Greenteeth
Molly O'Neill
Orbit
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: For one thousand years, Jenny Greenteeth has lived in the lake besides the little town of Chipping Appleby, tending the water plants and tidying the lake bed and only eating the occasional interloper. When a witch is thrown into her waters, bound with burning iron, Jenny thinks perhaps she's expected to end the mortal's life quickly... but this woman seems to have true power, and Jenny does not at all like the looks of the priestly figure who tossed the witch to her doom. She rescues Temperance and brings her to her cave beneath the waters. There, the witch tells Jenny of the wicked parson who seems to have bewitched her neighbors, convincing them to turn on her when once they were friendly. Together, Jenny and the witch hatch a plan to strike back... but find something far, far more dangerous than either anticipated within the skin of the holy man, something that could doom the whole country if left unchecked. In desperation, they seek help from Gwyn ap Nuud, king of the high fae and one-time leader of the Wild Hunt, and are charged with three seemingly impossible tasks as the price for his assistance - but if they fail, both mortals and immortals will suffer under the heel of the monstrous Erl King.
REVIEW: "Cozy" fantasy seems to be having a moment these days, and Greenteeth might roughly fall into that category as it focuses on the budding friendship between a not-quite-monstrous monster and a good witch, though in other ways it hearkens back to more traditional fantasies built around quests and elder-day magic that's fading away in an increasingly modern and human-dominated world.
The titular Jenny is a water monster, a green womanlike figure possessing great strength, nigh-immortality, the ability to breathe underwater, and multiple rows of very sharp teeth. "Jenny Greenteeth" is a traditional folklore creature of the British Isles, kin to pixies and hobgoblins, and this particular Jenny has been one so long that she no longer recalls if she had another identity or name. If she even thinks about her past at all, she assumes she was created in the same way that she herself once created a daughter from a drowned human infant. She's a solitary being, keeping her "household" beneath the lake nice and tidy with a pike as a sort-of pet, and she generally doesn't bother the nearby humans, who seem to have forgotten that they even have a lake beast... at least, so it seems, until they rudely drop a witch into her domain. Some twinge of compassion causes her to spare the woman's life, as much as a dislike of the parson who riled up the locals into a froth of anti-witch sentiment. But Jenny is not, and should never be mistaken for, human. She may have empathy and even be capable of kindness, but when need be, or when pushed, she's quite capable of putting her claws and teeth to bloody use; the traditional Jenny Greenteeth isn't known for her vegan diet, after all. Temperance the witch is initially, naturally, terrified, but her despair and anger, plus her determination to get back to her beloved husband and children and get them out of the parson's foul clutches, lead her into what starts as an uneasy truce with Jenny. When Temperance needs special ingredients for a spell as part of her attempted counterstrike against the wicked parson, Jenny calls upon Brackus, a traveling goblin merchant with a trickster streak and a bottomless bag of various goodies. It isn't long before Brackus is drawn deeper into the problem, when it becomes clear that there's a greater supernatural threat embodied in the parson that endangers the magical realm as well as the mundane - and the magical realm is already in trouble, slowly fading as the world ages. Indeed, the faerie king no longer even rides forth as he used to, content to preside over a diminishing court that was once the feared Wild Hunt; even the promise of a quarry like the legendary Erl King is insufficient to stir him from his retirement. Instead, he sets three seemingly-impossible quests out of legend before the trio seeking his aid, and even if they succeed, all he promises is advice, not active help. Still, it's better than nothing, which is what they have when facing the enemy in Chipping Appleby.
As Jenny, Temperance, and Brackus, along with some help from the faerie-touched hound Cavall (on loan from the faerie queen, Lady Creiddylad, who offers more tangible help than the king but is still constrained by his rules), set forth to fulfill the lord's requests, they travel the length and breadth of an elder England, seeing for themselves how magic and the memory of magic has faded in the centuries since Camelot stood. The three clash more than once, but adversity inevitably begets friendship, and Jenny even comes to appreciate Brackus despite his sometimes-irritating optimism.
There are a few points where the personal clashes feel a bit drawn out, as when Jenny and Temperance settle into a feud spurred by a petty misunderstanding that festers out of proportion; this primarily happens to force a plot-relevant event, and struck me as mildly manipulative on the author's part. The ties to Camelot and Arthur become more pronounced as the tale unfolds; it works for the most part, though I sometimes get tired of King Arthur as the inevitable go-to touchstone legend. For the most part, though, it's a fairly satisfying tale, evoking the spirit of questing fairy tales, even though the wrap-up feels slightly too neat and tidy. Being a standalone title helps, as it doesn't ever overstay its welcome or its premise.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Bradamant's Quest (Ruth Berman) - My Review
Thornhedge (T. Kingfisher) - My Review
Someone You Can Build a Nest In (John Wiswell) - My Review
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Greenteeth (Molly O'Neill)
Dragonfruit (Makiia Lucier)
Dragonfruit
Makiia Lucier
Clarion Books
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Seadragons are the great wonder and wealth of the Nominomi Sea, and the terror of many a ship. Their scales can be fashioned into nigh-impenetrable armor. Their flesh can be rendered into pure oil that burns brighter and cleaner than anything else. A stew made from their eyes can restore lost vigor and youth. Every part of the great beasts is worth at least its weight in gold. But it's their eggs, known as dragonfruit, that are most coveted and rarest seen. Consuming a dragonfruit, the old stories say, can erase one great sorrow from your life... but to do so is to risk the anger of the sea god, who will exact a terrible price. Sometimes, though, for the truly desperate and lost and heartbroken, the risk is worth the reward.
As a girl, Hanalei was a page to the queen of the wealthy Tamarind Islands... and, like the queen, fell victim to a terrible poison that induced a comalike slumber. Three seadragon eggs were brought in the hopes that they could provide a cure. But an accident destroyed two eggs, and Hanalei's father, a loyal soldier, turned traitor and stole the last egg, whisking it and his his stricken daughter away from the Tamarinds. The cure worked, but it cost the father his life, and made them both exiles from their homeland.
Ten years later, Hanalei wanders the Nominomi Sea. She studies the dwindling population of seadragons, selling her sketches and observations to the handful of scholars who want to understand the wonders of the Nominomi, but always the hunters and the foreigners seem to get there first. But she has an advantage they do not; ever since her cure, she has been able to sense the great beasts. Though she tries to keep it secret, one dragoner captain, Bragadin of the Anemone, works it out and takes her captive as he hunts for a gravid seadragon. Passing near the Tamarinds, she takes a chance to escape, even knowing she'll probably be seen as the unwelcome daughter of a traitor. Instead, she finds an old childhood friend, Prince Samahtitamahenele (or Sam), who tells her the queen, his mother, still sleeps her poisoned sleep. When a fresh seadragon nest is found on the island, Hanalei has a chance to undo her late father's mistake and secure a dragonfruit to cure the queen - but others covet the eggs, and the Anemone is still lurking just beyond the boundary stones.
REVIEW: There's plenty to like about Dragonfruit, from its setting - refreshingly non-Eurocentric, based instead on cultures and mythologies of the Pacific Islands - to its dragons. There are also some niggling issues that almost (but not quite) cost it a half-star in the ratings.
The story doesn't drag its feet, opening with the legend of the dragonfruit and the eggs' miraculous powers and establishing its heroine Hanalei and the seadragons, as well as the threat of dragoner crews. Hanalei is a decently pro-active main character, not one prone to freezing up or sinking into useless despair and helplessness, though she isn't above mistakes. Her attempt to save the dragons lands her in the clutches of an old nemesis, Captain Bragadin of the Anemone. As a penniless orphan far from home after her father was killed and his money stolen, she wound up working in his oil processing facilities rendering dead seadragons, earning starvation wages and hands full of silvery scars from the obsidian-sharp scales, until she outgrew the job; small, nimble hands (and young, helpless children) are his preferred workforce on land, while his ship is full of the usual assortment of pirate thugs. He's almost stereotypical in his monstrous behavior, but he's clever enough to have figured out that there's a reason she seems to keep turning up whenever there are seadragons to be slain. So fixated is he on his hunt and the potential reward for a clutch of seadragon eggs that he endangers his entire ship fending off a potential rival. Hanalei manages to escape, only to be forced to confront her past, or rather the wreckage her father left behind while she was comatose from poison... and this is where the story morphs into its main form, after it seemed like it would be about Hanalei and the dragoner captain fighting over the fate of the seadragons and the eggs. (It's not much of a spoiler to say that the Anemone is not entirely out of the picture, but it is shifted to the back burner for a long stretch.)
Sam, for his part, has lived half his life under the shadow of a stricken mother. His grandmother currently wears the crown of the Tamarinds - theirs is a matrilinear culture, power passed from mother to daughter - but cannot rule indefinitely. Unless Sam's mother is cured, and soon, Sam will be expected to marry, a political arrangement to strengthen the islands' stance in a world where foreigners are increasingly intrusive, for all that the spices of the Tamarinds still give them some wealth and leverage. His heart is clearly not in it; he pines for his old childhood friend, for all that he does not think of their bond as love in the popular sense of the term. He also carries his mother's living "mark", a tattoolike animal that sometimes appears spontaneously on the skin of islanders and can become a living creature, something like a familiar, to carry out tasks and provide companionship. The fruit bat is a perpetual reminder of his ailing mother, both a comfort and a further burden. He never even got his year of travel in, an island tradition where men and women leave the Tamarinds for several months as the cross the threshold into adulthood. Unexpectedly finding Hanalei fleeing a dragoner ship right on his metaphoric doorstep is a surprise that brings up all sorts of complicated emotions, not to mention all sorts of problems. The names of her and her father are still raw wounds to many on the Tamarinds, particularly the noble houses who still bear the brunt of the man's decision to snatch away the queen's potential cure to save his own daughter; the fact that Hanalei was evidently cured, indicating that the queen, too, would've likely recovered if she'd received the egg instead, makes her return all the more painful. But bonds of family and love are deep and complicated... especially when Hanalei's return coincides with a potential new seadragon nest on the island, and thus a chance to atone for her father's selfish act. Her ability to sense the dragons themselves gives the islanders a slight advantage in tracking down the eggs, but there are many people who feel desperate for their own miracle, and thus many potential traitors... in theory.
Now we get to the parts that almost weighed the ratings down. The baddies and the shifty characters turn out to be far, far too obvious from their first appearances, to the point where it gets hard to believe that nobody in the cast even remotely suspects them. This doesn't just apply to the dragoner crew and foreigners, but to people that the characters know (theoretically) well on the island. There's also a sense of blunted corners and pulled punches that almost feels more like what one would find in a younger middle-grade novel, and some elements that are brought up and then completely dropped without followthrough or fleshing out. (Even the "romance", such as it is, is so mild that I wondered at the original target audience, if it was "aged up" for marketing reasons for a story aimed younger. Not that every teen book needs to drip with hormones, mind you, but something about just felt odd.) With that sense of bubble-wrapping comes a hint of "plot armor" where it becomes impossible to consider that any serious harm or inconvenience will ultimately hinder the main characters. (And, yes, that's not entirely uncommon, but it just seemed a little more obvious than it should've been, in the same way that one intellectually knows a movie isn't reality but it's harder to suspend disbelief when the boom mic keeps dropping into the frame. I kept seeing the boom mic here.)
Those issues aside, the story does move well, and I generally enjoyed it. It has many nice details and scenes that bring the islands and their unique magic to life. It's also a standalone, which is refreshing when so many books are series these days. I ultimately liked it enough to keep the rating afloat at four stars, though I'll admit it came close to dropping more than once.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Lost Ryū (Emi Watanabe Cohen) - My Review
The Waking Fire (Anthony Ryan) - My Review
Dragon and Thief (Timothy Zahn) - My Review
Makiia Lucier
Clarion Books
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Seadragons are the great wonder and wealth of the Nominomi Sea, and the terror of many a ship. Their scales can be fashioned into nigh-impenetrable armor. Their flesh can be rendered into pure oil that burns brighter and cleaner than anything else. A stew made from their eyes can restore lost vigor and youth. Every part of the great beasts is worth at least its weight in gold. But it's their eggs, known as dragonfruit, that are most coveted and rarest seen. Consuming a dragonfruit, the old stories say, can erase one great sorrow from your life... but to do so is to risk the anger of the sea god, who will exact a terrible price. Sometimes, though, for the truly desperate and lost and heartbroken, the risk is worth the reward.
As a girl, Hanalei was a page to the queen of the wealthy Tamarind Islands... and, like the queen, fell victim to a terrible poison that induced a comalike slumber. Three seadragon eggs were brought in the hopes that they could provide a cure. But an accident destroyed two eggs, and Hanalei's father, a loyal soldier, turned traitor and stole the last egg, whisking it and his his stricken daughter away from the Tamarinds. The cure worked, but it cost the father his life, and made them both exiles from their homeland.
Ten years later, Hanalei wanders the Nominomi Sea. She studies the dwindling population of seadragons, selling her sketches and observations to the handful of scholars who want to understand the wonders of the Nominomi, but always the hunters and the foreigners seem to get there first. But she has an advantage they do not; ever since her cure, she has been able to sense the great beasts. Though she tries to keep it secret, one dragoner captain, Bragadin of the Anemone, works it out and takes her captive as he hunts for a gravid seadragon. Passing near the Tamarinds, she takes a chance to escape, even knowing she'll probably be seen as the unwelcome daughter of a traitor. Instead, she finds an old childhood friend, Prince Samahtitamahenele (or Sam), who tells her the queen, his mother, still sleeps her poisoned sleep. When a fresh seadragon nest is found on the island, Hanalei has a chance to undo her late father's mistake and secure a dragonfruit to cure the queen - but others covet the eggs, and the Anemone is still lurking just beyond the boundary stones.
REVIEW: There's plenty to like about Dragonfruit, from its setting - refreshingly non-Eurocentric, based instead on cultures and mythologies of the Pacific Islands - to its dragons. There are also some niggling issues that almost (but not quite) cost it a half-star in the ratings.
The story doesn't drag its feet, opening with the legend of the dragonfruit and the eggs' miraculous powers and establishing its heroine Hanalei and the seadragons, as well as the threat of dragoner crews. Hanalei is a decently pro-active main character, not one prone to freezing up or sinking into useless despair and helplessness, though she isn't above mistakes. Her attempt to save the dragons lands her in the clutches of an old nemesis, Captain Bragadin of the Anemone. As a penniless orphan far from home after her father was killed and his money stolen, she wound up working in his oil processing facilities rendering dead seadragons, earning starvation wages and hands full of silvery scars from the obsidian-sharp scales, until she outgrew the job; small, nimble hands (and young, helpless children) are his preferred workforce on land, while his ship is full of the usual assortment of pirate thugs. He's almost stereotypical in his monstrous behavior, but he's clever enough to have figured out that there's a reason she seems to keep turning up whenever there are seadragons to be slain. So fixated is he on his hunt and the potential reward for a clutch of seadragon eggs that he endangers his entire ship fending off a potential rival. Hanalei manages to escape, only to be forced to confront her past, or rather the wreckage her father left behind while she was comatose from poison... and this is where the story morphs into its main form, after it seemed like it would be about Hanalei and the dragoner captain fighting over the fate of the seadragons and the eggs. (It's not much of a spoiler to say that the Anemone is not entirely out of the picture, but it is shifted to the back burner for a long stretch.)
Sam, for his part, has lived half his life under the shadow of a stricken mother. His grandmother currently wears the crown of the Tamarinds - theirs is a matrilinear culture, power passed from mother to daughter - but cannot rule indefinitely. Unless Sam's mother is cured, and soon, Sam will be expected to marry, a political arrangement to strengthen the islands' stance in a world where foreigners are increasingly intrusive, for all that the spices of the Tamarinds still give them some wealth and leverage. His heart is clearly not in it; he pines for his old childhood friend, for all that he does not think of their bond as love in the popular sense of the term. He also carries his mother's living "mark", a tattoolike animal that sometimes appears spontaneously on the skin of islanders and can become a living creature, something like a familiar, to carry out tasks and provide companionship. The fruit bat is a perpetual reminder of his ailing mother, both a comfort and a further burden. He never even got his year of travel in, an island tradition where men and women leave the Tamarinds for several months as the cross the threshold into adulthood. Unexpectedly finding Hanalei fleeing a dragoner ship right on his metaphoric doorstep is a surprise that brings up all sorts of complicated emotions, not to mention all sorts of problems. The names of her and her father are still raw wounds to many on the Tamarinds, particularly the noble houses who still bear the brunt of the man's decision to snatch away the queen's potential cure to save his own daughter; the fact that Hanalei was evidently cured, indicating that the queen, too, would've likely recovered if she'd received the egg instead, makes her return all the more painful. But bonds of family and love are deep and complicated... especially when Hanalei's return coincides with a potential new seadragon nest on the island, and thus a chance to atone for her father's selfish act. Her ability to sense the dragons themselves gives the islanders a slight advantage in tracking down the eggs, but there are many people who feel desperate for their own miracle, and thus many potential traitors... in theory.
Now we get to the parts that almost weighed the ratings down. The baddies and the shifty characters turn out to be far, far too obvious from their first appearances, to the point where it gets hard to believe that nobody in the cast even remotely suspects them. This doesn't just apply to the dragoner crew and foreigners, but to people that the characters know (theoretically) well on the island. There's also a sense of blunted corners and pulled punches that almost feels more like what one would find in a younger middle-grade novel, and some elements that are brought up and then completely dropped without followthrough or fleshing out. (Even the "romance", such as it is, is so mild that I wondered at the original target audience, if it was "aged up" for marketing reasons for a story aimed younger. Not that every teen book needs to drip with hormones, mind you, but something about just felt odd.) With that sense of bubble-wrapping comes a hint of "plot armor" where it becomes impossible to consider that any serious harm or inconvenience will ultimately hinder the main characters. (And, yes, that's not entirely uncommon, but it just seemed a little more obvious than it should've been, in the same way that one intellectually knows a movie isn't reality but it's harder to suspend disbelief when the boom mic keeps dropping into the frame. I kept seeing the boom mic here.)
Those issues aside, the story does move well, and I generally enjoyed it. It has many nice details and scenes that bring the islands and their unique magic to life. It's also a standalone, which is refreshing when so many books are series these days. I ultimately liked it enough to keep the rating afloat at four stars, though I'll admit it came close to dropping more than once.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Lost Ryū (Emi Watanabe Cohen) - My Review
The Waking Fire (Anthony Ryan) - My Review
Dragon and Thief (Timothy Zahn) - My Review
Saturday, January 17, 2026
The Illustrated Man (Ray Bradbury)
The Illustrated Man
Ray Bradbury
William Morrow
Fiction, Collection/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: A traveler between towns chances upon a stranger covered in odd tattoos that seem almost alive. The Illustrated Man claims that the images were given to him by an old woman from the far future, and that they are more curse than blessing, for all that they fascinate the traveler. Before bedding down for the evening, the Illustrated Man warns his companion against staring too long - particularly at one blank section in his back. Yet the traveler cannot help himself. In those shifting, dancing lines of ink, he sees eighteen tales unfold: tales of the past, the present, and the future, of invaders from Mars and lost spacemen on Venus, of time traveling refugees and a children's game gone terribly wrong, and more... all inevitably leading toward the revelation in that final, forbidden image.
REVIEW: Ray Bradbury remains one of the true grandmaster wordsmiths, not just in science fiction but general storytelling. This classic collection holds up fairly well for the most part, painting vivid pictures in the mind's eye. He even foresaw the dangers of letting technology raise the next generation in "The Veldt", the tale of a family living in a "smart home" with a mechanical intelligence that does everything, even create and think, for the children. Still, several of his stories can't help but show their age in certain ideas of the future, particularly cultural assumptions about women's roles (or lack thereof) and a reliance on Christian imagery (particularly in "The Man", where an ambitious captain and his crew, out to exploit new planets, arrive at one rustic backwater to discover that another offworlder has just been and left after performing a series of miracles for the natives - a man who is never named but is clearly intended to be Jesus). One sad relic of his time was his idea that the book burners and censors would come from the halls of pure science and reason, striving to drive out "obsolete" imagination and superstition (and with it the creativity and wonder that truly makes humanity human); in our time, we can see that it's superstition that's determined to drive out science and reason as well as imagination. Bradbury's tendency toward downer endings, either slow-motion tragedies or dark final twists of fate, can also be a bit much after several such stories in a row. (My late father referred to Bradbury's works as "anti-science fiction" as he saw the genre as being more about the promise of science and the future, not the dark sides and the inevitable endings of great things, which Bradbury so often explored.) As for the Illustrated Man himself, whose stories bookend the collection, he remains an iconic figure in that gray area between sci-fi, magic realism, and horror. The stories are still worth reading, and still have plenty to say.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury) - My Review
Great Classic Science Fiction (BBC Audio) - My Review
I Am Legend and Other Stories (Richard Matheson) - My Review
Ray Bradbury
William Morrow
Fiction, Collection/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: A traveler between towns chances upon a stranger covered in odd tattoos that seem almost alive. The Illustrated Man claims that the images were given to him by an old woman from the far future, and that they are more curse than blessing, for all that they fascinate the traveler. Before bedding down for the evening, the Illustrated Man warns his companion against staring too long - particularly at one blank section in his back. Yet the traveler cannot help himself. In those shifting, dancing lines of ink, he sees eighteen tales unfold: tales of the past, the present, and the future, of invaders from Mars and lost spacemen on Venus, of time traveling refugees and a children's game gone terribly wrong, and more... all inevitably leading toward the revelation in that final, forbidden image.
REVIEW: Ray Bradbury remains one of the true grandmaster wordsmiths, not just in science fiction but general storytelling. This classic collection holds up fairly well for the most part, painting vivid pictures in the mind's eye. He even foresaw the dangers of letting technology raise the next generation in "The Veldt", the tale of a family living in a "smart home" with a mechanical intelligence that does everything, even create and think, for the children. Still, several of his stories can't help but show their age in certain ideas of the future, particularly cultural assumptions about women's roles (or lack thereof) and a reliance on Christian imagery (particularly in "The Man", where an ambitious captain and his crew, out to exploit new planets, arrive at one rustic backwater to discover that another offworlder has just been and left after performing a series of miracles for the natives - a man who is never named but is clearly intended to be Jesus). One sad relic of his time was his idea that the book burners and censors would come from the halls of pure science and reason, striving to drive out "obsolete" imagination and superstition (and with it the creativity and wonder that truly makes humanity human); in our time, we can see that it's superstition that's determined to drive out science and reason as well as imagination. Bradbury's tendency toward downer endings, either slow-motion tragedies or dark final twists of fate, can also be a bit much after several such stories in a row. (My late father referred to Bradbury's works as "anti-science fiction" as he saw the genre as being more about the promise of science and the future, not the dark sides and the inevitable endings of great things, which Bradbury so often explored.) As for the Illustrated Man himself, whose stories bookend the collection, he remains an iconic figure in that gray area between sci-fi, magic realism, and horror. The stories are still worth reading, and still have plenty to say.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury) - My Review
Great Classic Science Fiction (BBC Audio) - My Review
I Am Legend and Other Stories (Richard Matheson) - My Review
The Moon and the Sun (Vonda N. McIntyre)
The Moon and the Sun
Vonda N. McIntyre
Pocket Books
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Marie-Josephe de la Croix and her brother, Yves, have come a long way from their childhood in seventeenth-century colonial Martinique. Now, Marie-Josephe is a lady-in-waiting to a prominent courtier in King Louis XIV's entourage at Versailles, while Yves - now a Jesuit priest and natural philosopher - has just returned from a momentous expedition with a living sea monster. Sea monsters, grotesque and roughly humanoid creatures, were once more numerous on the waves, and legend claims that eating their flesh confers immortality, but it must come from a fresh kill. Until the feast, the monster is to be kept in the Fountain of Apollo on the grounds of Versailles, while Yves dissects its mate for the edification of his discipline and for the pleasure of the king. As always, Marie-Josephe is to act as his assistant, sketching Yves's findings and feeding the captive beast... but something about the living creature tugs at her. When she begins to discern images and ideas from its haunting songs, she questions everything she thought she knew about the beasts, about her own life, even about the infallibility of the king and the church's teachings.
REVIEW: First off, there's a little backstory with this particular book selection. My late father, a lifelong sci-fi fan, knew Vonda McIntyre from local fandom. When Dad was beginning his slide into dementia, the last book he wanted was this title, the last novel she published before her death, but it was very difficult to locate. It took a few years, during which Dad (as is the nature of dementia) further declined, but I finally managed to secure a hardcover copy for Xmas. Even though he could no longer read much, he was very happy to receive it. Toward the end of his life, when he could only manage to follow short audiobooks, I decided that I was going to read The Moon and the Sun in his honor... but life with a person in late-stage dementia is not conducive to deep, long stretches of reading, unfortunately, so my first attempts were set aside.
Almost one year after my father passed away, I have finally finished reading the book. I consider it a personal victory, even though, as it turns out, this book is not particularly my preferred cup of cocoa.
Set in an alternate-history France where the Sun King reigns supreme over all enemies foreign and domestic, The Moon and the Sun spares few words painting the extravagance and intricacies of courtly life in Versailles, from the sprawling palatial grounds to the complicated dance of courtly manners (barely masking the vicious backstabbing) to the wildly impractical fashions and amusements of the uppermost of the upper crust. The characters are firmly rooted in their class and time, with the church's teachings dominating both their understanding of nature and the social norms and hierarchy bent entirely toward the glorification and satisfaction of the king. This is both an interesting detail and an occasional source of frustration, as the mindsets of that class and time are very rigid things that take quite a lot of battering to even begin to flex slightly - and this is a story that cannot truly begin to move until that flex occurs. McIntyre also preserves many of the naming conventions, inserting real-life figures (which I'm far too ignorant of French history to recognize, let alone appreciate), so right out of the gate I found myself bombarded with a string of names and titles and ranks and people who blurred together on the page, their relationships - so vital to the intricate balance of courtly hierarchy - an absolute jumble in my head. I eventually had to resort to switching to an audiobook version (courtesy of Libby and my local library system); it was just plain easier to pick out the important characters with a narrator as intermediary than it was to try sorting out so many similar-scanning names. (And I'm a person who loves a nice, thick epic fantasy with a large cast; it was the similarity, not the number, of players that kept tripping me up, and the lack of time and space to properly establish them in my head before five or ten more characters barged into the narrative.)
In any event, the story mostly follows Marie-Josephe, an exceptionally sheltered young woman of minor noble birth whose intellectual passions and gifts put her at odds with societal expectations. Though every bit her brother's equal (and occasional superior) in intellect and inquisitiveness, he is encouraged to pursue his studies - within the narrow scope of thinking allowed by the pope, at least - while she has been repeatedly and harshly chastised for "unwomanly" behavior to the point where she self-censures her own thoughts more often than not. While Yves was away making a name for himself as a natural philosopher and gaining the patronage of King Louis, she was shunted off to a convent where she was forced into silence and punished for her musical compositions and studying advanced mathematics (which the nuns considered a form of spellcraft, burning her notes and correspondences). Comparatively, life at Versailles, confined as it is in so many ways, is the embodiment of pure liberty. She tries to become the ideal noblewoman, and is very happy to have risen as far as lady-in-waiting to a high-ranked family (the daughter of the king's legitimate brother and his German-born princess wife), but still yearns toward the forbidden fruits of intellectual curiosity. Yves, once her partner and champion when they were children on Martinique, has grown into someone she hardly recognizes after their years apart, far more willing to stick her in the prison society has built for highborn women (or in the veil of a nun, which he considers a perfectly acceptable solution that would also keep her free of immoral temptations of the flesh, not caring how the nuns of Martinique were even worse than high society when it came to proscribing a woman's thoughts and roles); he even seems reluctant to accept her help in the study of the sea monsters, for all that they were always partners in his studies back on Martinique. It takes a long, long time for the presence of the sea monster to begin to wear through the thick shell Marie-Josephe has built around herself and recognize that she's dealing with a person, not a mere animal... which raises a dire implication: if sea monsters are not mere beasts - placed in the world by God for the use of Man, as the church teachers her - but people with souls, then King Louis would be committing a mortal sin to consume their flesh in the pursuit of his own immortality. But how is she to convince anyone, when she's the only one who seems to understand Sherzad's songs and the images they weave? Even her own brother doesn't want to believe her, as not only would doing so defy his Biblical understanding of the world, but it would threaten King Louis's patronage of his studies. The matter is further complicated with the arrival of Pope Innocent at Versailles, in a long-awaited reconciliation between Rome and France that will create a world-spanning superpower to crush Protestant and heathen dissent; the pope already is angered by the liberal attitudes of many in the king's court, where they let mere women assist in ungodly pursuits and indulge sinful ideas, and isn't at all likely to reconsider the church's previous findings that allowed that sea monsters were not actual demons but simply natural beasts.
The whole tale is rather ponderous as it slowly takes shape, and even when it moves it tends to plod and loop and backtrack as Marie-Josephe questions her own observations and conclusions and runs into a near-impenetrable wall of skepticism on all fronts, all of which meander through the sumptuously detailed days and nights of courtly life and the power struggles among the nobility over who can most please the Sun King on his gilded and bejeweled throne. Victories are often cut short and crushed into agonizing defeats, as those with the greatest power to enact change invariably prove obstinately, even violently, opposed to doing so. The ending manages to be somewhat satisfactory, though I have to wonder if McIntyre intended to write more; there is "sequel potential", as the saying goes, in how things end. With that said, I'm not sure I would have read another book if it had existed. For all that I appreciated the deep research and faithfully reproduced details of not only the physical but the mental setting, and while there were some very imaginative ideas that were ultimately explored, I ultimately didn't find the world or that characters that pleasant to be around.
As a closing note... this one was for you, Dad. You weren't a drinker (save of root beer), so pouring one out for you seems inappropriate. Consider this me lifting one up - a book - in your memory.
You Might Also Enjoy:
My Sons Will Eat Today (Debra Borchert) - My Review
Into the Drowning Deep (Mira Grant) - My Review
The Legend of Charlie Fish (Josh Rountree) - My Review
Vonda N. McIntyre
Pocket Books
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Marie-Josephe de la Croix and her brother, Yves, have come a long way from their childhood in seventeenth-century colonial Martinique. Now, Marie-Josephe is a lady-in-waiting to a prominent courtier in King Louis XIV's entourage at Versailles, while Yves - now a Jesuit priest and natural philosopher - has just returned from a momentous expedition with a living sea monster. Sea monsters, grotesque and roughly humanoid creatures, were once more numerous on the waves, and legend claims that eating their flesh confers immortality, but it must come from a fresh kill. Until the feast, the monster is to be kept in the Fountain of Apollo on the grounds of Versailles, while Yves dissects its mate for the edification of his discipline and for the pleasure of the king. As always, Marie-Josephe is to act as his assistant, sketching Yves's findings and feeding the captive beast... but something about the living creature tugs at her. When she begins to discern images and ideas from its haunting songs, she questions everything she thought she knew about the beasts, about her own life, even about the infallibility of the king and the church's teachings.
REVIEW: First off, there's a little backstory with this particular book selection. My late father, a lifelong sci-fi fan, knew Vonda McIntyre from local fandom. When Dad was beginning his slide into dementia, the last book he wanted was this title, the last novel she published before her death, but it was very difficult to locate. It took a few years, during which Dad (as is the nature of dementia) further declined, but I finally managed to secure a hardcover copy for Xmas. Even though he could no longer read much, he was very happy to receive it. Toward the end of his life, when he could only manage to follow short audiobooks, I decided that I was going to read The Moon and the Sun in his honor... but life with a person in late-stage dementia is not conducive to deep, long stretches of reading, unfortunately, so my first attempts were set aside.
Almost one year after my father passed away, I have finally finished reading the book. I consider it a personal victory, even though, as it turns out, this book is not particularly my preferred cup of cocoa.
Set in an alternate-history France where the Sun King reigns supreme over all enemies foreign and domestic, The Moon and the Sun spares few words painting the extravagance and intricacies of courtly life in Versailles, from the sprawling palatial grounds to the complicated dance of courtly manners (barely masking the vicious backstabbing) to the wildly impractical fashions and amusements of the uppermost of the upper crust. The characters are firmly rooted in their class and time, with the church's teachings dominating both their understanding of nature and the social norms and hierarchy bent entirely toward the glorification and satisfaction of the king. This is both an interesting detail and an occasional source of frustration, as the mindsets of that class and time are very rigid things that take quite a lot of battering to even begin to flex slightly - and this is a story that cannot truly begin to move until that flex occurs. McIntyre also preserves many of the naming conventions, inserting real-life figures (which I'm far too ignorant of French history to recognize, let alone appreciate), so right out of the gate I found myself bombarded with a string of names and titles and ranks and people who blurred together on the page, their relationships - so vital to the intricate balance of courtly hierarchy - an absolute jumble in my head. I eventually had to resort to switching to an audiobook version (courtesy of Libby and my local library system); it was just plain easier to pick out the important characters with a narrator as intermediary than it was to try sorting out so many similar-scanning names. (And I'm a person who loves a nice, thick epic fantasy with a large cast; it was the similarity, not the number, of players that kept tripping me up, and the lack of time and space to properly establish them in my head before five or ten more characters barged into the narrative.)
In any event, the story mostly follows Marie-Josephe, an exceptionally sheltered young woman of minor noble birth whose intellectual passions and gifts put her at odds with societal expectations. Though every bit her brother's equal (and occasional superior) in intellect and inquisitiveness, he is encouraged to pursue his studies - within the narrow scope of thinking allowed by the pope, at least - while she has been repeatedly and harshly chastised for "unwomanly" behavior to the point where she self-censures her own thoughts more often than not. While Yves was away making a name for himself as a natural philosopher and gaining the patronage of King Louis, she was shunted off to a convent where she was forced into silence and punished for her musical compositions and studying advanced mathematics (which the nuns considered a form of spellcraft, burning her notes and correspondences). Comparatively, life at Versailles, confined as it is in so many ways, is the embodiment of pure liberty. She tries to become the ideal noblewoman, and is very happy to have risen as far as lady-in-waiting to a high-ranked family (the daughter of the king's legitimate brother and his German-born princess wife), but still yearns toward the forbidden fruits of intellectual curiosity. Yves, once her partner and champion when they were children on Martinique, has grown into someone she hardly recognizes after their years apart, far more willing to stick her in the prison society has built for highborn women (or in the veil of a nun, which he considers a perfectly acceptable solution that would also keep her free of immoral temptations of the flesh, not caring how the nuns of Martinique were even worse than high society when it came to proscribing a woman's thoughts and roles); he even seems reluctant to accept her help in the study of the sea monsters, for all that they were always partners in his studies back on Martinique. It takes a long, long time for the presence of the sea monster to begin to wear through the thick shell Marie-Josephe has built around herself and recognize that she's dealing with a person, not a mere animal... which raises a dire implication: if sea monsters are not mere beasts - placed in the world by God for the use of Man, as the church teachers her - but people with souls, then King Louis would be committing a mortal sin to consume their flesh in the pursuit of his own immortality. But how is she to convince anyone, when she's the only one who seems to understand Sherzad's songs and the images they weave? Even her own brother doesn't want to believe her, as not only would doing so defy his Biblical understanding of the world, but it would threaten King Louis's patronage of his studies. The matter is further complicated with the arrival of Pope Innocent at Versailles, in a long-awaited reconciliation between Rome and France that will create a world-spanning superpower to crush Protestant and heathen dissent; the pope already is angered by the liberal attitudes of many in the king's court, where they let mere women assist in ungodly pursuits and indulge sinful ideas, and isn't at all likely to reconsider the church's previous findings that allowed that sea monsters were not actual demons but simply natural beasts.
The whole tale is rather ponderous as it slowly takes shape, and even when it moves it tends to plod and loop and backtrack as Marie-Josephe questions her own observations and conclusions and runs into a near-impenetrable wall of skepticism on all fronts, all of which meander through the sumptuously detailed days and nights of courtly life and the power struggles among the nobility over who can most please the Sun King on his gilded and bejeweled throne. Victories are often cut short and crushed into agonizing defeats, as those with the greatest power to enact change invariably prove obstinately, even violently, opposed to doing so. The ending manages to be somewhat satisfactory, though I have to wonder if McIntyre intended to write more; there is "sequel potential", as the saying goes, in how things end. With that said, I'm not sure I would have read another book if it had existed. For all that I appreciated the deep research and faithfully reproduced details of not only the physical but the mental setting, and while there were some very imaginative ideas that were ultimately explored, I ultimately didn't find the world or that characters that pleasant to be around.
As a closing note... this one was for you, Dad. You weren't a drinker (save of root beer), so pouring one out for you seems inappropriate. Consider this me lifting one up - a book - in your memory.
You Might Also Enjoy:
My Sons Will Eat Today (Debra Borchert) - My Review
Into the Drowning Deep (Mira Grant) - My Review
The Legend of Charlie Fish (Josh Rountree) - My Review
Friday, January 9, 2026
The Rainfall Market (You Yeong-Gwang)
The Rainfall Market
You Yeong-Gwang, translated by Slin Jung
Ace
Fiction, YA? Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Everyone's heard rumors of the Rainfall Market. Supposedly, if you're trapped and frustrated and at rock bottom in your life with no way out or up, you can write a letter to a particular address - and sometimes, just sometimes, you will recieve a Ticket to the Rainfall Market, with instructions to arrive on the first day of the rainy season. Here, among the Dokkaebi spirits, one may trade away the pains and sorrows of life and purchase a magic Orb that will forever change your fortunes - but only one orb, and if you do not leave the market before the rainy season ends, you'll vanish forever.
Kim Serin hates her life. She hates living in a condemned building that's slated for demolition. She hates being so poor that university isn't ever going to be an option. She hates that her mother works so hard and is so busy that she barely notices her own daughter. She hates being so lonely after her sister ran away from home. She would do anything, just anything, for a chance to be someone else, to live a different life. She only half-believes the stories of the Rainfall Market, but she's desperate enough to try anything, so she writes her letter. Surprisingly, she gets a red envelope with a golden Ticket tucked inside.
She doesn't know what to expect when she goes to the tiny little village beyond the end of the train line, but what she finds is a hidden city of wonders and dangers and magic... and, unbeknownst to her, a hidden power struggle between Dokkaebi in which Serin is just a pawn - and a potential sacrifice.
REVIEW: There seems to be a string of Asian cozy fantasies coming out these days, or maybe it's just that there's a string of them somehow coming across my radar. In any event, this promised a light, cozy tale, and I was in the mood for light and cozy, what with so many, many things being dark and decidedly not cozy. (Plus I'd just finished a Stephen King novella, and I try to switch up moods.) What I found was a story with shades of Miyazaki's Spirited Away, in a whimsical fairy tale marred mostly by predictability and a Lesson that's too obvious from the start.
Though marketed at general adult audiences, The Rainfall Market feels more like young adult, or maybe even middle-grade; Serin's worries about university and the future strike me as more (young) teen, but the overall tone skews light and bubbly and even silly, with a surreal blunting of corners and softening of blows and that sense of the main character being walked through adventures and events with just enough peril to be a little challenged but not so much as to ever really be in serious danger. The descriptions make me wonder if it wasn't intended to be illustrated or animated; there's an exaggeration to things, even the human girl Serin, that made me think of anime.
In any event, Serin starts out clearly - and with some justification - unhappy with her life, trudging through school and even messing up in her martial arts training (the one thing that brings her happiness and which she thought she could do well until she messes up in front of everyone), then climbing the endless stairs to her condemned home and a mother who scarcely seems to talk to her only remaining child. The book may wallow slightly here, but establishing Serin's misery is essential to drive her to her desperate letter. Then she goes to the Rainfall Market and encounters her first Dokkaebi, and with him the start of her real adventure; just being willing to trust him is her first test on the way to the Rainfall Market, the first of many challenges she'll face.
These Korean spirits are bigger than people (usually), with disproportionate arms and legs, and they steal things like memories or worries or even the impulse to keep clean on vacation from humans, turning these emotions into magical items. They have shades of faerie about them, with their fascination with humans as playthings of a sort, their bargains and trickery and temptations, and their secret ways and rivalries that can threaten any mortal caught up in them, only they tend to be more silly than traditional fae.
Serin knows none of this, of course; she's just a desperate girl, willing to follow a strange, childlike giant figure into an impossible city just for a chance to not keep living a life that feels unbearable. She soon realizes that her misery really does seem special; she alone got a golden Ticket while most everyone got Silver, and she alone is invited by the host to a special meeting, where she's given special privileges and advantages as she seeks out a magic Orb that will fix her life. Then she's off through the city of the Rainfall Market, visiting a string of peculiar Dokkaebi shops and shopkeepers and performing good deeds and tasks that see her rewarded beyond the simple purchasing of an Orb. Each Orb offers her a glimpse into another life that seems to give her what she wants, until she sees that everything she thought would bring her happiness can also lead to misery and sorrow to rival her own. Still, she takes a little too long figuring out the Lesson the Orbs are spelling out in bright rainbow letters (this is part of what makes me wonder about the target age, as this reads so young I'd be tempted to call it a children's story, not even middle-grade), while shadows lurk behind her and some unknown plot between the Dokkaebi plays out around her adventures. Eventually, of course, the short rainy season must end, but will Serin have found a better life before it's too late to return home, or will she miss out on this unique opportunity?
You can probably guess about how things unfold; I mentioned earlier that it's somewhat predictable, playing out like a video game in which Serin has to complete simple puzzles and challenges before passing through each level, gathering Orbs and other items that, naturally, will prove useful at the endgame. But even with that said, it's generally a good-hearted story, with some solid emotions and fun imagery.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Husbands (Holly Gramazio) - My Review
Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Toshikazu Kawaguchi) - My Review
The Full Moon Coffee Shop (Mai Mochizuki) - My Review
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