Author Archives: Anna

The Mars House

by Anna

By Natasha Pulley

You know how there are rare authors that you as a reader just trust implicitly? Like, even if the story doesn’t seem to be making sense or clicking, you know they’ll pull it off in the end. Well, I don’t trust Natasha Pulley – in fact, I actively distrust her. This is not to say that her books aren’t consistently excellent. They are! She just has a real habit of throwing in some actual crime against humanity, and having all the characters shrug it off like no big deal.

I wouldn’t even read this one until Kinsey read it first and gave me the all clear, and even then, I read it in a sort of mental flinch state. This also made me very suspicious of the slightest hint of genocidal tendencies in characters, so I was extra judgmental of them all and not quite able to actually like them as much as perhaps I would have otherwise.

Our main character is a principal ballet dancer for the Royal Ballet who has to flee the climate crisis in London for a colony on Mars. There, he is consigned to manual labor until a conflict with an anti-immigration politician forces the two of them into a contractual marriage (it makes marginally more sense in the context). This would all be brutal to read if the protagonist wasn’t such an utter golden retriever, just overall cheerful (and a little egocentric) regardless of harrowing circumstances around him.

It seemed clear from the outset that the politics were not all that they seemed, but I stayed extremely wary of Pulley trying to trick me into rooting for a war criminal or some such. Instead, though, she wove a very satisfyingly complex mystery that pulls in geopolitics, gender and cultural identity, disability rights, and so much more. The core relationship is, of course, the draw, but I find myself continuing to think through the various linguistic and cultural extrapolations Pulley creates here.

The Black Girl Survives In This One

by Anna

Edited by Desiree S. Evans and Saraciea J. Fennell

A collection of horror short stories with an assured survival? Yes please! (Though the authors occasionally split hairs by ending the story before the perhaps inevitable conclusion.) In my enthusiasm, however, I’d overlooked that this is very much for young adult readers (and is clearly branded so). The fifteen stories all feature black girls in high school or college, all feeling the impatience for adulthood and independence that makes middle-aged me feel tired (and sympathetic for the adults around them).

So, I wasn’t exactly the audience for this, but the stories covered a truly impressive variety of horror subgenres and intersected them with Black life in a really fascinating way. Southern gothic hits a lot different with the added generational trauma of slavery, but also how do the cults of wellness MLMs punish Black bodies even more than white? Remote nature spaces can already be uninviting to many Black people, with or without supernatural horrors, and what would that look like in futuristic space exploration?

But then, there’s also the comfort in reading these, knowing that you won’t be exposed to an onslaught of abuse. In these stories the Black girls fight back, survive, and often triumph, even if occasionally leaving a truly impressive amount of destruction in their wake.

The stories varied in quality and my personal taste, of course, like any anthology, but I was really impressed with what a comprehensive overview it provided. I always particularly enjoy short story anthologies as a way to be introduced to new authors, including here two up-and-coming writers who won an open call with their submissions that fit in beautifully.

Nicked

by Anna

By M. T. Anderson

Described as a “wildly imaginative, genre-defying, and delightfully queer adventure,” I knew Nicked was going to be weird, but I hadn’t expected it to be quite so laugh-out-loud funny. In many ways, the humor had both a dryness and absurdity that reminded me of Catch-22, without being nearly so bleak, which is saying a lot for a 11th century setting.

A lowly monk is voluntold by his local bishop to accompany a ‘saint hunter’ in ‘liberating’ the reliquary bones of St. Nicholas from its celebrated gravesite and temple to the monk and bishop’s own town. In the middle of a plague, they hope the reportedly healing bones will be able to save the populace, so there is some redeeming motivation. The author claims that this based on a true story, and has the references to back it up, though he also explains that any deviation from strict accuracy is also highly representative of medieval nonfiction, which took plenty of licenses of its own (his afterward is well worth a read).

The humor comes from both the strangeness of the period in general and the quest in particular, and the familiarity of political and religious bickering across all times and geographies. The common people everywhere make due during times of great upheaval, and every interaction is a delight. The heist is also so well written, with setbacks and twists and turns that kept me agog. My one caveat is that there is a framing narrative that sometimes gets very philosophical and that I couldn’t always follow, but it is also used sparingly, so I didn’t find it a detraction.

Naomi Kritzer’s prophetic vision(s?)

by Anna

Whew, it’s been a month (or three) hasn’t it?! I don’t have much else to say except to thank Rebecca for continuing to push this blog forward when I ran out of steam for a while there. You can thank her too for dragging me back in by sending me these links and then haranguing me until I finally read them:

So Much Cooking

Rebecca sent me the link to this novelette (8,410 words) that has been making the rounds on social media lately. Written in 2015, it is eerily accurate for 2020, down to some of the tiniest details. Told in the style of a food blog, it stays grounded in everyday life, capturing the broader human experience through the smaller individual shared experiences. Though Kritzer is anticipating (again: frighteningly accurately!) an unusually difficult period in the modern era, she also highlights the strength and generosity that people can and do bring to shared struggles, making it a much more hopeful reflection than one would expect.

The Year Without Sunshine

This slightly longer novelette (10,883 words) came out in 2023, along with readers’ hopes that it doesn’t turn out to be quite so on-the-nose this time around, though it sadly doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. Though the scope of the crisis is even larger this time, so is the community that comes together to bolster each other in truly innovative ways. I very much hope it doesn’t come to quite this extreme, but Kritzer again focuses on the positive, the basic good of most people and how they want to and can help each other. Through this, she provides some innovative blueprints for what different kinds of mutual aid can look like, and isn’t that what scifi does best, showing us a path toward a better future? I look forward to more of her writing (with only a little dread, haha)!

The Road to Roswell

by Anna

By Connie Willis

We have a little joke about Connie Willis: when she is good, she is very, very good; when she is bad, she is horrific. That is to say that she is so technically skilled that you will either be rolling on the floor laughing or deeply traumatized. Although this isn’t quite at Willis’ peak (for that, see To Say Nothing of the Dog), The Road to Roswell is quite funny, about a woman grudgingly attending an alien-themed wedding in Roswell and then even more grudgingly dealing with a real alien abduction, along with a ragtag group of other abductees.

It is very funny, in Willis’ customary gentle satire of people of all types. However, it also has Willis’ customary frenetic energy – she portrays the onslaught of minor stresses we all deal with every day so well that even her comedic books come with some visceral stress. Additionally, it is very much influenced by Willis’ love of movies – there is a constant stream of allusions to classic westerns, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and some heavy screwball comedy tropes, which I enjoyed less.

Our protagonist is doing her best under admittedly very trying circumstances, but is enough of a classic Ditzy Broad to make some eye-rollingly bad decisions. It was all fun and games until we got to a (PG-rated romantic) trope that is a particular squick of mine, so I had to speed read through that a bit. I will say that the ending is immensely satisfying in a suitably ridiculous way.

For those new to Connie Willis, this could be a very entertaining introduction; for us old fans, there’s a fair bit of retread as she returns to a number of themes (aliens, linguistic confusion, meandering road trips) that she’s explored in earlier stories that felt more groundbreaking (possibly simply because I read them first). That said, I was extremely interested to read in her bio that she is currently writing a new entry to her Oxford time-travel series, which is truly her standout work.

A Dreadful Splendor

by Anna

By B. R. Myers

This is apparently the author’s first adult novel after a slew for young adults, and I have to admit that I’m not convinced it is fully aged up. Genevieve, the teenage protagonist, is very Feisty™ in a particularly young adult way (i.e. with all the common sense of a young adult). She is confident and sassy in situations that she would probably be better suited just observing or even fading into the background, and then acquiescent at times when she should really take a stand. She jumps to a number of fairly obviously wrong conclusions, which she then has to apologize for, which always makes me cringe.

All of that out of the way, the plot is a quite juicy gothic mystery surrounding the tragic death of a beautiful young heiress. Genevieve, raised as a scam medium under the tutelage of her mother, has been brought in to contact her spirit by two different men at cross purposes, one to set the other’s mind at ease, and the other to uncover a murderer. Once in the classic gothic sprawling estate of decaying wealth, she begins to experience strange occurrences that test her skepticism. I love a false medium/real ghost scenario!

While the writing continued to read juvenile to me, with a lot of the sort of repetition one offers to younger readers to make sure they are following along, the plot really did hold up all the way through. I was full of guesses but had no solid predictions of the final reveal, and felt it held up in a suitably melodramatic way.

Youth Group

by Anna

By Jordan Morris and Bowen McCurdy

I’ve been listening to the Jordan, Jesse, Go! podcast on MaximumFun lately (Jordan and Jesse are very funny and a little spicy), and Jordan Morris has just released his new graphic novel Youth Group. Set among a Christian church youth group, I wasn’t at all sure this was my sort of thing, but figured it couldn’t hurt to check it out from the library.

However, Morris treats everything with astonishing nuance and empathy, particularly for a story that revolves around said youth group exorcising the demons that are haunting the world. He truly captures the teenage spirit in a way that is incredibly rare, and had me laughing out loud multiple times. McCurdy’s art is also gorgeous, which goes a long way for me in a graphic novel.

There’s been lots of comparisons to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, understandably, and while it isn’t as similar as one would think with the topic, it captures a lot of the same feeling I had when I first watched Buffy way back when: utter delight! (It was really, really nice to revisit that feeling after the subsequent stories about Joss Whedon tainted it.) Youth Group takes the usually overly grimdark genre of religious horror and makes it light and funny and caring and surprisingly inclusive. And the art matches it perfectly, bright and colorful and just fun!

Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You

by Anna

The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud

By Becky Holmes

Of course the title and cover of this booked grabbed my attention immediately! I’d read articles about romance scams before and wondered how anyone could fall for them. And, as the author points out, thinking yourself impervious to a particular type of scam can lead you to lower your guard and become more susceptible. So, I clearly had to learn more.

Becky Holmes is quite funny, in a particularly British way that I don’t always get, so while I was giggling out loud several times, I also occasionally just sort of shrugged. She begins with a lot of texts leading various scammers on, which is entertaining but gets repetitive. This is also how she first got interested in the topic, entertaining herself with the various scam messages she got across social media platforms. The silliness sometimes felt a little jarring in contrast with the harm being discussed, but as she got more into the topic with accounts from victimized people, it got fairly grim and I appreciated the levity.

As ridiculous as the scams sound when reading them from the comfort of one’s own home, she explains that they are most effective on people going through other trauma in their lives, and desperate for love and connection enough to overlook the signs of fraud that are obvious to the rest of us. And in that light, scammers purposefully looking for people in trouble and illness is particularly disgusting. The people Holmes interviews look back at their own situation and can’t quite believe they were in such bad shape to fall for the lines they did, which really struck me because I’ve certainly related to being retrospectively astonished at how stress and exhaustion can compromise my reasoning.

Towards the end of the book, though, the cumulative stories all started to feel a bit draining. I felt discouraged by the cynicism of the scammers preying on people looking for love, and wondered what it was doing for their long-term psyche. Even worse, I fell back into some victim blaming, not for falling for fairly blatant false scenarios, but their willingness to go along with some incredibly shady dealings that could have gotten them in serious legal trouble if they’d been real.

The author’s total and unconditional support of the victims (and mild scolding of anyone even remotely critical of them) didn’t help. Holmes explicitly compares romance scams to abusive relationships, but they seemed more comparable to addiction to me. The victims become so attached to the scammer that they’ll do anything for them and deny all reason, including pushing away family and friends. (Especially shocking is when some admit that they would welcome the scammer back if they got back in touch.) Of course this is terrible and they need help and understanding, but it is not such a shock that their other personal relationships have taken a hit in the process.

Eli Harpo’s Adventure to the Afterlife

by Anna

By Eric Schlich

This book is an utter trip! (Pun semi-intended?) Eric Schlich captures and satirizes, with what I can only assume is great accuracy, what he calls the heaven tourism genre: Heaven is for Real and books of that ilk. Though I haven’t read any of those purported nonfiction books, this novel has enough similarities to the description of Todd Burpo’s book that I’m guessing the publisher had to brush up on the fair use rules for parody.

At age 4, fictional Eli Harpo had emergency heart surgery, and told his parents of visiting heaven while under anesthesia. His dad has since written a book about it (Heaven or Bust!) and ekes out a living selling and giving talks about the book. Eli happily supports this relatively small potatoes endeavor, but when a renowned televangelist comes calling and the publicity blows up, Eli is faced with increasing doubts. 

The chronology jumps around a bit, with most of the book being a flashback as middle-aged Eli is revisiting Bible World, the Christian theme park where his budding fame came crashing down at age 13. Most of the book details how Eli and his family got there, both physically and mentally, with some flashforwards to college, where he rebuilt his nonreligious life. The book pointedly does not reflect Eli any younger than 13 because he himself cannot remember any of the original pivotal near-death experience that has brought them all to this point.

Described as “witty, satirical, and profoundly big-hearted,” it was that, but the praise didn’t mention that it is also utterly mortifying. I don’t suffer from second-hand embarrassment as much as others, but I was both agog and cringing at most of the scenes in the novel. Which I mean in a good way — if it wasn’t so well written, it wouldn’t have nearly the impact! I didn’t relate especially closely to any of the characters (though other reviewers who experienced much more stringently religious upbringings than I have said that it is quite accurate), but I found it all fascinating. They could have so easily been caricatures, but truly each character contained unexpected dimensions. Schlich details each scene which such realism and matter-of-fact first-person narration from Eli, that I periodically had to check that this was in fact a novel and not a memoir.

Bodies

by Anna

By Si Spencer

This is a new(ish) program on Netflix, which looks both intriguing and confusing. The graphic novel it is based on turns out to also be intriguing and confusing. It is set in London but over four different years: 1890, 1940, 2014, and 2050. Investigators of each time period are faced with the mysterious appearance a brutally murdered corpse with no identification. The thing is that it is the same corpse for all of them.

I don’t have great facial recognition in general, so was impressed that I was vaguely able to recognize the reoccurring corpse, even across the different art styles. Each year has its own artist, all significantly distinct and all quite good. The art complements the writing in capturing the cultural changes of each time period as well. All that to say, it is a beautifully done graphic novel, and I still have only the vaguest sense of what it is all about.

I think it is probably very British? It reminded me a bit of Watchmen and V For Vendetta in overall style, though Bodies is generally more optimistic. Each year is a time of upheaval for England, highlighting different threats, both internal and external, that England has faced. It ends in a very English-centric declaration that I assume might resonate more if I were English.

… I decided I should probably at least watch the first episode of the show so that I can give my two cents on that, fully expecting to be unenthusiastic, but the show is actually really good! It takes significant divergences from the source, but they mostly improve the suspense and pacing to my mind, as well as making the characters a little more nuanced, though I’m still only halfway through the series. Rebecca pointed out that the cinematography is so good that it surpassed the illustration for her.

The show also made a theme more explicit that I’d initially missed from the comic: that all four investigators from the various time periods are various degrees of acab, exerting their power over vulnerable characters, but they are also each from a discriminated population themselves, possibly using their borrowed authority to balance.