Author Archives: Anna

Martyr!

by Anna

By Kaveh Akbar

This is capital-L Literary novel about a depressed young poet searching for the meaning of life and death, and I should absolutely hate it, but I was riveted! I guess that’s a testimony to the writing. The protagonist is still quite annoying, the sort of drug-fueled tortured artist that intrigued me in my 20s and just exhausts me now. But even within the first few pages, I ran across lines that I knew would stick with me for a while.

I never would have even picked it up if it hadn’t been recommended by what is becoming one of my favorite e-newsletters, Death by Consumption.* The recommendation includes this quoted passage:

Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty.

And I thought to myself, well, yes, of course we all want to be happy, contented, and rich; who doesn’t? So I felt like I needed to read the book to find the counter argument. I didn’t really get an answer, but instead got a lot to think about over the next few days and weeks. (Danny also calls it “short but expansive” and I believe his definition of short has been warped by the enormous tomes he usually reads, since this comes to a healthy 331 pages, but it was a quick read, with short chapters from rotating viewpoints that pull you in for ‘just one more.’)

Also, about halfway through the book, there’s a surprise twist that adds a significant mystery that I wasn’t expecting at all, but helped balance the tortured artist side of it all. That said, I found the ending both confusing and upsetting, which could have been intentional but I got the sense that I was getting caught up in details and missing the big point of it all. I was incredibly grateful to google for autofilling my search of “Martyr! Kaveh Akbar…” with “ending explained” and finding an hour-long lecture on youtube, as well as a decent sized reddit thread.

*Side recommendation: I first started following Danny Gottleib’s writing when he was doing a tongue-in-cheek Julie & Julia thing called Danny & Gweneth, where he tried to make all of Gweneth Paltrow’s recipes with ingredients he could find locally in the Midwest. He ended up moving to NYC and switched to a general media recommendation newsletter that I look forward to every week.

The Hymn to Dionysus

by Anna

By Natasha Pulley

Ooh, Natasha Pulley just keeps getting better and better at her special talent, which is weaving truly brutal social commentary through a cover of fantasy action. I went into this one with less trepidation after The Mars House, and I’m sort of wondering if The Mars House was a setup. There are enough notably similar themes between the two novels that I began to think of them as a pairing of sorts, though very, very different in setting, character, and plot.

The Hymn To Dionysus has an even more light-hearted tone right off the bat. Our protagonist is a happy child soldier in ancient Thebes, and if it doesn’t exactly sound like a happy existence to a modern reader, well, sometimes that’s just the case with fantasy, especially historical fantasy. I mean, look at the majority of children’s and young adult media, right? The Hunger Games and Naruto, just to name a few right off the bat – full of deeply traumatizing events for young children who just sort of make do, and that’s what our protagonist does, too. His life has some downsides (murdering, enslaving, etc.) but there’s plenty of upsides, too (his military unit is like a family to him, he gets to travel and see all sorts of sights). He and everyone else in Thebes are just going along, until Dionysus, the god of madness, shows up and suddenly they can’t just go along, and the full awareness of it all starts crashing down on them, and it is devastating, for both the characters and the reader.

As if all that wasn’t enough, there are some striking comparisons to our current world. My ancient Greek history isn’t up to much, but I started getting the impression this was set toward the end of the Grecian empire, with a years-long drought devastating all levels of civil society. As field slaves run away, figuring capture and death is better than starvation on the stringent food rations, the military is charged with rounding up ‘criminals’ to work the fields for the necessary food for the city and given a quota to meet, which rang direly true.

It ends as satisfactorily as possible, more so than I’d imagined it being able to after a whole series of gasp-worthy twists, and left some scenes indelibly imprinted in my head, so I’d generally recommend this, though I am looking forward to returning to something a little more gentle next (spoiler: I didn’t do that).

To Catch A Cat

by Anna

By Marian Babson

For such a charming cozy premise, this mystery is surprisingly grim and nasty, which is not necessarily a pan but definitely a surprise. Within the first ten pages, 11-year-old Robin has been dared to steal a neighbor’s prized cat but while in the house, witnesses the husband brutally beat his wife to death. I guess I’d expected more of a ‘closed door’ mystery, where all the violence is off-screen so to speak, but it’s really quite explicit. We continue to get intermittent chapters from the husband’s unhinged viewpoint, which are unpleasant and I imagine would be very triggering to anyone experienced in any sort of domestic abuse situation.

At the same time, Robin is staying with his aunt and her less violent, but still verbally abusive boyfriend, and honestly, this novel is not very generous to any sort of post-pubescent male characters. Individual scenes are darkly funny, but the overall situation is grim enough that it is hard to fully enjoy the mystery. Robin is, at best, severely neglected by the variety of self-centered adults around him, with his only real comfort and companion being this cat that he has successfully smuggled out of the murder house.

All the adults are fairly useless in general, with the only real support and help coming from other children and teens. The several divergent plot strands come together in a neat (and fairly quick, at less than 200 pages) ending, and like any decent cozy, it all concludes satisfactorily, though disconcertingly so, considering everything everyone has been through.

Manners and Monsters

by Anna

By Tilly Wallace

I’d run across a couple different recommendations for this book, and the premise is fascinating! Set in a fantasy England in the early 19th century, a biological weapon created in the Napoleanic wars has turned several hundred members of the English aristocracy, primarily women, into zombies of a sort. Honestly, the worldbuilding is so clever, this is more of what I would have liked to see in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! The aristocracy, being the elite, have made it a whole song and dance, with a whole new set of ridiculous etiquette around their living-dead members.

When the etiquette is broken quite violently with a zombie-esque murder (missing brains, of course) at a grand ball, chief investigator Viscount Wycliff, on the fringe of haute ton himself, must pry into secrets of the various ‘unfortunates’ in attendance. In order to ruffle as few feathers as possible, he is accompanied by Spunky Heroine™ Hannah, the unassuming daughter of a surgeon specializing in undead ailments. And here’s where the novel lost me a little.

I generally liked Hannah, but both protagonists are fairly flatly written: Wycliff is brusque to the point of insulting, while Hannah pines for love at least half a dozen times throughout the book. The two are very clearly destined for each other, which wouldn’t bother me if they didn’t seem like an exceptionally bad match. I’d be reading along, enjoying the general zombification of the Regency era, and then their personal interactions would be a sour note. Romance really is trickier to write than people realize!

An additional big kudo to author Tilly Wallace, though: she sells all of her books directly through her website, tillywallace.com, where you can pay and promptly download an epub file. As someone trying to cut my very last tie to amazon (those pesky self-published ebooks), I very much appreciated this, and hope that more self-published authors follow suit!

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.