Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Toshikazu Kawaguchi)

Before the Coffee Gets Cold
The Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, Book 1
Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot
Hanover Square Press
Fiction, Fantasy/Literary Fiction
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: There are plenty of flashy eateries in Tokyo, but only one with a unique secret. In a nondescript back alley, down a short flight of stairs, lies the café named Funiculi Funicula. It's a small, quiet establishment where a visitor can get home-churned butter, strong coffee brewed from Ethiopian beans... and, in a chair normally occupied by a ghost, one can travel back in time.
There are rules, of course. They must wait until the ghost leaves the chair on her own or face a terrible curse. Travelers can't leave the chair, let alone the building, so they can only visit people whom they know will be in the café when they choose to arrive. Nothing they do or say will change the present. Nobody can travel more than once, so they need to make their one journey worthwhile. And they must return to the here and now before their coffee gets cold, or they'll end up replacing the resident ghost.
Many dismiss it as an urban legend, and those who don't consider it next to useless: after all, with all the restrictions, what is the point of such limited time travel? But for a handful of customers at Funiculi Funicula - a career-driven woman who may have lost her one chance at personal happiness, the wife who is losing her husband to dementia, a family black sheep seeking to undo her greatest regret, and a woman determined to find out if her greatest sacrifice was in vain - those precious few minutes before the coffee cools are worth their weight in gold.

REVIEW: I was intrigued by the concept and the low-key stakes (I wasn't in the mood for anything big at the moment), and once again the length made it ideal to slot into the listening lineup on my Libby app for a workday. While Before the Coffee Gets Cold does deliver what it promises, it also dithers, repeats, and meanders to the point of irritation, drawing out foregone conclusions and seeming to forget its own time constraints to milk every moment for extra word count, all to the detriment of the rating.
The reader "meets" the café with businesswoman Fumiko and the conversation where she loses the man she'd hoped to marry as he chooses an overseas career over staying in Tokyo... only later realizing the serendipitous fact that her fateful meeting took place in the one place where a do-over was possible. The barista Kazu then explains the rules, including the need to deal with the ghostly woman who normally occupies the special chair and the various restrictions on time travel, leading to Fumiko's transit into the past - where her emotions cause her to hem and haw and quite nearly bungle things worse than the first time around. This pattern hold true for every other transit, even by people more familiar with the café and the whole time travel deal: a woman suffering some manner of heartache or loss hems and haws, finally travels through time, then undergoes such extreme emotional swings and distress they can barely gasp out the words they violated the flow of the space-time continuum to speak. At first it adds to the atmosphere and characterization, but there comes to be a sameness to how the women get overemotional before, during, and after the journeys, and how their stories are drawn out with repetition after repetition after repetition (after repetition after repetition) of dialog, details, memories, feelings, and more. I think the book would've been half as long had just a fraction of those repetitions been trimmed. The last story grinds in the overall themes of personal sacrifice for the sake of love and draws out its foregone conclusions by making the characters too oblivious to clue in to facts so obvious they might as well have been written in neon lights across the walls of Funiculi Funicula.
While I could appreciate the interesting concept, the low-key intimate stakes of time travel on a personal scale, and the decently-drawn characters and situations (when said characters and situations weren't being wrung out like a wet cloth to squeeze every last word-drop out of their fibers), and some of the emotions rung deep and true, at some point I was just grinding my teeth wanting everyone to stop dithering and get on with their stories already. (Especially that last one... one of the fastest ways to make me lose my empathy for a character is to make them less intelligent than the cooling cup of coffee in their hands just to pad word count).

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Let This Radicalize You (Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba)

Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care (Abolitionist Papers)
Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba
Haymarket Books
Nonfiction, Essays/History/Politics
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: It's no secret that we're living in turbulent times. The rolling back of rights, the gutting of environmental regulations just as climate change approaches a dangerous tipping point, the removal of any and all guardrails on greed, the rise of state violence, the stripping of viable venues and options for protest and dissent... not just in America, but around the world, it seems that cruelty, regression, greed, and authoritarianism are on the rise. But giving up has never been an option. In this book, two experienced leaders and organizers explore how to effectively resist in a time that seems openly hostile to resistance.

REVIEW: Since November this year (2024), I've been struggling to find anything resembling hope for the future of the country I live in and coming up with little to nothing, not helped by the fact that I'm not in a position to do much, if anything, about any of the innumerable dangers looming in the new year and beyond (dangers that are already here in some form or another). Don't give up, fight back, is the rallying cry on social media and elsewhere. Where? How? I ask, only to be told once more that if I don't do something and just give up They win. I was hoping this title would help answer those questions, or at least give me some ideas... or hope. Did it manage any of that? A little.
From the outset, it's clear that this book isn't quite targeting me. It's targeting current and would-be leaders and activists, offering advice not just on how to effectively recruit and organize people but on how to avoid burnout, mission creep, losing focus, and other risks, as well as some advice on dealing with the inevitable pushback one will encounter when challenging the status quo, legal and otherwise. A fair bit of word count is devoted to the importance of community and mutual support, not just for political or activism purposes but basic life needs. A vital community, one not reliant on social media (which is useful, to be sure, but, as has been illustrated all too clearly with "X" and others, not something one can rely on for privacy or even safe and neutral discussion), is the essential heart of any remotely successful activism group. The authors address the need to learn social skills and patient listening (skills that have fallen out of common practice in today's age of instant digital gratification and intentionally fractured attention spans), finding ways to meet people where they are and seek common cause for mutual benefit. They also emphasize the need to avoid the creep of dread and cynicism that can paralyze us and end resistance before it begins, essentially complying in advance. That's one heck of an ask, especially in 2024, but necessary just for basic survival.
For people better positioned to start or join activism and resistance efforts, this book offers plenty of information and moral support, plus appendices with practical links (such as how to deal with chemical weapons that police commonly unleash on rallies, and how to resist unlawful law enforcement action). That person may not be me for various reasons of life circumstances (plus me being me; there's a reason the number one advice I was given growing up was that the best way I could help was to stay out of the way, as I'm both congenitally invisible and basically useless), but it was still interesting to get an inside look at how more effective people can rally and organize and, every once in a while, actually succeed. That's hopeful, at least.

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Graven Images (Paul Fleischman)

Graven Images
Paul Fleischman
Candlewick
Fiction, YA? Collection/Historical Fiction
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Noted author Paul Fleischman presents three short stories centered on sculpted images:
The Binnacle Boy: When the crew of the sailing ship Orion is found dead, the carved "binnacle boy" compass holder from the ship's deck is installed in the town square as a memorial... one that may eventually reveal the terrible secret behind the tragedy.
Saint Crispin's Follower: A cobbler's lovelorn apprentice reads signs and portents into a weathercock shaped in the likeness of Saint Crispin, patron of his profession.
The Man of Influence: A stonecarver takes a commission from a ghostly client, only to learn truths he'd rather never have known about his wealthy patrons.

REVIEW: I needed a short audiobook to fill some empty time at work, and this one was available. From the official description, I expected there to be a little more to the sculptures themselves, a little more of a twist to them, though that's likely a bias from tending to read speculative fiction far more than regular fiction. In any event, the stories themselves are decent, though at times they feel like they're stretching their premises. The middle tale in particular runs long once the characters and central gimmick are clear. I found the third story to be the most interesting, as a sculptor obsessed with the class and breeding of his usual clientele is forced to confront just what kind of people have been paying his bills, and what that makes him for serving them so eagerly for years. It came close to losing a half-mark for that sense of stretching, but I gave the collection the benefit of the doubt.

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Slow Horses (Mike Herron)

Slow Horses
The Slough House series, Book 1
Mike Herron
Soho Crime
Fiction, Mystery/Thriller
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: The agents of MI5 are among the world's best, protecting England from enemies foreign and domestic... but anyone can stumble, fumble, or run afoul of office politics. The ones who aren't bad enough to fire (or are too politically sensitive to let go) end up at Slough House, home of the department's misfits and screw-ups. It's officially said that Slough House offers a chance at reform, but in practice it's the last stop before resignation - and if they don't quit on their own, the "slow horses" are saddled with openly pointless and tedious assignments until they get the hint and leave. The only ones who hang around more than a few months are the ones too oblivious to realize the snub, or the ones too broken to care about anything anymore, even themselves.
River Cartwright was a bright up-and-comer in the agency until a fouled training exercise resulted in real-world problems. Only the fact that his grandfather was a legend in MI5 saved him from being sacked outright, but being reassigned to Slough House under the doughy, washed-up veteran Jackson Lamb isn't much better than a firing, and he knows it. Surrounded by fellow outcasts, River clings grimly to the thin chance of redemption, not willing to let himself believe that his career is over before it properly began. When a London teenager is abducted by an extremist right-wing group and threatened with an online beheading, he and the other Slough House misfits can only seethe at their ineffectiveness... but a series of managerial missteps instead lands the agents right in the middle of a massive departmental mess centered around the kidnapping - and if they can't unravel the tangled threads and figure out what's really going on, they'll be the ones thrown under the bus by a ruthless and desperate deputy-director.

REVIEW: Not subscribing to Apple+, I have not seen the streaming series inspired by this book, but I was intrigued by the concept. It turns out to be a decent spy thriller, if one that sometimes overplays its tension by drawing out reveals and twists (and has a few elements that subtly set my teeth on edge).
Opening with River and the botched training exercise that derails his career (ironically in the London Underground), it introduces Slough House almost as a character itself, a run-down edifice where the hopelessness and misery are baked into the peeling Formica and yellowed paint, full of agents who seem to be going through the motions of existing more out of habit than out of any remaining aspirations about their lives, let alone their dead-ended careers. River struggles to cling to his sense of purpose, even as some part of him recognizes the truth: he's only still drawing a paycheck because his retired grandfather's reputation still carries some weight at the MI5 headquarters in Regent's Park, and he is expected to be a good little agent and resign so none of the top brass have to ruffle feathers by firing an agent of his pedigree. He perseveres in no small part because he knows in his bones that he didn't mess things up on his own; his partner and best friend (or so he thought) fed him bad intel, seemingly sacrificing River to further his own career. Still, he has no idea how he'll clear his name from Slough House, when the head agent Lamb pretty much tells him point-blank that the gruntwork he's doing - sorting through the garbage of a disgraced investigative reporter - is not actually intended to accomplish anything but make him stink, in a literal and metaphoric sense. This being a thriller and not a depressing literary examination of broken lives, however, it goes without saying that the pointless case of shadowing said reporter turns out to be not so pointless after all. And when the teenager Hassan, a British-Pakistani boy, is snatched off the streets and featured in a livestream by the previously-obscure extremist group Sons of Albion, things heat up across the city and especially in Regent's Park. Can River and his fellow "slow horses" sit on the sidelines as they watch the clock tick down to the promised online beheading of an innocent kid? Even the most cynical denizen of Slough House was and still is an MI5 agent, whether they admit it or not, so it goes without saying that they dip their toes into the investigation... and even if they managed to abstain as they're technically supposed to, they find themselves drug in by the schemes of Deputy-Director Diana Taverner, an ambitious woman who wants to make a name for herself and is more than willing to throw a few of her own people - especially ones already tagged as departmental disgraces - to the wolves to do it. Thus begins a complex game of cat and mouse in a story with multiple cats and mice, some characters being both hunter and hunted at once (though they may not always realize which, if either, they are at the time).
For all that things mostly moved well (after a bit of a slow start), there were a few parts that rubbed a bit wrong, such as the way it was presented as inevitable that a woman in power would mess up a major operation, and how another was basically fridged after River found her attractive. Some of the characters of Slough House felt extraneous by the end, and I'm not sure why Herron bothered cluttering the cast with them. A few of the side stories stretched out overlong, becoming padding at more than one point. For all that, it does wrap up reasonably well, though I don't feel invested enough to continue the series (or pony up the cost of yet another streaming service to watch the show).

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The Age of Wood (Roland Ennos)

The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization
Roland Ennos
Scribner
Nonfiction, Anthropology/History/Nature
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Computer Age... looking back, one might think that our history began when we started shaping rocks to tame the world, and our future lies in silicon chips and electricity. But long before the first axes and arrowheads, long before Homo sapiens itself came to be, our ancestors were relying on another natural material with amazingly useful properties, one that continues to underpin our modern world, one so ubiquitous it's often overlooked: wood. Author Roland Ennos explores how trees and wood helped transform us from arboreal apes to space-age humans, and how rediscovering the versatility of timber products might help create a sustainable future.

REVIEW: Due to its generally poor preservation compared to stone artifacts, the importance of wood in our own species's prehistory and the development of civilization has often been glossed over. It's only relatively recently that anthropologists have paid more attention to wooden tool making, a process whose roots can be seen in other great apes today (shaping branches to access food sources like insects or honey, even weaving nests for protection from the elements). When one realizes that wood was essential for mastering fire, an immensely pivotal development, it seems a glaring oversight, but Ennos demonstrates how wood has always been such a common part of our world that we almost don't even see it... and, he argues, we haven't paid enough attention as it has disappeared from more and more of our environment, both artificial and natural. Without mastering wood, our species never would've developed pretty much anything we take for granted now. Even the materials many of us think of as replacing wood - iron, concrete, and the like - depended on wood in some form or another, even just as the charcoal and coke to smelt it. Have we outgrown the need for natural materials like wood, in our age of plastics and synthetics? Not at all; there are still many places where wood and wood products are as good as, even potentially superior to, the often-polluting materials we've created to replace it, not to mention the planetary benefits of growing more (and more diverse, not just monoculture plantations) woodlands and the psychological benefits of reconnecting with forests.
For the most part, this book makes for an interesting tour of wood's uses (and limitations) through prehistory and history, generally centered around "Western" cultures but also looking into other places around the world, such as China and the Americas. There are a few parts where I felt Ennos could've dug a bit deeper - his European roots and perspective seem very much evident throughout, and he also waits until near the very end to even mention issues with biodiversity loss that come with overexploitation of woodlands even before modern machinery made logging so much more devastating to the environment - but overall I found it intriguing.

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Pony Confidential (Christina Lynch)

Pony Confidential
Christina Lynch
Berkley
Fiction, Humor/Mystery
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Few things are as magical as the bond between a little girl and her perfect pony. The thrill of learning to ride, the bliss of lazy afternoons on the trail, the pride of a ribbon at the big show... but little girls become bigger girls and grown women, and somewhere along the way the perfect pony gets left behind. But it never forgets that little girl - and some ponies never forgive.
Pony had a girl once, a girl named Penny who read him poetry and fed him carrots and promised they'd be together forever and always. Only she vanished without even saying goodbye, leaving him to a succession of owners, each worse than the last as he crisscrosses the country. It's been over two decades now, and only his determination to find her again and make her pay for her betrayal keeps him going. (Well, that, and the chance to inflict misery on the humans who pass him around like a bad coin.)
Penny, meanwhile, has grown up, married, and raised a child... but her life is anything but happy, with a possible divorce on the horizon and a teen daughter struggling with mental illness. In fact, she hasn't really been happy since she was a child in New York and took riding lessons at a local stable, where she talked her parents into buying a stubborn, cranky, wonderful pony the color of the sun - a pony she had to leave behind suddenly when a tragedy occurred. She thought that was all behind her, until the local sheriff turns up at her door with a warrant for her arrest.
By the time Pony catches up with Penny, the angry little animal may be her only chance at avoiding a lifetime in prison for a murder she did not commit. But what is one old pony supposed to do about it?

REVIEW: Though it was my sister who was the big horse nut in our household, I grew up with the requisite stable of Breyer figures and My Little Pony toys, not to mention innumerable playings of an off-brand audio story "The Little Brown Pony" (which was basically a watered-down knock-off of Black Beauty, but darned if the theme song doesn't still get randomly stuck in my head). So when I saw this title in an article on Best Books of 2024, it seemed like it could be fun. The cover bills Pony Confidential as a hard-boiled pony sleuth saving his grown-up girl by solving a mystery, down to the cover image (a Holmesian deerstalker cap hanging on a horseshoe), but the actual story isn't quite that at all. It's more The Incredible Journey than Sherlock Holmes, crossed with shades of an updated Black Beauty as it explores how humans use and abuse animals in general and horses in particular.
Splitting the narrative between Penny and Pony (weighted toward the latter), the book tells the inadvertently intertwined tales of woman and equine. As Penny, experiencing firsthand the crooked scales of justice, reflects on her unhappy life and the long-ago incident that culminated in her incarceration, Pony sets out on a quest to track down the girl who broke his heart while he still has enough stamina to do it; ponies only live thirty or forty years, and a good two-thirds of that span has already passed by. The journey is not a smooth one, especially when Pony's lingering resentment and tendency to act (usually in anger or sheer pony spite) first and think second trip him up at least as often as his nearly uncontrollable craving for carrots, and along the way he learns some lessons about life, love, and friendship. Some of his various encounters are humorous, while some are sobering, and the book mostly avoids venturing into preachy life lessons. For all the anger he's carried around for so long, an anger that's quite justified given how some of the people he meets treat him and others, deep down he's still nursing a broken heart and is surprised to learn that perhaps he hasn't entirely given up on humans (or at least one or two humans) after all. Penny, too, has to do some re-evaluating of her situation and choices, particularly how she's kept people at arm's length (which doesn't help when it comes time to find character witnesses for her defense), even as she realizes that she can't count on the law to save her and must try, with dim memories and limited resources, to figure out who the real culprit is from her jail cell.
There are some plot-convenient moments (and equally convenient plot delays), and some deliberate muddling of the concurrent timelines struck me as slightly manipulative (particularly how Lynch played coy about some events, stringing out reveals). Also, as implied, there were a few moments that felt a little like Chicken Soup for the Equine Soul sermons, but only a few. For the most part, though, it's the story of the timeless, magical bond between one girl and one very special, if very stubborn and cranky, pony.

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Ravenwood (Nathan Lowell)

Ravenwood: A Tanyth Fairport Adventure
The Tanyth Fairport Adventures series, Book 1
Nathan Lowell
CreateSpace
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Since escaping an abusive marriage, Tanyth has spent twenty years traveling the land, learning the ways of healers, until just one master remains: the elusive hermit of Lammas Wood, on an island across the sea. She hopes to get there before winter sets in, but plans change when the inhabitants of a small, nameless hamlet need her help. Their old healing woman passed away before training an apprentice, and with cold weather coming they could use some assistance. Despite herself, Tanyth finds herself drawn into village life... just when strange changes waken new powers within her, and bandits threaten the settlement.

REVIEW: Rather than a bold, brash epic adventure, Ravenwood presents a smaller, slower story, what might be called "cozy fantasy" now (though I'm not sure the term was much used in 2011, when this was originally published). This turns out to be both an asset and a detriment, leaving me with mixed feelings.
It opens on a decent note, with an aging Tanyth - in her early 50s - feeling the wear and tear of a long life of traveling as she heads toward what she thinks will be a small stop on her way to her greater goal of spending a season with the half-legendary Lammas Wood hermit, possibly the last healer left with secrets for her to learn. The hamlet she finds when she needs a rest along the way is so new it doesn't even have a name, populated with a handful of misfits and young families hoping to forge a new, brighter fortune away from city life, but lacking certain practical, hard-won knowledge of how to live at the edge of wilderness; she is called back to the people after her brief stopover when one of their number falls ill with a fairly common ailment, not even knowing enough basic herb-lore to brew a willow bark tea to ease a fever. After so many years as the pupil and apprentice, Tanyth finds herself seen as an elder and a master, and isn't entirely sure how she feels with this change in status... and that's before she starts having peculiar visions and visitations from an oddly cunning raven, signs of yet another change as (not really a spoiler) she begins manifesting what may be magical powers, which may be linked to early signs of menopause. Here is where I started feeling some odd vibes around the story; it's a man writing about a deeply feminine matter and layering it with mystical meaning, while also ensuring that the lives of all women revolve almost exclusively around males and children. I get that this is a pseudo-medieval world with limited options for women, but something about the way it came across, as though (from the author's male perspective) there was absolutely no question that the only things a woman could possibly ever care about are finding a mate, mothering children, and healing (presented as mothering in another context), struck a sour note. Even in medieval times, there were women who had other goals or ambitions, even if their social status didn't always permit them to pursue such things.
Beyond that, Tanyth's tale unwinds slowly. Very, very slowly, with more than a little repetition. Her age and greater worldly experience make her an important local fixture almost overnight, even as she initially resists settling down and delaying her pilgrimage to the hermit; her almost offhand suggestion that they might build an inn to diversify income sources and create a heart to the budding community is enthusiastically taken up by the town founders, and her promise (only sporadically followed up on) to instruct the local women in herbal medicine brings her a devoted following from the start - not just among the helpless little women but among the children (particularly one precocious boy - whose enthusiasm to become a healer, seen as unusual in a male, is never followed through on, almost like the author forgot about the promise he made in presenting that aspect of his character... by far not the only detail that was set up to be a plot point but turned out to be a red herring, such as the frequent ride-bys of King's Own soldiers, but I digress). Conflict comes not just from Tanyth struggling to come to grips with her newly-emerging abilities (with page-count-padding denials and backslides) but from a troublesome pack of bad guys looking to fleece the little hamlet via a protection racket, and taking the town's rejection of their scheme to almost ridiculous extremes. Much of the book is more about the townsfolk working to turn their little venture into a successful, self-sufficient community, and Tanyth visiting neighbors, drinking tea, and contemplating the potential uses of various local plants without actually using them, as well as having sporadic raven dreams that added nothing at all to the plot as often as not.
There's some interest to be found in all this, and the overall story and characters could be intriguing and even charming at times, but by the end it felt like it took far too long to get where it was going, and lost parts of itself somewhere along the way.

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November Site Update

Well, this was a terrible month on many levels... precursor of more to come, I fear. But, hey, that's half of why I read: to pretend reality isn't existing around me...

In any event, the month's reviews (plus two from the tail end of October that just missed my update cutoff point) have now been archived on the main Brightdreamer Books site.

Enjoy!

The Possibility of Life (Jaime Green)

The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos
Jaime Green
Hanover Square Press
Nonfiction, Media Reference/Science
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Are we alone in the cosmos? Ever since humans realized we are not the center of the universe, many have looked to the skies and wondered if, somewhere beyond our tiny sphere, other minds were looking back at us. But where might such life be found? What would it look like? Would we even recognize it if we saw it? What would happen if we ever made contact? Could we even begin to communicate with extraterrestrials? Drawing on experts and sources in history, science, and visionaries in science fiction, the author explores the possibilities of life beyond Earth.

REVIEW: - Given the sheer scale of the universe at large, the idea that Earth alone has been blessed with life of any sort seems almost ludicrously self-centered. Whether that life ever moves beyond single-celled organisms, let alone achieves the level of civilization required to be detected, let alone initiate communication with us, is another matter altogether. In exploring how people have approached the notion of extraterrestrial life and potential for civilizations beyond Earth, the author demonstrates how it's as much about learning more about ourselves and our world - not just on a sheer biological level, but psychological and cultural levels - as it is about speculative evolution.
Drawing on both fact and speculative fiction - Green explores how our fiction about aliens has evolved, and how it reflects both the eras in which it was crafted and ultimately reflects human hopes and fears and understanding - the book explores a broad variety of topics encompassed in the seemingly simple question of whether or not alien life exists. In doing so, it reveals how much we still don't understand about ourselves and our fellow terrestrial life forms past and present; even the definition of "life" itself is slippery, let alone defining life as it might have sparked and evolved under vastly different conditions. On Earth, convergent evolution tends to arrive at similar solutions to general problems - as prehistoric reptiles and whales and fish arrived at roughly similar body plans for optimal aquatic survival, for instance, despite not being closely related - but would that be the case elsewhere? And then there's the matter of brain biology and psychology. When we have great trouble envisioning the world as, for instance, a dolphin or bat experiences it, would we even have a chance of understanding a hypothetical alien ambassador standing right in front of us? There is rarely consensus on any given topic, and Green tends not to rely on just one expert or source. She also acknowledges how cultural biases have colored speculations, even beyond our inherent human thought processes.
There are a few blind spots, particularly in the science fiction works she cites and which she chooses to explore in depth. (How could she discuss aliens thinking and communicating in barely-comprehensible-to-humans ways without mentioning the creations of C. J. Cherryh, who in at least one book (The Pride of Chanur) had a species speaking in matrices that even other aliens often struggled to understand?) A few topics also felt less deeply explored than others, though that's an understandable issue given that, thus far, the whole subject matter of the book is hypotheses and speculation, let alone the bits and pieces that make up that subject. The whole, however, is an interesting enough look at the matter of alien life, and how it ultimately often becomes a mirror in which to better understand our own selves and the futures we both fear and hope for.

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The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland)

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
The D.O.D.O. series, Book 1
Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland
William Morrow
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor/Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Expert linguist Melisande Stokes never expected to find herself stranded in 1851 London, more than a century before she was born, but that's what happens when one signs on with a classified government project like D.O.D.O. In her defense, she had no idea about the true scope of the job when she met Tristan Lyons, who recruited her from the university where she'd been working as a lecturer. All she knew was that they needed someone versed in ancient languages and historical cultures, and that they offered a better wage, more job security, and (a definite plus) actual acknowledgement of her education and contributions, all things notably lacking under her old boss Professor Blevins. (The fact that Tristan was very easy on the eyes, in addition to taking her seriously as a scholar and a person, also admittedly factored into her decision.) It was only later that she learned the truth: the Department of Diachronic Operations was dedicated to resurrecting the lost art of magic, which went extinct somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century, but which would be an immeasurably powerful asset to national security and special operations if it could be revived... particularly if it was true that witches used time travel to alter reality. More amazingly, the reason Lyons and others consider this a feasible goal is that they have reason to believe other governments are already doing the same thing. And that was before Mel met her very first real live witch: Erzebet Karpathy, who insists Mel herself recruited her to the D.O.D.O. cause when she was a young woman - in 1851 London, just as magic was dying around the world.
When Lyons and his team, assisted by the retired physics professor Frank Oda and his wife Rebecca, succeed in their first-ever modern magical experiments, it triggers a whirlwind of activity across various Strands of the space-time continuum, with Mel herself traveling to times and places she only ever read about in historic records, pulled into a secret network of witches. But neither magic nor time travel are simple things to control, despite what the military seems to think, and the more they meddle, the more they risk a catastrophe that could utterly rewrite the world as they know it.

REVIEW: I obtained this free-to-me copy as it was on its way to the trash bin due to a partially broken binding, on recommendation that it was a good read. This is part of why it lingered so long on my Currently Reading list; part way through this thick volume, I had to pause to attempt repairs lest I cause further damage. The other part of why it lingered so long is what ultimately brought it down a notch in the ratings. For such a large book - north of 700 pages in hardcover - it felt too long for the story it contained.
The book kicks off on a strong note with Melisande Stokes stranded in Victorian London, relating how her dire circumstances came to pass in a memoir peppered with modern vernacular (often crossed out, to be replaced with more period-appropriate allusion and terminology) and humor, and along the way often switches to other formats and points of view: interoffice D.O.D.O. memos from staff members and superiors, diary entries, excerpts from incident reports and interviews, and so forth, filling in more details about the characters, organization, magic and time travel in general, and the missions. After the initial burst of entrepreneurial excitement leading to the proof of concept, however, the story bogs down and meanders about as D.O.D.O. becomes increasingly burdened by bureaucracy and people who generally don't really understand what they're doing but are determined they know better than anyone how to do it anyway. Being rooted in the military, it's a very male-dominated power structure (including the recruitment of Professor Blevins, the condescending ex-boss of Mel who shamelessly ripped off her translations of obscure texts and passed them off as his own while stifling her career) bent on manipulating a heavily matriarchal power. This sets up a weird, vaguely uncomfortable vibe that persists through much of the book and isn't really addressed by either author in any meaningful manner. Things inevitably get out of hand when pig-headed men don't listen to the warnings of the women who have been working with magic - itself rooted in an innate understanding of the quantum entanglements of multiple realities, pasts and presents and futures, which are ultimately the source of a witch's magic - all their lives... and when one particularly cunning and crafty historical witch realizes she can turn the tables on D.O.D.O. and outmaneuver them to create a future better suited to her own needs rather than theirs. All of this is overburdened with extraneous characters and pointless, vaguely humorous (or attempting to be humorous) tangents, and enough annoyingly "clever" acronyms to make me give my keyboard the side-eye even as I type this review. I also had a sense that the two writers had different visions for what this book was supposed to be about, the overall vibe and direction, and they never quite met in the middle, pulling one way and then another in a weird tug-of-war with no real winner. The ending sets up the next book in the series but left me vaguely unsatisfied; for all that it overexplained some parts of itself, there were other pivotal things that it seemed bound and determined to underexplain.
That's not to say there were no good points. I generally enjoyed Melisande Stokes and a few other characters (even if I never quite bought the chemistry with Tristan, for all that everyone insisted it was there), though others felt more like caricatures and still more just vague sketches on the page. There were some interesting ideas explored and some decently immersive time travel moments. It also generally avoided the old "everyone from before the twentieth century was a mindless superstitious buffoon, easily manipulated by sophisticated modern minds" stereotype and other ways history can be flattened or diminished. Now and again the humor worked for me. But those moments were inevitably weighed down by the other baggage, and the overall, dragging length of the book turned the reading experience into a slog by the end.

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Down a Dark Hall (Lois Duncan)

Down a Dark Hall
A Lois Duncan Thrillers book
Lois Duncan
Little, Brown Books
Fiction, YA Thriller
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: When she first heard her mother and stepfather talking about the private Blackwood School for Girls in upstate New York, Kit Gordon thought it sounded exciting, especially if her best friend could go with her. But somehow only Kit got past the unusual entrance exams, and when she sets eyes on the restored mansion in the remote woods for the first time, she has only one thought: evil.
At first, she thinks it might just be her nerves. The place is old and spooky and the headmistress Madame Duret is peculiar, to say the least. But she can't shake the feeling that something's not right at Blackwood. There are only four students including her, such an odd mix that Kit can't imagine how they were all selected when her own brilliant best friend was rejected. The teaching staff is just one one professor, the headmistress's young adult son Jules, and Duret herself. Then the nightmares begin... and the students start displaying unusual talents, things they could never do before they arrived.
What is going on? What is Madame Duret doing to the children - and why? And can Kit escape before it's too late?

REVIEW: It's a classic setup by a familiar old-school author... but, like the Blackwood School for Girls, something felt a little odd about this story from the start - such as why an old-school author would bring up cell phones, social media, and the internet in a tale that feels like it's from the mid-twentieth century. Apparently, this is an "updated" version of the original, which was published in 1974. It probably would've been best just to leave it in its original time; it does a disservice to modern young readers to assume they're incapable of comprehending or enjoying what, to them, would be "historical fiction". As it is, the updates come across a little forced, like a parent overusing slang from a younger generation without quite getting the nuance and context right, muddling an otherwise reasonably decent (for its original time) and atmospheric thriller.
Kit doesn't want to be at Blackwood from the beginning, especially not without her best friend; her remarried mother and stepfather, however, are going on an extended European honeymoon and need somewhere for Kit to stay, and Blackwood promised a premium experience they couldn't deny. At first, she thinks maybe that's why she has such a visceral reaction the first time she lays eyes on the school, formerly the home of a local eccentric... but, this being a thriller, her gut instinct is correct, and from the moment she sets foot on the property Kit is in more danger than she can understand. Students and staff are familiar characters one would expect in this kind of tale, from the intimidating headmistress (who is clearly hiding sinister secrets) to the bubble-headed blonde classmate to the swoonworthy young music instructor (and Duret's son) Jules to the kindly cook who provides backstory as needed for the plot and more. Nobody is particularly deep, but nobody really needs to be in this kind of plot. It's more about the slowly unfolding horrors, the nightmares and unusual expressions of spontaneous "gifts" that catch all the children off guard and elicit different reactions from each, as Kit slowly pieces together just why the four students were selected and what Duret intends for them. There are some logic stretches, but overall the tale does a decent job immersing the reader in Kit's hellish experiences as the horrors unfold and her efforts to resist and escape (which she does at least try, to her credit) are thwarted. The climax could've been punchier, the wrap-up quick in a way the left me slightly disappointed, but overall the story delivers the boarding-school-with-a-dark-secret thriller that it promised... though I still question the publisher's insistence on the "updates", especially when the first thing the story does is deprive the children of access to nearly all of the modern technology it itself shoehorned into the story. Why bother introducing the tech at all, anyway?

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Why Does Everything Have to Be About Race? (Keith Boykin)

Why Does Everything Have to Be About Race?: 25 Arguments That Won't Go Away
Keith Boykin
Bold Type Books
Nonfiction, History/Law/Politics/Sociology
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Slavery's been over for ages - why keep bringing up the past? Isn't "equal opportunity" just reverse racism against whites? Why can't we just ignore race altogether? Don't all lives matter? Every time someone mentions racial discrimination and inequality, these and more arguments inevitably pop up, shutting down discussions and derailing progress and demanding time and energy to answer questions that have quite definitively been answered innumerable times (just not the way that those who benefit from ongoing racial inequality would like). In this book, writer Keith Boykin dissects 25 common arguments that have been used to prevent real progress on issues of race, racism, and equity from history to modern times.

REVIEW: Reading this after the election of November 2024 - when a significant portion of the American public deliberately and definitively rejected progress on race (and pretty much every other front), setting the stage for a near-inevitable rapid race backwards on a scale I doubt I'll see recovered in my lifetime - puts a certain painful spin on this book, which deftly explores America's history of racial injustice and its often haphazard and temporary attempts to correct a problem of its own making. Boykin draws on history, personal experience, and current events to demonstrate how racism infiltrates every aspect of policy and life; the reason "everything has to be about race" is because there's no way for any remotely meaningful discussion on any problems facing the country today to occur without acknowledging how race has skewed America and its ostensible promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness since before the founding documents were drafted. It would be like trying to discuss forestry without talking about all that pesky woody plant life everyone keeps dragging into the conversation. The fact that these policies rooted in historic and ongoing racism also tangibly hurt other demographics makes it all the more urgent that they be addressed, but arguments like the ones presented here are designed to keep the topic muddled and turn those demographics against each other, tiring themselves out with explanations and infighting and semantics.
By turns informative, inspiring, and depressing, it makes for interesting reading, though I sadly can't help but suspect that a nation that hasn't apparently learned a thing in over two hundred years of existence - that apparently would rather slit its own throat and throw itself into the grasp of an avowed and proud traitor and authoritarian, potentially abandoning democracy altogether, in a pivotal election where race was very much a factor - is unlikely to ever actually address the problems of race and racism and systemic inequality without near-complete self immolation first... and maybe not even then.

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Zero Sum Game (S. L. Huang)

Zero Sum Game
The Cas Russell series, Book 1
S. L. Huang
Tor
Fiction, Action/Humor/Sci-Fi/Thriller
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Some people are good at math. Some are great at it. And then there's Cas Russell, a woman to whom the whole world is a series of numbers and equations in constant flow around her, enabling her to perform seemingly-superhuman feats. Rather than use her gifts to make a killing in business or at a casino, she instead takes freelance jobs finding things that have been lost... even people. Tracking down Courtney, a wayward girl who got sucked into the clutches of a Colombian drug cartel, is just another day on the job to Cas. But something isn't adding up about this job. Why would drug lords and federal agencies alike take such a particular interest in an unnoteworthy, expendable mule? Why is there an ex-cop PI on her tail almost from the moment they escape the cartel compound, babbling nonsense about secret projects and assassinations and mind control? And who has decided the Cas herself is now a sufficient threat that her contacts are getting killed? Cas may not have many (or any) real friends, and her morals may be generously described as charcoal gray, but that just makes her a very, very bad enemy...

REVIEW: With a snarky bad-ass heroine and action straight from the first page, Zero Sum Game starts on a strong note, quickly establishing Cas and her abilities (as well as her not-quite-friend Rio, a psychopath who ironically is the only person she trusts to have her back). It stayed strong through most of its length, until an ending that felt like a betrayal and letdown of most everything that came before.
In the vein of many a mercenary or bounty hunter, Cas is not a white-hat good girl; the book opens after she's already killed numerous people breaking into the drug lords' compound outside of Los Angeles, and it's not long before the body count ticks higher during the escape with Courtney. She is, however, interesting, a compelling character with a nice, quick-witted voice and an intriguing ability as she uses her beyond-prodigal grasp of mathematics to pick her way through firefights without a scratch (using formulae to calculate the location of shooters via echos and vectors, figuring out force and optimal angles of attack in a heartbeat, etc.). If it all stretches credulity a bit, well, it's basically a superhero plot, and math as a superpower is less implausible than mutation from a radioactive spider bite or other gimmicks. It isn't long before Cas realizes just how much more there is to this seemingly-routine rescue mission, but it still takes some convincing before she realizes the truth about the threat: a secret society with an apparent mind reader who can manipulate people with just a single conversation, driving them to spill secrets, betray friends and family, even murder or commit suicide, all thinking it's their own idea. For a woman who has always been self-reliant, who relies on her brain and her calculations, this is a horror beyond anything, the idea that she might not even be able to trust her own memories or thoughts. Despite her lone-wolf instincts and inherently distrustful nature, she finds herself picking up a small handful of new allies (who are familiar tropes, but decently done) even before she admits to herself that this is a threat she cannot compute down to zero without help... and even then, victory may not be a sure formula. Being around other people forces her to see herself as others see her - making her question her utter disregard for humans, her casual willingness to resort to lethal force as though lives were just more numbers to impersonally manipulate - but does not lead to an instant personality shift. She is who she is, for better or worse, but perhaps she could become a slightly more ethical version of herself, especially when confronted with an enemy whose rationale and methodology repel her, but which seem disturbingly familiar.
As mentioned, this is a fast-paced book with few lulls, punctuated by periodic snark. A few of the setbacks seemed avoidable or foreseeable, but overall I was enjoying it... until the ending. Granted, this is just the first book in an apparently trilogy, but the ending felt like it ripped away Cas's agency and invalidated most of what she and her companions sacrificed. It was enough to knock a solid star off the rating, and make me uninterested in future adventures with Cas. Why bother, when the equation just comes to zero in the end?

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The City in the Middle of the Night (Charlie Jane Anders)

The City in the Middle of the Night
Charlie Jane Anders
Tor
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Many generations ago, aboard a battered colony ship, humans came to the tidally-locked world of January, hoping to build a new home in the narrow strip between burning daylight and lethally-cold darkness... and barely survived. Now, what civilization remains mostly exists in two cities: Xiosphant, a rigid authoritarian state obsessed with strictly-enforced timekeeping, and Argelo, a chaotic place run by quarreling crime families. But with resources dwindling and the last technology of their ancestors wearing out beyond repair in the resource-poor land, even these holdouts of humanity may be living on borrowed time...
Sophie clawed her way to a place in the Gymnasium college of Xiosphant from a rough background on the city outskirts, hoping to make a better life for herself, only to be pulled into the orbit of her privileged roommate Bianca. They spend many a "night" - the period when windows are shuttered across the city, a strict curfew designed to encourage "natural" circadian rhythms on a world with no night and day cycle - whispering rebellious dreams of a future where Xiosphant may be freed from its rigid rules and tyrannical leaders, meeting up with fellow progressive students. Sophie just knows that Bianca will someday change their world, and would do anything to protect the girl she can't admit she loves (a forbidden notion in this city, girls loving girls) - so she takes the blame when the city guards raid a meeting. As punishment, Sophie is sent to her certain death, beyond the mountain on the night side of Xiosphant, where she runs into a deadly native "crocodile"... but, instead of killing her, it forges a telepathic connection, upending everything Sophie was taught about January.
As a child, Mouth was raised by the nomadic people known as the Citizens, who traveled endlessly between the world's two cities and outlying settlements, back when travel was even possible. But the others were slaughtered, leaving her the sole survivor to remember their ways. She joined up with a smuggler group, the Resourceful Couriers, the closest thing left to traders between Argelo and Xiosphant in these dangerous times, but it's not the same, and there's still a huge hole in her heart. Then, in Xiosphant, she learns that the city ruler holds a sacred Citizen artifact known as the Invention in the palace vaults: a compendium of the lost people's knowledge and myths, things even Mouth never learned in her time among them. Her obsession to rescue this last vestige of her lost people leads her into the orbit of a group of student radicals plotting an attack against the palace - a group led by a young woman named Bianca.

REVIEW: Set in an inhospitable world of extremes - social, physical, and biological - at a time of disruption, The City in the Middle of the Night offers a decently realized setting and flawed characters, most of whom learn the hard way that even the best intentions and ideas rarely survive contact with the battleground of the real world, and even love may not be enough to stop everything from falling apart.
Sophie starts out a naive student, dazzled by new ideas and new opportunities at the Gymnasium, but mostly by the wealthy party girl Bianca. In a culture that considers same-sex attraction taboo, she does not even recognize her own infatuation with her roommate, falling into orbit around the stronger personality and getting caught up in other people's ideas and goals. When an act of petty theft threatens to derail Bianca's plans and "destiny" (in Sophie's eyes) to change their rigid society for the better, Sophie takes the blame... not knowing the guards intend to not just jail her, but make an example of her as a warning to other young radicals. Still, she's perfectly willing to die knowing that Bianca will be spared - and then she meets "Rose", the "crocodile" (many animals and plants on January carry names from Earth, for all that the descriptions make it clear how unlike their Earth namesakes they are) who turns out to be not a mindless killer animal, but an intelligent species with a civilization far older than humanity itself. For the first time, Sophie has a purpose that is not Bianca-shaped, hiding at a tea house on the fringes of the city (terrified of being spotted and identified as someone who should technically be dead; her post-traumatic stress over the near-execution haunts her for most of the novel) while sneaking out to the dark to meet up with "Rose" and exchange memories and a few smuggled trade goods... but the alien may have an ulterior motive, one that will eventually put her at odds with her own people.
Mouth, meanwhile, starts out rather unlikable, jaded and prone to self-isolating even with her closest smuggler companion Alyssa. Witnessing the gruesome deaths of the Citizens left a seeping wound in her soul that nobody else can understand, the loss of a culture no city-dweller would ever comprehend; she is haunted as much by what she never had a chance to know - she never completed the rites of passage that would have given her an adult name - as what she remembers. Only when she hears of the Invention in the Xiosphant palace - a blasphemy, seeing a sacred item of a traveling people kept in the vault of a city-dweller - does she come alive, determined to rescue it from the clutches of outsiders and reclaim some small token of the heritage that was torn from her. That plan involves cozying up to a group of local radical students and their leader Bianca, feigning sympathy and support but all the while just hoping to use them and their ill-conceived plans as a means to get into the palace. When things inevitably go south, the Resourceful Couriers wind up escorting fugitives Bianca and Sophie to the distant city of Argelo, a journey with fateful consequences for all involved, as relationships are realigned and true colors are revealed.
The world Anders crafts is interesting, with numerous odd native lifeforms and various human innovations and adaptations to life on a tidally-locked world (that almost seems a bit on-the-nose as a metaphor for individuals and societies struggling to find a survivable balance between light and dark). There are allusions to a deep, generations-long history on the planet January and even further back, through the generational mother ship to Earth, and all the cultural and historical entanglements that implies. While Xiosphant enforces cultural conformity, insisting that forgetting the past is the only way to heal the future, Argelo emphasizes exploring and expressing one's heritage. The ways in which people honor, distort, or attempt to erase the yesterdays that became today form one of the book's themes, along with explorations of cultural exploitation and appropriation (intentional and otherwise), societal upheaval and change, climate collapse colliding with tribalism, toxic relationships, trauma responses, and more. These themes can sometimes feel a little heavy-handed, for all that they acknowledge the complexities involved, offering no clear-cut answers or preachy Lessons. Characters could also be complex, though I admit getting frustrated by Sophie's persistent inability to see the truth about Bianca long past the point where that truth was readily visible (and she herself acknowledged it, before falling right back into her old schoolgirl-with-a-crush habit to inevitably disastrous consequences). It ultimately lost a half-star for an abrupt and ambiguous ending that made me check the audiobook file twice to make sure it hadn't somehow skipped a chapter or three of wrap-up, plus the aforementioned frustration and some meandering of the story now and again.

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Finna (Nino Cipri)

Finna
The LitenVerse series, Book 1
Nino Cipri
Tordotcom
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: If retail work is Hell, then the Swedish-based home furnishing store LitenVärld is its own circle of that Hell. It's bad enough dealing with the disorienting, mazelike floor plan composed of a series of bizarre themed rooms, but now Ava has to cope with a bad breakup involving another employee, Jules. She even shuffled her schedule to avoid being there at the same time as them, even though the odds of the two crossing paths in the cavernous place were minimal. Then Derek calls out sick one dismal February day, so Ava has to slog in to work - and, of course, who does she run into almost first thing in the door but Jules. Just one day, she tells herself. She can get through just this one day in the same building as her ex. What could go wrong?
When a distraught customer tells the manager that her grandmother has vanished, Ava doesn't find it too alarming. Hell, she's an employee and even she gets turned around in this place. But when she goes to look where the woman was last spotted, she finds two things: Jules, and a weird room that definitely was not on the floor plan this morning... a room just beyond a weird glowing purple ring.
According to the manager and a poorly-dubbed training video, this is "just" a wormhole; the poor old woman must've wandered through into one of countless parallel dimensions with their own parallel LitenVärlds, some less hospitable than others. There used to be an entire team dedicated to wormhole retrieval, but cost cutting measures left the store with just a handheld "finna" device to track the wayward traveler, to be carried through the portal by whichever employees draw the short straw - inevitably, Ava and Jules.

REVIEW: I have been inside an IKEA (which "LitenVärld" is quite clearly inspired by) only once in my life, but that was more than enough: a strange, cramped maze of stuff, funneling customers from points A to Z without deviation or delay, disgorging the masses at the food court/checkout like spitting products off the end of an entirely impersonal assembly line. As dehumanizing and disorienting as that shopping experience was, I can only imagine how it feels to employees... and if an extra dimension or a thousand were tacked on, that would be a punishment worthy of anything Dante dreamed up.
Cipri takes the hellscape that is modern retail employment and crosses it with the multiverse, which adds a whole new chapter of canned responses to the managerial handbook and a whole new tier of instructional videos to be shown to hapless employees. In LitenVärld, the opening of a wormhole in the middle of the store is just an unfortunate side-effect of their innovative layouts, and one more onerous duty for management to drop onto underpaid and undertrained employees - incentivized not by bonuses or overtime (perish the thought), but with gift cards to a cheap restaurant... because, by management's logic, what low-wage worker wouldn't risk their lives for a discounted bowl of pasta? Ava already didn't want to be at work to begin with, still nursing a days-old breakup. Jules loathes every minute of every day they have to spend in the horrid place; the chance to explore the multiverse appeals strongly to the wanderlust they've nursed since childhood but have so rarely been able to afford to indulge. The two are forced to cooperate as they step through the purple ring and into their first other dimension, guided by the fickle "finna" that points the way but utterly fails to warn them of the many dangers they encounter in the worlds they're compelled to cross (because of course it can't be as simple as finding the old woman in the first place they go... or, rather, it both is and isn't, in the way of multiverses, and I can't get into more detail without some spoilers). Along the way, Ava and Jules must both re-evaluate their relationship, which was not so much a matter of one of them being right and the other wrong but of two flawed people whose broken edges wound up cutting each other rather than aligning. Even if they were ill-fated as lovers, could they possibly still be friends? Sometimes it takes fleeing from the dangers of a monster-filled dimension to rediscover what truly matters in life, and who matters in it.
With a certain dark humor and a sense of wonder about the possibilities of the multiverse, as well as some horror overtones now and again, Finna manages to be short enough to not overplay its premise or its characters, though even then I could find Ava trying as a main character now and again. I'm not sure I feel any need to read onward in the series, as this is a likely a gimmick with a limited shelf life.

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Gunpowder Moon (David Pedreira)

Gunpowder Moon
David Pedreira
HarperVoyager
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: The Moon smells like gunpowder, a cordite stink noted by everyone from the first astronauts to the miners of the late twenty-first century, but no weapon has ever been fired there. Until now...
When veteran Caden Dechert took a job to the Moon, he hoped he could finally leave the worst of Earth behind. Even a massive climate collapse that nearly dropped civilization back to the Dark Ages for a few decades couldn't break humanity's war addiction, and Dechert is beyond tired of killing for whatever cause top brass cooks up. So far, space has been subject of a tenuous peace, even as commercial ventures race to harvest water and raw materials (particularly helium-3, the fuel that may take humans to the stars) and spacefaring nations stake their claims everywhere from the Moon to Jupiter. Sure, there's been some saber-rattling and diplomatic one-upmanship, particularly between America and China, but nobody would be foolish enough to start anything on the lunar surface. Up here, the rule is help whoever needs helping, because death is too close at hand for everyone. Nationalism and violence are old Earth habits, best left behind.
Then Dechert and the crew of the American mining base Sea of Serenity 1 discover acts of sabotage on remote equipment... and one of their own dies after someone plants a bomb on their vehicle.
The obvious suspect is their nearest lunar neighbor, the Chinese base New Beijing 2. But even as the military and the mining administrators ramp up the rhetoric and start stockpiling weapons for the first-ever offworld armed conflict, Dechert just can't bring himself to believe it. He knows the commander of New Beijing 2. It just doesn't make sense that the Chinese would provoke a conflict like this when they have at least as much to lose as the Americans, and the logistics stretch credulity to the breaking point. With everyone else eager to spill blood, Dechert races against the clock to figure out who really killed his crewmate, and why they seem so eager to get more people killed.

REVIEW: Gunpowder Moon has an interesting concept and setting, and a decent enough main character in the war-weary veteran-turned-mining-base-commander Dechert. At some point, though, I found myself left behind by the story and characters, lost in a sea of flashbacks and tactics and a testosterone-heavy cast.
From the beginning, the innate strangeness of lunar existence is clearly established, along with the Moon's inherent hostility (or indifference indistinguishable from hostility) to Earth life. This is not a place humans will ever really belong, not when jagged grains of regolith perpetually defy the best filtration and threaten machinery and life support, temperatures flux between deep freeze and lethally hot, solar radiation makes prolonged surface exposure deadly, gravity and distances are deceptive, and more threats await even the experienced astronaut. Nor are extraplanetary bases technological utopias; sent by penny-pinching private conglomerates and cash-strapped desperate nations still clawing their way back to their former glory after global disasters, everything that doesn't directly increase productivity and profit margins is neglected, regardless of how it might endanger the lives of those working there. Crews tend to be eccentric and tightly-knit groups, a byproduct of close quarters living in an inherently dangerous environment (like life in a war zone or on an oil rig, only exponentially more isolated), and if you can't trust the guy (or, very rarely, girl) in the bunk next to yours, you can't trust anyone. Or, at least, that's how it used to be, before the sabotage comes to light and the Moon experiences its first homicide.
Dechert left active military service when he could no longer take the killing and the losses among his comrades and subordinates; they always start feeling like family to him, and somehow they always die while he survives. His lunar job was supposed to be a way to get away from all that, yet he nevertheless finds himself thinking of the little crew of Sea of Serenity 1 as yet another family... so when one of them is killed - not in a combat situation where death is part of the ambient risks, but on the Moon, the one place humans have yet to sully with violence - he can't help but take it personally. Even from the start, he knows something doesn't sound right about the official party line, that it was all China's fault. But how is he supposed to find the truth when his every message is monitored by both the military and the mining corporation, and will anyone even listen once it becomes clear how many people were champing at the bit to declare a lunar war? Given his own experiences, which are related through numerous flashbacks, one would think Dechert would be a little less credulous that the wheels of war could be so easily stopped by the efforts of one man, though at least part of that is his own sheer desperation to end the insanity that has ruined his life and so many others. Even as he digs for answers, the base is taken over by soldiers and things quickly spin out of control.
It's clear that Pedreira did quite a bit of research to get the physics and the tactics right... and here is where the story started to lose me, as the technical details and tactics grow into long, sometimes confusing slogs and occasional name soup. Peripheral characters often feel like too-familiar military sci-fi tropes (particularly the lone woman on Dechert's crew, Lane, who is never overtly ogled or romanced by him yet somehow still feels objectified). The pacing, between those slogs, is pretty brisk, and it builds to a reasonably satisfactory conclusion, though the wrap-up after the fact becomes another slog, driving home its themes about war seeming to be an innate and inextricable trait of the human species with the subtlety of a meteor. I've read worse stories, but once more this ultimately just isn't my cup of cocoa.

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Good Girls Don't Die (Christina Henry)

Good Girls Don't Die
Christina Henry
Berkley
Fiction, Thriller
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Celia has no memory of her life before she found herself standing in a suburban kitchen, with a young girl (a daughter?) demanding lunch and a husband on his way to work. Nothing about her home, her family, or her job - owner of a small-town family Italian restaurant - rings a bell, either, but whenever she tries too hard to remember, she gets a splitting headache. There's also something very strange about the town and the people, almost like they're reciting lines from a cozy mystery story rather than talking as normal people talk. When she finds the body of an irascible neighbor in the dumpster and the local police consider her a prime suspect, her amnesia becomes the least of her worries...
Allie's twenty-first birthday was supposed to be spent at the beach with her best friends Cam and Madison - until Brad, Cam's controlling boyfriend, invited himself and his friend Steve (also Madison's beau) along and unilaterally changed their destination to a remote cabin deep in the woods. It's just like something out of the slasher movies Allie loves to watch... until strange noises in the middle of the night make the slasher comparison all too real...
Maggie doesn't remember what happened after she fell asleep last night, but she wakes up dressed in a strange, numbered uniform with nine other similarly-disoriented women. A uniformed man informs them that they each have had a loved one abducted - Maggie is shown a brief video of her own terrified daughter as proof - and that, if they fail to complete a maze and series of challenges in time, those loved ones will be executed. Refusal to participate brings swift and lethal repercussions. She always used to think she'd be a solid survivor in the young adult dystopian tales she reads, but soon learn that words on a page are a far cry from living the nightmare...
Three women, three impossible situations, three story genres seemingly sprung to life around them - and, unbeknownst to any of them, one common enemy who means to see none of them walk away.

REVIEW: I've previous read and quite enjoyed another story by Christina Henry (The Girl in Red, an apocalypse-tinged riff on "Little Red Riding Hood"), and was looking for a seasonally appropriate read, so when this popped up on Libby I figured it was worth a shot. While the premise is interesting, it all gets drug down in the ratings by an ending that lingers too long and hammers home its point too hard, long past effectiveness.
Starting with Celia, the book tells each woman's story as their ordinary lives quickly dissolve into scenarios straight from a horror movie. The situations and protagonists are different enough to avoid straight-up repetition, though it's clear early on that there are similarities throughout. Even as they realize how things don't quite add up, a slow accumulation of details and discrepancies that seem more like staging than reality, they have no choice but to live through the terrible things happening to and around them even as they try to put the bigger puzzle pieces together. While none of them turn out to be the superstar heroines of their favored genres they imagined they'd become, they all find ways to step up to the plate and match wits with their apparent captors. Hints of what's really going on come from between-chapter snippets of online chat rooms and conversations between genre fans, conversations that are intruded upon by toxic trolls and take ugly turns.
On their own, the three tales almost work like a themed short story collection. Maybe Good Girls Don't Die would've been better served by being just that, leaving more mystery over how they each ended up in their surreal, borderline preternaturally nightmarish situations. But, skirting spoiler territory, what happens after they figure out the gist of what's going on and the three threads come together becomes an overlong slog, reducing their common enemy/enemies to caricature levels that sell short the central themes of misogyny and toxic masculinity turning the lives of girls and women into everyday horror tales, too often turning us against each other. (I would've thought the baddies were too over-the-top, but recent current events and political campaigns unfortunately show how many people apparently embrace that level of extreme, violent contempt for anyone without a particular set of genitalia.) Given what they had to go through to get to that point in the story, the things they had to do and who they had to become, that final bit should not have taken nearly so long to drag out to the conclusion. As a reader, I more than got Henry's point long, long before the book ended.

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October Site Update

Happy Halloween! The main Brightdreamer Books site has been updated with the month's new reviews.

Enjoy!

Apocalypse Kings (Derek Landy)

Apocalypse Kings
The Skulduggery Pleasant series, Book 5.6
Derek Landy
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA? Adventure/Fantasy/Horror/Humor/Mystery
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Adedayo thought he'd been cursed when objects started flying off shelves around him. It wasn't until his Nigerian grandmother came to stay with his family in Dublin that he learned about the hidden community of sorcerers and adepts and other bearers of magic, a family trait that skipped his mother but apparently manifested in him. Unfortunately, she spoke little English and he knew almost no Yoruban, and she passed away before teaching him more than a few small tricks - but she left him a strange wooden box and a cryptic phrase he struggles to understand. Inside the box are three powerful gods, trapped since the wars against the Faceless Ones... and when Adedayo inadvertently unleashes them, something terrible is bound to happen.
Fortunately, the next day at school, he meets a peculiar new girl: Valkyrie Cain, another mage. Along with her partner Skulduggery Pleasant - a literal walking skeleton - she has come to track down the so-called Apocalypse Kings before they can enact their eons-old plan. They have reason to believe that the gods are currently hiding somewhere in his school... but their efforts to blend in as they search are hardly seamless. The two investigators may need a little help with this job, but what can an untrained sorcerer who can barely summon a spark do against a trio of vengeance-minded deities?

REVIEW: This novella feels like an oddball in the series, and it is, written later as a (near) standalone project for World Book Day. This may explain why it feels a little neither-here-nor-there; it ostensibly takes place after the fifth book (which I just read via audiobook earlier this very week), but Valkyrie and Skulduggery don't quite "feel" like the characters I just left. Of course, this is written from an outsider's perspective - not just outside the core duo, but outside the Dublin magical community - but even given Adedayo's ignorance of the quite terrible and pivotal horrors that just elapsed in Dublin's magical community (though one might think he would've noticed the citywide lockdown, even if he didn't know the truth), this story just doesn't seem to fit where the chronology claims it fits.
Disregarding some wobbly continuity with the larger whole, the story has a more or less similar aesthetic, humor melding with horror. Some deliberate tweaks of school story cliches add to the humor, such as when the obligatory "meet the cliques" lunchroom talk reveals that nobody's really that shallow as to identify themselves solely by one aspect of their personalities. Adedayo himself is technically 15, but reads a bit younger, possibly because he's such a neophyte to magic and also because he's still very confused and unsettled about his own life, not sure what he even wants to do now, let alone in the future; he's in debate club because he was told he needs an extracurricular for future college applications, but he hates arguing and always loses. When Valkyrie arrives after the gods escape, he's relieved that there's someone older and more experienced to take charge. Granted, she's only a year older, but she acts almost adult in her confidence, not too surprising given what she's been through. Skulduggery, meanwhile, tries to go undercover as a schoolteacher, complicated by the fact that it's been ages - almost literally - since he had to interact with "mortals", and he's not even used to wearing a (false) flesh-and-blood face. When things inevitably go wrong, Adedayo ends up being the one who has to step up. Things wrap up pretty well by the end.
I came close to shaving a half-star for that "this doesn't quite fit" sense, which made me feel a bit more like I was reading rather good but noncanon fanfic than an official series entry, but wound up giving it the benefit of the doubt.

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The Truth About Animals (Lucy Cooke)

The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife
Lucy Cooke
Basic Books
Nonfiction, Animals/History/Science
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Since humans first began noticing the natural world, misconceptions have abounded - not just in folklore or myths, but in the works of apparent experts and theoretically learned people... and not just in ancient times. It's not all just harmless ignorance, either; bad press and flawed understanding can substantially harm conservation efforts and the future of our planet. Zoologist and author Lucy Cooke examines several species that have borne the brunt of our species's seeming inability to separate fact from fiction and superstition from science, from bats to storks and eels to hippos, even the venerated panda.

REVIEW: Anthropomorphizing nature is one of the oldest human traits, turning them into supernatural agents or morality lessons or embodiments of our own aspirations or failings or plain old wishful thinking. Unfortunately, this idealized thinking can prove a serious problem when one is trying to understand the truth, as demonstrated in this examination of several key species. One would think that we'd be over that by now as a species, or at least science would be over that as a discipline, with our advanced understanding of so many fields and our increasing awareness of our own faults, but, as Cooke demonstrates, even in modern times myths and mysteries persist, with many secrets the natural world is still reluctant to offer up for our edification.
With a focus on the "Western" world's views of nature and how the roots of science and understanding were so hopelessly entangled with ideas that appear quite ridiculous now (but at the time were often implicitly believed to be true), Cooke explores the history of natural science and the people who both advanced and regressed the field. From the notion that eels spontaneously generated in river mud to beavers having hidden human-like communities complete with law enforcement, many false notions were rooted in the ancient classical world, where armchair experts repeated travelers tales as gospel truth, often with a dash of moralizing that would be raised to an art form in medieval bestiaries. Animals like the sloth were dismissed and denigrated by Europeans as "useless", when in fact their slow-motion lifestyle is such a successful way to survive in their native habitat that it evolved twice, while bats were treated as agents of evil in much of the world because theoretically intelligent H. sapiens brains apparently could not wrap their minds around something that couldn't be neatly defined as "beast" or "bird", and hyenas were considered cowardly and nasty because they just plain look less noble than a lion (who, it turns out, scavenge hyena kills more often than hyenas scavenge lion kills, despite popular media depictions). Even scientists in "enlightened" ages often skewed data based on their own religious or moral assumptions, even deliberately burying observations they deemed "unsuitable" for general knowledge (such as the sex lives of penguins - especially ironic, given how the nature documentary March of the Penguins was embraced in conservative circles as depicting an ideal monogamous family). Politics also invariably come into play; for many years, it was a commonly understood "fact" that North American animals (and, of course, natives) were inferior to their European counterparts in every conceivable way... a notion that was difficult to dislodge when most of the "experts" penning natural science resided in Europe. Even today, politics warps popular perceptions: for instance, "panda diplomacy" has created a highly artificial image of the panda as a cutesy but clumsy and naturally deficient "teddy bear" in desperate need of human intervention to even reproduce, when in fact human interference and captive breeding has created an entire population of animals so divorced from their very capable wild cousins that reintroductions almost invariably end in disaster. (As for the notion they can't even breed competently, that's yet another result of humans projecting human ideas and moralities onto wild animals; pandas breed just fine outside of captivity, just not very well in monogamous pairings that are forced on them in zoos.) The only thing they need from people is to be left alone with sufficient natural habitat to survive... but that's something nobody seems particularly interested in hearing, let alone doing, even in their native country. And then there's how people have used/abused animals through the ages, where even the best intentions often go awry; the African clawed frog, once a boon in the days before simple chemical strip pregnancy tests, is responsible for the worldwide spread of a toxic fungus devastating global amphibian populations after they escaped or were released into nonnative environments.
As part of her research, Cooke talked with many working conservationists and scientists who are doing their level best to dispel old myths and bad press before time runs out on the conservation clock, as it has for too many species. Misunderstandings and mysteries still plague the field, despite modern technology being brought to bear on matters such as eel reproduction (a reverse-salmon situation, where adults breed in the ocean and the young swim upriver to live for years until returning to the Sargasso Sea to breed... though, as of the book's writing, apparently even now nobody has witnessed the act). There is still so much to learn (and unlearn), even as a fresh tide of intentional ignorance seems to be rising globally in the form of authoritarian governments and would-be theocrats gaining traction.
At times, I'd hoped for a little less focus on the "Western" perception of animals, and maybe a little more on how native populations considered the creatures they lived beside for countless generations (though even they were not above anthropomorphizing and other misunderstandings). The whole is a plea for humans to step off our pedestal and actually look at the world around us, that we are part of (little as many seem willing to admit it). Seen on their own terms, even the "lowest" and "ugliest" animal is valuable and wonderful, with much to teach us if we're willing to learn... which we can't do until we stop insisting we're the pinnacle to which all others should kneel in subservience.

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Mortal Coil (Derek Landy)

Mortal Coil
The Skulduggery Pleasant series, Book 5
Derek Landy
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA Adventure/Fantasy/Horror/Humor/Mystery
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Since becoming skeleton detective Skulduggery Pleasant's apprentice and partner, Stephanie - now Valkyrie Cain - has kept very few secrets from him... but this time, she has a very good reason. Ever since realizing that she herself is the ill-omened Darquesse, destined (or so the psychics insist) to destroy the world, she has been searching on her own for a way to change the future. Surely she would never do such terrible things on her own, so someone must gain control of her true name. Thus, she hatches a dangerous plan to seal that name so that nobody can turn it against her - only realizing how far in over her head she has wandered when it's too late.
As she's coping with that, the fallout of the destruction of Dublin's Sanctuary, the ruling body of Ireland's hidden magical community, continues to resonate through the country. Tracking down the perpetrator brings them no closer to figuring out who was behind it; the attack was too big and well orchestrated to be the work of one rogue mage. Now a foreign assassin known as the Tesseract is methodically and ruthlessly cleaning up loose ends before any of those threads lead back to the real culprit... culprits who may well already be infiltrating the new Council of Elders as Dublin's sorcerers regroup. When dark Remnants - malevolent shadow spirits that infest the living like parasites - are unleashed by the secretive necromancers, Dublin's magical community may finally be destroyed for good - and, against all of Valkyrie's will and sacrifices and efforts to the contrary, Darquesse may be unleashed.

REVIEW: After a slightly rushed fourth installment, the series returns to form here, beginning a new and darker journey for Valkyrie, Skulduggery, and their associates... one that will change everything going forward, making enemies of friends and leaving more than one dead.
After learning of her foreseen destiny as Darquesse, Valkyrie tries her hand at solo problem solving, erroneously believing that her previous adventures, not to mention the initiative that drove her to do the near-impossible and rescue Skulduggery from the dimension of the banished Faceless Ones, mean she's up to tackling any magical problem that comes her way. (She also, naturally, is not sure what her other magical companions would do if they learned the truth, given how ruthless sorcerers can be when facing threats less extreme than this.) The bargain she strikes to seal her name takes the series well and truly into horror territory, showing just how far she's come from the relatively innocent girl who never suspected the truth about magic. She's also 16 now, and dating, which marks another transition as the series leaves behind any lingering traces of middle grade territory (which were already ghostly thin in the previous installment) to enter young adult territory. Her boyfriend Fletcher may technically be a couple years older, but he's still rather boyish and awkward in relationships... and the outcast vampire Caelan makes no secret of his own growing attraction/obsession, which Valkyrie does not intentionally encourage even as she can't help but be a bit intrigued despite herself. Fortunately, she has friends to help keep her grounded, though given the secrets she's hiding she spends less time around them than she probably should at this stage in her magical training and overall life circumstances. (The fact that she'll soon have a baby sibling yet she's still over-reliant on her mirror reflection stand-in - which has become unusually outspoken for what's supposed to be an unthinking construct - shows just how much she's disappearing into the magical world and the loner role of "Valkyrie Cain", leaving the ordinary life of "Stephanie" behind, for all that she keeps insisting that she's excited to be a big sister and misses ordinary family time.) Without spoilers, the Valkyrie at the end of the book is a much different young woman than the one at the start, having done a lot of growing up and endured some very hard knocks and harsh lessons along the way... but, then, the entire Dublin magical community is not the same by the end, either.
As for the main arc, after the necromancers inadvertently trigger the release of the captured Remnants, things take a very, very dark and dangerous turn. They fixate on Darquesse as their future leader and messiah, someone who will give them the world of death and chaos they've always craved, and they're more than willing to destroy Dublin to get it, spreading like a dark plague through magical and mortal worlds alike. Skulduggery and company have their work cut out for them as they race to keep ahead of the danger... then race to try to find and reactivate the magical Soul-Catcher device that was used to trap them the last time they were unleashed, assuming the mechanism is still functional after so many decades of neglect. Through the influence of the Remnants, friends become foes in the blink of an eye; with the exception of Skulduggery, who is already dead, nobody can be trusted. This makes for some strange bedfellows by the time the climax rolls around, and some very interesting developments.
As in previous installments, there's little down time and no shortage of surprises, as well as sprinklings of humor throughout. Also as in previous segments, the end does not undo nearly all the damage wrought during the story, leaving things very different than where they began. I'm looking forward to seeing where things go from here.

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