A Fan's Playground

This is the first time in my life that I have gotten to hold in my hands a real actual published book written by a friend of mine, and let me tell you, it is a GREAT experience and also this book lived up to absolutely everything I hoped for from it. Five stars, would collapse into a puddle of emotions again. And I say this without bias! I would have loved this book even if I didn't know Becca!

So The Iron Children is a scifi novella about cyborgs warriors and a robot nun and one squishy human traversing a treacherous landscape together in the midst of war, and also is about questions of identity and religious ethics and duty and kindness and freedom. I loved EVERYTHING about this, I adored all the characters, I loved the worldbuilding, I loved its careful pacing and the way it built on its ideas, I loved that it managed to pack so much into such a short book without ever feeling like it was overcrowded.

The book is told through three different POVs: the squishy human, Asher, who's a young nun-in-training getting thrown in over her head; Barghest, the leader of the cyborg warriors, whose dedication to duty is above and beyond the call of duty; and a character whose identity is a mystery until partway into the book but is definitely one of the other cyborg warriors. The first two characters get their POV sections in third person, but the mystery character's sections are in first person.

I have gone on record in the past as stating that I find it irritating when there's multiple povs and some of them are, for no reason, in a different person than the others.

BUT the key here is that there IS a reason in The Iron Children, and when there's a reason it works! It's got a destabilizing effect, to have one of the three in a different person than the other two; it shows that character as other, as separate. It works thematically! (Okay and incidentally it lets the name be hidden to allow a reveal later on as to which character this one is, which is convenient!)

And now let me go into the realm of spoilers because I have to to talk about everything else I love.

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ANYWAY read this book!!!

Sometimes I finish a book and groan a bit at the thought of writing it up, because I don't know how to organize my thoughts into coherence, but I know I'll be happier if I do because then I'll have a better handle on my own understanding of the book!

So this is a sequel to Catfishing on Catnet, and after the exciting events of that book Steph and her mom are trying to settle down and live a "normal" life, now that the threat of her dad is gone. But because of a number of reasons, including her friendship with the AI CheshireCat, Steph gets drawn into trying to save the world from another AI. Among other things.

There's a lot that's good about the book, and I really enjoyed it a lot, when I wasn't totally stressed out with worry about what was going to happen to these kids. I felt so much for Nell, doing her best to escape the fundamentalist religious cult she was raised in but not yet sure how to feel confident in who she is outside of it. And Steph and her mom are doing their best after the chaos and trauma of the last many years but still struggling to learn healthy ways of relating to each other and to the world. And they're all in SO MUCH DANGER! As well as Nell and Steph's respective girlfriends, and their various other friends, and tbh most humans??

But one thing that made me laugh was how much I enjoyed all the adults in this YA novel......signs you've gotten old, I guess. (other signs you've gotten old: I just realized I referred to the main characters as kids in the previous paragraph.) But hot damn, Nell's dad's polycule! Steph's grandmother! the random lesbian activist in whose house they take refuge at one point!

I appreciated that there were understandable explanations for why a lot of these kids would not feel comfortable going to the adults in their lives for help, and also about interference in communication when they DID try, so that various excellent adults could be present and part of the story while still allowing for the usual YA thing of making sure the teens are the ones to save the day. Nicely done.

However. A lot of the plot in this book is kicked off because of all these people using what are honestly EXTREMELY sketchy apps, and it takes people forever to be like "hmm maybe there's something concerning about this app" EVEN AFTER it's convinced them to do all sorts of things that any reasonable person would be suspicious of. The cult's app, sure, it's a cult, that checks out. But the other apps???

Anyway as long as I turned up my dial in suspension-of-disbelief alllllll the way up, I think it was a good book. But that was a heck of a lot of belief to suspend, tbh.

Okay was this review helpful to me? might it be helpful to you? idk on either point but here we are.

So Martha Wells just tricked me into reading a murder mystery, didn't she. I don't read a lot of those! Well -- I read a lot of them by two specific authors and nothing else.

(...wait, were any of the previous murderbot books murder mysteries and I just failed to notice??)

Anyway this is the latest Murderbot novella and it is excellent as expected, I love Murderbot and this was a satisfying book to read, and is there anything else really to say? If you love Murderbot then this book is wonderful and it's probably something you've already read or are intending to read. If you haven't read Murderbot yet then start at the beginning because it's truly worth it, but this book is probably not the place to start.

This novella is a complete delight! Taking place in early 20th century Cairo, in a version of the world with supernatural creatures and mechanical automatons and an altered political reality, the setting feels to me almost like the main character of the book. Throughout the events of the actual plot (the titular haunting), is woven in the city's focus on an upcoming decision on whether women will get the vote, and the climax of both parts happen simultaneously.

Hamed, the viewpoint character, is a government worker in a ministry focused on the supernatural. This too is grounded: the sort of job where he has to worry about departmental budgets and paperwork, not glamorous exciting missions. Together Hamed and his junior partner Onsi must investigate whatever is haunting one of the city's tram cars and attacking passengers, and hopefully exorcise it.

In the process they meet all sorts of interesting Cairene city folk, including: a genderfluid djinn, a woman who works in a restaurant who enjoys discussing supernatural philosophy, an emancipated automaton, a subculture of women dealing with the supernatural in an entirely different way than Hamed's ministry does, and a whole lot of people agitating for suffrage.

Hamed is a very practical-minded man who wants to be modern in his thoughts but is only mostly there. He's an interesting choice of viewpoint on this vibrant and diverse city but I think it works. And I really liked the comparisons between him and Onsi (eager, wants to do things right, easily distracted by his enthusiasms), and between him and all the various women we meet.

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A number of years ago Naomi Kritzer wrote a short story called Cat Pictures, Please about a baby AI trying to figure out morality and how to interact with humans. It was very popular and won awards. I liked it a lot too!

This book is something of a sequel to that story. It's a near-future YA novel about a teen girl named Steph whose mom is constantly on the run from her abusive ex-husband but won't tell Steph hardly anything about the situation. Steph, because of all the moving, gets most of her social interaction online on a site called CatNet where she has a group of good friends. One of whom is secretly the slightly-less-baby AI from the short story!

A quick, easy read. I don't have a lot to say about it but it was an enjoyable way to spend an evening. Also: lots of queer characters, for those for whom that's a draw.

My one complaint is that the ending is more of a set-up for a sequel than a satisfactory ending on its own. Dangit, don't end books with brand-new game-changing information that you're not going to address in that book!

This is a pair of cute, quick-reading children's novels. The premise: a brand-new robot washes up on the shore of an unpopulated island, so instead of learning how to do useful tasks from new human owners, she learns how to become part of the life of the island amongst the animals. It's a sweet story about family you choose for yourself, and also acknowledges the realities of the cycles of life and death in the natural world.

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Ultimately these books are optimistic in tone, and I like Brown's simple, direct prose style and how the narrator isn't invisible. And I love the premise, of a robot at home in the natural world. I'm glad I found these.

I picked this book up basically entirely because I was drawn in by the title and the beautiful cover design. And I think I'm glad I read it? It was pretty fun. But I have some major frustrations.

The basic premise is that things went differently in the Victorian era and so the British Empire a) stayed a major Thing into the modern era but b) like, a relatively multicultural and non-patriarchal Thing, at least as colonial empires go. Also there is a genetics-reading computer system that is next-door to God in terms of its power and influence on the Empire.

I enjoyed the worldbuilding for the most part, though I also have questions about aspects of it. I appreciated that the author wasn't trying to make this alternate world a utopia, just a world that is mildly better than ours in certain ways though also perhaps worse in others. But it also just kind of all felt like an excuse to get people dressing up in fancy Victorian-era dresses and going to balls in the modern era. Which I understand the appeal of, but also I don't think that that aspect makes sense given the worldbuilding. Why would the alterations to how the British Empire works make fashion and culture so much more stagnant??

The near deification of the genetics-computer doesn't make any sense either, there's no effort made to explain how this perspective might have come into being in this alternate world, and it bugs me.

Anyways our main characters are:
- Helena, a Canadian girl who's on the poorer side of the aristocracy and is about to have her debut
- Margaret, the crown princess of the Empire, who is pretending to be a random unimportant aristocrat so she can have some freedom and experience of the world on summer vacation in Canada
- August, lifetime best friend of Helena, heir to a Great Lakes shipping company, plans to propose to Helena after Helena's debut (Helena expects and wants this proposal)

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I have been hopelessly obsessed with these books since I read them, and if there was any fandom for them to speak of I WOULD BE IN THAT FANDOM but since there are no epic-length fics for me to be reading, I'm left with just...rereading the books themselves. Even though I don't usually do rereads that soon after a first read. But this time I'm doing it by audiobook so it's at least a different experience!

It's been a while since I've listened to an audiobook, so I'd forgotten how much more intense and immersive an experience audiobooks are? There's no skimming or skipping ahead possible, and you can't read faster as it gets more exciting. You're stuck at speaking pace for every single sentence in the book so there's plenty of time for things to really sink in.

I mean, I knew this already, this is why I generally don't read novels by audiobook as my first exposure to the book, it's too stressful for my delicate sensibilities. I definitely would not have been able to handle The Scorpion Rules by audiobook if I didn't already know everything that would happen. But I was still surprised by how different an experience it was to listen to it as audiobook.

For one thing the horrifying nature of everything that happens was way more directly horrifying, oh my god. Like I did notice this stuff but it didn't strike me as much on first read through when I was all focused on questions of what happens next.

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Well, this was not what I expected, and also AMAZING. It's a YA future dystopia sort of novel, which seems like it's probably going to fall into the standard pattern of Special Girl meets Special Boy and learns she must REBEL AGAINST THE SYSTEM. And then it....doesn't do that. It does other things.

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This is a Star Wars novel set just after the Original Trilogy, and the first official star wars novel I've ever read! Actually the first tie-in novel I've ever read for anything, I'm pretty sure. A new experience for me. And I understand that as tie-in quality goes this one is actually pretty good.

I found this book varying in quality - in some ways it was good, and in some ways it was not so much. But overall I definitely did enjoy it!

I was not a fan of the prose style (so choppy that I could never settle comfortably into the book because reading it didn't flow, resulting in me having to read much more slowly than I'm usually able to), and I found the action scenes boring and confusing, and there were too many viewpoint characters who were switched between too rapidly. And the "interlude" chapters felt like interruptions, as opposed to an essential part of the story, though they did add interesting details about what was going on in the rest of the galaxy.

I liked seeing how after the destruction of the second Death Star and the death of the Emperor and Darth Vader, the Empire is not actually all the way gone yet: there's still work to be done, lots of it. And there was a great collection of characters used to show this, a number of characters who are complicated, not all good or all bad, and obviously affected by life under the Empire.

My faves: Sinjir Rath Velin and Mister Bones. Sinjir is an ex-imperial officer and Mister Bones is a modified battle droid. I liked them both a lot. But I also enjoyed reading about all the characters!

Plus: there's actual queer characters in this! Which is wonderful. Including one of our main characters, Sinjir! And among the secondary characters there's a lesbian couple and neither of them die! (my standards for queer representation, they are so low, wow)

I'm interested to see what'll happen next - I gather this is going to be a trilogy?