Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley

Review: The Echo of Old Books by Barbara Davis

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Echo of Old Books by Barbara DavisThe Echo of Old Books by Barbara Davis
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, historical fiction, historical romance, magical realism, mystery
Pages: 443
Published by Lake Union Publishing on March 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Rare-book dealer Ashlyn Greer’s affinity for books extends beyond the intoxicating scent of old paper, ink, and leather. She can feel the echoes of the books’ previous owners—an emotional fingerprint only she can read. When Ashlyn discovers a pair of beautifully bound volumes that appear to have never been published, her gift quickly becomes an obsession. Not only is each inscribed with a startling incrimination, but the authors, Hemi and Belle, tell conflicting sides of a tragic romance.
With no trace of how these mysterious books came into the world, Ashlyn is caught up in a decades-old literary mystery, beckoned by two hearts in ruins, whoever they were, wherever they are. Determined to learn the truth behind the doomed lovers’ tale, she reads on, following a trail of broken promises and seemingly unforgivable betrayals. The more Ashlyn learns about Hemi and Belle, the nearer she comes to bringing closure to their love story—and to the unfinished chapters of her own life.

My Review:

Instead of Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Echo of Old Books is a tale of Four Tragedies and an HEA – at least – and on both counts. The story folds together the bitter and the sweet into a saga that begins in mystery, middles in anger and ends in hope while it puts the readers, both of the story and within the story, through a wringer of emotions, keeping them turning the pages of not just the book in hand, but of the two mysterious books within.

It all begins with Hemi and Belle and the two seemingly anonymous, most likely privately published books that hold their separate perspectives on their clearly doomed, inevitably tragic WW2-era romance. But those little books are only the beginning of the web that has been woven.

A web that catches rare-book dealer Ashlyn Greer within its sticky strands. At first, she is snared by the emotions that she can feel pouring off the pages. And then by the mystery of how these two books came to be.

She knows, with her gift of psychometry, that the emotions held within the pages are real – but can’t be certain whether the story told within is the true story of the seemingly star-crossed lovers or merely a fiction intended to conceal a deeper emotional truth.

As she reads, and as we read with her, she also becomes caught up in the puzzle of it all. Were Hemi and Belle real? If so, who were they? And how far will she need to travel in order to learn that truth?

Her search takes her to an intrepid librarian who ferrets out much of the historical data with a twinkle in her eye and a spring in her step. But the real treasure trove of information comes from Ethan Manning, who brought the books – along with many other considerably more mundane works – from his late father’s library to the used bookstore where Ashlyn first encountered Remembering Belle and Belle’s response in Forever, and Other Stories.

Together they read the story of his great-aunt Marian (nicknamed Belle in the books) and the love of her life. Whoever he was and however he broke her heart – just as she broke his. Along the way, they learn more than either of them wanted to know about a past that STILL isn’t quite dead.

And discover that the tragedies locked in their own pasts do not mean that they can’t find a brighter future, if they can just manage to paradoxically, let it go.

Escape Rating A: I’m pretty sure I initially grabbed this for the cover. Because books. Seemingly endless stacks of books. I couldn’t resist the story even if I can now manage to walk out of a bookstore without carrying stacks of books out with me, if only because text is hard these days and ebooks are much easier to read and to carry.

Howsomever, I moved this book to a bit earlier in the week for two reasons. One, I was hoping for an unequivocal happy ending, which wasn’t possible in some of this week’s books and seemed disappointingly out of reach in yesterday’s.

But even if this did not turn out to have a happy ending I could tell that it was at least going to have a cathartic resolution of some kind. Even if that resolution was bittersweet or downright sad. I needed something definitive, and I most definitely got it in this absorbing, compulsive page-turner.

I got all of that and more in The Echo of Old Books.

This is kind of a timeslip story, and it’s also more than a bit of a treasure hunt story. And appropriately, it’s the timeslip, the story within the books themselves, that grabs both Ashlyn and the reader first. So the story of Belle and Hemi dominates the early parts of the narrative in a way that is both clever and absorbing.

We also start out Belle and Hemi’s story knowing it’s going to be tragic, so it’s not exactly a spoiler that their 1941 idyll gets, well, spoiled. What we, and Ashlyn, are desperate to learn is how. And the way that the story spools out, at first being a whole lot of Belle and Hemi with only hints of Ashlyn, carefully shifts over the course of the story to less and less of the past – even as it gets more searing and races towards its seemingly inevitable denouement – and more of Ashlyn and now Ethan’s presents.

And their own searing, scarring pasts. The more we learn about both couples, the more we hope for HEAs all around – no matter how impossible that might seem. We become invested in both stories every bit as much as Ashlyn does Belle’s.

The Echo of Old Books was absolutely the right book at the right time for this reader, with its combination of historical mystery, tragic romance and historical ambiance both in Belle and Hemi’s 1941 and Ashlyn and Ethan’s “present day” of 1984.

I’m definitely going to be snapping up this author’s next book as soon as I see it. In the meantime, I’ll be picking up a copy of her next most recent book, The Keeper of Happy Endings, for the next time I need a book with an absorbing puzzle, a bit of an ugly cry in the middle, and satisfying, cathartic resolution with hopes of an HEA to keep me turning pages until the heartstopping end.

Review: And Put Away Childish Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: And Put Away Childish Things by Adrian TchaikovskyAnd Put Away Childish Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: fantasy, horror, portal fantasy, science fiction
Pages: 208
Published by Solaris on March 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Harry Bodie’s been called into the delightful fantasy world of his grandmother’s beloved children’s books. It’s not delightful here at all.
All roads lead to Underhill, where it’s always winter, and never nice.
Harry Bodie has a famous grandmother, who wrote beloved children’s books set in the delightful world of Underhill. Harry himself is a failing kids’ TV presenter whose every attempt to advance his career ends in self-sabotage. His family history seems to be nothing but an impediment.
An impediment... or worse. What if Underhill is real? What if it has been waiting decades for a promised child to visit? What if it isn’t delightful at all? And what if its denizens have run out of patience and are taking matters into their own hands?

My Review:

If the title of this book sounds familiar, it’s because it’s from the New Testament quote from Chapter 13 of I Corinthians below. But as much as the first line is directly referenced in the title, the second line is every single bit as applicable to this story and the way that it all works out.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

The first question the story raises is “who decides?” Who decides what a childish thing is and when we should put it away. The second revolves around what it takes to truly be known, by oneself as well as by others.

Because as the story opens, Felix “call me Harry” Bodie doesn’t know himself or where he came from very much at all. And honestly doesn’t seem to want to. What he wants is to hide himself behind the mask of a working – if barely – actor and bury his past as the grandson of a famous juvenile fantasy author.

His grandmother, Mary Bodie, was the author of the Underhill books, a story and a world not all that different from Narnia. Or at least a Narnia without Aslan and the overt Christian allegory that seemed to exude from the lion’s mane.

Underhill was a place with quirky, intelligent animals and not too perilous dangers just perfect for a pair of young human scamps to slip into for adventures. Harry is more than happy to cash the decreasing royalty checks that still drop into his accounts and forget the rest. Or so he believes.

It’s only when he takes a rather desperate chance on a spot in the British equivalent of the Finding Your Roots program that he learns that Grandma Mary was born in an insane asylum to a woman who claimed to come from fairyland, and that she told her daughter all about it. It’s those stories that became the roots of the Underhill series.

The revelation of his great grandmother’s insanity draws the most rabid side of the still-active Underhill fandom out into the light of day – just as the real-world pandemic is about to drive everyone, everywhere under quarantine.

The world is going insane, and Harry is all too afraid he’s going with it. Especially when he starts seeing a diseased, desiccated version of Underhill’s resident trickster faun in the alleys behind his apartment – while a woman who claims to be a private investigator stalks him on the street.

Together they drive Harry straight out of this world and down into Underhill, which is rather more real than he ever imagined. And considerably more dangerous than his grandmother’s books EVER led him to expect.

Escape Rating B+: The thing about this book, at least for the first half of it, is Harry. And it’s not exactly a good thing, because Harry himself isn’t exactly a good thing. Nor does he have a good thing. Nor does he believe he has or is a good thing. Harry’s a bit ‘meh’ at best, pretty much all the way down to the bone. He doesn’t like himself, he doesn’t like his life, he isn’t going anywhere and he thinks nobody likes him because he honestly works at not being likable. He’s no fun to be with, not as a character and not even for himself.

So the beginning of the story is a bit rough because we don’t care about Harry – because he doesn’t even care about himself. At least not until he goes through a wardrobe, even though that’s the other fantasy series, and finds himself in Underhill. Or what’s left of it.

The place is dying and diseased and scabrous and NOTHING like the books. But for once in his life Harry is not being paranoid – everything left in Underhill really is out to get him. Or at least to find him.

Because he’s the heir to the entire blighted mess. Whether he wants to be or not. It’s the first time he’s been important in his whole, entire life. So he decides to seize the day – or at least the creepy twilight that is all that’s left in Underhill.

Only to discover that being the heir to the place isn’t remotely what he thought it might be. But then again, nothing and no one in this adventure has turned out to be anything like he expected. Not even, in the end, himself.

And that’s where things get interesting. At last. One way or another.

While it’s the off-kilter resemblance to Narnia that initially hooks the reader, it’s the subversions of any and all expectations – about Harry, about Underhill, about pretty much everyone and everything he’s met along the way – that give the story its, well, everything.

Initially, I thought this was going to be a bit like Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, which is also a play on Narnia. But The Magicians plays it more or less straight, turning Fillory into a version of Narnia that, while still fantastic, doesn’t mess with religious allegory and simply turns into an adult version of Narnia with a heaping helping of dark academia on top.

Instead, And Put Away Childish Things mixes the central theme of Never Too Old to Save the World with Carrie Vaughn’s Questland, and Tchaikovsky’s own Ogres to create a story about being called to save a portal fantasy world in midlife only to learn that the whole setup is SFnal and not fantasy after all, and that the person who can really save the place – or at least its heart – is the folklorist who everyone believed was just hanging on to prove her weird theories about literature that so-called “true academics” have discounted as either childish or merely unimportant and uninteresting to “real scholars”.

At the end, the seemingly childish things turn out to be not so childish after all, and Harry is known, to himself and to others, in a way that he never would have let himself be or even feel in the so-called real world. And it’s the making of him and the making of the story – even though – or perhaps especially because – he turns out not to be the true hero of after all. Although a hero he certainly becomes.

Review: The Atlas Paradox by Olivie Blake

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> C Reviews
Review: The Atlas Paradox by Olivie BlakeThe Atlas Paradox (The Atlas, #2) by Olivie Blake
Narrator: Alexandra Palting, Andy Ingalls, Caitlin Kelly, Damian Lynch, Daniel Henning, David Monteith, James Cronin, Munirih Grace, Siho Ellsmore, Steve West
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dark academia, fantasy
Series: Atlas #2
Pages: 416
Length: 18 hours and 28 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on October 25, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

“DESTINY IS A CHOICE”
The Atlas Paradox is the long-awaited sequel to dark academic sensation The Atlas Six—guaranteed to have even more yearning, backstabbing, betrayal, and chaos.
Six magicians. Two rivalries. One researcher. And a man who can walk through dreams. All must pick a side: do they wish to preserve the world—or destroy it? In this electric sequel to the viral sensation, The Atlas Six, the society of Alexandrians is revealed for what it is: a secret society with raw, world-changing power, headed by a man whose plans to change life as we know it are already under way. But the cost of knowledge is steep, and as the price of power demands each character choose a side, which alliances will hold and which will see their enmity deepen?”

My Review:

This story of dark academia, utter corruption and potentially the end of the world follows directly after the events of The Atlas Six – right after the Six seemingly become five. Only not through the murder that everyone expected to be committed.

And not that the expected victim of that expected murder, Callum Nova, is exactly anyone’s favorite person. Not even Callum himself. If anyone should have, would have been saved it was the missing Libby Rhodes. Who is equally not dead.

She’s furious. Or she would be if her captor wasn’t drugging her into oblivion.

So this story begins in fracture – and the characters just keep right on fracturing from a very inauspicious beginning to the bitter, deadly end.

The library at the heart of the Alexandrian Society may be sentient. It’s certainly hungry. It expects a sacrifice to its altar of knowledge every ten years. A blood sacrifice. A dead medeian (read as mage) to add body (literally) to its spice of knowledge.

Callum wasn’t killed, Libby isn’t dead, so the library spends the entire book getting its pound of flesh in any way it can, causing all of the characters to devolve and fracture over their second year at the Society. It’s not a pretty sight.

As each of the six descends down their own personal rabbit hole of self-involvement mixed with delusions of grandeur and/or inadequacy, refusing to acknowledge the gaping hole in their midst that should be filled by Libby Rhodes, Society Caretaker Atlas Blakely and his former friend turned rival, Ezra Fowler, plot and plan their way to oppose each other’s end-of-the-world scenario.

While Libby Rhodes applies a sharp rock to what’s left of her moral compass so she can power a nuclear blast that will bring her home. To a future that she may yet manage to destroy. If someone else doesn’t beat her to the punch.

Escape Rating C: I’m of two minds when it comes to The Atlas Paradox – even more so than I was after finishing The Atlas Six. Only more so.

Following the story of The Atlas Paradox was like doing “The Masochism Tango” – without even a scintilla of the joy that the masochist singing the song felt.

So why did I keep going? Because the voice actors were every single bit as excellent as they were in The Atlas Six. It’s a pity that they gave their excellence to a work which did not deserve it. (And I continue my frustration that there doesn’t seem to be a complete and definitive list of who is voicing whom.)

What helps make the narration so wonderful – while making the story so frustrating as well as frequently annoying – is that the whole story is told from the inside of the characters’ heads. Every single one of these people is a hot mess, and not in any fun ways at all. They’re also, individually and collectively, utterly morally bankrupt.

So I didn’t like any of them and I didn’t feel for any of them and most importantly, I didn’t CARE about any of them. They are, individually and collectively, self-indulgent, self-absorbed and shallow, and the entirety of this story is spent plumbing the teaspoon-like depths of their shallowness.

The Atlas Six was compulsively readable because so much shit happened, and the breakneck pace made it an absorbing page-turner no matter what genuinely awful people its characters were.

Little seems to actually happen in The Atlas Paradox until nearly the end, at least until it dissolves into a waiting game in preparation for the next book, The Atlas Complex. Which, I have to admit, I probably will listen to in spite of myself. I’m still curious to see how this ends. If it ends at all, and especially if it ends in anything other than the end of the world as they know it.

After all, I expect the narrators to still be utterly excellent, which is still the saving grace of this entire saga.

Review: Dead Country by Max Gladstone

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Review: Dead Country by Max GladstoneDead Country (Craft Wars, #1) by Max Gladstone
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fantasy, horror, urban fantasy
Series: Craft Wars #1, Craft Sequence #7
Pages: 256
Published by Tordotcom on March 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Since her village chased her out with pitchforks, Tara Abernathy has resurrected gods, pulled down monsters, averted wars, and saved a city, twice. She thought she'd left her dusty little hometown forever. But that was before her father died.
As she makes her way home to bury him, she finds a girl, as powerful and vulnerable and lost as she once was. Saving her from the raiders that haunt the area, twisted by a remnant of the God Wars, Tara changes the course of the world.
Max Gladstone's world of the Craft is a fantasy setting like no other. When Craftspeople rose up to kill the gods, they built corporate Concerns from their corpses and ushered in a world of rapacious capital. Those who work the Craft wield laws like knives and weave chains from starlight and soulstuff. Dead Country is the first book in the Craft Wars Trilogy, a tight sequence of novels that will bring the sprawling saga of the Craft to its end, and the perfect entry point for this incomparable world.

My Review:

Home may be the place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in. But just because they have to take you in, it doesn’t mean they have to let you stay. As Tara Abernathy discovered back when she was young and desperate, scared and hurting,  abused mentally, emotionally and magically. She came home to tiny Edgemont, on the edge of the Badlands, looking for a place to heal and recover.

What she found back then was an increasing tide of raids by the hungry, cursed Raiders, and a town that was too hidebound to do what was really necessary to fight back. So, in her youth and arrogance, she tried to do it for them. They forced her out with torches and pitchforks.

She can’t go home again – not after what she – and they – did. Or so she believes. And she’s probably right.

But when she receives a message from her mother that her father is dead, she goes anyway. To find out what happened. For the funeral. For closure of one kind or another – even if it’s at the pointy ends of a new set of pitchforks.

It should be different now. After years of life-altering practice in the necromantic contracting of the Craft, Tara has not merely power but the knowledge of when to – and more importantly when not to – use that power in the face of people who are mostly just plain afraid of what she can do.

Edgemont, and the entire Badlands, are under siege by the hungry, infected, cursed Raiders, at the end of their collective rope and facing inevitable absorption by a curse that consumes everything it touches including the bodies of its victims. Victims who are compelled to hunt for more grist for the mill of a curse that has become more voracious and deadly in Tara’s absence.

Edgemont needs someone to save it, and Tara needs to strike back at everyone who ran her out of town back when she needed them most – but who, conversely and perversely – made her the power she has become.

She’ll spit in their collective eye by saving them all. Whether they want her to or believe she can – or not. All while she attempts to train an apprentice, protect her mother and fight off a curse. Only to discover that she is returning to the beginning of all things just at the point where the end is entirely too nigh.

Escape Rating A: Once upon a time (back in 2012) there was a book titled Three Parts Dead, the first book in the Craft Sequence, set in a world where Craft equals magic, and where that magic is rooted – often literally – in a combination of contract law and necromancy.

Yes, all lawyers are necromancers in this world. It’s still a WOW concept and seems totally and utterly RIGHT, both at the same time.

In that utterly awesome opening book, Tara Abernathy – yes, the same Tara Abernathy, pictured on that cover of Three Parts Dead to the left – was at the beginning of her career, fairly fresh out of the whole torches and pitchforks experience.

Dead Country is the golden opportunity I didn’t know I was waiting for to return to the world of the Craft Sequence without needing to remember every detail of this intricately detailed world. (Contract law, remember? LOTS of details. Positively – and negatively – entire metric buttloads of details – generally arising from the dead bodies – including butts – of gods.) The whole thing is intensely fascinating and I loved the series but I got a bit lost at the end and didn’t finish. I’ll probably go back.

But Dead Country is a starting over kind of book. While Tara comes home with all her years of experience and power, she is returning back to her point of origin – in more ways than she believes as she’s on her way back for her father’s funeral. That return kicks off Craft Wars, a new sequence in the Craft Sequence, and provides the perfect place for new readers to get themselves stuck right in – as well as giving returning readers a way of coming back to a place once loved but not remembered in detail. Just as Tara herself does.

In Three Parts Dead, Tara was still a neophyte, giving readers the opportunity to learn about her world and her Craft right along with her. In Dead Country, she is older and sadder, if not always wiser, just as the readers (and probably the author) are, making her yet again a character that the reader can identify with.

Her parents’ home and village have gotten smaller, she has gotten bigger, and the world has gotten darker and more dangerous, as it does as we move further into adulthood. At the same time, the old fears and the old grudges are all still very much active, and it’s all too easy to slip back into the same old patterns of thought and action. As Tara does. As we do.

The overarching story of the series is a huge one – as it should be. Tara discovers that saving the world is part of some old business she thought she’d finished. She faces traumas both old and new, driven to clean up the messes she left behind, and it nearly kills her.

But death is not an ending when you’re a necromancer. Unless it’s the death of her entire world. Or her soul. Hopefully, we’ll all find out in the second book of the Craft Wars, equally hopefully in the not too terribly distant future.

Review: World Running Down by Al Hess

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
Review: World Running Down by Al HessWorld Running Down by Al Hess
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, science fiction
Pages: 299
Published by Angry Robot on February 14, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

A transgender salvager on the outskirts of a dystopian Utah gets the chance to earn the ultimate score and maybe even a dash of romance. But there's no such thing as a free lunch...
Valentine Weis is a salvager in the future wastelands of Utah. Wrestling with body dysphoria, he dreams of earning enough money to afford citizenship in Salt Lake City - a utopia where the testosterone and surgery he needs to transition is free, the food is plentiful, and folk are much less likely to be shot full of arrows by salt pirates. But earning that kind of money is a pipe dream, until he meets the exceptionally handsome Osric.
Once a powerful AI in Salt Lake City, Osric has been forced into an android body against his will and sent into the wasteland to offer Valentine a job on behalf of his new employer - an escort service seeking to retrieve their stolen androids. The reward is a visa into the city, and a chance at the life Valentine's always dreamed of. But as they attempt to recover the "merchandise", they encounter a problem: the android ladies are becoming self-aware, and have no interest in returning to their old lives.
The prize is tempting, but carrying out the job would go against everything Valentine stands for, and would threaten the fragile found family that's kept him alive so far. He'll need to decide whether to risk his own dream in order to give the AI a chance to live theirs.

My Review:

World Running Down turned out to be my third climate-apocalypse dystopia in a row, after Junkyard War and Perilous Times. The world is going to hell in a handcart and it’s all humanity’s fault no matter how you look at it. But these three looks at the view from that handcart are quite different. And all, surprisingly, hopeful.

At first, Valentine Weis doesn’t seem to have much hope. Or, perhaps, hope’s all he’s got without any real way of making any of his hopes come close to realization. At least not until Osric drops into his life – just about literally – with an offer that Valentine probably should refuse.

Because anything that looks too good to be true generally is – especially with people who actually still have a conscience and at least an ounce of compassion for their fellow beings. However those beings present themselves and whatever they happen to be made of.

In his very post-climate apocalypse world, Valentine lives his life on the outside looking in. Someone is offering him the opportunity to finally be on the inside. The question is whether the price is one that he’s willing to pay.

Salt Lake City is one of the few remaining, functional cities in the U.S. It’s a place where healthcare and transportation are free, where it seems as if everyone has enough to eat and a place to live. It’s a place where the rich get richer and the poor peek through the glass at all the things they can’t have without citizenship. Or sponsorship. Or both.

Valentine has none of the above. Instead his only possession is a barely functioning van, his only friend is more of a frenemy, he’s just barely breaking even on the delivery and salvage jobs he takes to keep body and soul together. And he’s trapped in a body he knows is wrong, deals with regular and depressing bouts of body dysmorphia and keeps falling further behind in his quest to save up enough money to get admitted to the place where he can get the medicines and the surgery he needs to make his external appearance reflect his inner self.

Osric, on the other hand, isn’t even human. He’s a Steward, an elite artificial intelligence who has been placed in a mere android body by nefarious person or persons unknown and sent out by even more nefarious persons to rope Valentine and his friend Ace into a job that must have one hell of a catch – because the fee for doing it is beyond Valentine’s biggest hopes and best dreams.

Which he just might manage to make come true. Not by giving in to what either those nefarious persons or his best frenemy/business partner Ace might say is the best thing – but by doing the actual, honest-to-goodness right thing. No matter how much it breaks his heart.

Escape Rating A: Before I even attempt to get into any more detail, first things first. And the first thing is that I loved World Running Down. A lot. Which kind of surprised me, not for itself, but because it was the third climate apocalypse dystopia book I read in a row, and as a subject that’s kind of a downer.

But the book itself isn’t a downer at all, which is really all down to Valentine. He just so earnestly wants to be a genuinely good person in spite of the world running down. Given a choice between the right thing and the easy thing Valentine chooses the right thing every single time – quite often to his own detriment.

He’s not unrealistic – at all – about just how FUBAR’d his world has become. He just doesn’t let that affect his own decision making process. He knows that things overall are heading towards an even hotter place than the climate, and he’s cognizant that he can’t fix much of that. But he’s committed to making things a little better as he can to those whose lives he actually touches.

Which is what gives the story both its hopefulness and its poignancy.

Valentine himself is caught in a “catch-22”. He’s trans, he needs both meds and surgery to complete his transition – which he very much desires to do. To be able to do that he needs to get residence in Salt Lake City, and for that he needs to pass a citizenship test. Which is just as big a hurdle because Valentine has ADHD or some variant of it which hasn’t even been diagnosed, making it difficult for him to study and retain certain kinds of information. Math gives a lot of people trouble. It gives Valentine a double dose of trouble, and he needs to get it to pass the test. Doing the original job would be a shortcut to his dreams – but absolutely does come at much too high a price.

But this isn’t just Valentine’s story, although we see much of it from his perspective. It’s also Osric’s story, and it’s the story of the job they are contracted for and the huge cloud wrapped around the silver lining of the payoff for doing it. Both parts of which result in discussion of artificial intelligences and the definition of what makes a being of artificial intelligence intelligent enough to be self-aware and eligible for citizenship.

And then the whole story works its way around to just how much heartache and heartbreak can be caused by trying to do what you think is best for someone you care for and how demeaning it is to make those decisions without their input.

There’s more. There’s just so much more. More than I should get into here, no matter how tempted I am. Which is very.

Between the climate apocalypse, the dystopian elements, the so, so sharp divide between the haves and the have nots, and both the political and the romantic issues that are raised by the questions of sentience and artificial intelligence, World Running Down touched on themes that brought to mind (my mind at least) a whole shelf of books that a reader might find equally appealing and/or interesting and very much vice versa.

So if you’ve ever read any of the following, you will probably also find World Running Down to be running right up your reading alley. And if you like World Running Down, these may also appeal; A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune, Automatic Reload by Ferrett Steinmetz and The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson.

I wish you hours of joyful reading in some fascinating worlds gone very wrong that still have hope of things coming round right. Definitely starting with World Running Down. But don’t just take my word for it. World Running Down is in the midst of running on tour at the following sites. Check ’em out!

FEBRUARY
Tues 14 Curiosity Killed the Bookworm
Tues 14 Civilian Reader excerpt
Wed 15 @cklockwork 
Thurs 16 @brittni.in.ink 
Fri 17 @bookish_black_hole 
Fri 17 Reading Reality
Sat 18 It Starts At Midnight
Sun 19 @dexterous_totalus 
Mon 20  @TinasAlwaysReading 
Tues 21 Scrapping and playing 
Wed 22 FanFi Addict
Thurs 23  @intothevolcano 
Fri 24 E. J. Dawson
Sat 25  @kevinscorner 
Sun 26  @thespineofmotherhood 
Mon 27  @Booksforscee 

MARCH
Wed 1  @from__my__bookshelf 
Thurs 2  @moyashi_girl 
Fri 3  @chippyreads 
Sat 4 SparklyPrettyBriiiight
Sun 5  JamReads
Mon 6  @sophi3saur 
Tues 7  @bookstagramrepresent 
Wed 8  @pufflekitteh 
Thurs 9  @emilysarahart 
Fri 10 FanFi Addict
Sat 11  @luchiahoughtonblog 
Sun 12  @josephina_rae 
Mon 13 superstardrifter
Tues 14  @bookwormescapes 
Wed 15 @kevinscorner 

Review: The Scarlet Circus by Jane Yolen

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Scarlet Circus by Jane YolenThe Scarlet Circus by Jane Yolen, Brandon Sanderson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fairy tales, fantasy, fantasy romance, Romance, short stories
Pages: 256
Published by Tachyon Publications on February 14, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

The Scarlet Circus, the fourth volume in Yolen’s award-winning short fiction series brings you passionate treasures and unexpected transformations. This bewitching assemblage, with an original introduction from Brandon Sanderson, is an ideal read for anyone who appreciates witty, compelling, and classic romantic fantasy.

A rakish fairy meets the real Juliet behind Shakespeare's famous tragedy. A jewelry artist travels to the past to meet a successful silver-smith. The addled crew of a ship at sea discovers a mysterious merman. More than one ignored princess finds her match in the most unlikely men.

From ecstasy to tragedy, with love blossoming shyly, love at first sight, and even love borne of practical necessity―beloved fantasist Jane Yolen’s newest collection celebrates romance in all its glory.

My Review:

This ended up being my Valentine’s Day review because, to paraphrase the author’s forward just a bit, while the stories contained within are not “Romances” with a capital R, each story does contain a romantic element – even if that element is not the center of the story and seldom results in anything like a happy ever after.

Then again, one does have to kiss a fair number of frogs – and a few outright toads – in order to find the person they’ve been looking for all along.

Many of the stories in this collection are twists on familiar themes – or at least they sound familiar upon reading. “San Soleil” is one of those. It sounds just like the kind of fairy tale we all used to read – with the same kind of sting in its tail about listening to warnings provided by witches and sorceresses. It starts as a love story but is also a bit of a ‘just desserts’ kind of story. Not that anyone is evil. A bit TSTL but not evil.

As the opening story in the collection, it certainly sets the tone for the many and varied ways that love can go off the rails.

I had a sneaking bit of admiration for “Dusty Loves” in the way it takes off on Romeo & Juliet. This is one where the ‘heroine’ really is Too Stupid To Live, and consequently doesn’t. Which is pretty much what happens in Romeo & Juliet which is, after all, a TRAGEDY and not a romance. That the teller of this particular version of the tale has their tongue very firmly in cheek as they relate it makes the whole thing work a bit better than it would on its own.

On that favorite other hand, in “Unicorn Tapestry” the heroine is really a heroine, and most definitely not TSTL. If you like stories where the underdog wins the day, then this one will be right up your reading alley. It certainly left me with a smile at the end.

My least favorite stories in the collection were “A Ghost of an Affair”, “The Sea Man” and “The Erotic Faerie”. “Ghost” because it had so much promise but ended a bit ‘meh’. I felt like I was set up for a better and happier ending than I got. “Sea Man” felt like it didn’t belong here, it gave me vibes of other, more horrific tales than fit in this collection. And “Erotic Faerie” was an interesting concept rather than an actual story, a concept I’ve seen done better in Kenneth Schneyer’s “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer” in his Anthems Outside Time collection.

Those initial stories were interesting and fun but didn’t quite touch my heart – although “Dusty Loves” certainly tickled my funny bone a bit. These next ones, however, got a bit closer to the heart of the matter – or at least my heart.

“Dark Seed, Dark Stone” takes the idea of a warrior’s child picking up their weapons to defend their king and country and changes that child from the usual son to a daughter who uses more smarts than skills to defend her homeland. This one isn’t so much a romance as it is a story about duty and purpose – and I liked it better for that. It’s more a romance in the older meaning of the word than the current commercial definition, and I liked it all the better for it.

“Memoirs of a Bottle Djinn” takes the usual Aladdin-type story and gives it a twist that’s been seen before – but does it well. In this case, the savvy but desperate discoverer of the bottle is wary about spending his wish foolishly and without thought. At the same time, as a slave he’s all too able to empathize with the djinn’s plight. So he makes a wish they can both live with, happily ever after.

“Peter in Wonderland” was a delightful surprise. It’s clearly a takeoff on Alice in Wonderland, but shows that the real Alice Liddell still travels to Wonderland even in adulthood, and gives her a fellow-adventurer on her trip that leads to a happy ever after a bit different from the one she experienced in real life.

As much as I enjoyed the above stories, my two favorite entries in this Scarlet Circus were wonderfully entertaining indeed.

“Dragonfield” was wonderful because all of its characters are so very flawed in such human ways, and yet they manage to pull each other up and together to defeat the all too real dragon that is terrorizing the town and achieve a happy ever after that neither of them expected or thought they could ever deserve. It’s a romance and an adventure wrapped into one shiny, magical ball of a story and it’s just lovely.

Last, but not least, because the Matter of Britain can never be least of anything, is “The Sword and the Stone”, a much different story than The Sword in the Stone that you may remember from either the novel by T.H. White (part of The Once and Future King), or the Disney movie or even the episode of the British TV series Merlin. For an inanimate object, Excalibur sure does manage to get around.

This version of the tale is told from Merlin’s point of view, and he’s getting pretty jaded at this point in his long life of meddling with Britain. Arthur himself is also a bit older in this version than the more traditional versions of the tale. While he’s trying his best, he’s clearly better, and happier, at some things than others. To the point where he’d much rather fight the wars than wrangle the peace that he needs to secure and maintain. Merlin cooks up the idea of the sword in the stone to give Arthur’s rule the final stamp of popularity and legitimacy it needs. Arthur thinks it’s all mummery, magic and cheating, which it most definitely is. Until it isn’t.

Which makes the ending just that bit more magical.

Escape Rating A-: Like most collections, the stories are a bit all over the map. I adored a couple, liked quite a few more, and a small number just missed the mark for me in one way or another – as the above descriptions show. But overall I’m very glad I picked this up, and enjoyed the ways that it played with romances of many types and stripes and definitions. That “love is all there is is all we know of love” doesn’t have to mean that all loves are exactly the same type.

The author has published three previous collections in a similar vein to this one, not necessarily romances but rather whole entire circuses of fractured and reinterpreted fairy tales like How to Fracture a Fairy Tale, The Midnight Circus and The Emerald Circus. I’m sure I’ll be visiting those circuses the next time I’m looking for familiar tales with just a bit of a twist in their tails.

Review: Never Too Old to Save the World edited by Addie J. King and Alana Joli Abbott

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Never Too Old to Save the World edited by Addie J. King and Alana Joli AbbottNever Too Old to Save the World: A Midlife Calling Anthology by Alana Joli Abbott, Addie J. King
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fantasy, science fiction, short stories, urban fantasy
Pages: 318
Published by Outland Entertainment on February 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Once every generation there is a Chosen One, who will stand between humanity and darkness.
But why is the Chosen One so often a teenager? Why do only children get swept through portals to save the fantastic world on the other side? Whose idea was it to put the fate of the world in the hands of someone without a fully developed prefrontal cortex?
In Never Too Old to Save the World, nineteen authors explore what would happen if the Chosen One were called midlife. What would happen if the Chosen One were:
a soccer moma cat ladya nosy grandmothera social workera retireean aging swordmaster?
The Chosen One could be anyone— because when the universe calls, the real question is whether the hero will take up the mantle and answer their midlife calling. Sometimes the world needs a hero who's already been in the thick of chaos and survived. In those cases, age does matter.

My Review:

What if you didn’t find a wardrobe to Narnia – or anywhere else – back when you were 8? And you didn’t get your Hogwarts letter at 11? And Gandalf didn’t even manage to come to take you on an adventure at 50?

Or perhaps, by the time Gandalf found you at 50, you thought you were too old to go on adventures – or – and much more likely –  had too many commitments in the so-called ‘real world’ to run off and leave your responsibilities behind? After all, Bilbo very nearly did.

That’s what this collection is about. It’s all about people who pick up the mantle of the ‘Chosen One’ in some fantasy or science fictional world who are explicitly not children or teens. Who are a bit too tied down – or a bit too wised up – to be the fool that rushes in where angels rightly fear to tread. Or so they think.

This collection is for everyone who missed that wardrobe or that letter and still wonders whether or not they’d have what it takes – or have the willingness to feel the fear and do it anyway – if a white wizard or a mad man with a blue box came calling for them.

There are 19 fabulous stories in this collection – and I think I loved every single one. To the point where I can’t just pick one favorite. I have to pick two.

My favorite fantasy story is “Jackalope Wives” by Ursula Vernon – who also writes marvelously fantastic fantasy and horror as T. Kingfisher. “Jackalope Wives” is the only story in the book that has been previously published, originally in Apex Magazine and later in her short story collection Jackalope Wives and Other Stories.

This is the story that won the 2014 Nebula Award for Best Short Story and should have won the 2015 Hugo Award in the same category. But, well, puppies. I digress and I need to stop to keep from going there again. Because ARRGGGHHH. Still.

“Jackalope Wives” is one of those stories that surprises the reader with a twist at the end that is even more heartbreaking, in its way, than the story you thought you were reading – which was already heartbreaking enough. Grandma Harken is absolutely correct that “You get over what you can’t have faster than you get over what you could.” But the truth of that statement doesn’t make the getting over any faster or any easier.

As a counterweight to the bitter, bitter sweetness of “Jackalope Wives”, my science fictional favorite story is “Launch Day Milkshakes” by Jim C. Hines, which is literally laugh out loud funny. To the point where I started laughing and couldn’t get a breath OR stop as my spouse looked over at me like I’d lost my mind because I could not catch enough breath to explain the joke.

At first, “Launch Day Milkshakes” is a story about absolutely deliciously getting one over on a misogynistic asshat boss in the biggest and best way possible. It’s also a brainship story in the vein of Anne McCaffrey’s classic, The Ship Who Sang. But that’s not all it is, and neither of those things were the parts that made me laugh so hard – no matter how much I enjoyed the asshat’s comeuppance. Which I very much did. I’m not going to spoil this one because it’s just so much fun when you get the joke – and see it get batted around like the universe’s biggest ball of yarn.

I know I said two favorites, but my third is kind of a riff on Buffy, meaning that there’s some urban fantasy in here as well. “Lean In: The Lord of Hell is Coming” by Ericka Kahler starts out with the local representative for the equivalent of the Watchers coming to a CEO to tell her that demons are coming to her city and that she’s the ‘Chosen One’ who is supposed to vanquish them. It’s not news to Mary Ann because she already has, just not in the way that heaven expected or that hell can ever manage to fight. I think this one is funnier the longer you think about it.

Of the rest of the collection, there are considerably more fantasy stories than SF as fantasy does tend to lend itself more to ‘chosen one’ narratives. Not that there haven’t been more than a few famous SF stories in this vein (I’m looking at you, Luke Skywalker – ahem). But magical appointments, by their very nature, do find themselves a bit more comfy – while their protagonists are generally quite uncomfy – in fantasy.

Because I loved this collection so hard, I can’t resist a brief shout out to every single one of the stories in it. The SF stories are listed first because there were fewer of them and because I’m contrary that way.

  • “The M.A.M.I. Incident” by Guadalupe Garcia McCall reminded me a whole lot of Day Zero by Robert C. Cargill which makes for a great but uncomfortable story.
  • “Utopia” by Vaseem Khan about making a friend out of a very great enemy.
  • “All the World’s Treasures” by Kimberly Pauley about a family legacy that is just so much bigger on the inside than it first appears.
  • “Big Momma Saves the World” by Maurice Broaddus about the great power in bad macaroni and cheese.
  • “A Legacy of Ghosts” by Sarah Hans about exorcizing one’s very own demon family with the power of positive thinking.
  • “Adya and the Messengers” by Jaymie Wagner about the proper treatment of heavenly messengers and their steeds.
  • “Soccer Mom Saves the World” by Addie J. King, a story whose title does pretty much say it all.
  • “My Roots Run Deep” by John F. Allen about a social worker saving the multiverse and getting her groove back at the same time.
  • “It’s My Nature – A ‘Monster Hunter Mom’ Adventure” by JD Blackrose, another one whose title gives more than a bit of a clue about the story.
  • “Truthteller” by Linda Robertson, a historical fantasy about an object of power that isn’t quite what any of the parties seeking it imagined.
  • “Granny” by R.J. Sullivan about a neighborhood snoop who is way more than she seems.
  • “The Sunspear” by Alexandra Pitchford, about a young woman who believes she has a destiny and a middle aged woman who is running from hers.
  • “Once a Queen” by Alana Joli Abbott, a Narnia-like story with a much better ending.
  • “By the Works of Her Hands” by LaShawn M. Wanak, another Narnia-type story where the portal opens as a lure to pull the right person in chasing after the young fool who rushes in believing that they are ‘the one’ when they’re just bait for their mother.
  • “Strange Wings” by Kathryn Ivey about a warning that comes nearly too late.
  • And last in both the collection and this list: “The Mountain Witch” by Lucy A. Snyder about the uses to which both heroes and villains are put when they are both female.

Escape Rating A+: I don’t normally list every single story in a collection like this, but this collection frequently got me in the feels and gave me something to identify with in just about every story. Sometimes we all need that reminder that age is just a number and that everyone has it in them to save, if not the world, at least their corner of it.

I’m also still hoping against hope that Gandalf will finally get the hint!

 

Review: The Unbalancing by R.B. Lemberg

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Unbalancing by R.B. LembergThe Unbalancing by R.B. Lemberg
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fantasy
Series: Birdverse
Pages: 241
Published by Tachyon Publications on September 20, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

In this first full-length novel from the acclaimed Birdverse, new love blossoms between an impatient starkeeper and a reclusive poet as they try together to save their island home. Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte finalist R. B. Lemberg (The Four Profound Weaves) has crafted a gorgeous tale of the inevitable transformations of communities and their worlds. The Unbalancing is rooted in the mystical cosmology, neurodiversity, and queerness that infuses Lemberg’s lyrical prose, which has invited glowing comparisons to N. K. Jemisin, Patricia A. McKillip, and Ursula K. LeGuin.
Beneath the waters by the islands of Gelle-Geu, a star sleeps restlessly. The celebrated new starkeeper Ranra Kekeri, who is preoccupied by the increasing tremors, confronts the problems left behind by her predecessor.
Meanwhile, the poet Erígra Lilún, who merely wants to be left alone, is repeatedly asked by their ancestor Semberi to take over the starkeeping helm. Semberi insists upon telling Lilun mysterious tales of the deliverance of the stars by the goddess Bird.
When Ranra and Lilun meet, sparks begin to fly. An unforeseen configuration of their magical deepnames illuminates the trouble under the tides. For Ranra and Lilun, their story is just beginning; for the people of Gelle-Geu, it may well be too late to save their home

My Review:

My first introduction to the Birdverse was in The Four Profound Weaves. At the time I said it had the feel and sense of a myth in the making. The Unbalancing while telling a much different story, has the sense of a myth or legend being broken and remade, as the poet Erigra Lilun and the new starkeeper Ranra Kekeri are the ones left holding the very large and torn bag, so to speak, when the most heartbreaking chapter of this world’s origin story comes home, not to roost but to destroy, on their beloved home islands of Gelle-Geu.

The island confederation of Gelle-Gau has experienced regular earthquakes during its nearly 1,000 year history. Because one of the 12 stars that are part of this world’s creation myth – which is no myth in the Birdverse – rests uneasily in the ocean between the islands. Whenever the star gets restless there’s a tremor. In recent years those tremblers have been getting bigger, longer and more frequent.

There’s clearly something wrong, and it’s getting wrong-er all the time. The last starkeeper, the person whose duty it is to monitor the health of the submerged star, didn’t want to know. Or knew too much and wallowed in despair rather than searching for a solution.

Whatever is upsetting their star is going to result in an extinction level event for the islands. And it’s already too late for their beloved Gelle-Gau. The question before the new starkeeper and the shy, withdrawn poet who perhaps should have been starkeeper years ago is whether or not it is too late for their people.

And whether they will have time for a new beginning for themselves.

Escape Rating A: I enjoyed my introduction to the Birdverse in The Four Profound Weaves and The Unbalancing was even better. Weaves was lovely but it was a bit of a quieter story in its way, while The Unbalancing is considerably more dramatic and dynamic by the very nature of the crisis it must contend with.

The world, at least as far as the islands of Gelle-Gau are concerned, is ending. Attempting to hold back that literal tide pretty much guarantees a fast-paced story filled with high stakes, epic conflicts and nearly crushing lows and blows.

At the same time, it contains a beautiful story of opposites not only attracting but discovering that they belong together and need each other – not just to overcome the disaster that has crashed into their budding romance – but because they are both unbalanced, just as their star is, and they need each other to bring balance to their lives, their hearts, and ultimately their people.

This is also very much a coming of age or coming into maturity or simply a coming into self knowledge story. Ranra, the starkeeper has always known who and what she is in all her prickly, sometimes overbearing, always pushing forward self.

Lilún, very much on the other hand, is cripplingly shy, and so uncertain of their own nature or their place in the world to the point where they almost completely isolate themself. Lilún’s part of The Unbalancing is to finally figure out who they are in relation to their wider world. Because initially the only thing about themselves that they are certain of is that they are a gardener and tender of trees.

(Even their name evokes that identity. The name Lilún is reminiscent of “lulav”, one of the four plants that epitomize the Jewish harvest holiday Sukkot. Among the other plants is the etrog citron, which is abundant on Gelle-Gau to the point that it is used as the basis for a cool citrus drink similar to lemonade.)

What gives this story its oomph – and lots of it – is the race to heal the star and save the islands. That the effort fails seems like it would be one hell of a downer – but it’s not. What makes the story rise in the end is the acknowledgement that the land, though beautiful, is not important. It’s the people that made the islands, and they’ll find a new place that they will make just as beautiful and fruitful, because they are bringing both the heart of Gelle-Gau and the heart of their beleaguered star along with them.

The more I read of the Birdverse, the more fascinated I become with this fantastic and fantastical place. The story in The Unbalancing is complete in and of itself, but it hints at depths that I found myself wishing I knew better. In other words, I loved it AND I wanted more. And I found it in Geometries of Belonging: Stories & Poems from the Birdverse, a collection of many of the foundational stories of this marvelous place. I’m looking forward to diving in and learning that MORE – and soon!

Review: The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Skeleton Key by Erin KellyThe Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook
Genres: Gothic, mystery, suspense, thriller
Pages: 512
Published by Mobius on January 24, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

A reunion leads to tragedy, and the unravelling of dark family secrets . . .
It is the summer of 2021 and Nell has come home at her family's insistence to celebrate an anniversary. Her father, Sir Frank Churcher, is regarded as a cult figure by many. Fifty years ago he wrote The Golden Bones. Part picture book, part treasure hunt, it was a fairy story about Elinore, a murdered woman whose skeleton was scattered all over England. Clues and puzzles in the pages of TheGolden Bones led readers to seven sites were jewels were buried - gold and precious stones, each a different part of a skeleton. One by one, the tiny golden bones were dug up until only Elinore's pelvis remained hidden. The book was a sensation. A community of treasure hunters called the Bonehunters formed, in frenzied competition, obsessed to a dangerous degree. People sold their homes to travel to England and search for Elinore. Marriages broke down as the quest consumed people. A man died. The book made Frank a rich man. And it ruined Nell's life.
But Sir Frank has reunited the Churchers for a very particular reason. The book is being reissued, along with a new treasure hunt and a documentary crew are charting the anniversary. Nell is appalled, and fearful. During the filming, Frank finally reveals the whereabouts of the missing golden bone. And then all hell breaks loose.
From the bestselling author of He Said/She Said and Watch Her Fall, this is a taut, mesmerising novel about a daughter haunted by her father's legacy . . .

My Review:

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,’ is already deceptive – as it turns out are ALL the members of the combined, misaligned, co-dependent Churcher and Lally families.

The saying is deceptive because it sounds so much like Shakespeare – but it isn’t. It’s a quote from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion that is OFTEN attributed to the Bard. The many, many interwoven deceptions of the Churcher and Lally families are a whole lot more intertwined – and that much more difficult to untangle.

The Skeleton Key begins in the summer of 2021, just barely post-pandemic – or at least post the pandemic lockdowns, which adds a whole ‘other layer to pretty much everything. Frank Churcher, now in his 70s and starting to feel his age, has decided to have one last hurrah over the thing that made him famous 50 years ago and is still wrecking the lives of his entire family – even as it made their privileged lifestyle possible.

Frank, now Sir Frank, created an armchair treasure hunt puzzle phenomenon combining creepy, Celtic myths and a touch of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with gorgeous imagery into a book titled The Golden Bones. It wasn’t just a best-seller, it became a worldwide obsession. An obsession that some people still haven’t gotten over.

One of those people is his daughter Nell. Not that she was obsessed with The Golden Bones, but that more than a few of the fanatics who called themselves Bonehunters conflated the woman in the story, Elinor, with Frank’s daughter Eleanor and stalked her. With knives.

The prize of The Golden Bones was a literal set of golden bones which were worth lots of money to motivated – or crazed – Bonehunters. By the time Eleanor was 15, all the bones had been found except one – the pelvic girdle. As obsessions and conspiracy theories went, the idea that Eleanor’s pelvic bone was actually Elinor’s pelvic bone wasn’t that far a stretch. At least not for someone who had lost touch with reality.

Eleanor, who is now reaching middle age, left her family behind with all its messiness – including Frank Churcher’s massive ego. She still sees them, but she’s steadfastly refused any money or help no matter how much she might need it. She owns a narrowboat and lives on England’s waterways with a surrogate daughter she’d adopt if she could. Her living situation can sometimes be a bit dicey but it’s safer away from her family’s mess and the media spotlight that seldom leaves them alone for long.

But the 50th Anniversary celebration of The Golden Bones brings Nell back home – if only for the celebration itself. Frank was supposed to retrieve that last piece of the original skeleton from a tree behind the house. He does uncover a pelvic girdle, but not the tiny jeweled piece that was part of the original prize skeleton. What comes out of that tree hollow is a real human pelvis from a long-dead woman who is about to unravel all the secrets that everyone has been keeping for more than 50 years.

Those revelations and the events that precede them will melt the thin ice of Nell’s precarious safety. She’s never really been safe. She just didn’t know how unstable the web of lies that kept her family afloat truly was.

Escape Rating A: It’s all too easy to comprehend the obsessions of the ‘Bonehunters’ while reading The Skeleton Key, because the complex, twisted nature of the puzzle – and the people at its heart – sinks its teeth into the reader and does not let go until the end.

Two things to start. First, the concept of The Golden Bones may sound vaguely familiar – and that’s intentional on the part of the author and acknowledged at the beginning. There was a real, worldwide craze for armchair treasure hunt books in the 1980s, kicked off by the publication of the massively illustrated puzzle/story book Masquerade by Kit Williams in 1979. Plenty of people got obsessed with Masquerade and the imitations that followed in its wake, and there was a scandal around the solution to the puzzle. Not a murderous scandal, but a scandal nevertheless.

Second thing is that even from the beginning of the story, it’s pretty obvious that there are multiples of things wrong in this semi-combined, utterly co-dependent, joined at the hip double household. It’s tempting to say that the family is a hot mess, but even from the initial glimpses we get into the family dynamic it’s all too clear that a hot mess would actually be a step up. The Churchers and the Lallys are not putting the fun in dysfunctional, but there’s plenty of dysfunction to go around.

We see this family through Nell’s adult eyes as she observes these people she knows, loves and even sometimes hates through a perspective that is not exactly that of an outsider but still has more than a bit of distance. They may not recognize that the family is not healthy, but she knows that living in their midst is not healthy for her and never has been. That her parents named her after the dead woman in their famous story and never even thought that it might inspire the crazies is just the tip of a very ugly iceberg of parents behaving very badly indeed.

Because, as we see the incidents in the past that brought them all to this mixed-up present, the center point of the family is Frank Churcher and his ego – and he’s never cared or taken care of anyone but himself. Everyone else just enables him and lives off the proceeds – whether they see it or not.

And what Frank is, at the center of that massive ego, is rotten to the core. And that his rot has seeped into all of them. The best thing Nell ever did was to walk away. And it’s the best thing she can do now, too. Even if she has to let herself be smeared with just a little bit of that rot to escape from the rest.

While it is easy – and cathartic and filled with oodles of schadenfreude – to get caught up in The Skeleton Key for its story of rich people behaving very badly indeed, what made it fascinating for this reader was the way that the story wove backwards and forwards in time to reveal that everything that existed between all of them was founded on a web of lies that burned away once the truths started coming out – leaving them all blinking in the light of an unforgiving new day.

Just as I sat blinking when I turned the last page, because WOW! what a ride!

Review: The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke NatsukawaThe Cat Who Saved Books by Sōsuke Natsukawa, Louise Heal Kawai
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, coming of age, fantasy, magical realism
Pages: 198
Published by HarperVia on December 7, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

A celebration of books, cats, and the people who love them, infused with the heartwarming spirit of The Guest Cat and The Travelling Cat Chronicles.
Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookstore he inherited from his beloved bookworm grandfather. Then, a talking cat named Tiger appears with an unusual request. The feline asks for—or rather, demands—the teenager’s help in saving books with him. The world is full of lonely books left unread and unloved, and Tiger and Rintaro must liberate them from their neglectful owners. 
Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey, where they enter different mazes to set books free. Through their travels, Tiger and Rintaro meet a man who leaves his books to perish on a bookshelf, an unwitting book torturer who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read, and a publishing drone who only wants to create bestsellers. Their adventures culminate in one final, unforgettable challenge—the last maze that awaits leads Rintaro down a realm only the bravest dare enter...

My Review:

When we first meet Rintaro Natsuki, he has come to a fork in his road, at the point where he’s going to have to take it whether he wants to or not. He’s just been orphaned for the second time. When his parents died, he was still a child, and packed off to his grandfather without any choice or protest on his part.

At his grandfather’s death, Rintaro is in high school, even if he skips class a lot. He’s old enough to have a voice in his future – if he can come to terms with the reality of his loss. And if he can manage to reach out of his own social isolation to take it.

His legacy from his grandfather is a beautiful, marvelous and just barely profitable second-hand bookstore. A place that Rintaro has no desire to leave, but he seems to have no option to stay. At least not until the talking cat Tiger the Tabby swaggers out of the back of the bookstore and demands that Rintaro come with him on a journey to save books.

Rintaro loves books and reading. He also has nothing better to do and no motivation to do it. So he follows the cat through the suddenly endless book stacks and emerges into a labyrinth of wonder and danger. He’ll need not just courage and a bit of cunning, but every single drop of his love of reading to save the endangered books – and himself along the way.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this one up for the cat and the books, in that order. Which reminds me that the cat pictured on the US cover does not do Tiger the Tabby justice. The UK cover (pictured at left) does a much better job of giving Tiger his due.

But the story, of course, isn’t really about the cat. It is, however, at least in part about the way that cats – or any companion animals – can save us even from ourselves if we just let them. And the way that books and reading can give us time and space and tools to save ourselves if we let them into our minds just as the cats do when we let them into our hearts.

It’s also a bit of magical realism that leads into a very modern type of fairy tale. Tiger leads Rintaro into a series of labyrinths where books and reading are under assault in the guise of the love of books combined with bowing and scraping to market pressures and other distractions of modern life to save books by means that will, in the end, destroy them.

I think the story does conflate the love of the container – the physical book – with the love of what it contains and the experience of reading. I’m a bit concerned about that as I’m mostly an ebook reader because the genres I read are not widely represented in large print. If I were confined to the physical artifact I’d miss out on the thing I really want out of reading – the immersion in the story that the physical AND the electronic article contain and present for my enjoyment.

I digress just a bit.

What makes The Cat Who Saved Books such a lovely little read, however, is the totality of Rintaro’s journey. Not just the thoughtfully scary labyrinths where books go to die in the name of loving them, but Rintaro’s first steps on that path to adulthood. Because the story is about Rintaro’s chance to choose his life. To stay a socially withdrawn hikikomori, always dependent on someone else to deal with the world he has retreated from, or to take up the reins of the bookstore and his own life and learn to stand on his own. And that’s the part of the story that grabs the heart in its sharp, feline claws.

Because this is a book about books and reading, I can’t resist leaving this review without including a couple of readalikes. Any reader of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld will recognize that the way the back of the bookstore opens into endless shelves means that the store connects to ‘L’ space, the liminal place where all great libraries connect. The Discworld is not at all like The Cat Who Saved Books but that love of reading certainly exists in both places. The Girl Who Reads on the Métro by Christine Féret-Fleury is another lovely story about someone looking for a purpose who finds it in books and reading and loving them and the people she associates with them. And last but not least, more in tone than in specific, “All the World’s Treasures” by Kimberly Pauley, included in Never Too Old to Save the World, a story about a young woman inheriting a shop from her grandmother and discovering that there are connections to more places and infinitely more treasures than she ever imagined.