Dead Voices (Katherine Arden)

Dead Voices
The Small Spaces quartet, Book 1
Katherine Arden
G. P. Putnam's Sons
Fiction, MG Horror
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Coco used to be the new girl at school who many people didn't much like, too bubbly and clumsy and with pink hair to boot. That was before the incident on the school trip to the farm, where she and two classmates, Ollie and Brian, found themselves pulled into the world beyond the mists, a world of malevolent living scarecrows and mournful ghosts and a dark entity known as the Smiling Man, who offers wishes and plays games with terrible strings attached. Since surviving that, the three kids have been best friends. Now, they're on their way to a week at a new ski resort in the Vermont mountains, Hemlock Lodge, along with Ollie's widower father and Coco's single mother (who seems to be spending a lot of time with Ollie's dad lately). They're all looking forward to a vacation... but even before they get there, in the heart of a snowstorm, there are signs of trouble ahead. A phantom figure appears in the road, as though to bar the way. Nightmares warn about the "dead voices". And when they get to Hemlock Lodge, they find the power has failed and no other guests have been able to brave the roads. Then the stranger shows up and tells them of the lodge's haunted past, and the ghosts who may still be stalking the halls. Like it or not, Coco and her friends are about to experience another close encounter with the supernatural... only, this time, they may not escape with their lives.

REVIEW: I enjoyed Small Spaces, and had no idea Arden had extended the series into a quartet. While the first book focused mainly on Ollie as she came to terms with her mother's loss, this one shifts focus to small (and often underestimated) Coco. She likes her friends, and they like her, but sometimes she still feels out of place among them; they like books she doesn't like, and games she doesn't play, and sometimes it seems she doesn't belong with them much at all, despite their shared secrets. While Ollie still has a major role to play and more issues to work out, this time about her father possibly being ready to move on from her mother (who still seems to maintain a presence in Ollie's life through her peculiar watch), it's Coco's turn to step up and face the challenges of the phantom threat, one that may have a very familiar face underneath it all. As before, the adults are pretty much sidelined while the kids are left to deal with the (no real spoiler, as it's a horror title) all-too-real malevolent spirits of Hemlock Lodge. Also as before, there's plenty of creepy imagery and scary moments and a few nice twists along the way. I enjoyed it, and hope to get to the rest of the quartet soon.

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13 Minutes (Sarah Pinborough)

13 Minutes: A Novel
Sarah Pinborough
Flatiron Books
Fiction, YA Thriller
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: It started on the icy morning when sixteen-year-old Natasha was pulled from the icy river waters by a passerby. Clinically dead for thirteen minutes, she wakes in the hospital - and the first person she asks for is Rebecca, the childhood friend she cast off years ago in favor of thin, blonde, popular Haley and Jenny. Becca is wary, but Tasha is desperate. Something happened between her leaving her house and plunging into the water, something she needs help remembering. Was it some sort of accident, or was someone trying to kill her - someone Tasha thought was a friend? Despite herself, Becca finds herself drawn into the mystery, unearthing a dark web of secrets and lies and betrayals. If Tasha is right, then there may well be an attempted murderer hiding in plain sight... one who might strike again if they get too close to the truth.

REVIEW: 13 Minutes starts with the simple premise of a teen girl coming back from the edge of death and builds to a twisting tale where nobody can be trusted and everyone can be a suspect. Tasha's the most popular girl in school, the head of the "Barbies" group of friends whom everyone looks up to (at least, everyone who matters); it seems impossible that someone would want her dead, but somehow she ended up in that river, and it wasn't under her own power. Becca was burned badly when Tasha pivoted to newer friends, but can't forget the old bonds they shared, coming to share Tasha's conviction that something very sinister is going on in the Hive (Becca's term for the waspish social web of their school, a vicious nest full of stingers and venom that happily and hungrily devours its own members). The investigation hits some dead ends and takes some tragic turns as unfolding events reveal a dark and twisted mind behind events going back months or even years, for all that the police seem willing to chalk the whole thing up to ordinary teenage rivalry or bullying. If you look too hard there are a few stretches, but it's a decently taut thriller that actually produces thrills and a little unpredictability as it unfolds.

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Mystic (Jason Denzel)

Mystic
The Mystic trilogy, Book 1
Jason Denzel
Tor
Fiction, YA Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: In the small mountain village of Oakspring, little ever changes, at least for the better. Pomella knows this down to her bones, knows that her lot as a commoner, the caste born to serve merchants, nobles, and the mystics who keep the land safe, may not be great, but is at least better than life as a nameless, homeless Unclaimed. Still, when she looks over her grandmother's old Book of Songs and remembers the woman's heretical ideas - that anyone can learn to connect to the magical Myst of the land, not just nobles - and sees the silver phantom animals in her garden that nobody else sees, she can't help wondering and dreaming of a brighter, better future, one not crushed under her stern father's heel. Then, on the night of the Springrise festival, a green man messenger rises from the earth in the middle of town and says that the new High Mystic of the land has summoned candidates to become her new apprentice... and she has named Pomella.
It's an outrage, a direct insult to the daughter of the local lord, who immediately declares that if Pomella sets one foot outside her baron father's land she'll be branded Unclaimed or killed. Her father outright forbids it as madness above her station. But Pomella can't let this one chance to escape commoner life, to chase her grandmother's dream, go... even if it means leaving her father, her brother, her friends, and Sim, the blacksmith's son for whom she's developed more-than-friendly feelings that are clearly reciprocated. Just getting to the High Mystic's tower at Kelt Apar is the first of many challenges; she must prove herself to both the Mystic and the other noble candidates, but most importantly to herself.

REVIEW: The plot here looked more than a little familiar, but familiarity doesn't always mean boring. In this case, unfortunately, it also didn't mean exciting or interesting. Pomella is the typical insecure (yet inherently gifted) young adult heroine, whipsawing between bravery and cowardice, self-conviction and self-loathing, at the drop of a hat. Around her is the usual cast of characters one would expect in this story: a local love interest, a potential new love interest, a father who is dour and controlling simply for the sake of being dour and controlling, snobbish rivals who look down on her for existing, and a host of allies and enemies who line up for or against her simply because she's the protagonist in a story and therefore must be that important. None of them feel particularly deep, often with the simplest of motivations. Pomella herself tends toward helplessness as her first response most of the time, only rising to challenges after being pushed and beating herself up, and even then she can be somewhat slow on the uptake and prone to wallowing in "I'm helpless and can't do anything!" angst even when time is of the essence and she really, really needs to do something, anything, please stop whining and think for half a second because you've proven umpteen times before that, no, you're not helpless and, yes, you can do something. The world she inhabits has some interesting bits and neat details, like the silvery fae animals, but never becomes more than a flat backdrop to a very familiar tale. It gains a little extra dimension by giving Sim his own journey, accidentally falling with a mercenary band on a sinister mission, but it still ultimately comes down to Pomella being the center of the story universe and everyone and everything else falling into orbit around that fact. It's not a terrible story for all that, and it hits its marks with reasonable competence, but it's so similar to numerous other young adult fantasies that it's already fading into background noise, and I literally just finished listening to it.

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The Cold Between (Elizabeth Bonesteel)

The Cold Between
A Central Corps novel, Book 1
Elizabeth Bonesteel
Harper Voyager
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: In humanity's expansion through the stars, the ships of the Central Corps often mean the difference between life and death, delivering needed supplies, terraforming equipment, and - when applicable - peacekeeping forces to colony worlds. They maintain an uneasy truce with the vessels of the PSI - a spacegoing organization opposed to the methodology of the Corps, sometimes considered pirates, but not generally violent - and keep a wary eye on the underground syndicates, but overall Corps runs are fairly routine. When a crewman of the ship Galileo is murdered during shore leave on Volhynia, that routine is blown to smithereens.
Central Corps commander Elena Shaw went to the planetside bar with vague hopes of forgetting a recent breakup. When she runs into a former PSI officer, Trey, she finds a spark of connection like she hasn't felt in too long... but when a Corps crewman (and Elena's ex) Danny is found murdered the next morning and the local law tries to scapegoat Trey, Elena finds herself drawn deep into a conspiracy that reaches far past the atmosphere of Volhynia, all the way to the highest ranks of the Corps, encompassing the mysterious destruction of a Corps ship twenty-five years ago.

REVIEW: This looked like a fast-paced science fiction adventure with action, danger, mystery, and some romance, and it delivered in full. From the start, it builds solid-feeling characters in a world complex enough to feel real and lived-in beyond the borders of the story, yet not too intricate to understand. Elena starts out in a bad place, navigating both the fallout of a rough breakup and the recent souring of a long-term friendship she'd come to rely on, but she's never so shallow that her love life is her sole defining characteristic, and neither is anyone else; they all have different sides and different strengths and weaknesses that come through, of which their romances (or lack thereof) are only one aspect. After her night with Trey, a suitably steamy interlude, the discovery of Danny's body kicks the tale into high gear, drawing in more crewpeople and locals as the scope of the crime expands. Loyalties are tested to the utmost as duty and justice pull in different directions, even as the clues point to something much bigger, deeper, and more sinister than the murder of one Corps member and the framing of one former PSI man. The plot maintains a decent pace throughout, picking up to a solid finale that doesn't unfold quite how one would expect, but is reasonably satisfying, leaving enough threads for future installments. In looking back over it, I couldn't find any flaws worth noting, and I was invested enough that I had to finish off the audiobook on a weekend instead of waiting for my next workday, which is not all that common. Therefore, it gets kicked to the top of the ratings, and I'll be keeping an eye out for the next novel.

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Gilgamesh the King (Robert Silverberg)

Gilgamesh the King
Robert Silverberg
Open Road Media
Fiction, Fantasy/Historical Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: King, hero, god... there are many names for Gilgamesh, highest of high kings of the great city of Uruk at the center of the world. Here, in his waning years, he sets down his own story, from a childhood where he first learned to hate and fear death through his rise to the crown, his tumultuous relationship with the gods and the high priestess of the goddess Inanna, the finding of a true friend in the wildman Enkidu, and his grief-stricken wanderings in search of immortality.

REVIEW: Silverberg puts a historical fiction spin on one of the oldest tales known (if in fragmentary form), the Epic of Gilgamesh, from the ancient Middle East. While a real king of that name is presumed to have existed from other records of the time, around him has grown up a myth cycle reminiscent of later half-divine heroes such as Hercules. Silverberg does a decent job fleshing out the basic tale with decently realized characters and action and details, creating a reasonably cohesive arc. The world he inhabits comes to life in many vivid details about the lands, the cities, the peoples, and the beliefs and customs. I'm not educated enough to know how historically accurate these details may be (or were as of the time it was written in 1984), but they create a solid world for the tale to unfold in, and a solid foundation for Gilgamesh's triumphs and failures, his worldview and senses of right and wrong. Here, elements of the supernatural and the presence of gods and demons are taken as a matter of course, though their presence is often just ambiguous enough to invite some skepticism over whether there actually is spiritual influence or if Gilgamesh and his companions are reading their own beliefs into otherwise natural events; some things clearly appear to be natural phenomena, while others aren't quite so easily explained. From his childhood, watching the funeral of his royal father, the boy who would be Gilgamesh vows to never let death defeat him; since he is two parts divine and only one part mortal (or so he has been told, and his unnatural size and strength seem to confirm), he considers this an entirely plausible goal. This ambition and assumption of ultimate divine victory shape his personality from the start. Along the way, he must regain the throne that was handed to an unworthy successor after his father's passing, enduring through years of exile and dealing with the plots and scheming of an ambitious priestess who may or may not be backed by the power of a goddess. He must also come to terms with the mortality of his subjects, whom he pushes to the point of tyranny with his semidivine ambitions and his lusts until he finds a worthy match for his energies in wild Enkidu. Though the story sometimes bogs down and Gilgamesh can be rather self-absorbed and a bit slow on the uptake at times, it moves decently as he faces various challenges and struggles to either overcome them or gain wisdom from them (as in his quest for a way to evade death).
Where this story lost a half-star was partly due to the occasional sense of dithering but also due to the fact that, to be mild, this was clearly written by a man. Gilgamesh is almost a caricature of a manly man at times, the problems with his rule stemming from him being so perfect and so full of testosterone that no mere mortal can hope to keep up with him. His sexual exploits in particular are detailed and somewhat boastful throughout the tale. Women, meanwhile, are best when they are mild-mannered and stay in their place well behind (or pliantly underneath) men; both the priestess and the goddess Inanna are shrewish, petty, grasping, backstabbing, power-hungry vixens who threaten to destroy everything in the name of vengeance, utterly corrupted by their power. The priestess herself suffers most because she falls in love with a man who, through custom and her vows to her goddess, she can never truly marry and can only know pleasure with ritualistically once a year; yes, Gilgamesh is such a perfect specimen of masculinity that even a priestess falls hopelessly in love with him, and would rather see the world burn than admit he must be shared with his people and his kingdom. Clearly, no woman of this world should ever be given any power at all, not when there are manly and masculine men who are far better endowed to handle such things. There's historical accuracy (as interpreted here, at least), and there's stomping the sexism into the reader's face... Add to that some irritation with the way the audiobook reader delivered some of the lines, particularly the ritual incantations, and it was enough to drop the rating just below Good.

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