Publisher: Tordotcom

Review: Under the Smokestrewn Sky by A. Deborah Baker

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

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

My Review:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo

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

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

My Review:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi VoMammoths at the Gates (The Singing Hills Cycle, #4) by Nghi Vo
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy
Series: Singing Hills Cycle #4
Published by Tordotcom on September 12, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

The Hugo and Crawford Award-Winning Series!
The wandering Cleric Chih returns home to the Singing Hills Abbey for the first time in almost three years, to be met with both joy and sorrow. Their mentor, Cleric Thien, has died, and rests among the archivists and storytellers of the storied abbey. But not everyone is prepared to leave them to their rest.
Because Cleric Thien was once the patriarch of Coh clan of Northern Bell Pass--and now their granddaughters have arrived on the backs of royal mammoths, demanding their grandfather’s body for burial. Chih must somehow balance honoring their mentor’s chosen life while keeping the sisters from the north from storming the gates and destroying the history the clerics have worked so hard to preserve.
But as Chih and their neixin Almost Brilliant navigate the looming crisis, Myriad Virtues, Cleric Thien’s own beloved hoopoe companion, grieves her loss as only a being with perfect memory can, and her sorrow may be more powerful than anyone could anticipate. . .
The novellas of The Singing Hills Cycle are linked by the cleric Chih, but may be read in any order, with each story serving as an entrypoint.

My Review:

When the Cleric Chih returns home to the Singing Hills Abbey after three years on the road collecting stories, they are astonished to discover that there really are mammoths at the gates of the abbey. It’s not exactly like saying there are barbarians at the gates – but as Chih learns it’s not exactly unlike, either.

Because in the stories that the clerics of the Singing Hills Abbey collect, mammoths ALWAYS come at the end. After they’ve trampled everyone and everything that stood in their way.

So Cleric Chih already knows that something terrible has happened even before they walk through the gates of the Abbey. And it doesn’t take them long to learn at least the tip of the iceberg of the rest.

Discovering that under the trumpeting of mammoths, it’s grief and stories all the way down.

The abbey is virtually empty, as most of the chroniclers and archeologists rushed to the site of a temporarily uncovered village, located in a valley that has been flooded for years, has been temporarily and briefly unflooded, and will be flooded again in just a few short months. Stories are what the Singing Hills Abbey is, and what it does, and there have been stories sunken in that village for decades that won’t survive the re-flooding.

So away they went.

In their absence, Chih’s best friend Ru has been made temporary Abbot, making the divide between the two lifelong friends even deeper than it has been, as Chih’s duty is to leave the Abbey to gather stories, while Ru, disabled in childhood by disease, is left behind to learn how to administer the place.

Which he is, and has, but…nearly the first thing that happened after most of the abbey’s population was out of reach was the death of the most senior cleric, Cleric Thien. Thien was both Chih’s and Ru’s mentor and father-figure. But before he became a Cleric, Thien was a high-ranking advocate (read lawyer) in the Empire.

Thien was disowned by his family and stripped of his imperial status when he became a Cleric. But the mammoths at the gate demonstrate that someone official, at least, has not forgotten Thien’s imperial service. And now they want him back. Dead or alive.

Escape Rating A+: I love the Singing Hills Cycle, and have from its very beginning in The Empress of Salt and Fortune. At first, it seemed like this series was a bit of an exercise in mythmaking, fantasy not because there’s any particular magical system, but because it feels like fantasy and doesn’t fit, neatly or otherwise, into any other box.

Also the writing is utterly lovely every step of the way, and it’s easy to get caught up in Cleric Chih’s world and the stories in it, even if we’re never quite sure whether or not it has any relationship to our own. There’s magic in these stories, they’re magically compelling, and that’s all that’s necessary to make for a captivating read.

Howsomever, while each story is complete in and of itself, the series as a whole is Chih’s literal journey around their world to learn and record the stories they find in that world, and that overarching frame provides a vehicle for telling fantastic adventures.

One of the fascinating points about that overarching story is the way that Chih began very much on the periphery of it. In The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Chih seemed merely to be the vessel into which the handmaiden Rabbit poured her tale of the Empress that she served, loved and hated, all at the same time, while Chih was there to make a record of it and explicitly not become a part of it.

But the following stories, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain and Into the Riverlands, nudged Chih towards the center, as they spend the night When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain telling the tiger of the tale the tale of the tiger as it is remembered among humans, in the hope that said tiger won’t eat them and their companions before morning. While in Into the Riverlands it almost seems as if the tale is happening around them even as the villagers tell that tale to Chih.

The tale in Mammoths at the Gates is Chih’s own story, it’s happening TO them as we read it. It’s a story about love and loss, a story about friendship and compromise, and a story about growing up and letting go.

It’s also a heartbreakingly beautiful tale of a truth that sets no one free, and a love that both transcends and transforms death.

This was my second read of Mammoths at the Gates, and it was even better this second time around, as I had more time to savor it. I didn’t want to leave Chih and their world when I turned that final page, and I’m happy to say that I won’t be. I picked up the audio of Into the Riverlands, which I read when it came out but didn’t review here, because I wanted a chance to experience the Singing Hills Cycle as it feels like it’s meant to be, as a story being told and recorded.

AND, and I’m oh-so-happy about this, a fifth book in the Singing Hills Cycle, The Brides of High Hill, just popped up on Edelweiss last night as coming out in May, 2024. I’m thrilled and already looking forward to it!

Review: Wild Spaces by S.L. Coney

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

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

My Review:

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

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

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

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

And then it’s too late.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko CandonThe Archive Undying (The Downworld Sequence, #1) by Emma Mieko Candon
Narrator: Yung-I Chang
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, dystopian, mecha, science fiction
Series: Downworld Sequence #1
Pages: 496
Length: 16 hours and 28 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tordotcom on June 27, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Archive Undying is an epic work of mecha sci-fi about Sunai, the immortal survivor of an Autonomous Intelligence that went mad and destroyed the city it watched over as a patron god. In the aftermath of the divine AI’s suicide, Sunai is on the run from those who would use him, either to resurrect what was lost or as the enslaved pilot of a gargantuan war machine made from his god’s corpse. Trouble catches up with Sunai when he falls into bed with Veyadi, a strange man who recruits him to investigate an undiscovered AI. Sunai draws ever closer to his cursed past, flirting with disaster and his handsome new boyfriend alike.

My Review:

The Archive Undying is a fractured story about broken people in a shattered world. Everything about this story, the people, the place, even the story itself, is in jagged pieces.

But with everything in jagged pieces, while it makes the characters compelling, and the world they live in a fascinating puzzle, the fractured jaggedness of the story itself makes the whole thing hard to follow.

Which makes describing the thing more than a tad difficult. Because you’re never quite sure what’s going on – even after the end – because you don’t know how anything or anyone got to be who, where and what they were at the point things start. Or even what the point of what they did might have been.

That’s true of the characters, the institutions and the whole entire world they inhabit. Because it’s all been corrupted. Not by the usual human forms of corruption – well, honestly, that too – but because everything in this world was run by autonomous AIs, and someone or something, both in the distant past and in the immediate present, introduced corruption into those AIs’ codes that caused them to fall. And to die.

At least as much as an AI can die.

So the story begins with Sunai. Or at least the story we drop into begins from Sunai’s point of view. He’s a salvage rat hiding a bitter truth from himself – but as it turns out Sunai is lies and bitter truths pretty much all the way down.

So is everyone – and everything – else. But the more of all those perspectives of lies and deceptions and bitter truths and sorrows we see, the more it all comes back to Sunai. And to the bitterest truth of all that he has hidden so deep that it will take an invasion of rogue mechs and rapacious AIs destroying his city to finally bring it to light.

Escape Rating B: I listened to The Archive Undying in its entirety, and I have to say that its the narrator that carried me through all SIXTEEN AND A HALF HOURS. The narrator didn’t just do a good job of voicing all the many, many characters, but by literally being in their heads and not my own it allowed me to care enough about the individuals to be willing to experience the whole constantly twisting saga. If I’d been reading this as text, if I’d been in my head instead of theirs, I’d have DNF’d fairly early because the sheer number of changes in perspectives combined with unsatisfying hints of the world they occurred in would have driven me mad in short order. YMMV.

The Archive Undying is a story that expects a lot from its readers, probably more than it is likely to get. Which is somewhat ironic, as Sunai, the being who stands more-or-less as its protagonist has learned to expect very little, and is often surprised when he gets even that.

But then, that’s the thing about this book, in that if the reader can come to care about the characters, particularly Sunai the failed archivist and reluctant relic, then that reader will stick with the story to see what happens to Sunai and the ragtag band of friends, allies, frenemies and rogue AIs who have attached themselves to him. Or that he has attached himself to accidentally or by someone else’s purpose.

The story has so many perspectives, and it jumps between them so frequently and with so little provocation, that the story is difficult to follow. But more often than the reader expects, all of those fractured pieces come together in beauty – just the way the bits of color in a kaleidoscope suddenly shift into a glorious – if temporary – whole.

I left this story with three completely separate – almost jagged – thoughts about it.

Because we spend this story inside pretty much all of the characters’ heads – even the characters that don’t technically HAVE heads, and because so many of their actions have gone horribly wrong and they’re all full to the brim with regret and angst, this struck me as a ‘woulda, coulda, shoulda’ kind of story. We see their thoughts, they’re all a mess all the time, they’ve all screwed up repeatedly, and they’re all sorry about almost everything they’ve done – even as they keep doing the thing they’re sorry about.

Second, as a question of language, and because I listened to this rather than read the text, I got myself caught up in the question of whether the word, and more of the characters than at first seemed, was ‘relic’ or ‘relict’ as they’re pronounced the same. Sunai, and others, are referred to as ‘relics’ of the mostly dead AI named Iterate Fractal – or one of its brethren. But a ‘relic’ is an object of religious significance from the past, and a ‘relict’ is a survivor of something that used to exist in a larger or active form but no longer does. Not all of the autonomous AIs were worshipped as gods, but they all left relicts behind.

There’s a part of me that keeps thinking that at its heart, The Archive Undying is a love story. Not necessarily a romance – but rather a story about the many and varied ways that love can turn toxic and wrong. To the point where even when it does come out right the selected value of right is tenuous and likely to break at the first opportunity.

An opportunity we’ll eventually get to see. The Archive Undying is the first book in the projected Downworld Sequence, implying that there will be more to come even if the when of it is ‘To Be Determined’. I think I got invested in the characters enough to see what happens to them next – and I have hope that maybe the many, many blanks in the explanation of how things got to be this bad will get filled in in that next or subsequent books in the duology. But after the way this first book went, I KNOW I’ll be getting that second one in audio because the narration of this first book by Yung-I Chang is what made the whole thing possible for me and I expect him to carry me through the next one as well.

Review: The Book of Gems by Fran Wilde

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Book of Gems by Fran WildeThe Book of Gems (Gemworld, #3) by Fran Wilde
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy
Series: Gem Universe #3
Pages: 142
Published by Tordotcom on June 20, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

“A glittering tale of academic jealousy and ancient artifacts, The Book of Gems is a pulse-pounding adventure.” ―Katherine Addison, author of The Goblin Emperor
Some truths are shatterproof...
It’s been centuries since the Jeweled Valley and its magical gems were destroyed. In the republics that rose from its ashes, scientists craft synthetic jewels to heat homes, power gadgetry, and wage war.
Dr. Devina Brunai is one of these scientists. She also is the only person who believes true gems still exist. The recent unearthing of the Palace of Gems gives her the perfect opportunity to find them and prove her naysayers wrong.
Her chance is snatched away at the last moment when her mentor steals her research and wins the trip for himself. Soon, his messages from the field transform into bizarre ramblings about a book, a Prince, and an enemy borne of the dark. Now Dev must enter the Valley, find her mentor, and save her research before they, like gems, become relics of a time long forgotten.
More books in the Gem The Jewel and Her LapidaryThe Fire Opal Mechanism

My Review:

The Book of Gems is the third book in the Gem Universe, after The Jewel and Her Lapidary and The Fire Opal Mechanism. This entry in the series brings the action back to the place and the history where it all began, the Jeweled Valley.

In that first book, the titular characters, Jewel Lin and her Lapidary Sima, sacrifice themselves in their attempt to save the Jeweled Valley. While their attempt is not exactly in vain, it is a bit of a pyrrhic victory. They destroy what they love in order to save it from, literally, the ravening hordes who intend not merely to destroy it, but to use its power on their way to saving the world by destroying that.

The Fire Opal Mechanism is the story in the middle, as the history of this world has gone on its not so merry way, down the path that Lin and Sima tried to prevent. Or at least did their level best to keep the power of the singing gems from powering the destruction of the world.

They didn’t exactly fail, but they certainly didn’t succeed, either. In this second book it’s up to their descendants to divert the tide – or at least to set their less than powerful selves against the onrushing storm.

Now the story has both come full circle and done a strange turn into Motel of the Mysteries, but one not nearly as much fun. Because that tyranny has come and finally gone, leaving in its wake a dearth of true historical documentation and a whole lot of scholarly inquiry about things that perhaps shouldn’t be inquired into. Resulting in seemingly innumerable academic and archaeological expeditions to the Jeweled Valley to dig up things that should remain buried, even as the academics seem to be doing their worst to bury each other’s careers if not, actually, each other.

In the midst of this furious excavation, the Jeweled Valley is being slowly but surely uncovered, as it waits a bit impatiently for Lin and Sima’s descendants to save it one more time. Or at least to save their world from the force that has been waiting within. Or both. Definitely both.

Escape Rating A-: I originally picked up The Jewel and Her Lapidary because I was looking for a short bite of the SF/F reading apple and Tordotcom always delivers. I stuck with the series because that first book was just so damn good, such a perfect epic fantasy in an amazingly succinct little package, that I couldn’t resist seeing what happened after Jewel’s rather cataclysmic ending. Not that it didn’t have a slam-bang, bittersweet ending for itself, but the world clearly had plenty more stories to tell.

The second book, The Fire Opal Mechanism, kept me enthralled because it was just a little too prescient, all the while managing to be both different from the first while still following the same threads.

This third book does a lovely job of bringing the saga full circle while still telling a story of its own that yet manages to tug on those very same threads – as well as some of the same heartstrings.

All the books in this series are stories about power imbalances, very specifically the vast, sweeping power of tyrannies to control and rewrite history and belief vs. the tiny, subversive but ultimately enduring power of families and family stories to keep the truth alive in spite of the odds and the power of the state to stop them. At the same time, there’s also a bit of the “Mother Nature bats last” trope, as in this ending, the singing jewels and their imbued power have been hunted down and corrupted and yet are still waiting for their chance to rise once more.

The form that each story in the series has taken have also differed, and this entry in the series is very much a story about academia, both dark and light, the viciousness of its politics and policies and the single-mindedness of its pursuers in their intellectual pursuits. And in this particular entry in the series, the power imbalance between an untenured lecturer and the head of their department. This facet of the story had a surprisingly similar vibe to Malka Older’s The Mimicking of Known Successes, which I utterly loved.

So even though it doesn’t seem like there will be more stories in the Gem Universe – at least for a while, I do have the sequel to Mimicking, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, to look forward to. And, very much like the way the drama in The Book of Gems plays out, doesn’t that title just scream academic obfuscation? Which is always fun to see knocked down, just as much as it was in The Book of Gems.

Review: Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Emergent Properties by Aimee OgdenEmergent Properties by Aimee Ogden
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: science fiction, science fiction mystery
Pages: 126
Published by Tordotcom on July 25, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Emergent Properties is the touching adventure of an intrepid A.I. reporter hot on the heels of brewing corporate warfare from Nebula Award-nominated author Aimee Ogden.
A state-of-the-art AI with a talent for asking questions and finding answers, Scorn is nevertheless a parental disappointment. Defying the expectations of zir human mothers, CEOs of the world’s most powerful corporations, Scorn has made a life of zir own as an investigative reporter, crisscrossing the globe in pursuit of the truth, no matter the danger.
In the middle of investigating a story on the moon, Scorn comes back online to discover ze has no memory of the past ten days—and no idea what story ze was even chasing. Letting it go is not an option—not if ze wants to prove zirself. Scorn must retrace zir steps in a harrowing journey to uncover an even more explosive truth than ze could have ever imagined.

My Review:

When we first meet Scorn, ze is pretty much of a mess. A very determined mess, but a mess all the same. Ze has just lost over ten days of memory – along with ALL of zir backups. As ze is an autonomous AI, that shouldn’t even be possible. But as ze is an investigative reporter doing zir best to make zir mark by breaking a sensational story to get zir high-powered, highly intelligent, mega-corporation-owning mothers off zir back about zir’s career choices, it’s a tragedy in the making.

At the same time, in the best tradition of investigative reporters everywhere and everywhen, it’s also a sign that ze is on the right track to that story. Which means that ze is incapable of letting it go. And as a state-of-the-art AI, Scorn is capable of retracing his steps, both digital and physical, to get back what ze lost.

On the moon, which is where Scorn lost it the first time. Which is also the last place zir mothers want zem to go – considering Scorn’s last trip got zir memory wiped.

Emergent Properties is the story of Scorn’s journey back to where ze nearly lost zirself, dodging EMP pulses and drone attacks every step of the way, along the trail of a story that will either make or break zem.

Or both. Definitely both. In ways that Scorn never, ever expected – even though ze very much should have.

Escape Rating A++: I’ve been pushing this book at anyone willing to stand still for it for months. I read this one for a Library Journal review and fell completely in love, and don’t seem to have fallen out in the intervening months. To the point where a reread just now was like catching up with an old friend.

One of the things I loved about Scorn is that ze is pretty much Murderbot’s ‘brother from another mother’, even though neither identifies as or even has a gender. Which doesn’t change how much their snarkitude is in sync even if pointed in different directions.

Notice I didn’t say anything about either of them not having a mother, because Scorn certainly has two – both of whom are giving zem exactly the same kind of grief that mothers the world over give their newly adult children when those children are not living their parents’ dreams for them.

Mother may not always know best, but she always thinks she does, and Scorn is getting that times two. Which ze does zir best to ignore or delay or postpone dealing with, as so many of us do. At least until this time it bites zem in the ass – in multiple senses of the phrase – even if Scorn doesn’t always have an ass, depending on which carapace ze happens to be using at the present.

While Scorn is very much the character that carries the story, the places ze carries that story through are both fascinating and fantastic every step of the way.

A part of this reader wants to say that Scorn comes across as very human, because that’s our default paradigm. But like Murderbot, Scorn isn’t human and doesn’t want to be – no matter how much zir mothers hoped that ze would aspire to such.

And the whole idea that ze still must deal with zir human mothers and their human disappointment in zem is what makes Scorn so easy for human readers to identify with. Ze has mommy issues – and don’t we all?

But zir world is our future, and it feels plausible even as we get sucked into it. Human greed carried out through corporate political shenanigans is running the show. Independence for human colonies and autonomy for sentient, sapient, autonomous AIs are being spun into opposition instead of banding together to help each other. Because the corporations make more profits out of war than they do peace.

Scorn moves through zir world as an AI, not a fixed body in time and space. Ze uses bodies, but is not attached to or possessed by one, and it changes zir perspective in ways that go even beyond what we’ve already seen in John Scalzi’s Lock In, although there are some similarities. Scorn goes well beyond the ‘threeps’ in what ze does and how ze does it. It feels like a next step.

At the same time, Scorn’s emotional landscape is as fraught and confused as any human’s. Ze just processes it differently some of the time, and turns it off some of the time, but it is still recognizable and well within our empathetic parameters.

So I had an absolute blast reading about Scorn’s surprising Emergent Properties, was fascinated with zir world, and hope the author takes us back to zir and it sometime in the future!

Review: War Cry by Brian McClellan

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
Review: War Cry by Brian McClellanWar Cry by Brian McClellan
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, military fantasy, military science fiction, science fiction
Pages: 96
Published by Tordotcom on August 28, 2018
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Brian McClellan, author of the acclaimed Powder Mage series, introduces a new universe, new armies, and new monsters in War Cry
Teado is a Changer, a shape-shifting military asset trained to win wars. His platoon has been stationed in the Bavares high plains for years, stranded. As they ration supplies and scan the airwaves for news, any news, their numbers dwindle. He's not sure how much time they have left.
Desperate and starving, armed with aging, faulting equipment, the team jumps at the chance for a risky resupply mission, even if it means not all of them might come. What they discover could change the course of the war.

My Review:

I picked this up because I adored the author’s In the Shadow of Lightning and was looking for something else by him but didn’t quite have the spoons to get started on his Powder Mage series. At least not yet. Nor does the sequel to In the Shadow of Lightning seem to be on the horizon. Although I just learned there’s a prequel (Montego) and I just picked it up. And, honestly, I was looking for something short.

Leading me to War Cry.

William T. Sherman is the American Civil War general famous for the rather pithy comment that “War is Hell”. War Cry is a story deep into just that kind of hell – and it’s a gut punch of a story.

The world of War Cry exists in that nether region between science fiction and fantasy, as well as the hellish netherworld of war. Teado and his clandestine unit have a battered airplane, an equally battered pilot, an illusion mage and a shapechanger. Teado is the shapechanger.

Their tiny little unit is nearly out of everything, food, supplies, ammunition, and most especially, hope. They started out being near the front but the front has swept by them and now they are behind enemy lines and waging a guerrilla war from the shadows.

They’re listening to enemy propaganda while they are on watch, each wondering which of the others is going to be the first to break and run for the enemy-offered amnesty. Or whether they will be the first one to give up and just go.

But the powers that be haven’t forgotten them – nor have they quite let go of a hope of peace.

Which is where Teado, his unit, and this story come in. They have a crazy chance of striking a blow against the enemy’s new forward base and stealing an entire cargo plane full of desperately needed supplies.

If they are successful, there might be a chance at the peace talks to actually get a little. If they fail, at least their own war will be over.

Unless they are all just part of something much, much bigger and way, way, way above all their pay grades.

Escape Rating B: What made this work is that it isn’t about building up one side as the “good guys” and the other as the “bad guys”. We don’t really get much of a sense of what the two sides are fighting over beyond the obvious motivations of resources and territory.

It’s never all that clear that the two sides are truly all that different, or that one is all that much better or worse than the other.

This turns out to be a story that embodies, not just Sherman’s “War is Hell” quote, but more especially a less often seen quote from G.K. Chesterton that goes, “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” Or in the case of Teado and his company, because he loves what is beside him.

Teado is fighting, not for himself, but for his friends and comrades. And so are they. Which is what makes this story cut deep, as the powers that be only see the big picture and which pawns they need to move to change that picture.

Where Teado sees, and we experience through him, the real cost of those pawns being moved.

Review: Light Chaser by Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews
Review: Light Chaser by Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. PowellLight Chaser by Peter F. Hamilton
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera
Pages: 173
Published by Tordotcom on August 24, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell's action-packed sci-fi adventure Light Chaser, a love powerful enough to transcend death can bring down an entire empire.
Amahle is a Light Chaser - one of a number of explorers, who travel the universe alone (except for their onboard AI), trading trinkets for life stories.
But when she listens to the stories sent down through the ages she hears the same voice talking directly to her from different times and on different worlds. She comes to understand that something terrible is happening, and only she is in a position to do anything about it.
And it will cost everything to put it right.

My Review:

How to reboot the galaxy in 10 (or so) not so easy lessons. Because that first lesson includes the really heavy lifting of getting you to believe that the cushy, if a bit lonely, life you’ve been leading for millennia NEEDS to be rebooted in the worst way.

And that you’re the only one who can possibly do the job. If you can be convinced to deal with the heartbreak of both a completely epic betrayal on a galactic scale AND the heartbreak of un-forgetting the loss of the love of your artificially long life. Over and over again.

Amahle is the Light Chaser of the title. She, and all of her ilk, travel in endless repeating circuits of their little corner of the galaxy, distributing trinkets, treasures and carefully curated technology to dozens – or perhaps hundreds – of stagnant little planets in return for recordings of memories and experiences faithfully preserved in high-tech collars in the centuries since their previous visits.

There’s nothing sinister about the recordings themselves. In fact, the reverse. The Light Chasers are treated pretty much like deities, and the tech and the treasure that they bring is a boon to both the individual economies and the local planetary government. The collars keep records only, they don’t take anything from their wearers.

But the conditions of the planets. That’s where things get sinister. Because each planet is locked in whatever era of development it was created – whether their situation is bloody, medieval horror or post-scarcity techno-pampered ennui.

There’s no growth. There’s no change. There’s no evolution. Golden ages last forever – but so do Dark ones. To the point where Amahle, no matter how many times her memory has been wiped, is starting to notice.

Which is where Carloman comes in. Over and over again. Seemingly reborn on multiple planets in multiple eras, seeking out one of her collar-wearers so that he can deliver a message. Knowing that she will inevitably see that message in the long (at least relatively) journeys between the stars.

If he doesn’t manage to get the whole message across in one circuit, he’ll simply have to try again. Until he gets it right. Or she does.

Escape Rating B: As much as I LOVED yesterday’s Red Team Blues, I did go into it thinking I was going to get something SFnal – so I had still had a taste for that in my mind. (And I had another book just fail.) So I went looking for something short and SFnal that I already had – which is where Light Chaser comes in.

There are two threads to this story. The first one is hidden – at first. Because from one perspective, Light Chaser is the ultimate star-crossed, crosstime, long-distance romance. It’s so long distance and so far across time that initially Amahle doesn’t even remember that once upon a time, it happened. (And yes, there are hints of This is How You Lose the Time War if you squint a bit.)

Amahle’s been made to forget, repeatedly and often over the very long years, but her once and future love, Carloman, loves her so damn much that he’s managed to get around a veritable empire of AIs that are keeping them apart.

We never do find out how he does that, we only know that he has. And does. And possibly will again if it doesn’t work this time around.

The truly SFnal part of the story is the story of Amahle’s life in her here and now, as Carloman’s intrusions into the collars she has collected and viewed slowly but surely strips away her somewhat bored complaisance and wakes her up to a truth that seemingly only he can see. But once she’s seen it, she can’t unsee it, to the point where she tears her whole world apart to get it back.

It starts at the end and ends at the beginning, but along the way it portrays a far future world that isn’t what it ought to be – and tells the story of the painful stripping away of both illusion and self needed to get it back on track.

I finished Light Chaser wanting just a bit more of pretty much everything, as there is a LOT of handwavium involved in making the whole thing work. But within the constraints of a novella, it does a terrific job of making the reader think right along with Amahle. Digging this one out of the depths of the virtually towering TBR pile was absolutely the right thing to do!

Review: Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: Untethered Sky by Fonda LeeUntethered Sky by Fonda Lee
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy
Pages: 160
Published by Tordotcom on April 11, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From World Fantasy Award-winning author Fonda Lee comes Untethered Sky, an epic fantasy fable about the pursuit of obsession at all costs.
Ester’s family was torn apart when a manticore killed her mother and baby brother, leaving her with nothing but her father’s painful silence and a single, overwhelming need to kill the monsters that took her family.
Ester’s path leads her to the King’s Royal Mews, where the giant rocs of legend are flown to hunt manticores by their brave and dedicated rukhers. Paired with a fledgling roc named Zahra, Ester finds purpose and acclaim by devoting herself to a calling that demands absolute sacrifice and a creature that will never return her love. The terrifying partnership between woman and roc leads Ester not only on the empire’s most dangerous manticore hunt, but on a journey of perseverance and acceptance.

My Review:

I picked up Untethered Sky, as I suspect many readers have or will, because I utterly adored the author’s Green Bone Saga (Jade City, Jade War, Jade Legacy and the prequel short The Jade Setter of Janloon) to the point where I’m still suffering from the book hangover a year later.

Which means I’m delighted that there is a collection of prequel short stories coming out this summer, Jade Shards. If I had the damn thing in my hands right now I’d be reading it instead of writing this review. Because WOW! And DAMN! And OMG I’m squeeing with glee because this is a world that just hasn’t let me go.

Untethered Sky is not set anywhere near Janloon. And it’s not the same kind of story. But it is still based on some of the same concepts. Love. Duty. Honor. But instead of adding criminal enterprises and gang warfare, it adds something a bit different.

Rocs. Gigantic birds that are mythical in our world, but entirely too real in Untethered Sky. As are the great birds’ great enemy, manticores.

Both rocs and manticores are monsters, but rocs are trainable, using similar principles to falconry, just on a rather grand scale. So to speak. Manticores are equally wild creatures, and equally monstrous, but unlike rocs their preferred diet is human beings. As the country grows and expands, the manticores treat each new settlement as their own version of Grubhub, at least until the rocs and their rukhers, trained by the King’s Royal Mews, sweep in to beat back the threat.

On the surface, the story here is the story of one young roc, Zahra, and the apprentice rukher Ester who has won the right to train this magnificent beast.

But the surface of the story isn’t the whole story. Because Ester loves her monster, knowing full well that the monster won’t love her back. She also comes to love the life of the rukhers, finding it a duty and a balm for the damage to her soul. And it fulfills her desire for revenge against the manticore who killed her mother and her baby brother, and broke her father’s spirit as well as her own.

‘Roc feeding its young on elephants’ by Charles Maurice Detmold (1883-1908),

She makes Zahra her life, knowing it can’t be forever. But it’s what she discovers about herself that raises Untethered Sky high on Zahra’s wings.

Escape Rating A-: At first, the story does seem to be drawing from familiar elements, beginning with Ester’s childhood trauma at the claws of a rampaging manticore. (Not that manticores seem to do much other than rampage.)

The early parts of the story take her from the grief-stricken farm to a desperate desire to strike back against the monsters that stole her family and her childhood into a deep dive into an extension of real-world falconry scaled up to work with birds that can break a monster in one dive – let alone a puny human.

Still the parts of the story where Ester bonds with Zahra AND with the life of the rukhers is both familiar and fascinating to anyone who loves a good story about training and being trained. (The falconry aspects reminded me a LOT of H is for Hawk). But it’s the friendships that Ester makes and the lessons that she learns from those friendships – both good and bad – that make the book.

Along with a disastrous military campaign against the manticores that any reader will recognize as embodying the old cliche about military intelligence being an oxymoron.

But Ester learns hard lessons on that campaign, and even harder lessons after it. Lessons that she can forge a life out of, with or without the great winged monster that lifts her high and strikes her heart.

So, the beauty of the writing certainly carries over from Janloon, but this is a story that is writ much smaller using some of the same tools. Ester’s love for the monster Zahra, but also for the found family and true – and false – friends she makes among the rukhers. Her loyalty to her true friends and her envy of the false ones. The honor of serving her bird, her people and her king – not necessarily in that order. And the duty of knowing when it serves her people best to obey, when it serves her bird best to let go, and when it serves her friends best to hang on.