sophia_sol | Entries tagged with pub date: 2019

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this book, going into it. It's a nonfiction book about underworlds, but what did that mean, exactly? What approach was the author going to take?

It turned out that the approach was: Macfarlane, over a number of years, went and visited 10 different places where the human world intersects with the world beneath our feet, and used that to talk about the human relationships with those places, and why we use them and what for, and what the experience is like, and the history of them. Each chapter was on a different place, and was a deep dive into that place in particular, and then the cumulative effect of these different places was built up together to say something bigger.

It's a remarkably beautiful book, caring far more about the artistic qualities of the prose than most non-fiction books I read. It's so evocative and thoughtful at the same time! In each chapter he's so careful about building the narrative landscapes for each chapter, in the details he does or doesn't choose to include. I was surprised to discover in one late chapter that the author must be a birder, because he kept on referring to so many different kinds of birds he saw there, specifically by species name, but it had never come up before because birds weren't thematically relevant details in previous chapters!

The chapters include things like salt mining, cave art, tunnels beneath Paris, melt-holes in glaciers, and more. All of it was fascinating and thought-provoking and carefully researched, too.

My one and only point of disjoint in reading the book was in his chapter on nuclear containment, because in my opinion he seems too optimistic about the likelihood of containment methods working for the span of time they'll be needed. Like. Ten thousand years is an astoundingly long time! I have concerns!

But other than that, this is truly an excellent book, and I recommend it highly.

A solid, research-based book about all the ways that diet culture hurts people, how inescapable and insidious it can be, and how best to free yourself from the harm it causes.

This is a message that honestly SO many people need. Diet talk - and its current iteration, "wellness" talk - is everywhere, as is size discrimination and fatphobia. But a) sustainable long-term weight loss is almost impossible for almost everyone, because your body loves you and wants to keep you alive through famines, b) you can be healthy at any size, and c) weight cycling and experiencing weight stigma are the factors that are actually associated with greater health risks, independent of the actual size of your body.

There were a few place in the part where the book goes through the history of weight and dieting where I think it simplified things a bit much, but this book's overall goal isn't to be a history book, it's to show people how to have a non-guilty, non-shaming, comfortable relationship with food and eating and their body. And it does a great job at that. Highly recommended read.

This is a graphic novel memoir written by a person of my generation about eir relationship with gender over the course of eir life. Kobabe is genderqueer and seems to be somewhere on the ace spectrum and grew up in fandom, just like me, and grew up with similar cultural references and touchpoints. I've spent so much of my life reading books written in bygone eras (whether a decade or two centuries out of date!) that seeing a book where the author's life seems familiar is honestly odd, lol! But eir relationship with eir body and gender and sexuality is all ultimately very different than mine, as is eir family and the context in which e grew up. And e mostly hung out in different fandoms than me, too!

Anyway Kobabe is clearly skilled at comics and I enjoyed reading this journey through eir experiences, and it's clearly brave of em to put this out into the world, and it's just nice to have more narratives of the ways that queer experiences can look!

The book does feel like it ends a little abruptly, but the author was 30 or so at the time of publishing and that's still honestly early in one's journey through life, so it's perhaps not surprising that there isn't a satisfying conclusion to wrap it all up with, and it's still a good ending.

This book started out SO strong, with a bunch of space nuns living in a living spaceship grown from a species of slug, each of the nuns with their own personalities and foibles and strengths and weaknesses that make living together in a small, isolated community a fun challenge. And it was so good at this!!! So good!!!!!! But then we went and had plot happen.

( cut for spoilers )

I read the first book in this duology more than two years ago, so when I decided it was FINALLY time to get round to Realm of Ash, the second book, I did a quick reread of Empire of Sand first, just to remind myself of what happened. The first time I read Empire of Sand, it took me until 100 pages in to be drawn in, but this time I fully appreciated everything the first 100 pages were doing too, which I was so glad of. It's doing great things! And then. Realm of Ash! Also great all the way through.

These books are set in an alternate universe world inspired by Mughal India, and are fantasy romances about the evils of empire.

The heroines of the two books are sisters who have mixed ancestry: their father is of the Ambhan people, the people of the Empire, and their mother is Amrithi, a derided and oppressed people group of the desert. I loved seeing how different the two women's experience of their heritage was, both challenging in different ways. Mehr, the elder sister, knew her birth mother for a part of her childhood and was deeply connected to her Amrithi heritage and hated how in her father's house she was forced to suppress that part of herself. And Arwa, the younger, was raised entirely Ambhan, and discovers as an adult the pain of what it means to be so disconnected from a people and a culture that should have been hers to access.

The books are also about the importance of TEAMWORK in romance, and let me tell you I AM HERE FOR IT. In both books the heroine, before coming to a place of loving her romantic lead, first gets to experience working together with him towards a common goal, and having the hero and heroine respect each other and work well together and appreciate each other's values and skills. Yes please. I love this for a romance. This is SO much more my jam than love at first sight!!! And in the second book, Realm of Ash, they're explicit about this with each other - they call each other partners, and talk about how they're a "mystical order of two" as they study the things they need to study to reach their goals. I adore this for them.

I love the worldbuilding stuff that these books are doing too, and that continues in Realm of Ash. Also continuing: characters who have complicated relationships to other people, and characters who do bad things for understandable reasons. LOVE that stuff.

I also think I didn't talk enough in my last review of Empire of Sand about how much relationships between women are so well depicted in these books. But they are! In both books! There are so many women, and women in community with each other, and women having their own priorities, and all that.

(I was talking with my sister this morning about how a lot of male authors, even if they successfully depict an interesting female character or two, don't actually understand that to accurately depict the world, there needs to be a multiplicity of women who have their own lives and aren't just About The Men. One of the reasons I end up reading far fewer male authors in any given year!)

Anyway, Realm of Ash IS its own book doing its own things too, but I keep on talking more about it in the context of its conversation within its duology, I think because Suri is SO good at making it a proper duology Two books that each stand alone just fine but are clearly a matched set that belong to each other and draw out additional things to appreciate if you read them together. So good.

(Trilogy consists of: The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower, The Winter of the Witch)

I read the first book in this trilogy for the first time four years ago, and liked it a lot at the time, but wrote a VERY incomplete review of it. So I reread it before reading the sequels, so I would remember what actually happened in it! And then I read the sequels.

And now that I've read the whole trilogy I'm....hm. Evaluating the three books all together, I like it a lot less than I thought I was going to. And the thing is, I don't know WHY!!! It's doing so many different things that I generally find extremely compelling, and yet when all put together, I am left feeling cold.

It's a book set in medieval Russia, fairy tale inspired, about the tension between Christianity and the traditional beliefs, featuring a young woman with interesting complicated relationships with her family and also with the god of death. And it's well written, and the main character has a complicated morality but is dedicated to doing what she thinks is the right thing to do, and the winter vibes are powerful and delicious. You would think that this is my jam! And yet.

I mean, yes, there were some aspects of how the story was put together that did not agree with me. Like, Vasya spends most of the second book crossdressing as a boy, and she is very clearly experiencing The Genders about it, but the author is completely and utterly unaware of this fact in a very "I'm cis and have never considered what it means to be a gender" kind of way that feels like it belongs to a bygone era of crossdressing novels. And there were some aspects of how this played out that were really uncomfortable.

(and the books are also extraordinarily heterosexual........except for one brief moment where the god of chaos and the evil priest kiss. Because obviously gayness is something that only belongs to antagonists. SIGH. I would honestly be happier if I just thought the author somehow didn't know gay people exist.)

Also, although I am all about those delicious human/personification-of-death ships, this particular god of death felt so very human that it didn't really feel like that's what it was doing! And yes, there were watsonian reasons why he was more human than he ought to have been, but that doesn't actually make it satisfying to me.

But honestly these are things that would, in other books, not actually stop me from enjoying other parts of a book, if the other parts were good. So idk. *enormous shrugs* If you have read these books and have any thoughts about why it might not have spoken to me, then please talk to me about it!

Other thoughts:

I did, throughout the whole read, keep finding myself thinking "This is like spinning silver except spinning silver did it so much better. Why am I not just rereading spinning silver instead."

I kept being thrown by Konstantin not being the character type I expected him to be, because....okay. When I was a teen, I began reading the Alvin Maker books by Orson Scott Card. They are, um, extremely baffling and horrible, and although they began with some compelling worldbuilding, they went very off the rails remarkably quickly and I think I gave up like halfway through the series. But they contain a character who plays a similar role to Konstantin: a priest/minister type person who thinks he is hearing god talking to him but is actually hearing the devil, and doing what the devil wants. And that dude from the Alvin Maker books is a very different person from Konstantin! But I kept expecting Konstantin to be him! Anyway Konstantin's terrible but in a different way, and I could never quite hold it in my head what kind of way that was, lol.

I've read The Magnolia Sword once before, when it first came out, and I loved it at the time. But on rereading, I've unfortunately discovered that I don't love it nearly so well anymore.

The first time I read it, I was racing through it because it was so exciting and I couldn't wait to find out what would happen next, and I didn't have a lot of brainspace left to spare for really paying attention to everything the narrative was doing. This time, the way I read it was via me and a friend (M) taking turns to read it aloud to each other chapter by chapter over the course of 5 or so days while we were on vacation -- a much slower, more meditative way to read a book. And it turns out that I don't think it's actually particularly deftly written.

There are a number of quirks of the prose that are actively irritating to me, to the degree that I started editing on the fly as I read aloud to make it flow better, plus nearly EVERY chapter ends in some sort of cliffhanger. M and I started laughingly going "dun dun dunnnnnn" at the end of every chapter because it was such a thing.

I also felt like various aspects of the story and characters were handled in a too-simplistic way.

And there are some choices that I feel work against the themes the story is going for! For example, the book is going for "war is bad and destabilising, and anything that can create greater stability under the circumstances is worth chasing after in order to avoid widespread death, even if it's an imperfect solution" which is a great theme to go with the time period in China that the book is set in. But then when Mulan meets the emperor at the end she's like "ah yes but he's a GOOD emperor because I can tell he really cares, so I'm glad he's the emperor" when I think it would have made more sense to reinforce the theme by having the emperor be like, mediocre at best, but supporting his reign is still the right choice because toppling the current dynasty will lead to further instability and death for the common people. (okay I might also have preferred this vision of the emperor because I am the opposite of a monarchist lol but I STILL THINK IT WOULD BE BETTER FOR THIS PARTICULAR STORY TOO)

And I haaaaaaated that there are multiple really big decisions in Mulan's life that are taken out of her hands at the end and the narrative doesn't seem to notice it or see a single thing wrong with it: someone else reveals her true gender to the rest of her comrades without even asking her if she is okay with that, and Kai invites her father to the capital without telling her when Mulan is still in turmoil over the things she's learned about her father and isn't sure she's ready to meet him again.

I do still appreciate the casual queerness of background characters, and the friendship between Mulan and the other soldiers in their little band, and the connection between Mulan and Kai, and all that. Though I'm a little more uncomfortable now with exactly how Kai's anxiety is handled, even if I'm still glad a lead character gets to be shown as both anxious and heroic.

But one thing I actually like better this time around than my first read is the crossdressing and gender identity! I actually really like that Mulan has a very clear sense of her gender identity and doesn't like being seen as a man or having to dress like a man through so much of her life. She's cis, but cis in a way where she kind of had to interrogate her own gender, and has come to a solid answer about what gender that is. Do I still eternally want more "crossdressing" narratives that lead to the character coming to some trans realisations about themself? Absolutely! But I like this too.

It was also fun to read this wuxia-inspired novel with more of a grounding in wuxia/xianxia now; I could see the ways in which it was following those tropes, when last time I had no idea how to recognize what it was doing in that respect.

At any rate, despite my various frustrations this time around, I still very much enjoyed sharing this book with M; reading it aloud to each other was a great deal of fun, and such a good way to experience a story together.

With the evil ex out of the picture, the rest of the characters in these graphic novels have distinct enough character designs that I no longer had trouble following things, and I had an enjoyable time reading volumes 2 & 3. Volume 4 turns out to be a Very Special Episode about eating disorders, and also the pacing is all over the place, so I didn't like it quite as well -- but I'm enjoying watching all these teens doing their best and caring about people!

I discovered the graphic novel tag on Libby a few days ago and have just been motoring through a whole pile of random ebook graphic novels that looked interesting to me, mostly not even pausing long enough between reading them to write down any thoughts. So here's a collection of very haphazard short reviews of a bunch of graphic novels! Yes most of these ARE middle grade, I love middle grade fiction and I super gravitated towards those when wandering through the options.

Witches of Brooklyn, and Witches of Brooklyn: What the Hex?!, by Sophie Escabasse

These are cute middle grade graphic novels about an orphan girl who lives with her aunts, discovers she's a witch, and learns about friendship and magic and being who you are. Quick and charming reads!

The Fire Never Goes Out, by Noelle Stevenson

A collection of Stevenson's biographical comics they wrote each year since 2011, along with other art and notes. It's a glimpse into a young person growing up and discovering who they are and how to live with mental illness and trying to figure out their identity, but all written in a very distancing and non-specific way (understandable, as much of this was written while the author was actively struggling with these things), so although it was interesting, it didn't fully capture me.

Be Prepared, by Vera Brosgol

A story about a girl with Russian immigrant parents who always feels like an outsider among her peers, and then learns about RUSSIAN SUMMER CAMP! Unfortunately, camp is not everything she dreamed. I loved this book, the art and the writing work so well together to capture the main character's experiences, and I loved that it was a book about camp where the conclusion actually was "hey it turns out camp's not for everyone and that's okay."

They Called Us Enemy, by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker

A memoir of Takei's experiences as a child in Japanese internment camps in WWII. Really powerfully done. I loved the way the book manages to show both how genuinely hard it was, and also how much child-him was oblivious to the real seriousness of what was happening to him and his family.

Snapdragon, by Kat Leyh

Delightfully queer story about a girl who feels like an outsider, an old butch lesbian witch who lives in the woods and articulates roadkill skeletons, and a lot of ghosts. I loved it!

Heartstopper (volume 1), by Alice Oseman

This is really just the first part of a multi-part story, but volumes 2 and 3 are checked out and I have to wait for my holds to come in to be able to actually finish! Alas. Anyway this is a gay high school love story between two boys, and I enjoyed it, but the art made it really hard for me to tell the new love interest Nick apart from the mean ex Ben, which was an ongoing problem.

The Magic Fish, by Trung Le Nguyen

Wow, this was incredible! The weaving together of the stories of a young Vietnamese teen trying to come to terms with his gay identity and how to tell his parents, and his mother's experience of being a Vietnamese immigrant who left her family behind and being caught between the world of her mother and the world of her son, and the fairy tales they read to each other that allow them to connect and communicate with each other. The three elements dip in and out of each other constantly, but each is monochromatic in a different colour, allowing you to easily follow how everything's connected without feeling lost. It also does a good job of making the art speak without words, which is something I don't always do a good job of following, but it really works for me here. The whole book is about different ways of communicating, and it uses its own form to enhance that theme. SUPER good.

Operatic, by Kyo Maclear

I see what it was going for, and I liked the bones of it, but it didn't quite all gel together for me, unfortunately.

How Mirka Got Her Sword, by Barry Deutsch

A perfectly fine story about a Jewish girl who wants to fight monsters. Nothing wrong with it, but it didn't excite me either.

Jane, the Fox and Me, by Fanny Britt & Isabelle Arsenault

The main theme of the book appears to be fatphobia -- but the art depicts the main character as being just as skinny as anyone else in the book, and nobody is in fact noticeably fat? So the theme of the art and the theme of the story end up being in tension with each other in a way that really detracted from what it was trying to say. Also the fatphobia the main character experiences doesn't actually ever really....get dealt with or addressed much. She finds a friend and then she feels better about everything, including her weight. (And, in a much pettier complaint, the fox of the title hardly shows up at all!!)

This is a nonfiction book about the history of eugenics and scientific racism, and the ways it is still embedded in modern science. It's a good book, but tbh I don't feel like I really learned much new from it. I got some additional data and context, but the base stuff the book was trying to convey I already knew, which made the reading a little boring. So a good book to exist in the world, but not one I personally really needed to take the time to read.

One of the things that kind of threw me off about this book though is that multiple times when talking about this or that scientist, the author would say things like "I know that [PERSON'S NAME] is not a racist" which feels weird to me in this context. Classifying people who perpetuate racist science by whether or not they are personally racist seems kind of beside the point? They're doing something racist whether or not they are the kind of deliberate whole-heartedly Bad People usually meant by "a racist". But maybe she's doing this to maintain good relationships with her sources, which would be understandable. Still don't love it though.

I like to browse the recent books section of the libby app, to see what recent ebooks my library has acquired, and sometimes it really pays off! I hadn't even heard of this comic series before, but I saw it and was immediately intrigued, and when my holds came in on the four volumes collecting the whole series, I read them INSTANTLY and was totally drawn in.

The premise: a sports anime, but make it explicitly queer. High-school aged boys on a boarding school fencing team! Nicholas is the lead character, a scholarship student whose good instincts in fencing are held back by inferior technique. He has placed himself as a rival to Seiji, a dedicated and consistent fencer with years of training who doesn't know how to be anything but serious, and Nicholas is determined to beat him -- and also be friends with him.

I love both of them, but I also love all the other characters. They're all individuals, with their strengths and weaknesses (both on the fencing piste and off), and their own relationships with the other characters. And I was going to mention here which of the other characters I was most interested in but uh it may be basically all of them? I was riveted through the whole of the story.

The four extant volumes take us through team tryouts and to the end of the team's first practice match, and now that I've finished them I'm desperate to read more. Unfortunately that's all there is!

It looks like there are also some novels by Sarah Rees Brennan continuing the story, but I've found Rees Brennan's writing pretty hit-or-miss for me, so I'm feeling a bit skeptical about giving these a try. I want to read more of this story as written by CS Pacat! SIGH. Has anyone else read the Rees Brennan Fence novels, and can tell me more about how they are?

I read this short story collection for the promise of a story about the Thousand and One Nights with time travel, despite having decided after reading Chiang's other collection that his writing is not for me.

And...his writing continues to not be for me. The vast majority of the stories in this collection, like his other collection, are explorations of thought experiments housed in a light narrative frame--and in one case he doesn't even bother with a narrative frame at all. Also the story I was lured in by isn't actually about the Thousand and One Nights or any of the stories in it, it's just vaguely inspired by the structure and setting!! And I didn't find it emotionally satisfying either! Sigh.

I don't know what else I expected though. Chiang is the kind of writer he is, and I am the kind of reader I am, and the two just don't get along. That's how it goes sometimes. I'm going stop trying with Chiang going forward, and leave him to be enjoyed by readers better suited to what he has to offer.

A retelling of The Secret Garden IN SPACE! And it's really well done and gave me feelings.

( I guess everything is spoilers? )

Anyway it's a free self-published ebook so if you want to read it you can download the pdf uhhhhhh SOMEWHERE, I lost the link and googling it isn't helping me find it. But it looks like you can read it chapter by chapter on the author's patreon if you subscribe to it, at least!

Sequel to The Widows of Malabar Hill, this is another mystery novel starring Perveen, a woman lawyer in 1920's India. I didn't like this one as much as the first one -- it took SO LONG to get going. The main mystery took place in the palace of Satapur, and Perveen only even got to the palace more than a third of the way into the book! Once the mystery got properly going I became more drawn in, but wow that took a long time coming. By the time I got to the end of the book I was glad I read it, but I nearly gave up on it multiple times.

I think my biggest issue is that in my opinion books need to have some sort of emotional or character arc, not just a plot arc. Even mystery books. Yes, when a mystery series has a consistent detective character, the character arc can't always be for that lead character, because there's only so much growth one person can be expected to do. But there's plenty of scope in secondary characters! I think this is one of the things that made the first book work better for me; Perveen herself had an arc, it wasn't solely about the mystery she was solving. And that was well done and made me care a lot about her! But in this one she's just the vehicle for solving what's going on in Satapur.

And there are some secondary characters who could have had some really interesting stuff if the narrative chose to focus on their arc. I think the dancing woman especially (sorry, I forget her name). But the narrative didn't seem to be particularly interested in that kind of thing; the characters all felt pretty static to me.

Also. What was up with ( very minor spoiler )

Well, I'll give the next book in the series a try when it comes out, but if that one doesn't work for me then I'll be giving up on the series, I think.

A romance novel featuring a demisexual hero! How neat! I love that this meant there was a lot of focus on the meaningfulness of their friendship before the inevitable "oh no she's hot" sort of content started up, though I wish we could have seen more of the development of their friendship, instead of jumping right in at the point where they're already best friends.

I really enjoyed the two leads, and I liked that it's a bit of a mix-up from Hibbert's usual style. She tends to write a lot of grumpy heroines, which like, extremely valid, but it starts to get repetitive after a while for me. Rae and Zach have a different dynamic, and I liked them a lot -- both as individual people, and as a couple.

Rae and Zach are both working on getting over their past romantic/sexual history (Rae a sucky ex-husband, Zach a habit of saying yes to a lot of sex before he realized that it wasn't actually working for him personally and he needed to respect his own desires), and working on living out the kind of confidence in themselves they want to have, which is great. I loved the way Rae leans into her persona as a mildly scandalous and worldly widow when she's in the small town, and has fun with that. And the way Zach is in the process of learning how to say no when people want things from him without them ever giving back. And that both Rae and Zach have developed a circle of friends who like them for the weirdos they are instead of feeling the need to pander to broader social expectations.

All in all a highly enjoyable read!

My fave of Guillory's books I've read so far!

This is a romance novel featuring two people who had bad first impressions of each other, and find each other unlikeable and annoying, but end up falling into bed with each other repeatedly.

I enjoyed watching them seamlessly tip over into liking each other without them recognising it was happening even though it was super obvious from the outside. So charming!

And I loved ( small spoiler )

This is a very earnest and good-hearted book about a teenager who figures out they're nonbinary and is kicked out of their house by their parents because of it, and then has to try to grow from there. They go to therapy and deal with their anxiety and work on their relationship with their sister and make friends and even eventually get a boyfriend!

Deaver says in the author's note at the end that this is the kind of book they needed when they were a teenager, and I can absolutely see how this would be a valuable book for a queer teen to read.

However. It's not the kind of book that current me needs to read, it turns out. I felt very bad for Ben and their struggles, and wanted good things for them, but I never felt connected to the book in any kind of more personal way. It's just...it's so very obviously an Issue Book, where the serious things the main character is dealing with are the main point of the book, and I like there to be a little more going on, you know?

A charming romance about an older couple. Vivian goes on holiday to England with her daughter and meets a hot guy who's really nice to her! They have a great time hanging out while Vivian's in England! They're good at having fun together AND are capable of opening up to each other about more serious things on their mind! But oh no, what'll happen once they need to go their separate ways???? A fun, light read.

Ohhhhhhhh ouch. This children's book is a hard one to read. It's about two sisters' experience of living in an abusive household, their frantic struggle to follow all the rules perfectly so that nothing will go wrong, and their journey into a portal world they find underneath their bed where everything's breaking and they're expected to fix it. This is a masterfully written book, where the themes all tie into each other beautifully, and each part of the story fits. And it's heartbreaking.

I'm sure there's kids out there who are living through things like this who will find it a comfort to read a book that validates their experiences. It's so awful that this kind of thing can be a reality for too many families. I cared so much about Mike and Eleanor, and all the ways they're so clearly hurting because of the abuse. ( brief spoiler )

Sequel to Playing House, and aaahh this one is so good too! Featuring a real estate agent and a founding member of a local community garden, and deeply rooted into a sense of the importance of community and heritage. Again I loved how the leads do their best to be thoughtful and respectful even when they're in a difficult position with respect to each other. And they just clearly like each other so much and see the good in each other, and both of them have issues they're working through but are clearly capable of growth, and ugh it's just so GOOD. And the scene where they end up spending hours together in a blackout and the darkness leads to openness and vulnerability and connection--amazing. And the complicated family dynamics are wonderfully drawn as well. And the sense of place in that big old townhouse Magda's trying to sell. And I could keep going! What a lovely book.