October Site Update

I finally got the October site update posted, archiving and cross-linking the month's reviews.

Enjoy!

Space Opera (Catherynne M. Valente)

Space Opera
Catherynne M. Valente
Saga Press
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: Despite what that human Fermi once speculated on an insignificant watery world, life is surprisingly abundant across the universe - but where there's life, there's going to be war. A galaxy-spanning, world-burning, species-snuffing-out war, to be precise, waged while that watery world remained blissfully unaware and conducted its own quaint species slaughtering. Eventually, the survivors metaphorically dusted themselves off, came to their many senses, and decided there had to be a better way to decide which species were sentient enough to spare and which were acceptable losses in the universal economy. What they came up with was the Metagalactic Grand Prix, an annual musical exposition which determined resource allotment, trade deals, and single sales - and, to any newly discovered civilization, whether they would be allowed to live or would be reduced to their constituent molecules for the safety of the neighborhood.
Danesh was king of the pop charts as Decibel Jones, lead singer of the Absolute Zeros, for a blink of an eye. Now he's in a death spiral of drugs and alcohol and self-loathing as his solo "career" collapses in a heap of flaming reviews and empty venues. He never recovered from the death of bandmate and lover Mira Wonderful Star, and his music has shown it. But when aliens finally make contact with Earth, obligating the species to send a representative to the Grand Prix and prove their worth, he finds himself selected as humanity's ambassador to the stars, along with his straight-laced ex-bandmate (and also ex-lover) Oort St. Ultraviolet. Unless Decibel Jones can pull off the comeback of the millennium, the odds of humanity's survival are about absolute zero...

REVIEW: I'm trying to think of how to describe what I just read, and am struggling... in a good way, for once. Space Opera exists at a peculiar intersection of Douglas Adams, global and interstellar politics, philosophical musings on the nature of sentience and life, utter surrealism, and the power of rock and roll.
Far from being generally humanoid with improbable head growths, the aliens here can be anything from self-aware plants to parasitic viruses to time- and alternate-reality-traveling red pandas to self-aware artificial entities; interludes explore the history and peculiarities and interactions of various species, much of which ultimately comes into play, if as a subplot, in the main story. That story can be a little thin on action - Decibel and Oort are more or less drug along and forced to run the metaphoric gauntlet, and even then have to be prodded more than once to get them to move - but has surprising layers beneath the overt humor and absurdities. Unlike Douglas Adams's genial white middle-class nobody Arthur Dent, Decibel and Oort and the late Mira embrace modern England's diversity in color and origin and sexuality, explosions of neon and holographic glitter in the face of drab tweed... a diversity that many rail against as unseemly and "nontraditional", which is not so much a digression as a theme that runs through the story: how xenophobia leads nowhere but ultimate destruction. The characters are, naturally, rather flawed; rock and roll, and music in general, doesn't grow from an unfurrowed field. They struggle and often fail against those flaws, leaning into them for comfort and familiarity, even as they recognize the harm they're doing to themselves, their loved ones, and the potential fate of an entire planet. On a sentence level, every word and turn of phrase, while sometimes requiring a little extra focus to navigate from the start to the end, counts.
I almost trimmed a half-star for that thinness mentioned earlier, but this isn't really just the story of Decibel Jones and the Zeros. It's the story of humanity, of history, of a galaxy of aliens who somehow found a way to not kill each other by recognizing the truly universal power of a power chord, and hope that maybe, somehow, impossible as it seems, comebacks can happen for even the most monstrous of primate-descended species. The whole book becomes a wild hallucination of a tale, a mesmerizing flurry of sights and sounds and ideas that can dazzle and dizzy and even overwhelm, yet it has a good beat and you can dance to it.

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide (Douglas Adams) - My Review
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (Grant Naylor) - My Review
The True Meaning of Smekday (Adam Rex) - My Review

Lumberjanes Volume 8 (Noelle Stevenson et al.)

Lumberjanes Vol. 8: Stone Cold
The Lumberjanes series, Issues 33 - 36
Noelle Stevenson, Brooke Allen, Grace Ellis, Kat Leyh, and Shannon Watters, illustrations by Maarta Laiho and Carey Pietsch
BOOM! Box
Fiction, MG? Adventure/Fantasy/Graphic Novel/Humor
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: The Lumberjanes of Roanoke cabin were looking forward to a nice, normal, and magic- and monster-free breakfast with their friends of Zodiac cabin. (It will also be a good chance to see how new Lumberjane Barney is settling into camp.) But instead of hugs and laughs, all they get is cold stares; everyone has been turned to solid stone! Just then, they see an old frenemy wandering around camp: the perpetual teen goddess Diana, who was supposed to have been exiled back to Olympus. Is she responsible for this? If not, can she find out who - or what - is? And will they ever get to share waffle sticks with Zodiac?

REVIEW: Like the previous installments, this is a fun little adventure of monsters, mayhem, and friendship to the max. There's some minor character progression along the way as the girls deal with imperfect families. Mostly, though, it's just an amusing diversion, a nice and needed dose of whimsy.

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Lightning Thief (Rick Riordan) - My Review
Lumberjanes Vol. 1 (Noelle Stevenson et al.) - My Review
Princeless: Save Yourself (Jeremy Whitley) - My Review

Voyage of the Basilisk (Marie Brennan)

Voyage of the Basilisk: A Memoir by Lady Trent
A Natural History of Dragons series, Book 3
Marie Brennan
Tor
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Lady Isabella Camherst has been the subject of rumor and scandal for years, ever since she dared declare herself a scientist (so unladylike, especially in proper Scirland) and dedicated her life to the pursuit of knowledge about dragons around the world. Her latest venture is certainly something only a madwoman would consider: setting forth on a sea voyage aboard the Basilisk around the globe to observe as many species of dragons and their relations as possible, from the arctic sea serpents to the tropical fire-lizards. With her, once more, is her companion and fellow scientist Tom and - for the first time - her young son Jake and his governess. As usual for Isabella, though, what started with clear and sound intentions quickly goes askew, thwarted by nature and politics and the wild, inscrutable ways of dragonkind, in a voyage that will become renowned the world over.

REVIEW: With distinct echoes of Darwin's voyage aboard the Beagle, Isabella's journey draws the reader further into her Victorian-flavored world undergoing its own age of discovery and enlightenment. As in previous volumes, she proves to be a dauntless, if not infallible, woman, often stumbling (or outright charging) into thorny predicaments. Around her grows a cast of friends and allies and the occasional enemy, though more enemies due to politics than personal matters. The subplot of preserved dragonbone - a potential breakthrough building material whose secret was discovered in the first book, but which could lead to the wholesale slaughter and extinction of dragons unless a synthetic substitute can be devised - continues, as the ramifications of previous failures and industrial spies lead to international fallout that complicates her voyage. On a personal level, Isabella still stumbles with social niceties and personal connections, as she attempts to bond with a son who (thus far) shows no interest in science or her personal passion for dragons. The adventurous story has few, if any, lulls, moving decently from the first page to the last as it traverses half the globe and introduces yet more dragons and their mysteries, while further exploring the legacy of the lost civilization known as Draconeans whose ruins can be found worldwide. I look forward to future volumes, book budget pending.

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Natural History of Dragons (Marie Brennan) - My Review
His Majesty's Dragon (Naomi Novik) - My Review
The Waking Fire (Anthony Ryan) - My Review

The Wendy (Erin Michelle Sky and Steven Brown)

The Wendy
The Tales of the Wendy series, Book 1
Erin Michelle Sky and Steven Brown
Trash Dogs Media LLC
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Like many of the foundlings who appeared overnight in 1700's London, Wendy Darling had no idea who her parents were or where she'd come from, but she does know where she wants to go: to sea, as captain of her own ship, living a life of bold adventure. Even though everyone tells her girls are good for nothing but marrying and mothering, she clings to her dream, learning navigation and fencing and other useful skills from a friend. At 17, Wendy takes her first step out into the world from the almshouse where she was raised when she joins the Home Office... but their mission is something she had never suspected. It turns out that England is under attack, and has been for years. Fiendish winged men known as the everlost raid and murder and steal away children, presumably to drink their blood. (All this is kept carefully under wraps, of course, lest the public panic.) Only women and dogs are sensitive to the smell of magic that precedes their arrival - and it's a toss-up which one is considered the more human to the men of the Home Office in general and their ruthless Captain, a man named Hook, in particular. Thus Wendy finds herself shipped off to Dover, but even though she proves herself worthy to the men in her platoon, she's still treated as a delicate and excitable object... until the day of their first everlost encounter. That's when she meets him, their leader, a mercurial young man whom she finds oddly enchanting and who, in turn, seems strangely enchanted with her: the one they call Peter Pan.

REVIEW: I knew, going into this, that it was a reshuffling/retelling of J. M. Barrie's classic children's story. I did not know just how tonally confused it would end up being, with canon and original characters randomly recast and sprinkled about in a story that never quite seems to get a bead on what it's aiming for.
It starts off quickly with a nice, breezy voice, establishing Wendy as a girl determined to take charge of her own destiny in defiance of everything 18th century England expects of young women... then it makes her so silly and internally inconsistent I was rolling my eyes at her more often than I was rooting for her. Or maybe my eyes rolled themselves; Wendy's facial features and body parts seem exceptionally prone to acting on their own, evidently without consulting her, in a literary trick that wore out its welcome long before the book ended. The authors also hammered home the "secret kiss in the corner of her mouth" line that Barrie used so sparingly, and with direct ties to the story arc and climax. Here, there's far less plot relevance to the term, and at least half the mentions of her face mention the "secret kiss" as a visible thing... maybe because every male (save Captain Hook) is irresistibly smitten. Yes, for all that the story tries to establish "the Wendy" as her own girl, forging her own destiny and earning the respect of her male peers, she is pretty much reduced to object status, a prize to be claimed and heart to be won, an animal to be coddled and patted on the head and not to be really taken seriously as a person. Nobody can think of her as a comrade and friend, evidently... not even Peter.
And here we get to one of the other major trouble spots: Peter Pan himself. The book tries to establish him as a possible romantic subject, but it runs into several stumbling blocks. First off, the canonical Peter Pan was inherently incapable of grown-up love; it was one of the defining features of his character. Secondly, the authors come at it with the same often-silly children's book voice that the rest of the story uses, making their attraction feel less like genuine chemistry or mystique and more like little children playing dress-up who blush and giggle and secretly cringe at the thought of cooties when forced to play-act gooey love stuff. Third... I have no idea, even by the end of the book, just what Peter and the everlost are in this world. They act like the lost boys, the perpetual kids playing pirate games and having adventures - but apparently they also raid England, kidnap children, and casually slaughter countless Home Office soldiers, all with the same tally-ho grins of their playacting, as though they don't get the concept of death at all. They also are described as having inhuman teeth and the ability to materialize hawk wings to fly with... though pixie dust still may be involved... sometimes... maybe...? The authors completely dance around the everlost, what they're doing, or why they're doing it - which makes no sense, given that they are Hook's sole obsession with the Home Office and Wendy is (sometimes) portrayed as a determined researcher who stops at nothing to get to the bottom of whatever subject she sets her mind to. (She's also aided by the only two nonwhite men in the entire book, who exist entirely to train the white English girl in service of her goals, which has some iffy racial connotations if you look at it for more than a second.) This is a massive hole in the middle of the story, made especially blatant when the whole plot centers on the everlost and Wendy's conflict when torn between her duty to England and Hook and her feelings when confronted with Peter in the flesh. The end is a jumble of whiplash loyalty shifts on the part of Wendy, concluding on a note that isn't particularly conclusive, though not a cliffhanger; it just sort of ends, unresolved, halfway through yet another tonal pivot, as though I'll automatically pick up the second volume to find out what's going on and who will claim the Wendy as the ultimate prize.
There were some nice moments and decent ideas swirling around in the depths of The Wendy. Unfortunately, my suspension of disbelief kept crashing into the ground.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Peter Pan (James M. Barrie) - My Review
Peter and the Starcatchers (Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson) - My Review
The Librarian: Little Boy Lost (Eric Hobbs) - My Review

Middlegame (Seanan McGuire)

Middlegame
Seanan McGuire
Tor
Fiction, Fantasy/Horror
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: Roger was a young boy when he first heard the girl's voice in his head, helping him solve his math homework. When Dodger needed help with spelling, he returned the favor. It seems impossible, or at least highly improbable, but the two share something akin to telepathy, though they live a continent apart and have never met. But there is more than mere coincidence at work. Though they don't know it, the two are the work of an alchemist who seeks control over the universe, part of an experiment that stretches back more than a century and has already spilled an ocean of blood. If they ever grow into the powers they were created to manifest, they may well doom themselves and the world... unless they can take control of their own fates. But how can they hope to do that when they don't even know who, or what, they truly are?

REVIEW: This is an unusual book. Weaving in ancient alchemy, language, mathematics, strained sibling relationships, the pain and isolation of genius children, and even the power of children's literature (a beloved in-world book, Over the Woodward Wall, turns out to have been written by an alchemist with unsavory ulterior motives), McGuire crafts a compelling, often-harrowing story that spans over two decades - and more, if one takes into account the time travel element. It takes a while to get the feel of the story, and the characters, while always interesting, aren't always likable. Events range from simple moments of human interaction and quiet beauty to gruesomely detailed pain and terror; there's a trigger warning-worthy plot point involving one character's attempted suicide and the aftermath. Once things pick up, they move at a fair clip and ratchet up to a very intense finale. I wavered a bit on whether to clip a half-star for a slightly drawn-out ending, but ultimately came down on the side of a full fifth star. The many disparate elements are just so expertly slotted together.
On a closing note, McGuire has actually written and published Over the Woodward Wall as a standalone title under "A. Deborah Baker." The excerpts included here have me itching to get my hands on it.

You Might Also Enjoy:
All the Birds in the Sky (Charlie Jane Anders) - My Review
Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
The Golden Compass (Philip Pullman) - My Review