February was slightly longer than last year, but I didn’t read more. I was in Florence all month, reading and writing, eating gelato and looking at art. I read twelve books, the vast majority of them were excellent and I’m excited to share them with you. (I’d share the gelato too, if you were here.)
Derring-Do For Beginners, Victoria Goddard (2023)
Gosh this was such fun. It’s fantasy, set in the same universe as her Hands of the Emperor series. I think you perfectly well could start here, though there was a special delight in the intersection of these people and this adventure with a person whose later adventures I already knew about. (I actually laughed aloud when he suddenly appeared.) I don’t think that’s necessary, though—I think it would be fine to approach the world with this end up. This one is wonderful, anyway. It’s the story of a girl going off to college, only things are more complicated than that, and she ends up going (one reasonable step at a time) farther and farther off from home and preconceptions, and into an adventure and way of living very different from her expectations. There are very few bad people here, and lots of culture and magic and people and nature and a really excellent city, and a path between worlds. This is not an especially deep book, and sometimes the answers are a little too easy, but it feels churlish to complain because the experience of reading it is so delightful and full of sparkles. There’ll be a sequel, I’ll be buying it. Goddard is an unusual writer doing a lot of really interesting things.
Jewel Box: Stories, E. Lily Yu (2023)
Great title, because every story here is a gem. E. Lily Yu writes these dazzling prismatic short pieces and they’re full of originality. She’s not afraid to tackle hard subjects, and she deals with them well. There’s science fiction here, and fantasy, and realism, and a lot of things that blur the lines. The heart of SF has always been at short length, and Yu is one of the people doing the exciting work that redefines where the genre is going. Yu has a gift for making me care about what’s going to happen to even the unlikeliest characters—the monster, the bee, the flying prayer mat. Don’t miss this collection.
We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, Arthur Ransome (1937)
Re-read, one of the Swallows and Amazons sequence. Before I say anything else, let’s admire that title for a bit. It puts the whole of the first part of the book into a situation of expectation—you, the reader, know from the title that they’re going to go to sea, even though they have no intention of doing so. How is this going to happen? Will it be now? How about now? What I remembered best from reading this book as a child was not the terrifying moment reefing in the storm (when, reading it now, I was holding my breath), but the moment when John is quietly aware his father is proud of him. That’s what stuck with me for decades. They didn’t mean to go to sea, they did go to sea, everyone is fine in the end, I love this book.
What Happens Now?, Sophia Money-Coutts (2019)
Extremely enjoyable novel about a woman who gets pregnant on a one-night stand and then has to figure everything out from there. Genuinely funny, with many memorable moments and excellent family and friends, and a surprisingly plausible romance despite everything that makes it seem nonsensical when you think about it.
Spear, Nicola Griffith (2022)
Re-read, book club. It seems weird to say this is an anti-monarchical Arthurian fantasy, but that’s what it is. Beautifully written, with absolutely masterful handling of magic and mythology. It’s lovely to see the feminism and the power of taking a character from the mythos who is usually perceived as a villain and doing something complex instead. Griffith always writes well about the thingness of things (is there a word for that?), the solid reality of a pot over the fire, a sword with a chipped end, wood snags in a flowing river. This is a very interesting comparison with She Who Became the Sun where we also have a traditional story and a woman disguised as a man in a man’s role, because it’s so similar and so different, as lived experience, in both cases. Spear is great, and short, and forceful, and you should read it. It was pointed out in book club that Griffith chose to do the opposite of what I did with the same material, which I think is interesting—there’s still a lot of power in the Matter of Britain, and it’s still alive and effective and there are still lots of different interesting things people can do with it.
Isabella d’Este: A Renaissance Princess, Christine Shaw (2019)
Thorough biography of Isabella d’Este organized thematically rather than chronologically, which is an odd choice that doesn’t quite work. That said, there was information here I didn’t have, the book was well written and interesting, and I commend it to anyone interested in Isabella d’Este, in the Gonzaga court at Mantua, or in the complexities of politics in Italy in the 1490s and 1500’s.
The Fledgling, Elizabeth Cadell (1975)
This book was so great. Wonderful child’s point-of-view, and wonderful child agency. I’m not sure that this is any 1975 anyone could recognise, but there is a milk bar as a gesture at a modern world, even if most people believe Anthony Burgess made them up. There’s a child with an English father who has grown up in odd circumstances in Portugal and is being sent home to England to go to school, shenanigans ensue, the child manages everything, and they all live happily ever after.
Scorpio, Marko Kloos (2024)
In the universe of Frontlines with Lankies, etc, but from a completely different POV. Kloos has an incredible ability to write action sequences that keep me on the edge of my seat. I remain really impressed at how he does this. This book also contains a dog, and quite a few human characters. I’m slightly unhappy with the same aspect of worldbuilding I’ve complained about before, but I like this book well enough that I don’t want you to read it with spoilers, so never mind. Not perfect, but if you’re ever going to read any contemporary military SF, read Kloos.
The Stand-In, Lily Chu (2021)
Romance novel about a Chinese-Canadian woman who is mistaken for a Chinese film star and then offered a job standing in for her for life-changing amounts of money. All the characters are well drawn, the situation is preposterous but done well, I figured out everything that was going on but I was glad to be right. Well written and well characterised. This is totally wish fulfillment romance, and all the better for that.
Troubled Waters, Sharon Shinn (2010)
This is the first of Shinn’s Elemental Blessings series, and I haven’t read any of them before. There’s a thing you do when you’re doing worldbuilding that people don’t talk about much, and it has to do with theodicy—why is there evil, and how much evil exists, and how evil are people? If you’re writing in this world, you have to by default go with the way you perceive these things in this world; if you’re making up a world from scratch then you get to choose. Here everyone gets three blessings from the gods when they’re born and everyone’s personalities are formed by Blood/Water, Air/Intellect, Fire/Emotion, Bone/Horn, and Stone/Earth. Shinn’s answer, in this world she’s creating, is “not very much evil at all.” This is a mostly nice world, where most people are horrified when bad things happen and do their best to set things right, where a girl rough sleeping alone among other homeless people in a big city wakes up to find a stranger has left her breakfast. Readable, as always with Shinn, quite a fun world, quite sympathetic characters, and when you look back at it not much of a plot really. Really interesting reading the details of working in a shoe shop in a world like this.
The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf (2015)
This is a biography of Alexander von Humboldt and an examination of how his unique and holistic way of seeing the natural world revolutionized the way everyone has seen the world since. He was a weird guy, and I wish he’d had the opportunity to make more expeditions, as his expeditions were both my favourite parts of the book and his favourite parts of his life. He influenced Lyell and Darwin and wrote about the interconnected nature of climates and biomes and the whole planet. He was probably asexual and had passionate friendships with other male scientists. Large parts of his life were difficult for Wulf to make interesting as they consisted of him being in various cities writing long scientific books and quarrelling with people, but on the whole this is a nifty book about how ideas change and are changed.
Skin Folk, Nalo Hopkinson (2001)
A great collection of Hopkinson’s early short stories, showing a lot of her range and promise of the work she was going to do later. Some of the very early stories show a little sprawl, but most of them are marvellous and inventive in her characteristic way. There’s a wonderful selkie story that resonated oddly with both Troubled Waters and The Stand-In because it’s about a young woman immigrant in Toronto who is claiming water powers, and it really felt like these three things written over twenty years were in a very interesting conversation that was in fact only in my head, which is an experience you have sometimes when you read a bunch of things at the same time. Hopkinson has written better things since these stories, but they’re still very much worth reading.
Possibly “quiddity”?
Surely haecceity (a word I learned from Clute)?
I really like going into a Sharon Shinn book because of that level of evilness. I mean, in most of my life that’s the level I expect, because have some control over who I surround myself with. So it’s a closer match than many “realistic” grim stories.
I also clearly remember John and his dad in the Ransome.
I enjoyed the Kloos as well. I don’t recall what quibbles you have with the worldbuilding – I have a couple as well – but fun. Really looking forward to the fourth Palladian wars book coming out later this year.
I find the way he depicts the living conditions of ordinary people on Earth really silly. I discussed this when I read the first Frontlines book, where there is most of it. Apart from this, I enjoy these books a lot.
The von Humboldt biography was really good.
The parts about him writing long books and disagreeing with others aren’t boring if you’re a biologist.
Maybe they’re just overspecialised? I must say my heart sank when I saw there was a whole chapter on Thoreau.
I enjoyed Derring Do for Beginners too. It was fun reading about the girl’s gradual adventure and I could relate to a lot of what she and the other characters were going through. And I reckon it’d make a good entry point to Goddard’s books too. There’s several good entry points actually – Stargazy Pie is another good starting point, and so is Hands of the Emperor.
You’ve added to my TBR pile, as usual. Thanks for these reviews!
The only real spoiler I want is: Does the dog die?
Good news for you there.
Loved The Stand-In. Discovered this while shopping at Target. The whole situation is preposterous. I couldn’t put it down.
Wait a minute, Anthony Burgess didn’t make up milk bars? Tricky to Google that, but eventually I drifted onto Wikipedia, which has a page on them. They were “…encouraged by the Temperance Society as a morally acceptable alternative to the pub”. Wow, I never knew. I thought it was just really weird world building.
Yes, when people were going into them in The Fledgling I was half-expecting were in Clockwork Orange world and things were about to get weirder.
Still a thing in Australia, I believe.
We must have read Jewel Box and Spear all but simultaneously. (Spear was a book club read for me too.)
Both excellent books, and, yes, the way Griffith presents things, and the way people use things, and really just everday life in 6th or 7th Century Britain, in Spear as well as Hild and Menewood, is remarkable, and really involving.
And Jewel Box is just fantastic. Yu is a really exceptional writer, and I don’t think she’s gotten quite the attention she deserves, though she hasn’t been ignored or anything. I reviewed it here: https://rrhorton.blogspot.com/2024/02/review-jewel-box-by-e-lily-yu.html
All very interesting, without exception, and I have read none (not even Jewel Box, so far). I’d love to read them all – except for The Invention of Nature, which I’d prefer to have read, but not to read. There are a fair number of books that fall into that category. This gets into Bennett Sims territory, “Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.” And perhaps the opening of “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller.”
I’m another one the moment between John and his dad stayed with. I also have a vivid visual memory of them shining a torch through a coloured plastic plate to make port / starboard lights, and a ship seeing them at the last moment and veering away. Is that part actually there or is it one of those bits I’ve half made up myself?
I love all the various crossovers in the interconnected web of Goddard stories – which are sometimes just easter eggs but often give new perspectives and understandings. I _think_ Jo hasn’t read Stargazy Pie and the rest of the Greenwing & Dart series yet, and would be interested to see how that comes across having already read Derring-do for Beginners.
Curious quite what was meant about Spear doing the opposite of the King’s Name / King’s Peace? I loved both
The bit with the plate and the torch and the boat is there. I was on the edge of my seat.
I have indeed not read Stargazy Pie yet, and we will see.
Major spoilers for Spear! Spear explicitly denies Arthur an heir, on the grounds that assimilation to the Saxons is better than monarchy (though the Saxons were pretty monarchical themselves in fact!) whereas I give my Arthur character an heir and assimilate the Saxon equivalents to my Romano-British equivalent civilization. There’s a lot there, you can do a lot with it. Spear is great.
My sisters and I loved Elizabeth Cadell’s books so much. Enjoyable list – thanks for sharing
I read Troubled Waters based on this and absolutely loved it!! Went looking for the rec in the “grabby books” article first because it was absolutely that for me.