firstfrost | A smaller number of books than usual, because I didn't wait a million months to post (Reply)

Sisters of the Vast Black (by Lisa Rather): An interesting, thoughtful story about a very small nunnery aboard a living spaceship in a very large universe. It managers to touch on gender politics and colonialism politics and choices of faith and a lot of things, without using a very big hammer for any of them, and it reminded me a bit of the Long Journey to a Small Angry Planet books too. Four and a half light but deep stars.
A Deadly Education> (by Naomi Novik): In order to enjoy this book, you have to accept the premise - Magical School for Magical Kids, but malevolent - as a given. But from that starting point, it's quite entertaining. The main character, El, is cranky/snarky almost to the point of anti-hero, but with enough self-aware irony to keep it amusing. The pecking-order sort of civilization that a magical high school with no grownups would evolve is an interesting civilization to poke in, and the quasi-sentient malevolent monster-haunted Scholomance is a fascinating setting. The book starts out fairly actiony and keeps going at a good clip. After the introduction is through, we get some more world-building about the larger magical-and-mundanes culture, the privileged and the less so, and that's done pretty well. El is certainly bitter about the huge gap between the haves and haves-not, but she's not wrong. During the exposition, I started thinking a little bit about the premise ("Okay, so it has to be this way because of these reasons. But why wouldn't they have... done this other thing?") and maybe it doesn't hold up, so never mind that - Malevolent Hogwarts, turned up to elevent - just roll with it. The pacing keeps escalating, there's a lovely moment of tense temptation in the middle, after it has done the work to make the stakes real. The one caveat - this is the first of two. Book one is junior year and book two is presumably senior year, so there's a reasonable stopping point, but it isn't a true ending. Four stars and one monster disguised as a star.
Spellbreaker (by Charlie N Holmburg): Another book one of two! Nice cover, though I kept wanting it to have subtle differences between the top side and the bottom side. Not a bad analogy for the book as a whole - nice, but I kept wanting a little more subtlety that wasn't there. Interesting and evocative magic system, feisty heroine, slightly too obvious Big Plot Twist. A number of nice little bits - here's one I highlighted. Elsie is an apprentice with not a ton of her own time, which makes pursuing her own plot difficult. For one side quest, she has to be gone for several days; the deuteragonist sends an invitation to a low-cost sponsored bookkeeping seminar, which is attractive enough for her boss to send her. But then she has to come up with an explanation of why she doesn't come back with any new skills.
She'd already rehearsed her words in the cab, so they flowed from her lips as easily as if they were true. "It was rather dreadful, honestly. Everyone invited was in a position similar to mine, including a few secretaries. But they treated us like a bunch of ninnies, like we barely knew how to read, let alone put our shoes on the right foot. I didn't learn much of anything." She sighed. "I'm glad to be home." That much, at least, was sincere.
Seeing it afterwards, it's not that awesome a quote, but at the time it made me smile - both the original pretext for leaving, and the excuse after, are sufficiently clever to the purpose. Anyway, I'll probably get the second one, but I'm looking forward to the sequel to Deadly Education more. Three stars.
Piranesi (by Susanna Clarke): This was a wonder. I don't want to explain the plot too much because the unfolding is part of the magic. I listened to this on audiobook, and I think that added to the experience, because it enforced a slow, dreamlike pacing. Here is how the book begins.
ENTRY FOR THE FIRST DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS
When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of three Tides. This is something that happens only once every eight years.
The Ninth Vestibule is remarkable for the three great Staircases it contains. Its Walls are lined with marble Statues, hundreds upon hundreds of them, Tier upon Tier, rising into the distant heights.
I climbed up the Western Wall until I reached the Statue of a Woman carrying a Beehive, fifteen metres above the Pavement. The Woman is two or three times my own height and the Beehive is covered with marble Bees the size of my thumb. One Bee - this always gives me a slight sensation of queasiness - crawls over her left Eye. I squeezed myself into the Woman's Niche and waited until I heard the Tides roaring in the Lower Halls and felt the Walls vibrating with the force of what was about to happen.
First came the Tide from the Far Eastern Halls. This Tide ascended the easternmost Staircase without violence. It had no colour to speak of and its Waters were no more than ankle deep. It spread a grey mirror across the Pavement, the surface of which was marbled with streaks of milky Foam.
Next came the Tide from the Western Halls. This Tide thundered up the westernmost Staircase and hit the Eastern Wall with a great Clap, making all the Statues tremble. Its Foam was the white of old fishbones, and its churning depths were pewter. Within seconds its Waters were as high as the Waists of the First Tier of Statues.
Last came the Tide from the Northern Halls. It hurled itself up the middle Staircase, filling the Vestibule with an explosion of glittering, ice-white Foam. I was drenched and blinded. When I could see again Waters were cascading down the Statues. It was then that I realised I had made a mistake in calculating the volumes of the Second and Third Tides.
A towering Peak of Water swept up to where I crouched. A great Hand of Water reached out to pluck me from the Wall. I flung my arms around the Legs of the Woman carrying a Beehive and prayed to the House to protect me. The Waters covered me and for a moment I was surrounded by the strange silence that comes when the Sea sweeps over you and drowns its own sounds. I thought that I was going to die; or else that I would be swept away to Unknown Halls, far from the rush and thrum of Familiar Tides. I clung on.
Then, just as suddenly as it began, it was over. The Joined Tides swept on into the surrounding Halls. I heard the thunder and crack as the Tides struck the Walls. The Waters in the Ninth Vestibule sank rapidly down until they barely covered the Plinths of the First Tier of Statues.
I realised that I was holding on to something. I opened my hand and found a marble Finger from some Faraway Statue that the Tides had placed there.
The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

The story takes place in the House, full (as you can infer from the above) of Halls. I spent the entire book with an extraordinarily clear visual sense of the place, as familiar yet unfamiliar as a dream when you're dreaming it. After a while in which nothing much was happening, I wondered if it was going to be a book in which things happened - and I decided I didn't mind if it wasn't, it was interesting and strangely compelling anyway. But then some things happened, and some more things were learned from reading some journals, and some more things were learned for other reasons. I'm having a hard time putting into words what drew me in so strongly - but the isolation of pandemic is probably a lot of it. The House is the World, to Piranesi. He is alone, isolated, but in a place that is the entirety of the (small) world. Only one other person is in the House, and that's all the people there are in the world. There's the sea, and the sky, and the statues, and the albatross.... Anyway. It wasn't fun (nor was it not-fun), or exciting, or, a lot of other things I read books for. But it felt like breathing outside air after being inside for a long time, and the House is still in my head if I close my eyes. Five stars for me; I am really not sure how other people would like it.
The Hollow Places (by T Kingfisher): What an odd niche to have started to write in - horror novels adjacent to classic horror stories by someone else. Or - not adjacent to, more like the novels are pearls around the grain of sand of the older story. The grain of sand is integral, but the pearl is better to read, to my modern reader brain. The Twisted Ones weaves The White People (Arthur Machen, 1904) through itself, and The Hollow Places visits the places of The Willows (Algernon Blackwood, 1907). The seams in this book are less obvious (though presumably they would be a lot more obvious had I read the original story first), but there isn't a manuscript being quoted here. The Hollow Places is scary, but it doesn't have any of the super-terrifying moments, due to the setting - scary things in another world are always easier to keep at a distance than scary things outside the window. So this is scary more along the lines of one of the Peter Cline stories where it turns out your townhouse has a wardrobe to Cthulhu Narnia in it. Four and a half stars.
the Inspector Hannasyde mysteries, by Georgette Heyer: I listened to all of these on audiobook also - Heyer is one of my comfort-read authors, and she's much more well known for her romances than her murders. These are all romances too, with a lot of the Heyer stock characters - but I enjoy her stock characters, and it also means she doesn't cheat the way Christie does by having the murderer only show their true character at the end. Well... I have always thought of that as a cheat, but I suppose that way lies the fallacy of "He can't be a rapist, he was always charming to *me*." But I don't really mean unrealistic, I mean in the enough-clues-to-solve-the-puzzle way, and "consistent characterization" is not actually one of the rules. But anyway, these four books are generally fun and banter-filled. Hannasyde himself isn't all that interesting as a detective, but his sergeant is great and the pair of them are a fun team. The fourth book, though - [SPOILERS AFTER THIS]. There are a lot of conventions in mystery novels, especially Golden Age mysteries and cozies. One of them is that the police, or the detective, or whoever, has the goal to find the true murderer, rather than win the police mechanic with an arrest and a conviction. (Tana French is my go-to example for Not That, but she is of course modern and not Golden Age). Here, the murderer is the local policeman who "finds the body". And my goodness, once the Inspector starts drawing up difficult timetables, it becomes really obvious. There are proper subtle clues inserted to point the way as well, but basically the culprit is protected by the convention that the policeman is the Good Guy to make it a surprise at the end. And it's not nearly as fun to be reading a book thinking that the clever inspector is being an absolute idiot.
Cocaine Blues (by Kerry Greenwood): I'm starting to re-watch Miss Fisher's Muder Mysteries, and thought I would see what the books were like. This is the story the first episode is based on, and you can see that it's a pretty close adaptation, and equally fun. Watching the episode and then reading the novel makes it not the most puzzling mystery, though. On the other hand, these aren't puzzle-boxes, these are fun investigations with an awesome main character and gorgeous clothes. :)