Anticipation Interrupted

There's so much exciting stuff coming out this year, and I've been trying to put this post together forever, but it's a darned moving target out there.  Release dates come and go and then it turns out that the Kindle release date isn't for months, or the date has moved, or something else.  So this is sadly in no particular order, and it might be that some of these aren't even coming soon anymore.

The Girl with All the Gifts, by M. R. Carey, is somewhere between highly anticipated and well-reviewed, depending on which side of the pond you're looking at and what format you're looking for.  But there's an extended free preview for the Kindle, and holy crap, it was good.  Creepy and meticulous and just incredible.  I can't wait.

Terry Pratchett's newest Discworld novel, Raising Steam, will follow my favorite character, Moist von Lipwig, on his next adventure. I don't even have a very clear idea of what's going to happen here--some kind of power plant, presumably?--but I hardly care.  Moist can charm his way out of...into....well, my wit abandons me, but he can do anything and I want to watch him do it.  Maybe you already read this; it is out in print, just not on the Kindle yet.  For some reason, I'm waiting.

Princess Labelmaker to the Rescue is not a promising title, but Tom Angleberger has kind of backed himself into a corner with the structure of the series.  The last book was a cliffhanger, so I am completely hooked and absolutely can't wait to watch the kids of McQuarry elementary take on the awful FUNTIME test review system.  Go Dwight!

Dreams of Gods and Monsters, by Laini Taylor.  Guys, I can't even.  I just cannot.  I lovelovelove this series and cannot wait to follow Karou to the end.  (Akiva I can take or leave.  I'm following Karou and Zuzana to the ends of the earth.)

Two words.  Rainbow Rowell.  She's having a much-deserved moment, having come out with All the Books right in a row.  I'm not sure if they're as great as they feel like they are, but I am all full of the warm fuzzy feelings when I read them.  Cannot wait for the new one, Landline.

They just keep coming and coming: Jo Walton's got a new one coming up, My Real Children.  I know nothing about this except that Jo Walton does amazing things. Different things every time.  Can't wait to see what's up next.

There's more: a new volume of Buffy, the last book in the Paradox trilogy (I'm right in the middle of Honor's Knight, very good stuff), a Veronica Mars spinoff novel.  All this between now and the end of the summer.  I'm salivating.  Unfortunately, I'm having a really hard time keeping track of when all these books are coming out, but luckily, I've got more than enough to keep me busy, both bookwise and otherwise.  It's gonna be a good spring!

Worldbuilding 101

Andrea Höst's Stray is a hard book to explain.  It breaks so many rules of storytelling, with lots of telling instead of showing, character soup, and a few elements I couldn't follow (what are the Ddura again?).  But all that is kind of irrelevant, when I just kept reading and reading because I wanted to know what happened.

Cass, our narrator, is awesome.  She's practical and level-headed.  When she finds herself suddenly in a strange and unfamiliar world after walking through a wormhole on the way home from school, she is as confused as any of us would be.  But she's also got the same theories any of us would come up with, because she's watched enough Star Trek and Doctor Who to make some guesses.  When she's faced with a tough moral dilemma and picks the tough but virtuous course, she blames the Scooby Gang (both the ones with the Mystery Machine and the ones with the stakes) for putting her in a position where she knows she needs to do the hard but right thing.

The book is Cass's journal, and it does a better job of reading like a journal than almost any book I've read.  One could look at this as a weakness, because it's a very direct, matter-of-fact recounting of events.  But it's very much like having someone tell you a story--you don't want flowery descriptions, you want to know what happened next.  And because Cass is learning everything as she goes, she explains it all to us.

So when she's rescued from the uninhabited world she wandered into and taken to a city, there's a lot of infodumping.  But think what an infodump it would be, to learn the history of a world that travels between dimensions.  And honestly, the backstory is complicated enough that I think if I had to learn it gradually, I would never have been able to hold it all.  As it is, plenty of it sailed over my head--I just retained enough to follow the monster fights.

But the main story of the book is how Cass is discovered, in this society of psychic powers, to be able to strengthen the powers of anyone who touches her.  She's recruited to help the Setari (psychic space ninjas, as she calls them) protect the world from the creatures that live between dimensions.  Apparently interdimensional travel has its dangers, which no one realized until it was too late.

What are spaces, and pillars, and Lanterans?  I don't know.  No clue.  But I don't care.  I caught enough to keep reading, and what I know is that Cass is part of this team now, and that she's making friends, slowly but surely, and convincing the bureaucracy that she's intelligent and can be an ally, and that she's looking for a way home and coming to terms with her place in this new society. 

Cass is one of the most mentally and emotionally strong characters I've read in a while.  She's surrounded by people who can kick all kinds of butt, but she keeps her head on her shoulders in a way that just keeps me cheering for her, time and again.  I can't wait to read the next book!

Ballet

Linden, thank you SO much for this recommendation; I fell hard for Meg Howrey's The Cranes Dance. I'm going to run out and get her other books, but I think this one will be hard to beat, because it's full of details from the world of professional ballet.  Insider bits make any story that much more fascinating.

I was completely won over in the first chapter, when the narrator, Kate Crane, takes you through a production of Swan Lake.  Now, this is the one ballet I've ever seen performed (no, I've never even seen The Nutcracker), and I've read a novelization of the story, and I still barely know what happens in it.  Kate has a wonderfully wry voice as she explains, for the vast majority of the world that does not follow ballet, all the comings and goings, and the long dancy bits.

Kate's wry voice is really the core of this story.  Ballet, as I think most people know by now, is hard, physically taxing work in a fiercely competitive environment that is judged by exacting standards.  Kate is near the top of this world, in a very comfortable place within it, but it's consumed her whole life, and her sister's, and she's split between wondering if it's worth it and wondering what that even means.

The competition here is not made melodramatic--there's no catfighting or backstabbing.  But there are only so many excellent roles to go around, and there are more gifted dancers who have given their whole lives for this goal than there are places.  Everyone is good, but everyone wants things that not everyone can have.

Kate is a powerful dancer, but her sister Gwen is in a class by herself,  Gwen's emotional struggles,  her  mental health, and her break from ballet are pivotal to the story, though Gwen herself is mostly not present.  Kate is a sister without a sister, and it leaves her adrift.

I'm not describing this well, but let me say that Kate's day to day life, the sharp, witty view she brings to everything in her life, even as she's questioning it all, is really the driving force of the story.  Kate has everything she's worked for, and somehow it feels both right and wrong to her at the same time.  This dissonance, and her blunt, smart, wry observations about it, make this the most readable book I've read in a long time.  

Book Moments

I had two excellent moments this week that I wanted to share--the kind of thing that just makes your day.

I stopped at the library on my way to work to pick up a reserve I had waiting, and when I got there they were unloading the next batch of reserve deliveries.  While the librarian was pulling my book off the shelf, I was scanning the stacks of books that have just arrived.  Right there on top, my next book!  And when I asked for it, they asked me if I had anything else waiting, and so I walked out with three exciting new arrivals!

(For the curious: Fairest: In All the Land, Angel & Faith vol. 4, and Season 2 of Veronica Mars)

Anecdote 2. Warning: ARC bragging ahead.

So I told you recently how much I loved loved loved Fortune's Pawn, by Rachel Bach. The day I finished it, I also got the ARC to the sequel from Netgalley.  Honor's Knight is waiting for me on my Kindle, and I'm so incredibly excited I can't even tell you. 

Space Opera!

I'm probably misusing the term, but this book is awesome in an old-fashioned sci-fi way, and it reminds me (unreasonably) of the Vorkosigan Saga, which brings the term to mind.  But space opera is sweeping and epic--so far, Devi's story only hints at the Big Politics out there.

Backing up: Fortune's Pawn, by Rachel Bach is so great I want to squee.  I swallowed the thing in just a couple of bites.  Like I said, there aren't a lot of ways in which it is actually like the Miles books, except for that feeling I get when I'm reading them.  That sort of awesomely competent character in over their head but about to come out on top.

Devi Morris is a mercenary from the world Paradox, and a damned good one.  In fact, she's risen about as high as she can go in her outfit, and has her eyes on the elite Devestator squad.  But they don't take you without years of experience--or a few months on a crazy, high-risk ship like The Glorious Fool.  So Devi packs her Iron Man-style armor and saddles up to make  her name.

There she meets Rupert, the mysterious and sexy cook; Cotter, her meatheaded fellow security officer; Basil, the snooty navigator from an avian race; Nova, a sweet, dreamy girl whose kooky religion may actually give her powers; Hyrek, the ship's doctor, whose lizard-like alien race literally eats humans for breakfast; and Ren, the captain's strange, blank-faced daughter.  This ensemble cast is why you will love this book--Hyrek has a wicked sense of humor, even though Devi's first instinct is to kill him.  Basil is a complete snob, but he is paternally protective of Nova, who becomes a good friend to Devi.

And then there's Rupert.  After an initial urge to bed him, Devi realizes there's more to him than meets the eye, and she can't figure out if that's a good thing or a bad thing.  As they get closer and Devi fights off the first of a really remarkable number of attacks on the ship, she realizes that there's more going on here than meets the eye. 

I will admit that this book is mostly setup.  There's a lot of mystery, and a good deal of it gets explained at the end, but you wouldn't call the end of this book "closure."  I mean, it ends--it's not a cliffhanger--but if the sequel wasn't out there waiting for you, you might be annoyed.

I don't know if I can explain what I liked about this.  I loved the world building.  I loved Devi.  I loved that she started right out trying to get Rupert into bed, but then backed off when she realized he was something more than a simple cook.  I loved the ragtag crew (and yes, the Firefly comparisons others have made are apt--loveable!  I love them!).  I loved the immediate sense of trust I felt--again, Vorkosigan-like, I knew that my protagonist was good at her job, and I would not have to rely on her doing anything stupid (or at least not the kind of stupid that people do just to move the plot of a novel along). 

I can't explain it.  It's just really, really, REALLY good.  Thumbs all the way up.

All the Whimsy

More comics!  Two ARCs I received ages ago, then lost in the Great Laptop Crash.  But these books were irresistible--I went out and got my hands on them anyway, and my week has been full of whimsy.

The Monster on the Hill, by Rob Harrell, is a dream and a chuckle.  I'm seeing bits of my life in everything I read and watch and see these days, and this mopey monster is no exception.  Low grade depression has rarely been so charming.

Every village has a monster--to keep them on their toes, wreak a little havoc, show any invaders who's boss.  But the town of Stoker-on-Avon has a problem: their monster, Rayburn, is not much of a monster.  He mopes, never rampages, and can't seem to get up a good roar.  The village elders send a discredited gentleman scientist to sort him out, and he and his saucy newsboy sidekick attempt to show Rayburn that he really is a very good monster.

I don't know if I can really explain how much I enjoyed this book.  The newsboy's extras are more up to date than my news feed, the monsters have trading cards and souvenir stuffed animals, and everyone's just rather jolly.  Even poor depressed Rayburn is polite an apologetic about his shortcomings.  I loved the warmheartedness of everyone in this book--it's about friends taking care of each other, and all the new and old friends who rally around Rayburn just made my heart swell up.  It's really a very sweet book about mild depression.  Who knew?

Bandette, Volume One: Presto, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover, is one of the Frenchest things I've ever read.  The watercolor-style painting is lovely and reminds me to those reproductions of French posters that everyone had in the kitchen of their second apartment after college.  The book is populated by detective inspectors, ballet students, and a criminals wearing masks and zipping around on mopeds.  It's like a dream of what a heist movie should be, starring Audrey Hepburn as Bandette.

The absolute charm of it mostly makes up for the fact that it's a fairly thin confection--there is plenty of conflict, but our heroine and all of her friends are brave, smart, sassy, talented, loyal, and good.  The police officer who both chases her and enlists her help is curmudgeonly but warm-hearted.  The bad guys are all absolutely wicked, but most of the thieves here are full of honor.  So there isn't much character development, no depths or angles here.  Just a delightful bite of cotton candy.

If it was a 300 page novel, I might not think this charm was worth it.  But in the a slim comic with winsome art, I'll be reading the next one, and rewatching How to Steal a Million very soon.

All the Comics

Been reading comics lately, lots of 'em.  Saga.  Locke & Key.  Angel & Faith.  Bone.  So many great comics so far this year.

I'm sure you've heard of Saga, which is all over the place with buzz.  It's by Brian Vaughn, who brought us Y: The Last Man.  I enjoyed a lot of things about that series, but I found the story to be kind of flawed on a couple of levels.  It's hard to tell at this point what's going to happen with Saga, but the characters are so, so wonderful. The teenage ghost half-nanny, the troubled bounty hunter and his truth-scenting cat, the romance novel-reading soldier.

I almost didn't give it a shot, because the first issue contained a rather off-putting sex scene (really, the idea of characters with TVs for faces is kind of heavy-handed to begin with), but that was fortunately not indicative of the overall tone of the series.  I am SO on board for this ride.

Locke & Key has sold me on Joe Hill.  I don't know why I haven't read Joe Hill yet--everyone tells me how great he is. The first volume of Locke & Key is one of the creepiest things I've ever read, and now I have to read a bunch more.  I'm only on number two, but I'm already getting twitchy for the point at which our protagonists realize that there's something going on.  Because right now they're just wandering around having their strings pulled left right and center and not even realizing, and this is going to get really depressing until they start fighting back.

I'm going to skip Angel & Faith; my relationship with that series is incredibly complicated and based on a long and weirdly passionate emotional history with the Buffy franchise.  I hate Angel; I like Faith; I hate Eliza Dushku; I like David Boreanaz; I'm trying to follow the Buffy comics and I need to keep the dream alive.  But I can only watch the same characters learn the same lessons so many times over before I despair of them.  So that's all I'll say about that.

Bone, though!  Let's talk about Bone. Adam and Mike have almost finished it, but I'm still on volume 5.  It's just so charming.  It's got all the elements of epic fantasy, with the adorableness of a Sunday comic strip.  And you're reading about this aw-shucks little non-human character having a crush on the gorgeous girl, and it's like Opus the Penguin all over again, but then there are all these hints of backstory, all these echoes of incredibly rich world-building that you're just getting these tastes of but that point to something rich and wonderful.

I'm really glad to be reading the recently published color versions.  I've tried to read them before in black and white, but I found that the art was a little too complex to take in easily that way.  Mike tells me that ex post facto coloring is usually bad, but this is really excellent work; you would never know it wasn't meant to be this way.

More comics coming up!

First Impressions

Starting a bunch of new books.  Here's a rundown of my opinions based on the first 3-10% of each one (depending how long it is--I'm probably 40 pages into The Goldfinch and I just hit 3%.  Kindle tells me I won't be done for 17 hours, and every time I turn a page that estimate gets longer.  That cannot be a good thing).

The Cranes Dance, by Meg Howrey.  This one was a recommendation from Linden, and when the library had the ebook available I picked it up idly.  It starts with a ballerina's rundown of Swan Lake for the uninitiated and from the backstage point of view, and I was hooked.

Kate has an amazing voice. she is everything you believe hard-core ballet dancers to be--edgy, competitive, passionate, anxious--and you want more than anything to listen to her dish.  But it's not a fluffy book--it's about how ambition and intensity affect relationships and personality.

The Well of Ascension, by Brandon Sanderson.  Well, you know, meh.  The problem with a second book is always (or at least often) that you have to start fresh with a new plot.  So you start out with either no tension or unearned tension.  Plus, all the progress we made in the last book just seems to have fallen away.

There are other things that annoy me, though.  Kelsier as a charismatic character was not just holding the characters together, he was kind of holding me in the story last time.  Vin's being a jerk to the chandra.  And oh jeez, too much political meandering.  And not in a complicated Dune/Vorkosigan way, but in a boring The Phantom Menace kind of way.

That said, it's a LONG book and I'm just a little way in.  Eventually, he'll get me invested.  This reaction, though, is why I tend to avoid epics.

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt.  The first few pages set up a delightful tease--our narrator is holed up in a hotel room, clearly on the run, but in a banal kind of way (it's unlikely that anyone at this hotel will recognize him, but he doesn't have any underwear).  This had promise.  Then we flash back to what is explicitly the afternoon of his mother's death and spend a while with them at an art museum.

It's not that it's not good.  It's well written.  But I don't yet know why I'm reading it.  The thing about Donna Tartt is that she wrote The Secret History--a wild, chilling, almost surreal ride through an upper class that almost doesn't exist--and she also wrote The Little Friend--a dull-as-dishwater story that promises to be about an unsolved murder in a small town, but which is really a slice of life in the '70s in the South.  It might have been okay, but it was nowhere near as satisfying.  Southern Gothic a few decades ago is just much less interesting and fresh than New England Gothic hiding in plain sight at a college that is practically where I went.

So far, we see hints of a New York Gothic, and I'm kind of digging them--the family that lives in a doorman building and takes cabs everywhere, but has to scrounge for change in the couch cushions to tip the deliveryman from Gristedes.  There are hints of what made The Secret History great, of this odd world positioned right behind the one I'm in.  But I'm just not sure Tartt has enough trust left from me to make it work.

She'd better--that puppy is 800 pages long and I'm reading it for book club, so no quitting.

Finnikin of the Rock, by Melina Marchetta.  I'm not sure I can deliver even a first impression verdict on this one yet.  I've started but not finished several Marchetta books, and I find myself put off by the fact that she always seems to skip the exposition I want and start kind of in the middle of the story.  Not just in medias res, but with kind of an infodump that leaves you feeling stranded.

Finnikin, for example, is currently working with refugees from the destroyed kingdom of Lumatere.  But the story doesn't exactly start with him, and then give us back story.  It starts with a weird, confusing account of the end of Lumatere--full of a bunch of drama based around characters we don't know anything about and who are dead now anyway.  It's dense and confusing, and even the characters are unclear about some of it.  It's the predominant fact in the lives of all the characters, but I have no feel for it, no texture.

So Finnikin seems to be acting like a jerk when he's impatient to be kept from doing things that he's passionate about but I don't quite get.  They are traveling through all these places whose impressions I'm given, but don't quite get.

Sarah believes in this series--she read the last book several times in a row--and I'm going to read it.  But I'm not sure about it yet.

Endless Rue

I have discussed Madeleine Robins.  I love Madeleine Robins.  She wrote the Sarah Tolerance mysteries, but I hadn't read anything else by her yet--not till now, when I have fallen in love with Sold for Endless Rue. 

Okay, I'm out of practice here, and it's late and I need to get to bed, so this is going to be complicated.  The structure of the book isn't hard to explain, but it's hard to explain why the book is so wonderful.  Basically, the book is divided into three parts.  In the first, Laura is taken in and trained by a midwife.  In the second, Agnesa is a bride who is expecting a child.  In the third, Bieta is the daughter of an acclaimed female doctor and in training herself.

So, we've got midwives and medical students in 13th century Salerno.  If you read Mistress of the Art of Death, you know that female doctors were not unheard of at the time, and this is fascinating to me.  How different did Salerno need to be from the rest of Medieval Europe?  All of those Mediterranean places where Africa and Europe and the Middle East came together at that time are just amazing, and the details of Salerno are just wonderful.

But really, this book is about how every choice we make is influenced by all the other choices that came before--our own and everyone else's.  The character and historical details of Laura training as a midwife and medica in the first part would have been more than enough to keep me reading, but the weight of her history and the surprising ways it affects her are what make this more than just interesting. 

Laura has been kept as a slave by a man who murdered her family and destroyed her home.  When she escapes, she's hidden by Crescia, a midwife, and stays with her to learn her craft.  Most of the story is just about Laura growing up, but at every turn, we see how her personality was shaped by her life--by her family, her captor, her teacher, her understanding of danger, her fear and defiance.  And as we see how Laura is shaped by, say, Crescia, we learn a little of how Crescia was shaped by her own life. 

Then these observations are tied into how each person's understanding of the others is imperfect, and how even in agreement, they have differences.  And all these observations ricochet, explicitly and implicitly, through the different parts of the story.  And now I'm going to stop talking because I don't want to spoil it, but wow.  We can't really know each other, and sometimes the decisions we think are correct are damaging--sometimes while still being right.

If you're not someone who thinks "wow, a domestic novel with character studies of medieval midwives!  Sign me up!" then this might not be the book for you.  But lordy, it was the book for me.

Neither Ghosts Nor Zombies Nor Vampires

The dead are everywhere in this world; any shadow might contain them. Binders keep the villages safe, but something is wrong in Westmost.  Their binder is not well, her daughter, Otter, is untrained, and the most dangerous of the dead, the White Hands, stalk the village.  Sorrow's Knot, by Erin Bow: there's your setup.

There's some scary stuff here, and a good story, but what makes this book shine is the what it's about.  It's about chosen family, and about the ties that (forgive me) bind people together.  It's about mistakes--mistakes you don't realize you made, mistakes that have horrible results that could have been prevented if only you knew more.  It's about how life is incredibly messy, both in its strengths and its points of pain. 

There's so much that's cool and interesting and unusual here that are appealing.  The setting is based on a non-specific Native North American idea, but it's not derivative.  The specific trappings are all fantasy, though--the characters have dark hair and brown skin, wear deer hides and make arrowheads from flint, but there's nothing that feels stolen or condescending. 

Also, Westmost is not exactly a matriarchy, but it's a society of women, with only a few men.  Only women have power to bind the dead, so most boys born in the forest villages end up journeying to the plains, which are safer.  This is simply a world of women.

The friendships, though.  That's what really tore my heart out.  Otter, Kestrel, and Cricket are the main characters of the story, and the three are a family, more than anyone else.  And they have each other's backs, always--it's not even a doubt.  The friendships have facets and change, but they are never in doubt, at all.  There is no question of where any of their loyalties lie.  And in the end, really, those friendships are what save the world.

It's not a perfect book--there's a weak point in the middle, where the first crisis has past and the parts of the story that need to align for the second crisis are plopped together a bit heavy-handedly.  And, in a book about how messy life is, the writing style is somewhat stiff, in the manner of formal storytelling (which is a big factor in the story).  But I couldn't stop reading.

I said in a recent review that one of the things I loved about All Our Yesterdays was that it was so honest about how sometimes good and evil are so interdependent that you just can't untwine them; so many books shy away from that.  Well, this book is about how so often, enormous evil happens because someone makes a bad decision that looks innocuous at the time--or a decision that goes unnoticed.  Too often, everyone is able to undo their bad decisions, and the high stakes of the story are edged down because, essentially, everything turns out okay.

But not here.  The bad things that happen, they don't almost happen.  They do happen.  Some tragedies are prevented, but many are not.  There is real loss here, and not everyone gets the happy ending.  I think that's important.  It's definitely authentic.

That Great Moment

When everybody's raving about how great that brand new book is, you can be pretty much guaranteed that you'll have to wait for months for the library to acquire it, and then another few months on a waiting list.

BUT!  There is nothing like the feeling of looking for a new release idly, no hopes or expectations, and then finding it! There! With a SHORT wait!  And it'll be a couple of weeks at most before I'm reading Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie.\, about which I know very little, except that it's supposed to be really good.

And--bonus!--this one I've already got in my back pocket.  Another one from a few top-ten lists that I picked up to read a while back and thought I lost in the Computer Crash  of '13.  But no, just when everyone's telling me how great Rachel Bach's Fortune's Pawn is, here it is on my backup drive (shout out to Mike for setting up automatic backup software before it was needed!).

I can tell already, 2014 is going to be a great book year. 

End of the Year Thingie

Everyone's doing a wrap-up post, with statistics and analyses and best-of lists.  Do you all think more coherently than I do?

Anyway, since Goodreads crunches the numbers for you, I figured I might as well throw this out there.  So here are my stats.

Total titles for the year (according to Goodreads): 132

But wait, some of those are books that I gave up on but logged anyway: 17



Okay, now how many were comics?: 38





(Slightly embarrassing aside: how many of those comics were from the Buffy franchise?: 18)

What about kids' books--like, chapter books from the children's section?: 11



And sometimes you put in a short story or novella: 8



So how many "actual" books does that leave?--YA, nonfiction, novels: 59



So much good stuff.  Above were a few of my favorites--not necessarily my most-most favorite, but the ones that I am not seeing on everyone else's top 10 lists.  Fangirl, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Saga, Eleanor & Park, Americanah--a lot of my favorite bloggers are raving about these, so I'll just add some to the mix.

I'm back in a groove with some great reads in process now, so hopefully there will be more posts to come.  And I am already making a list of 2014 releases I can't wait for. In the meantime, happy new year, everyone!

(And, once again, I edited this because I left out a book!)