s ‘origin story’, the story of how Marty became the man that readers know and love from Red Team Blues.

So it begins with Marty flunking out of MIT because he’s discovered the one, true love of his life. Just as so many people did in the mid to late 1970s, Marty was introduced to personal computers at the dawn of that revolution – and it swept him away.

It also swept him out of MIT, into an Associates Degree program at UMass Boston where he was introduced to the Apple ][ Plus and the revolutionary program VisiCalc. As it turns out, spreadsheets made Marty’s world go round, and his rare combination of skills, the ability to create complex business models AND the accounting background to engineer or especially reverse-engineer a company’s financial statements, turned what most saw as a ‘hobby’ into a satisfying, sustaining and surprisingly fascinating career.

The story in Picks and Shovels also sets up the pattern of Marty’s life – at least as he tells it. Because, this origin story, like the stories of the life that follows after it, is the story of how Marty dives head-first into a job, discovers that his employers are not on the side of the angels, and then puts himself on the side of the angels by the most expedient method possible.

Unfortunately for Marty, but fortunately for the reader, Marty’s expedient methods of switching sides usually piss off the villains in a way that is exponentially worse than if he’d been professional about the whole mess. He ends up making lifelong grudges while thinking that he’s the good guy. Which he mostly is even though his self-righteous cluelessness creates even more enemies than he needed to. On the other hand, it creates good friends, too.

That, along with telling the story of how Marty got to be the Martin Hench of Red Team Blues, Picks and Shovels is also steeped in the early ‘glory days’ of the Silicon Valley ‘gold rush’ and the whole thing is told in Marty’s wry, witty and often self-deprecating story, combines two great stories into one terrific tale.

Escape Rating A: I fully admit that there’s a certain amount of nostalgia in just how much I enjoyed this book. I built my first computer out of a kit. In 1979. Meaning that I remember this period entirely too well. I even lived some of it. Scarier still, I’m realizing not just that Marty and I are about the same age, but that he’s exactly the sort of guy I dated back then. And I’m a bit freaked out about all of that. I’m also VERY weirded out that a time period that I have adult memories of has become historical fiction.

Because this is stuff I remember as it happened, I found Marty’s story about the early days of personal computing and the rise of Silicon Valley to be a bit like the fable about the frog in the pot of water that is slowly turned up to boil. Not that the situation is quite as bad as that poor frog’s, but rather in the way that Picks and Shovels is very much grounded in real events in the way that what started out at least seemingly sane got overwhelming surprisingly fast but the people in the soup were too busy to notice. Those years were every bit as chaotic as Marty describes.

Where the water really starts boiling, to stretch the metaphor, is the way that the story adds in the fictional elements in ways that are utterly plausible. Because, while this particular crap didn’t happen, crap like it very much did. To the point where I had to look to see if the setup was based semi-obvious on a real company, although if it is I couldn’t find it.

But there were plenty of situations of the kind of built-in customer lock-in and the jacking of prices because companies and organizations were held hostage, not just during the 1980s but even into the 1990s in some niche applications. It was all as wild and wooly as portrayed.

The situation does eventually fly right over-the-top, but until that point most of it parallels stuff that really happened, if not necessarily all in one single combination.

The story, and the series as a whole, works because of Marty’s voice as a character. Marty is the one telling this story. So, of course, Marty is the hero of his story, as we all are the heroes of OUR own stories – even the villains. But Marty is a likable, intelligent and a thoughtful character. His head is an interesting place to be – at least as he tells it. And this story makes it easy to see how the Marty we met in Red Team Blues got to be that person even though he’s not fully baked in Picks and Shovels.

That’s what origin stories are for, after all. This particular origin story turned out to be a doozy.

OTOH, it’s hard to imagine the series diving back any further into Marty’s past. Meaning that the one-off could be a three-off and be done. Howsomever, based on what we’ve learned about Marty over these three books, I’m confident that Marty has PLENTY more stories to tell about his escapades in the years between Picks and Shovels and Red Team Blues. And I’d be happy to read them all!

A+ #AudioBookReview: The Silverblood Promise by James Logan

A+ #AudioBookReview: The Silverblood Promise by James LoganThe Silverblood Promise (The Last Legacy, #1) by James Logan
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy mystery
Series: Last Legacy #1
Pages: 521
Length: 17 hours and 2 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on April 25, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Lukan Gardova is a cardsharp, academy dropout, and - thanks to a duel that ended badly - the disgraced heir to an ancient noble house. His life consists of cheap wine, rigged card games and wondering how he might win back the life he threw away.When Lukan discovers that his estranged father has been murdered in strange circumstances, he finds fresh purpose. Deprived of his chance to make amends for his mistakes, he vows to unravel the mystery behind his father's death.His search for answers leads him to Saphrona, fabled city of merchant princes, where anything can be bought if one has the coin. Lukan only seeks the truth, but instead he finds danger and secrets in every shadow.For in Saphrona, everything has a price - and the price of truth is the deadliest of all.

My Review:

To take a page from a story not nearly as different as I expected it to be, “So naturally, our story begins where all great stories begin; with the seediest bar in town,” not with a missing contact but with a man attempting to piss his life away one drink and one shady card game at a time.

Lukan Gardova believes that he’s merely in the process of completing a job he started years ago, when he killed a man in a duel, his family paid the price with what little was left of their fortune, and Lukan left home in a storm of regret and recriminations.

He thought he had nothing left to return to. He wasn’t quite right seven years ago when he left, but he is when the story opens, when his past catches up with him. When he learns that his father was murdered and that the old man’s last words, written in his own blood, were Lukan’s name, the name of a glittering city far, far from his home in Parva, and a third word that might be a place or might be a name but almost certainly represents both a mystery and one last chance to do right by his father. A task that Lukan always thought the old man believed him incapable of.

But needs must and Lukan needs a purpose even more than he needs air to breathe and wine to drink. Not that he hasn’t done entirely too much of the latter over the years he’s been on the run from his past. From himself.

There’s one talent that Lukan Gardova has, above all others, a knack for getting himself into ever deeper piles of shit and trouble – and getting himself out alive. He’ll need all of that, and more than a little help from friends he hasn’t even met yet, to find his father’s murderer.

His quest begins in the fabled city of Saphrona, searching for a person, place or thing named Zandrusa. Lukan thinks what he has is a clue, but what he really has is a key. The key to a long-bubbling pot of corruption and conspiracy, facilitated by figures out of myth and nightmare.

A key to his father’s past. And, perhaps, a key to his own future. If he can manage to survive the pile of shit and trouble that his dubious gift has placed in his path. The odds are against him. Exactly what he expected.

Escape Rating A+: Some stories are very much “out of the frying pan and into the fire”, some are frying pans and fires all the way down. Lukan Gardova, on the other hand, the moment he lands on yet another already hot griddle the flames lick around the edges and he throws himself right into their path. Again, and again, and AGAIN.

Reading this felt like watching TV from behind the couch, with my hands covering my eyes to keep from seeing the onrushing disaster while peeking through my fingers to see if the hero might manage, yet again, to escape that onrushing disaster.

I found myself caught between the book and the audio, over and over again, because, as much as I really, really, really, NEEDED to find out what happened next, I also really didn’t want to see Lukan crash and burn – yet I expected it at every turn, much as he himself does. (Also, the audio voiced by Brenock O’Connor is EXCELLENT.)

From the very beginning, The Silverblood Promise had me hooked on its mystery and its protagonist every bit as much as Lukan himself is hooked on finding his father’s murderer. This story also scratched the itch left from my epic book hangover after finishing In the Shadow of Lightning. (I’m still waiting for the second book in that series. It’s been nearly three years. Come on already! PLEASE!)

But as much as Lukan reminds me of Demir with the similar openings of the two stories, with both men rotting their brains as fast as they can in very low places, not quite suicidal but not quite looking out for themselves either, trying to outrun their own demons and secretly hoping the demons will catch up anyway, Lukan also reminds me more than a bit of Kihrin from The Ruin of Kings and Kinch from The Blacktongue Thief. The story, OTOH strikes me as a readalike for City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky with a touch of the upcoming Idolfire by Grace Curtis. These are all stories that I loved so it’s not a surprise that I fell hard for this one as well.

I’ve read that it reminds a LOT of readers of The Lies of Locke Lamora, but I haven’t read that – YET. Let’s just say that the repeated comparison has moved that story considerably up the virtually towering TBR pile.

Back to Lukan, who is, in spite of his cynicism and snark, really just a big softy under his fractured and fraying armor – both literal and figurative. He’s on his last nerve pretty much all the time, and it shows. He’s the fool that rushes in where angels and demons would both fear to follow, someone who leaps over and over again never assuming that the net will appear. He leaps assuming that it will be pulled out from under him if it bothers to shimmer into existence at all – however briefly.

It’s just a part of what makes the story so compelling as the reader is always on the edge of their seat waiting to see what mess Lukan is going to fall into even as he escapes the previous mess by the skin of his teeth.

He’s one of those characters whose heart is in the right place even as entirely too many opponents are attempting to reach it between his fourth and fifth ribs. He doesn’t merely feel the fear and do his damndest anyway, he feels the fear, fucks himself up over it, and still does his damndest anyway even though his road to good intentions is paved with trapdoors.

I had an absolute blast following Lukan and his friends and frenemies as they find their way into the rot at the heart of Saphrona and out the other side – more or less intact – on the run yet again. I’m on pins and needles waiting for the next book in The Last Legacy series, The Blackfire Blade, coming in November. I’m definitely NOT waiting most of a year to read, or more likely listen to it this time around. Because Lukan’s journey has clearly just begun, and I can’t wait to see what trouble it leads him into next!

A+ #AudioBookReview: Blood Jade by Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle

A+ #AudioBookReview: Blood Jade by Julia Vee and Ken BebelleBlood Jade (Phoenix Hoard, #2) by Julia Vee, Ken Bebelle
Narrator: Natalie Naudus
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dragons, fantasy, urban fantasy
Series: Phoenix Hoard #2
Pages: 448
Length: 14 hours and 23 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on July 16, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The follow-up to Ebony Gate , the critically acclaimed debut of Vee and Bebelle's Phoenix Hoard series.
IT TAKES A KILLER TO CATCH A KILLER
Emiko Soong, newly minted Sentinel of San Francisco, just can't catch a break. Just after she becomes the guardian for a sentient city, a murder strikes close to home. Called by the city and one of the most powerful clans to investigate, she traces the killer whose scent signature bears a haunting similarity to her mother’s talent.
The trail will lead her back to Tokyo where the thread she pulls threatens to unravel her whole world and bring dark family secrets to light.
Meanwhile, the General rises in the East and Emiko must fight the hidden enemies of his growing army who are amped up on Blood Jade, while keeping her promises to her brother Tatsuya as he prepares for his tourney.
Her duties as Sentinel and her loyalties collide when she must choose between hiding her deepest shame or stopping the General’s relentless march.
Phoenix Hoard#1 Ebony Gate#2 Blood Jade

My Review:

Blood Jade is the second book in the dark, compelling, utterly marvelous and occasionally downright infuriating Phoenix Hoard trilogy that began with the fantastic Ebony Gate. If you love fantasy, especially contemporary set fantasy that features hidden worlds operating within our own, if you adore flawed heroines filled with angst and doubt who still get the job done no matter what or who might be stacked against them, I can’t recommend this series highly enough.

But I do absolutely recommend that you start with Ebony Gate, as the Phoenix Hoard reads like one story divided into three parts and this one is the damn middle. I promise it’s worth the ride and the read – especially if you’re still jonesing for a book to assuage even a bit of your Green Bone Saga book hangover – as I certainly still am.

The first book, Ebony Gate, was the set up and the introduction. The Jiārén, the descendants of the Eight Sons of the Dragon, hide their true operations behind magic in the world that we Wàirén only think is ours.

Emiko Soong has done her best and her damndest to leave that world; her father’s world and her father’s machinations, behind – even though she knows she’s probably just fooling herself. The question is how much.

The answer, as Emiko learns in Blood Jade is that she’s been fooling herself a LOT and that she hasn’t truly moved outside her father’s influence at all. He’s just been watching from a distance and letting her make her own mistakes for a while.

Which she has certainly done. She’s also made real friends and a life of her own in San Francisco – some of which may have also been a mistake. Or at least it feels like one when her two worlds collide and she goes back home to Tokyo, to the center of her father’s power.

But now she has a power of her own as the magical ‘Sentinel’ of her adopted city, San Francisco. A power that will either make her, or break her, mend her or shatter her. If she can manage to survive leaving the seat of her power, the very real threats against her friends AND her family, and her father’s forever secret, always hidden, and all too often damnably right, plans for her, for the future of their clan, and for their people.

Escape Rating A+: I’ve had this book for almost half a year. I hung onto it for several reasons. One, because I wanted the time to savor it. Two, because this is the middle book in the trilogy and damn I wanted to have the final book in my hot little hands before I started this one (which I do), and three, I wanted the time to listen to the audio read by Natalie Naudus because she embodies Emiko perfectly.

I also kept it as a Hanukkah present to myself because I knew it would be excellent – which it absolutely was. But I knew even before I started that I’d need time and space to deal with all the feels before I even made a stab at writing up what I thought and felt.

And, very much like Emiko herself, I realized that I had to rethink a whole lot of the story when I reached the end. Just as her relationship with her parents wasn’t quite the way she thought it was, neither was my relationship with this book.

Before I start on my own personal thoughts and feelings, one thing needs to be said up front. Blood Jade is the middle book in a trilogy. Middle books, frequently, often and absolutely in this case, are walks through dark places. If you think of Frodo and Sam’s trip through Mordor in the second half of The Two Towers, well, that’s pretty much the archetype of a middle book. Not that the first half of that middle book in the Lord of the Rings is that much less grim, just that it’s hard to imagine anything more grim than walking through Mordor.

In Blood Jade, Emiko is walking through her own dark places, in many cases made all the darker because she’s walked them before. She’s always been the ‘Broken Blade’ of her clan, her powers blocked off or non-existent, and she’s always been a disappointment to her parents and her teachers, the flawed daughter of a powerful house with no power of her own.

Returning to her father’s orbit, doing her best – which is in fact very, very good – to keep both her brother Tacchan and her friend and ally Fiona Tran protected from the very real threat to their lives also forces her to deal with the reality that her own people see her as broken, see her as ‘less than’ at every turn, see her as a failure at everything she tries.

Except being her father’s hatchet-woman, a role she has chosen to reject. A rejection that is seen as yet another failure on her part. Emiko has a LOT of angst to deal with in this story – and because the whole saga is told from her first person perspective, we’re inside her head experiencing it right along with her. It’s a LOT, it’s all justified and it’s HARD.

In Emiko’s dysfunctional family and their interpersonal relationships I found a lot of my own buttons being pressed, which made the first half of the book a difficult read – or in this case listen – for me in spite of the excellence of the narration. (I can’t say enough good things about Natalie Naudus’ voicing of this story as well as Ebony Gate. She’s just awesome even if I’m angsting over some of what happens nearly as much as Emiko is.)

Emiko’s family is utterly dysfunctional in ways that are baked into their society. The amount of abuse the children suffer through is way too much like the Antivan Crows in the Dragon Age videogame series, AND, it’s also a reminder that it’s somewhere between hard and impossible to keep a dynasty going through inheritance because the later generations don’t have the same kind of drive their elders needed to in order to survive their real struggles and manufactured struggles through torture simply don’t instill the same needs and values. (Come to think of it, that was also a part of the mess in Tuesday’s book, Echo, in spite of the vast difference in their settings.)

What made me rethink how I felt about the whole book, what makes Emiko rethink everything she’s ever believed about her relationships with both of her parents, is a huge spoiler but at the same time is something I’ve been expecting since Ebony Gate. It’s a revelation that also beautifully sets up the third book in the trilogy, Pearl City, coming in July. I have an eARC but I’m doing my damndest to resist the temptation to read it RIGHT NOW because I’m holding out for the audio that I hope will be recorded by Natalie Naudus because she HAS to take up Emiko’s mantle one more time.

#AudioBookReview: The President’s Brain is Missing by John Scalzi

#AudioBookReview: The President’s Brain is Missing by John ScalziThe President's Brain Is Missing by John Scalzi
Narrator: P.J. Ochlan
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: humorous science fiction, science fiction, short stories
Pages: 29
Length: 47 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on July 12, 2010
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBetter World Books
Goodreads

The question is, how can you tell the President's brain is missing? And are we sure we need it back?

My Review:

My brain is toast today which is what caused me to pull this book and audio out of the virtually towering TBR pile. I was looking for a bit of a laugh, something lighthearted that wouldn’t tax my own poor missing brain too much – and this certainly delivered!

It starts out with a simple but confounding idea. What if the brain of the President of the United States went missing? I don’t mean surgically removed or shot out or anything even remotely logical. But what if the President woke up one morning, felt a bit lightheaded, and his doctor did all the obvious tests and a few less obvious tests and determined that there was a void in his cranium where his brain matter was supposed to be.

And that he was otherwise healthy and as operational as he ever was.

It’s a crisis – and it’s a conundrum. There are plenty of jokes about whether anyone will notice that this particular president no longer has a brain. Likewise, plenty of people would notice if the president dropped dead because his brain had gone walkabout. Just because he seems to be fine – at the moment – doesn’t mean he will continue to be fine under the circumstances.

The human body is not meant to function without something up there.

So one poor low-level staffer is assigned to figure out what happened before they have to tell the president what happened. Because he’s not going to take it well – AT ALL. Who would?

That assignment that leads from the White House to an old high school buddy to Area 51 to white panel vans to, well, back to the White House. After the dust has settled and the crisis hasn’t so much been resolved as expanded and made totally moot – at the same time.

Escape Rating B: This turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. It was light, short and fun. It also, surprisingly, is NOT a commentary on any of the parties in the recent election – or the one before that or the one before that. The President’s Brain is Missing was originally published in 2010. It took me a while to remember which president this particular lack of braininess would have been lampooning at THAT time – but once I did it worked even better than it had initially.

And it most certainly did work.

It did remind me more than a bit of the author’s When the Moon Hits Your Eye in the sense that the crisis is just so completely off the wall and comes out of absolute nowhere. Although this story about the President’s missing brain did a much better job at, at least, nodding towards causality than Moon did and I liked it more for that.

Part of what made this so much fun is that it took me back both to a more innocent time – as strange as that seems – and it reminded me of a whole lot of wonderfully strange and geeky science fiction into the fun bargain.

There’s the obvious take off on the Star Trek: The Original Series episode Spock’s Brain – which was a terrible episode. At least Spock’s missing brain was considerably more apparent, as, after all, Spock USES his.

In addition to the multiple nods to Trek, and the beautifully played reference to the extremely applicable Clarke’s Law (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,) I also got some whiffs of nostalgia about the X-Files and even a touch of Stargate. The X-Files were specifically mentioned, but so was Area 51 where Stargate Command had a base that dealt with alien technology.

The President’s brain may, or may not, have been missing – or maybe it’s Schrodinger’s Brain after all – but the author’s deft touch with science fiction humor was certainly present. And this story turned out to be the perfect listen for my own missing brain to wrap up the week.

A++ #AudioBookReview: The Daughters’ War by Christopher Buehlman

A++ #AudioBookReview: The Daughters’ War by Christopher BuehlmanThe Daughters' War (Blacktongue, #0) by Christopher Buehlman
Narrator: Nikki Garcia
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, grimdark
Series: Blacktongue #0
Pages: 416
Length: 13 hours and 14 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on June 25, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Enter the fray in this luminous new adventure from Christopher Buehlman, set during the war-torn, goblin-infested years just before The Blacktongue Thief .
The goblins have killed all of our horses and most of our men.
They have enslaved our cities, burned our fields, and still they wage war.
Now, our daughters take up arms.
Galva ― Galvicha to her three brothers, two of whom the goblins will kill ― has defied her family’s wishes and joined the army’s untested new unit, the Raven Knights. They march toward a once-beautiful city overrun by the goblin horde, accompanied by scores of giant war corvids. Made with the darkest magics, these fearsome black birds may hold the key to stopping the goblins in their war to make cattle of mankind.
The road to victory is bloody, and goblins are clever and merciless. The Raven Knights can take nothing for granted ― not the bonds of family, nor the wisdom of their leaders, nor their own safety against the dangerous war birds at their side. But some hopes are worth any risk.

My Review:

I finished The Daughters’ War for the second time over the weekend, but I was so deeply into the story, the characters and simply the world between the pages that I had to sit on even attempting to write a review for a bit – to let the SQUEE calm down some. But I also felt compelled to reread the first book set in this world, The Blacktongue Thief – which I did. Which didn’t tone the SQUEE down AT ALL.

The book hangover was huge after my first read of Blacktongue, and after my first read of The Daughters’ War earlier this year for Library Journal, but this time I listened to the thing – and the book hangover is absolutely epic.

Now let me attempt an explanation – which is still going to have a LOT of SQUEE in it. Because damn I loved this book – and I fell hard into Blacktongue again, too. So hard.

The title of this book immediately tells the reader just how badly this world is totally wrecked. You see, the first war between humans and goblins was the Knights’ War, because the noble Knights beat the goblins back on their swift and equally noble horses. So the goblin mages created a poison, a bioweapon, that killed all the horses. The second war, not even a decade later, was the Threshers’ War, because the goblins cut the untrained farm boys sent to fight it like they were threshing wheat. This war is the Daughters’ War because that’s pretty much all that’s left to fight this time around, less than a decade after the end of the Threshers’.

This is one of the rarest of rare cases where the old saying that “There never was a good war or a bad peace” doesn’t feel strictly true. Because the goblins USED those brief years of peace while the humans WASTED them.

Readers of The Blacktongue Thief will remember Galva as she will be, as in that story she’s 30 years old, a hard-bitten, cynical, heart-sore veteran of the Daughters’ War, on a mad quest to save her queen, her country, and quite possibly her whole entire species from the idiocy of the so-called powers that be who seem to be wasting yet another peace.

The story of this book, The Daughters’ War, is the story of how this Galva got to be that Galva. How the 20 year old swordswoman and newly fledged Corvid (read that as war-raven or murder-bird) knight came of age, lost her innocence and her naiveté, as well as her faith in pretty much everything she once believed, including her family and her country – or at least the king who usurped its throne.

So this is Galva’s story, which means it’s a story about the cost of war and the price of peace, and the question of which one is higher than the other and whether either will prevent the actual extinction of the human race. Because it’s also a story about the damage a small man can do to shield himself from the knowledge that he is truly small and the way that power and privilege can blind a whole society to the destruction that is happening all around them because they rather maintain their power than save everyone’s future – including their own.

And over and under and through all of that, The Daughters’ War is a poignant, lyrical, heartbreaking paean to times and places that are no more, told by someone who develops a truly cynical perspective on command and control and the lack thereof and the high price that may be paid because humans are gonna human even if it kills them all.

Escape Rating A++: I don’t give A++ ratings often as that’s kind of the point of the thing, but The Daughters’ War absolutely earned one – as did The Blacktongue Thief three years ago. My one and only disappointment with this book is that I can’t seem to find any information on whether or not the author will be returning to this world – but that was also true after Blacktongue so I still have hope.

After all, Galva’s – and Kinch’s – world is so FUBAR’d that there are plenty of possibilities for more stories where these two came from. And I want them. BAD. Seriously BAD.

Ahem…

I keep talking about the two books, The Daughters’ War and The Blacktongue Thief, as though they are intertwined. Only because they are. Blacktongue was published first, but Daughters’ War comes first in the internal chronology. So it doesn’t matter which one you read first. Whichever one you can get first will be fine – especially if you like your epic fantasy with more than a bit of grimdark – because their world is very grim – and both Galva and Kinch are VERY cynically aware of that grimness.

Although I have friends who don’t like grimdark who STILL enjoyed Blacktongue, that I think I’ve convinced to read Daughters’ War. The author does such an excellent job of getting inside his characters’ heads to let the reader – or especially listener – see the world from their point of view that he carries the reader through the grimdark exceedingly well. I fully admit, however, that I got so into the characters and their perspectives that both books made me cry more than once each.

The stories are a bit different in tone, as Kinch is an extremely unreliable narrator and Galva is the exact opposite. She hates lies, lying and liars, while he can’t stop any of the above – sometimes not even to himself. He’s also a bit of an optimist in spite of his circumstances, while she’s definitely a pessimist.

Both stories are told in the first-person singular, so we spend the entire story inside each of their heads. Which does serve as a kind of a hint that they each survive their own adventures. It’s the audiobook that really got me in both cases, not just that we see the world from their perspectives, but that excellent choices were made for narration in both cases (the author chose himself for Kinch which says something about several somethings but absolutely worked). So if you like audiobooks these are excellent and Nikki Garcia did every single bit as fantastic a job “being” Galva as the author did Kinch.

I have to conclude this review and I honestly don’t want to. I simply do not want to be done with this world and these characters. I hope that this review and my general, overall squee about the marvels of this series will convince you to give it a try as well. Because both books are seriously awesome and well worth a read – or even better – a listen.

A+ #BookReview: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

A+ #BookReview: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. KingfisherA Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, fairy tales, fantasy, horror, retellings
Pages: 336
Published by Tor Books on August 6, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

A dark retelling of the Brothers Grimm's Goose Girl, rife with secrets, murder, and forbidden magic
Cordelia knows her mother is unusual. Their house doesn’t have any doors between rooms, and her mother doesn't allow Cordelia to have a single friend—unless you count Falada, her mother's beautiful white horse. The only time Cordelia feels truly free is on her daily rides with him. But more than simple eccentricity sets her mother apart. Other mothers don’t force their daughters to be silent and motionless for hours, sometimes days, on end. Other mothers aren’t sorcerers.
After a suspicious death in their small town, Cordelia’s mother insists they leave in the middle of the night, riding away on Falada’s sturdy back, leaving behind all Cordelia has ever known. They arrive at the remote country manor of a wealthy older man, the Squire, and his unwed sister, Hester. Cordelia’s mother intends to lure the Squire into marriage, and Cordelia knows this can only be bad news for the bumbling gentleman and his kind, intelligent sister.
Hester sees the way Cordelia shrinks away from her mother, how the young girl sits eerily still at dinner every night. Hester knows that to save her brother from bewitchment and to rescue the terrified Cordelia, she will have to face down a wicked witch of the worst kind.

My Review:

The name of that sorceress who comes to call on Hester Chatham and her brother the Squire is “DOOM!”.

That’s not what she was christened with – assuming she was christened at all. Or baptized or anything like that because she’s clearly evil. This evil has a name, and it’s Evangeline. She’s hoping to change that to Mrs. Squire, but in order to get her way she’ll have to get past the Squire’s sister, Hester.

Evil is sure that Hester will be a pushover – or she’ll simply push her over a balcony. After all, she’s done it before. She even does it right in front of Hester to one of Hester’s dearest friends.

But evil, as that saying goes, only triumphs when good men stand by and do nothing. Evil’s magic is such that most of the men, including the Squire, are quite literally standing by and doing nothing as she has utterly ensorcelled them – or at least the ones she thinks are important.

Seeing her friend die, watching her brother succumb to the sorceress’ seductive magic, discovering that the sorceress’ daughter is ANYTHING but her mother’s accomplice, spurs Hester to ACT. To do whatever she can and however she must in order to save her brother, her friends and even the sorceress’ desperate and despairing daughter.

All their lives hang in the teetering balance.

Escape Rating A+: This wasn’t what I expected, although having read quite a bit of the author’s work, I probably should have. I also had zero recollection of the fairy tale the story is loosely based on (The Goose Girl if you’re curious too), and that didn’t matter a bit, although if the idea of that drives you bonkers there’s a summary in Wikipedia, which some Wikipedian needs to edit to include this book in the list of adaptations.

Kingfisher writes both fantasy and horror and often in that mushy middle between the two. While this one is in that middle, it leans more to the fantasy side the way that the equally awesome (and award-winning!) Nettle and Bone did, rather than hewing closer to the horror side the way that her Sworn Soldier series (What Moves the Dead and What Feasts at Night) does.

Not that the acts that the sorceress commits are not plenty horrific – because they completely, utterly and absolutely are. But the way the story works its way out of her evil feels more like a fantasy. It also specifically feels a bit like a very specific fantasy, Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons by Quenby Olson. I’m certain that Hester and Miss Percy would be the very best of friends – and would have PLENTY of common ground to talk about!

I certainly enjoyed both stories for the same reason, their marvelous middle-aged female protagonists who take terrible matters into their own hands – after a bit of quite reasonable and reasoning reluctance – in order to get the best of the evil bitch attempting to put them down so they can save the day.

Which is when I felt like I got hit with a clue-by-four, to the point of chagrin that I didn’t figure out a whole bunch of things sooner. Not the way that Hester got the best of the sorceress, but rather the way that the story as a whole worked. And, as I mulled things over more than a bit, the way that Nettle and Bone and What Feasts at Night and a LOT of the author’s work, well, works.

The stories are feminist by example rather than by hitting the reader over the head with feminism. They simply show that women are beyond capable of doing all the things that men do, including being insufferably and thoughtlessly and selfishly and unironically evil

Meanwhile, the male characters serve in secondary roles. You know what I mean, the roles that women normally fill. In this story, and now that I think of it in much of the author’s work, women fill the big parts and do the big things, while men are the assistants, the helpmeets, the love interests, the dupes, and the fools. They’re sidekicks. And even, as in the case of Hester’s brother the Squire, they can be TSTL.

Which he absolutely is. He’s just lucky that Hester absolutely is not.

The icing on the cake of this story is that the Squire merely gets a lucky escape, while Hester is the one who deserved and certainly earned a glorious happy ever after.

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
Goodreads

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.