psocoptera

Destroy All Monsters, Sam J. Miller. This was definitely much more like Art of Starving than Blackfish City - I'll be curious about his next book, whether he's alternating or Blackfish was an exception. (An awesome exception and I hope he writes more like that.) Unfortunately this one didn't work for me as well as Art of Starving did (which I talked about here). The two-worlds "is this schizophrenia or is it a sane connection to a real alternate world" thing just felt sad to me. The ways that the two versions of people were different in the two worlds never felt like it added up to anything, and the "leaking" of magic into the mundane world felt like cheating. Miller says he is writing for kids in high school who are dealing with mental illness, which I applaud him doing, and I hope it finds its right audience among them. I wasn't it.

(Because I am me though, I of course want to read the minor character who draws with fire as Miller having read and been inspired by my Zuko story - I know I did not invent that idea and this is like one step away from thinking the people on the TV are sending secret coded messages to me personally, but Miller talks about his love for ATLA in his acknowledgments again, and a bunch of people actually have read that story, so it's not outside the realm of possibility that he could have been one of them and it could have entered his mental neat-ideas bank from there. As with the bit in Dragon Republic earlier this year, I was delighted to see it and get to ask myself this question, even if the real answer is probably "come on, dude, get over yourself.")

Rosewater Insurrection, Tade Thompson, second of the trilogy that started with Rosewater. Dang this was good. In retrospect, Rosewater maybe felt like it didn't quite come together because a lot of what it was doing was just setting up all the elaborate backstory for the big story happening here. This has a strong arc and cinematic high-drama action and a big payoff while also continuing to be smart and clever and all the stuff I said about the first one. Very much looking forward to the third.

I have now read all 9 volumes of The Wicked and the Divine, and will try to give some non-spoilery advice about whether other Hugo voters should do likewise! I really liked it - I found it gripping, well-paced, some good story beats. It's also a fast read - I would say it's closer to adding one more novel's worth of reading than 9. In terms of content, it's nicely queer and significantly female, like, it does very well on the "do women get to occupy a bunch of different roles in this cast" front. I would describe it as heavily influenced by Sandman, so if you liked Sandman, you'll probably like this. If you liked FreakAngels you should definitely read this. If you read Die vol 1 and hated it, this is the same author, although this is less horror (but not zero horror). People in a hurry can safely skip the fake magazine articles at the start of volume 5 and the text story in volume 8.

More (spoilery) thoughts behind a cut, and also my ballot. ( Read more... )

A nice batch this year but I still don't like any of them as much as I liked Chronin, hmph.

Monstress 4 - always gorgeous, always a little confusing, although I think I did a decent job letting go of my need to remember where we saw all these characters last and just rolling with it. I don't think I liked this one quite as much as 3 (which got my second-place vote last year) and I would really like to see something else win this year; Monstress is great but this doesn't have to be the Monstress Award for Best Monstress.

La Guardia - oh, this was neat. I guess it's actually set in Okorafor's Lagoon universe, but you don't need to have read that, and the tone is pretty different. Good story, good stuff about travel bans and racism and the richness of different people coming together, and I really liked the art.

Mooncakes - super sweet YA. A nonbinary werewolf and a witch with hearing aids, childhood friends/sweethearts, reunite to fight a demon, with help from the witch's badass gay grandmas. Felt like it would definitely appeal to fans of Witch Boy even though the protags here are more like young adults; I might get a paper copy for my kids, actually. I'm always glad to see disability rep in sff; there was a great panel early on visually showing deafness with distorted and shrunken letters in a speech bubble that was really nice comicsing.

Oh, and I guess I've already read Paper Girls 6 (spoilery comments here), so I'm actually more than halfway done! (Although if we're measuring by reading time, nine volumes of WicDiv is going to take like twice as long as everything else. Shh.)

(Also, wow, when we got the finalists list, I was so busy being sad about no Chronin that it didn't even hit me that there's also no Saga. I used to be so into Saga (the breastfeeding cover!!) and now my reaction is "yay I didn't have to read Saga this year" which, uh, suggests that maybe that series has not done a great job not squandering my goodwill. Anyways apparently Saga has been on hiatus since the issues that got collected into volume 9, so we don't have Saga this year because there is no Saga, and it's on indefinite hiatus so we may not have Saga again next year either, or, one has to wonder, possibly ever, if Vaughan has run out of kitchen sinks to throw in there. Welp.)

Middlegame, Seanan McGuire. Let's just go right to the cut. ( Read more... )

This was my last Hugo Novel and I get to rank novels now! Behind another cut! ( Read more... )

Other miscellaneous theories: publishers are waiting on the Nebulas to decide what they want to put in the packet, and we'll get the packet shortly thereafter, like next Friday.

Sciiiience fiction, double feeeeature... ok, more like fantasy, but it's been awhile since I managed to have two books to write about at once!

Deeplight, Frances Hardinge, YA, on the Lodestar ballot. I've really liked some Hardinge I've read (Well Witched, Skinful of Shadows) and not others (Fly By Night); I have three of her older books on my to-read list. I found this hard to get into at first, but thought it really picked up once the plot broke out and once we got to spend some time with a relatively-late-introduced secondary POV character. Spoilers: ( Read more... ) There's some pretty good stuff from the middle onwards - some very cinematic action/vehicle sequences. Skinful of Shadows did not do especially well on the 2018 Lodestar ballot - it got the fewest first-place votes, although eventually beat Art of Starving and Book of Dust for fourth place (losing to Akata Warrior, Summer in Orcus, and In Other Lands in that order) - so I don't know that I expect Deeplight to do much better, but I'm pleased to have read it and it may well crack the top half of my personal ballot. (I still have one more to read, and I'm not entirely sure how I'm ranking things.)

(To digress a little, I think part of why I was having such a hard time getting into it is that I'm really not in the mood to read anything difficult or uncomfortable at all right now. In a world with no Hugo voting and where I wasn't trying to juggle my library holds, I would probably be reading nothing but romance novels. I have so many good queer-romance recs that I just never get to, and I actually have even thought about bailing on the Hugos this year. But I like the community aspect of the Hugo reading, like, if I keep at it, I get to talk to my Hugo friends about books, and I don't want to cut that particular tether to the outside world right now. So the ballot reading will continue and morale may or may not improve.)

The Deep, Rivers Solomon, novella. Mixed expectations here as I really liked the clipping. song and really didn't like Solomon's previous novel. Unfortunately this was a slog; repetitive, belaboured, didn't do much with the aspects of the song I found most interesting. Might have worked for me at novelette length.

I have however now read all six Hugo novellas, and that means it's ranking time! Behind the cut. ( Read more... )

In an Absent Dream, Seanan McGuire. Hugo novella and book, um, four? yes, four, of the Wayward Children series. This is another prequel story, which, like the last prequel, didn't especially interest me. There are people who can pull off a story where we already know the end, and still make it surprising how we get there, or make us care in a fresh way, but McGuire is really not one of those authors for me. Must have worked for a bunch of people though since it's on the Hugo ballot, so, like, I'm glad McGuire is writing this series people love! Yay! For my purposes, at least it was a fast read.

I have managed to read another book! Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Dark-fairytale mythic fantasy set in Jazz Age Mexico. I liked this a lot - I loved the setting, we get to visit several places and they were well-described and honestly despite studying Mexican history in Spanish and History of the Americas I'd never really thought about what the 20s were like culturally, and Moreno-Garcia really brought it to life. (I want more books set in specific not-pre-industrial times in other countries like this!) The characters have some great moments - the plot isn't hugely surprising, it's a fairy tale/quest plot on sometimes literal rails (fantasy with trains! more of that too please!), but it really worked. I don't think this is going to beat Memory Called Empire for the Nebula but I like it being on the ballot.

I have been making exceedingly slow progress through a book and regretting that my new lifestyle doesn't really include time to read and then I got *this* book (library queue) and have read it in a single day and apparently part of the problem was the other book. *This* books was Catfishing on Catnet, Naomi Kritzer, a sequel to the short story Cat Pictures Please although I wouldn't say you *have* to have read that. Catfishing is short and gripping and extremely tense in parts and I definitely recommend it. It is up for the Norton (YA Nebula) and I would have nominated it for the Lodestar (YA NotaHugo) if I had read it in time.

Some content warnings behind a cut: ( Read more... )

The Candle and the Flame, Nafiza Azad. Early on this book felt like I had stumbled into someone's vocab assignment - I don't think of myself as someone who gets weird about "foreign" or unfamiliar words, but when the writing reads like it's been constructed to fit as many as possible in there, at the expense of the flow of the scene, that's not great. And worse, it felt like there was so much focus on hitting the vocab that major emotional turns and pieces of fantasy world-building were just sort of dropped in without any lead-up.

On the other hand, given the profound Islamophobia of our world right now, I can't help but be sympathetic to the idea that we-the-reading-public *need* to be aggressively familiarized with as many little bits of culture as anyone can cram in, and heck knows Hindi/Urdu/Arabic vocab (food, clothing, family, religion, stuff like that) is more relevant than the names of a hundred made-up elves and their elf culture or whatever. So, I don't know. I really don't want to be the person who is always saying "we need diverse books but not *this* one" - just going by the parallel to "we need a woman president but not this one", those people are assholes. I did finish the book and I did think there were some good bones to the story, but the style and voice were not for me. But I hope it's finding readers it does click with!