sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: fantasy

A collection of short fiction by NK Jemisin. I don't have a lot to say about this collection, tbh! Jemisin's a good writer, and she has a bunch of very good stories in her. Like in almost any short story collection*, I don't love every story in the collection, but when you're reading a collection by a writer who works for you, the baseline level of worth-reading in the collection is still not bad. And some of the stories are excellent!

A few of the stories in the collection I've read before, but most of them are new to me, and the ones I already knew were worth rereading.

My biggest problem with this collection, tbh, is the ongoing war between my descriptivist values and prescriptivist instincts for language, as applies to the title of the book. "Until" as a word is actually a derivative of "till" so if you want a short form of "until," "till" is right there! You don't need to go for "'til"! That's a form of over-correction! But given the prevalence of "'til," including (obviously!) in professionally-edited writing, I think I am losing this one, and I need to learn how to accept it. Sigh. The eternal struggle.

*every story collection except Zen Cho's Spirits Abroad, where I love every single story!

A novella about the Matter of Britain, featuring Percival the Grail Knight as a young woman. Griffith's prose is beautiful, and she's doing some interesting things with this interpretation, and I found the beginning of the book compelling, but ultimately....idk, I finished the book feeling oddly dissatisfied. I'm not sure what I wanted done differently, I'm not sure what wasn't working for me.

( some spoilers for the ending, as I try to talk through what didn't work for me )

Dangit I wanted to like this book!!

After having seen multiple enthusiastic reviews for this children's book from 50 years ago (thank you

melannen and

cahn), I had to get my hands on it myself, and it was well worth it! Such a good book.

It's historical fantasy set during the time when Mary Tudor was queen of England, which is not an era I see getting a lot of attention from fantasy novels, and it's well grounded in its particular time in history. The book is about a young woman, Kate, who is exiled to a place that has a lot of dismissed-as-superstition rumours about unsettling connection to magic and Faerie.

And this too is great, the writing is wonderfully evocative, and the fairies of the book are appropriately Other while still managing to be sympathetic in some ways. ( I guess this is spoilers? )

Anyway. Excellent book, love this for me, highly recommended to others for whom this kind of thing is your thing as well. Oh and it's a Newbery award winner too!

Sequel to last year's A Marvellous Light, a book I enjoyed but felt rather like it wasn't focusing on the story I wanted it to focus on. This one.... unfortunately continues the trend, though in a slightly different way.

Maud and Violet are two young women on a trans-atlantic ship voyage, who get caught up in a mystery surrounding a murder and a missing magical object. Together, they work to solve the mystery, accomplish their various goals, and navigate their growing relationship with each other.

There are many things to like about this, and honestly it is executed very well. There's good stuff between Maud and Violet, and the amount of trust and vulnerability they're a) interested in sharing with each other or b) capable of; and there's a fun cast of secondary characters in the restricted environment of a ship at sea. Some of the food descriptions really stuck with me, and I don't usually notice food in books! And we get to find out more about the Forsythia Club, the group of old lady magicians who had fascinated me so much in the last book.

But the story being told here is really a lot more hijinks-heavy a story than I usually prefer, featuring two main characters who are both hijinks-generators in their own ways, so I just wasn't really into the vibe for the first, like.... at least half the book.

And then I was teased with an AMAZING idea that then didn't go anywhere near what I was hoping and expecting for such an idea!

( cut for spoilers )

At any rate, highly recommended for anyone more into hijinks than me. I really did like the characters and their relationship!

And the next book is going to feature my favourite secondary character from this book, apparently: Ross, the class-conscious pornography-smuggling reporter. I'll be interested to see where that goes! And I hope there'll be more of Mrs Vaughn in the next book.

I've been holding on to this review since last November since it's for a book published by a HarperCollins imprint, but the HarperCollins Union finally has a contract with their employer (yay!!!!! go union go!) and has said to feel free to post reviews again! So here we go.

Moira's Pen is a book of short stories (and poetry, and anecdotes, and descriptions of relevant archeological objects) from the Queen's Thief universe. And ehhh, it's fine? But at the end of the main series, my increased understanding of the actual themes and priorities the overarching series narrative was engaging with meant I have lost much of my enamourment with it, and the stories and content in Moira's Pen are mostly pretty slight and meant to just be fun little additions to the novels. I did enjoy the new Immakuk and Ennikar content!

A children's graphic novel, an Anishinaabe retelling of the story of Alice in Wonderland featuring a nonbinary kid as the Alice character. It's fine, but the story is too disconnected and random to develop much interest for me - though that might just be that I have no particular attachment to or familiarity with Alice in Wonderland, which I gather is also pretty disconnected and random. But the art is nice, and it's never bad to have more Indigenous and queer representation for kids, in stories they recognize!

I first heard of this book via a rec from

sineala, and I'm so glad, because ahhh I loved this book so much! It just really hit the spot perfectly, of feeling like a classic secondary-world fantasy of my childhood while also being well written and interesting and queer. So much of the sff I read these days is either historical fantasy or futuristic sci-fi, and though both are delicious, I'd forgotten how good it can be to sink your teeth into a nice well-built secondary world fantasy and immerse yourself in that created world.

And it's a book published in the 90's that's textually queer! This aspect isn't forefronted, but it's subtly-yet-clearly woven into the worldbuilding throughout the whole book, in a way that's probably possible for an oblivious het to not even notice, but is blatant to anyone else.

The worldbuilding in general though is all really good. It's doing things that are interesting and specific and well integrated, and clear about what it's doing without ever feeling infodumpy. And I love how the city where most of the story takes place feels lived in and full of real people living their various intersecting lives, and with enough references to other cultures (and the tensions of living in a multicultural city with Histories between the various cultures) that the city feels like part of a larger world too. And there are enough references to things that have changed or happened in the past, including the recent past, that it doesn't feel stagnant; it's a living city, a living world.

Anyway the actual plot/characters. Rathe is a pointsman (....sort of a policeman, but with enough specificity about their place in the culture that it doesn't feel to me at least like it carries with it all the burden of associations a modern reader brings to police) and Eslingen is a mercenary soldier temporarily between jobs; together, they fight crime! That is, the city has recently had a more than usual rash of children disappearing, ones who seem very unlikely to have simply run away from home, and no bodies have been found, so what could have happened to them?

The mystery doesn't have Shocking! Twists! but unfolds well and interestingly, and

spoilers

I was pleased that in the end all of the children were recovered safely.

Anyway it looks like there are 4 more books in the series, and I want to read all of them! Though my library only has 1 other, so we'll see how far I get.

An odd sort of fantasy novel where it's like....mostly about the experience of community theatre, and interpersonal relationships, and learning to understand yourself better, but the theatre's director happens to be a faery. I like this approach! But the book as a whole was, idk, I more or less enjoyed the reading of it but I also found it fairly frustrating.

First of all, a large cast of eccentric characters isn't really my thing; I had trouble keeping track of them all and who they were and what their relationships were with each other, and most of them were fairly one-note characters. (some of those one notes were fun! but put together it was a lot.)

Second....the romance. ( cut for spoilers )

Sigh.

The book was promising! I really wanted to like it! But the more it became about the romance and about how tragic and wonderful Rowan was, the more I squirmed and skimmed ahead. In the end I would have preferred this book to not be fantasy at all, I think. Cut Rowan and faeries entirely, narratively reprioritise how important it is that Maggie is finally able to develop close supportive friendships instead, and I'd be here for this! But that would be an different book.

I got this book from

skygiants' review, and like, reading through this book I could ABSOLUTELY see how it is obviously the poison for Becca, Becca's poison, but also: I read the first two pages and was immediately confident I would like this book too. And I was right!

It is a historical fantasy novel with three main characters. The first two are an angel and a demon who live together in a Jewish shtetl in Poland as chevrusas, or study partners in their study of the Talmud, but who for a variety of reasons end up immigrating to the US. The third, Rose, is an extremely lesbian Jewish teen girl who immigrates to the US as well, for opportunities and for adventure and for getting away from her best friend Dinah who had the temerity to marry a man. Then they all get involved with labour activism! And also dealing with ghosts and dybbuks and gentile demons and oppressive immigration policies and more.

The three main characters are all so different from each other and I adore all three of them so so so much! Never ever a moment of disappointment on switching viewpoints, just excitement to spend time with that character again. Also: the narrative itself is a character with an "I" which I love too. Actually I would have loved if this was an even more prominent feature too! Love me a book where the narrative isn't trying to disappear into the background but has its own opinions separate from that of the characters it's writing about.

Plus the book as a whole is suffused both with very Jewish and very queer vibes and I love this about it. I am not Jewish myself so cannot speak in detail to that aspect of it, though I always love to read books that go all in on depicting very specific experiences like this! And the queerness....ohhhh it was beautiful. This book not just a book with queer characters; the whole narrative is queer in its soul, and I love that for it. And for me, reading it!!! It's just like, this is a book that understands me.

( minor spoilers I think )

At any rate, thank you Becca for the rec because this was a GREAT read.

Note: I was given a free copy of this ebook in exchange for an honest review.

Schemes of the Wayfarer is an f/f secondary world fantasy novel featuring the commander of the capital city's guard, and a woman who has spent the last 10 years or so in the Wilds - a place known for its strange creatures and unsettling magic, that changes the people who spend time in it.

I enjoyed the worldbuilding of the novel a lot, the way that various magical things and non-human beings were a normal part of life that people don't spend a lot of time thinking about. And I wanted to know more, tbh! I loved the opening conceit, the major river that the people who live in this country have been unable to travel down for 30 years because the key that allows you to do so safely has been lost. And I super enjoyed a spoilery reveal that happens later in the book!

Click here if you want the spoiler!

The treasurer is a dragon!! Loved this, and loved how when you looked back over what you'd heard about him earlier it made total sense.

The novel is competently written and drew me along through it easily and comfortably, but to be honest I spent a lot of time being frustrated by some aspects of characterization.

Keth, the viewpoint character, is the commander of the guard and is supposed to be very good at her job. And part of the job is, by its nature, spending time in political situations. But we spend a lot of time seeing Keth being bewildered by things and making silly blunders (eg drinking too much wine on an empty stomach and blurting out things she doesn't mean to say), even though she's successfully held this job for many years. She comes across as young and insecure and inexperienced. Which then makes the times when she thinks about how OBVIOUSLY she couldn't help picking up something about politics over the years feel like it lands wrong, because that's not the Keth I've seen! It just felt inconsistent to me. (She does, for the record, seem decent at the half of her job that involves actually commanding the guard.)

Theraine, the love interest, I never felt like I really understood entirely or saw who she was as a person. I never got a sense of what her time in the Wilds had actually done to her, for example. But the most frustrating part:

I think this is also spoilers, though less spoilery this time

She's supposedly the puppetmaster behind everything that happens in this book, orchestrating it all for a specific purpose. But I never actually got the sense that that was really happening? Idk, it kept on being referenced, and every time I would be like OH RIGHT, I FORGOT, because it just never felt relevant or intrinsic to either the plot or the character. But this is like, even the title of the book! It's supposed to be the point! I guess I just wish this was somehow integrated better.

And then there was the relationship between Keth and Theraine. They knew each other in their school days, when Keth apparently beat up Theraine multiple times, and haven't seen each other since school. And they're both just so casually fine about the beating up, and laugh about it, and very quickly act as if they're close and trusting friends, and it just feels off. Later it comes out that they had one positive interaction when Keth was leaving school, but honestly that does not feel like enough. So it's just weird.

There were a few other minor issues that I noticed as I read, but those I would have been fine overlooking if the characters and their relationship worked for me better. Sigh, I wanted to like this book! And there were good things about it. But for me as a reader, I want books where I can really care about the characters, and I couldn't quite get there with these ones.

I just reread Piranesi, and you know how when a book is so close to perfect and yet falls short in a few specific ways, it can feel more disappointing than a book that didn't get so close? Yeah, that.

There's so much about this book that's truly glorious, that I absolutely adore. Things that it's doing that are really special and unusual and incredible. But. For a book published in 2020 to unquestioningly reproduce a) the evil gay trope and b) the heroic police officer trope, with no indication there was ANY thought put into complicating either those ideas.....it's disappointing. Look, I'd absolutely be okay keeping Arne-Sayles gay; it's relevant to him as a representative of outsider thinking, especially during the era he was academically active. But there needs to be other non-evil, non-predatory queer characters as well to balance him out! In fact, let's just make 16 a non-cop lesbian, and maybe make Matthew Rose Sorensen gay as well, and the book would be fixed.

It's especially disappointing from an author like Clarke, who in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell created a book where the persistent theme throughout is that people with social and political power abuse it, and that the outsiders and people from oppressed people groups are worth listening to. But of course, as was pointed out to me, just because people are interested in those themes doesn't mean they're capable of recognizing all of who has power and who's oppressed.

On my first read of Piranesi I was so transported by the good things the book is doing that I didn't think much about these issues except to note that they were present. But now on reread, they sting a little more. SIGH. I want this book to be perfect, dangit!!!!

EDIT: can't believe I forgot to mention: Piranesi must have had a background as a birder! he confidently identifies herring gulls instead of being like "um, they're seagulls of some kind"

Whew, I'm done reading TGCF!!! I read the first half in the officially published translation, and the second half in a fan translation since the official one isn't all published yet, but let me tell you I am ABSOLUTELY going to be rereading the whole dang thing once the official tl is all out.

Anyway! What a book! What a lot of book in which a lot of things happened! I've been reading this thing for over a month, fairly consistently, and it took me this long because I gather the english translation is something like 750,000 words long?!? That is Long.

But what this means is that I feel like I do NOT remember everything that happened well enough to feel like I have a good grasp on the Things that the book is trying to do as a whole. How do all the themes tie into each other? What ARE the themes? This is hard to say when I had trouble even keeping track of who was who amongst all the different secondary characters, because a book this size can fit SO many secondary characters in it, and most of them have at least two completely different names if not more.

(Mu Qing and Feng Xin were particularly bad for this because they go by those names, and also by Nan Yang and Xuan Zhen, and ALSO by pseudonyms where they're pretending to be their own underlings. I absolutely 100% could not keep track of them by all these different names and as a result have very little sense of which is which between them, which I can tell is Problems!)

Anyway anyway! This is a chinese danmei webnovel about a guy who becomes a god (and then stops being a god, and then goes through that cycle a few more times...), and about heavenly politics between all the different gods, and also about the ghost who loves him. And I LOVED it.

There were some parts that got a bit tedious (some of the fight scenes went on a bit long, I will not lie, but then I think this about MOST fight scenes, lol) but overall it was remarkably moreish for the entire very long length.

It's a book about how choices make you who you are, I think, and about the importance of having people in your life whom you can love and trust and rely on. And the way these themes are intertwined with the love story between our hero Xie Lian and the ghost king Hua Cheng is just completely delightful. I adore Xie Lian as a main character and a viewpoint character. He's so endlessly fascinating! He's 800 years old by the time of the main events of the novel, and he's been through a lot (understatement), and he's made very definite and deliberate choices about what kind of person he wants to be. But at the same time, he's spent most of those 800 years living a life where he prioritizes the well-being of pretty much everyone except himself, because he sees that as his job - and in his relationship with Hua Cheng, he finally is introduced to the idea that it doesn't have to be selfish for him to allow happiness into his life, and to have someone prioritize him. I love them both very very much.

I feel like there's a whole enormous thread of another theme I cannot comment on though because I do not know enough about either a) Chinese cosmology or b) cultivation novels as a genre. Which is that although it seems to be the goal of all cultivators to cultivate successfully enough to ascend into godhood, in this book godhood does not uhhhhhhhh seem to be that great. Heaven is full of petty squabbles, a lot of the gods kinda suck in an exciting variety of ways, and you still have jobs to do and paperwork to complete and roles to live up to and asshole coworkers to try to get along with, and so on and so forth. Basically: it doesn't seem to be any better than ordinary human life, except that you get fancy palaces and exclusive access to Brain Twitter (dubious prize). There definitely seems to be questioning of like, why is this the goal? Is this worthwhile? Should we be aiming for something else instead? But again! I do not have enough context for this entire thread of questions to be sure of WHAT it's saying with all this!

Other characters in this book I had strenuous feelings about:

- Ling Wen! I find her FASCINATING. A civil god who is really really really good at administrative work, such that when she rebels, the entirety of heaven is kind of lost without her! It was sooooo funny that when she and Xie Lian are fighting at one point, Xie Lian automatically goes to update Ling Wen about the situation because as the administrative manager of heaven she needs to know, and then is like. Uh. Right. She knows because she's HERE. FIGHTING ME. But we get remarkably little of her internal life and I want to know more about what's going on with her!

- He Xuan and Shi Qingxuan. Obviously! Beefleaf!!!!! God their story is so deliciously painful. One of those things where there is no way for there to be a happy ending but you can't help hoping anyway.

- Guzi - the poor kid! I spent so much of the book being like, auuuughhhhhhh this is so horrible that he's so attached to his dad but that asshole qi rong is possessing his dad and so he's running around after QI RONG endlessly, and then you get just this tiny info drop near the end that actually his dad was the worst and he's so attached to qi rong as his father because qi rong is actually the best dad he's ever had? (low, low bar) Anyway I still hate qi rong but. I want guzi to be able to have a better experience of family :(

I've been in a bit of a reading slump, so I pulled out T. Kingfisher's latest, because you can't go wrong with a Kingfisher.

This one, Illuminations, is a children's book about rival magic families in an alternate universe Italian city-state, which of course gave me inescapable dwj vibes, but this one is doing its own thing!

It's a very good and charming book, with solid themes, but I found the first lengthy part of the book very stressful since it involved everyone thinking badly of the main character with her unable to defend herself because of secrets she has to keep. And people spend a good while not trusting each other and not talking to each other. But thankfully the book recognizes that this is a problem, and sets out rectifying it much more promptly than it would have in another book, which I appreciate! Still meant though that I spent more of the book than I like being stressed rather than enjoying myself.

One of the things it's doing is the classic children's book thing of depicting important lessons about friendship, and you know, this is one of the things I love about children's books, that they DO highlight the value of friendships and the work needed to be a good friend to someone, and how worthwhile that is. Learning how to navigate jealousy in a vital yet platonic relationship in your life is key actually!

Overall: maybe not my fave Kingfisher, but a quick read and a solid book.

This isn't exactly a book review, since it is kind of hard to review just volume 1 of an 8 volume novel, but I just wanted to check in to register how much I love Xie Lian already! There's clearly A Lot that we don't know about him yet, but from everything we see of him he's just....I love him. I'm looking forward to finding out more, both about him and about Hua Cheng (even more of a mystery so far!!!!) and also about all the other characters beloved by fandom who haven't had a huge showing just yet.

Really not sure WHAT I just read or how to explain/describe it, but dang I was into it. It's kind of science fiction and fantasy at the same time, it doesn't do a lot of explaining what it's doing or how the worldbuilding works but just sort of presents it to you, and it is not linear. Its use of language - of languages - is fabulous, and the rhythm of the prose. I love how Wilson writes!!! And the way he can draw characters and worlds so well in such a short space.

And the whole thing is written with such confidence that it just carries you along through the things that don't make sense as an understanding is gradually built up in your mind of the things that matter.

The one issue is that I'm not quite sure how I feel about the ending.

( spoilers for the ending! )

The other thing is a technical issue with the ebook copy I have, which is a collection: In Our Own Worlds #2: Four LGBTQ+ Tor.com Novellas. And there are some footnotes in Sorcerer of the Wildeeps; not a lot, but the ones that are there are important. And they are placed at the end of each chapter with no link to take you from your current page to the footnote and back again. So when you get to the footnote you've entirely forgotten the context of what was being footnoted. This is highly unhelpful! I kind of want to reread in hard copy now. Or a better ebook.

I've tried to read this book once before, and found myself just never coming back to it when I was only partway in, because I just wasn't drawn to it enough. But I finally was like NO let's DO this because I'd heard some interesting things about it!

And I do find the gender stuff about this worldbuilding interesting! But honestly that was about it. This book is a short novella, and it is structured as like...peeks into the life of the main character over the course of decades, and although that could be an interesting structure, I never felt like we went in deep enough at any of the peeks for me to care about the characters or the plot. It was fine? It was readable. I was just kind of bored.

The third novella in the Singing Hills cycle! I absolutely adored the first two, so I was extremely excited for this one. It's a series that is about storytelling, and about the ways in which the teller affects what the story is and what details you get, and I looooooove this.

But having read this latest book, I feel sincerely like I'm missing something. I feel fairly confident the book is doing something that connects the various stories told within the narrative to each other, and I think also with the character Lao Bingyi in particular, in order to say things about the series theme. But I have no idea what! I ended the book feeling a bit obtuse. PLEASE explain it to me if you've read this book!!!!

Anyway without whatever it is that pulls the disparate parts together, the book felt very episodic to me. Lots of lovely details and I enjoyed it on the surface level of "Chih goes on a road trip and hears some nice stories and nearly dies a few times" but on that level it doesn't seem to fit with the other books in the series. It was nice though to get to see more of who Chih is as a person, though! You get to see more of that in this book than the previous ones.

But really. Please explain what I'm missing here! Was I just too sleep deprived when reading it to put some obvious hints together??

The last volume of scum villain!!!! Can't believe it's actually over. The first three volumes contained the entirety of the main story, so this one is a collection of all the extras. I hadn't read all the extras before, only the ones that were posted as additional chapters to the story, so I got to read new-to-me content, not just a new translation!

I had a variety of reactions to the various stories in this collection. There were plenty of great details and fun character stuff, and I was delighted to get to reread the Airplane extras! I love the Airplane extras. But not all the stories were of particular interest to me, as is kind of inevitable in short story collections. And also.....one of the stories, the succubus extra, contained an unpleasant slur for trans people, and that kind of threw me off.

My understanding is that in the original text, a slur is also used, so the translation is accurate in that respect. But I do think that there are other ways the translation could have handled this, to make it clear what the narrative is doing without just confronting the reader with a word like that unexpectedly.

Anyway my other main response to that is to be even more interested in sqq being weird about his own gender and also lbh's, lol. (will never be over

acernor's wife life!!!)

Overall I do still definitely recommend this book, but just, like, be prepared. (also: be prepared for bingqiu sex to um...not be a shining example of healthy communication about their needs and desires. it's very them! and also dear lord.)

Huh, this novella did some odd and wonderful things, playing back and forth and sideways with time and with what's real, and I loved it. I loved the rhythms of the prose too, and I loved the fascinating worldbuilding that you just got matter-of-fact hints of as major things happened offscreen while the book focused on things that were small and personal and familial.

I think it would have benefited from me reading it all in one go, because at least for me, I had trouble keeping in my head what had happened in my previous day's reading and I kept having to go back and reread previous chapters, but that might just be a me-and-my-memory problem.

Aqib's relationship with his (male) lover, his wife, his daughter, his brother, and his father are the major focus of the book, and all of these relationships are fascinating, and some of them are very unhealthy but still understandable. I was fascinated by the Blessed Femysade in particular!

And dangit, now I think I DO need to read the other novella by Wilson set in this world, Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, which I'd previously skipped over because it looked like it wasn't going to have a happy ending and I didn't want to get invested!

This novella felt very....slight, idk. Historical fantasy set in 1940's San Francisco, and it was fine but honestly I found it boring? There were some nice details, but I didn't find myself particularly drawn in.

And then also..... there's almost no magic for most of the book, to the point where I was wondering why the heck the author had bothered to make it fantasy, and then all of a sudden there was a highly magical ending. The presence and importance of magic felt super unbalanced as a result, and the ending didn't feel to me like it fit at all with what had come before.

And another thing about the ending! ( cut for spoilers )