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This week I finished The Dawnhounds, the first book of the The Endsong series by Sascha Stronach.

This book has been compared to Gideon the Ninth, which I think does it a disservice, because while there are enjoyable things about it, if you go into it expecting The Locked Tomb, I think you're going to be disappointed. They are not on the same level.

Protagonist Yat's homeland—the port city of Hainak—is implied to have been colonized and fought a revolution to escape that, but while some of the changes have been welcome—the embrace of "biotech," freedom of determination—her home is in the throes of sliding from one abusive regime to another. They have thrown off the yoke of colonization, but as Yat comes to slowly realize over the course of the novel, what they replaced it with isn't much better.

Yat is in a prime position to realize this. A former street rat turned cop who joined the police in hopes of making a positive change for people like herself, she's been slowly worn down over the years into someone who simply closes her eyes to the worse abuses by the government and partakes herself in the lesser offenses. The kick-off for the story isn't any of that though—it's that Yat is demoted after her coworkers learn she's patronized a queer bar. She's blundering through the fallout of that—continuing to patronize that same bar, and using drugs to cope—when the fantasy plot hits her in the head.

Unfortunately, here is where the novel began to lose me. I think the comparisons with The Locked Tomb arise from the way The Dawnhounds throws the reader into the plot with the promise of revealing more information later. Except that where TLT is a masterclass in subterfuge and gradual reveals that make perfect sense in retrospect, and in some cases reframed entire characters and story arcs, The Dawnhounds just...never really reveals the information.

By the end of the book I could not describe anything about the antagonists—who they were, what their goals were, how Yat defeated them. And although the city of Hainak is omnipresent—it's almost a character in itself, and much of Yat and Sen's motivation surrounds wanting to do right by the city—I could not tell you anything about how its government functions or why there are problems with it (or what those problems are at the core, besides wealth disparity and abuses by the criminal justice system). It's suggested at one point that the specious specter of violence or re-invasion by their former colonizer is being wielded to allow some to gain power within the city...but we never learn who those people are, what they want, or how they're able to do this. Given how much lip service is paid to politics in the book, this feels particularly jarring since it's precisely the kind of thing Yat and her pal Sen should be really invested in.

Early in the book, the confusion about the magic system and the import of various characters and objects is forgivable, because Yat herself doesn't know any of this. I have no problem with an author who wants the reader to feel the protagonist's confusion and sense of being overwhelmed. But the book never gets around to explaining anything.

As mentioned, this is the first book of a series, which may mean that more information about who the antagonists are and what they actually want is revealed later on, but I can't say I'll bother with the next book. This one just did not give me enough to care about and I'm not willing to dive into a whole new book on the hope that it might explain things the first book failed to explain.

And for a truly nitpicky complaint: the title has no relevance to the book. The term "Dawnhound/s" never comes up.

That said, if you set aside the obtuse nature of the plot, the book is still fun. I liked Yat as a protagonist. She's certainly a flawed person whose general attitude at the start can be summed up as "careless," but it's a kind of self-enforced carelessness, because she is too afraid to really open her eyes and see what Hainak has become, and what she's assisted them in doing as a cop. Her transformation from someone largely passive into someone with the courage to take real action is nice to see.

Stronach has the bones of something interesting in Hainak, but I wish we had gotten more time to explore it. Stronach is trying to fit a great deal into a midsized novel, which makes the boat detour to some random island we never really find out much about and thin hints towards Captain Sibbi's past feel a little frustrating in retrospect, and I think the book would have benefited from more room for all of these things to breathe. Sometimes it feels like Stronach was trying to cram everything she personally thinks is cool into the book, and that does not benefit it.

I don't feel that I wasted my time with The Dawnhounds, but I also don't feel compelled to pick up the next book in the series. I think I've seen enough of Hainak.

Book #8 from the Women in Translation rec list: The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo, translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim. This book is about a 65-year-old assassin approaching the end of her career who faces one last unexpected challenge.

This book hooked me immediately with its premise. While 65 may not seem old enough in today's graying society to be considered truly "elderly," a hard life can take its toll much sooner than might be expected, and protagonist Hornclaw (her work alias; we never learn her real name) has definitely had a tough road. Letting a woman—and an old woman at that—be the sole protagonist of an action novel like this was fun to read.

This isn't a book about Hornclaw reflecting on her life and career, though her recollections of what led her into this work are sprinkled throughout the story. Rather, Hornclaw is focused on the future. Despite a lifetime of being physically active, Hornclaw's punishing work has taken its toll, and every day she is evaluating herself to judge if she can reasonably continue with her work, or if its time to take her payout and retire. At various times, she fantasizes about owning a small beer and fried chicken restaurant, being a lady who gets her nails done regularly, and having the time and safety to walk her dog more often. It's these small goals which drive home how much of Hornclaw's life has been controlled by the nature of her work, although she never pities herself for the road her life has taken.

Neither is she wringing her hands with regret over a life spent killing for money. Hornclaw is nothing if not practical, and it made her perspective interesting to sink into. Her job is just a job for her; she does what she needs to to complete her assignments, and she moves on. When a relative of one of her old victims comes calling, she has no recollection of them and no particular pity for the role she played in their life. I enjoyed this aspect; it felt like Hornclaw was allowed to inhabit a role I've only ever really seen filled by male characters: the grizzled old veteran assassin.

And of course, even at her age, even recognizing she can no longer pull some of the moves she used to, Hornclaw is still a stone-cold badass.

The story itself was a little less gripping for me, it felt like it meandered a little and didn't have as much time to build up as I might have liked, particularly Hornclaw's relationship with Dr. Kang. Hornclaw is definitely the most compelling part of the book, and I enjoyed it for her narration and her actions. Naturally, the book also has commentary on ageism, as Hornclaw is constantly aware of how she's viewed as she gets old (the quickest way to make her snap is trying to refer to her as "ma'am"), which she uses to her advantage when it comes to her targets, and which she fights against when it comes to her coworkers and clients.

On the whole, this book goes by quickly, and it's fun. It's not the sort of book I'll spend a lot of time thinking about now that I'm done with it, but I enjoyed reading it and it was fun to see such a different protagonist for this kind of story.

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Latest commute audiobook: Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield. This novel is about a woman, Miri, whose wife is a marine biologist, and goes on a submarine expedition for work meant to last three weeks. Six months later, Leah's sub finally resurfaces, but she isn't the same person Miri remembers.

This is another WIN for online queer recs - I thoroughly enjoyed it. I may even buy a copy for myself. There is a horror element to this story—for Miri, our primary narrator, the horror of watching someone you love become something you don't recognize or understand—but mostly Our Wives Under the Sea is a meditation on grief and loss. It is so easy to transform this story into a metaphor for anyone with a loved one who is terminally ill, or missing, or otherwise there, but not there.

Armfield's writing beautifully illustrates this journey, and she does a particularly good job of doling out information a little at a time, so that the reader often share's in Miri's confusion and muddled state of mind. The audiobook is only six hours, but the story moves along at a leisurely pace, the horror of it unfurling slowly in small, initially mundane things, like Leah's new obsession with running the faucets, or her strange eating habits (which Miri has been with her long enough to recognize as out of character). We spend long moments with Miri on the phone, trying to get ahold of Leah's private employer to get some answers, only to see her once again rerouted through an obtuse bureaucracy, and this wonderfully crescendos the growing fear of wondering if anyone has answers or will take responsibility for what's happened to Leah.

While most of the book is from Miri's perspective, Leah does break in with excerpts from her recollection of that last submarine dive. Most of her chapters are as unsettling as you would expect, but readers looking for all-out horror are likely to be disappointed. The focus of this book isn't on what happened, exactly, to Leah and her team, but what happens when they get back, and on Leah's relationship with Miri. And in this sense, I think Armfield maintains the sheen of horror over the whole story, which is in large part, the fear of the unknown. What is more frightening for Miri and Leah than to not understand? I think it may also support the idea that even Leah who experienced the thing can't put it into words or understand what exactly happened to her; it is simply too alien.

Armfield also excels at capturing Miri's emotional struggle and the way her moods swing from frequent emotional catatonia to sudden flashes of anger or open grief or nostalgia as she struggles to understand this person in her home wearing her wife's face. This is a messy situation all around, and it shows so believably here, in how Miri distances herself from their friends as she can't think of how to explain to them exactly what's wrong with Leah; in how after months with no improvement of Leah's often bizarre and troubling behaviors, Miri begins to resent her wife; in how she continues to put herself through the motions of the every day while trying to manage this utterly baffling home situation.

Mixed in with Miri's struggle to adapt to Leah's new behavior are her recollections of their relationship prior to Leah's most recent dive, which paint a sweet and achingly realistic portrait of a couple. No spoilers, but I was definitely starting to get choked up at the end!

The book builds towards a predictable end, but I didn't find this took away from the story at all. At some point, you're aware that there's only really one way for this to go, but Armfield manages to keep the story engaging through that endpoint even as you saw it coming. It comes so naturally as the climax and denouement of the journey we've been on with Miri. As noted, it's easy to couch this book as a metaphor. Leah is home, but not really. Leah is alive, but not really. Leah is there, but she's not Leah anymore. There are certainly parallels with Miri's past experience with her mother, who passed away after a battle with dementia several years earlier. She was there, but not there. Alive, but not herself. Miri is trapped in emotional purgatory, neither able to have her beloved wife, nor able to let her go, and it's both gut-wrenching and deeply touching to see. Leah, even as she is now, is so loved. And there is where the more mundane horror comes in: the horror of feeling that you're watching someone you love slowly slip away from you and you cannot close your fingers around their essence to keep them here, with you.

This was a fantastic read, highly recommend if you're a reader with patience for a slow, very introspective story. I will definitely be looking into more of Armfield's work in the future.

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The most recent commute audiobook was The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern, of The Night Circus fame (although admittedly I have not read that one yet). This is a fantasy novel about Zachary, a young man swept into the drama of a secret underground society and the mysterious figures who surround it.

I finished this book on Sunday morning, catching the last 7 minutes of a whopping 19-hour runtime over breakfast, and since then I've settled into a relative disappointment. On paper, this book has so many things that should make it an ace in the hole for me: Book lovers! Cats! Secret magical societies! Queer characters! Women who are something Other taking control of their destinies! And yet, overall, this book just did not land for me.

As is a risk, I think, with all stories that are about the power of stories, The Starless Sea comes off a little pretentious and self-important. It is a book lauding the unmatched importance of books. I felt aware at various points throughout the book of how hard it was trying to appeal to people like me, who would enjoy the idea of a dark-paneled underground room with endless books and an on-demand kitchen, and this sense of pandering did take away from it at times.

However, it also does some interesting things with regards to what it is like to be the person in a story (such as the fate of Eleanor and Simon, once their part in the story is done) as well as the risks of valuing preservation over change and growth. Without giving too much away, there is a secret society in decline, and a woman so determined to prevent its downfall that she ends up causing significant harm to the organization she's trying to save because she is unwilling to accept that an end comes for all things. I enjoyed this theme and I felt like it was echoed well throughout the story, and in many ways it's easy to sympathize with her ultimate goals, if not her methods.

I also enjoyed the attitude the book takes towards its protagonist, Zachary. Not too much of a spoiler, but Zachary is confronted with a magical door into this secret society when he's about 11. But he doesn't open it. Years and years later, when Zachary is 24, is when his role in this society begins. While I adored those kinds of child isekai stories as a child myself, it was fun to see a story about a child who didn't quite dare answer the call at the time, but still got his chance for an adventure later.

The book also really captures Zachary's sense of having missed out. By the time he arrives, the secret society is essentially on its deathbed, and while Zachary enjoys his exploration of it, several times we catch him thinking longingly of what it would have been like to be a part of things at the height of the society's relevance and power. Nevertheless, Zachary is there at a key time, and he understands that by the end.

On the whole, the book is frustratingly short on details. I don't consider myself someone who needs every riddle solved and every question answered to enjoy a story (in fact, a bit of lingering mystery can really make the tale!), but when I hit 75% completion on this lengthy audiobook and still had no real idea what the purpose of the secret society at its core was, I found myself annoyed. It began to feel that Morgenstern had no answers, and was keeping things vague and whimsical to cover up a lack of depth. There is value, particularly in this kind of story where the magic is ill-defined and fate plays a present if unclear role, in not laying things out too plainly. It leaves room for imagination, it keeps things a little mysterious and exciting. But at some point, we need enough answers to know why we should care about these things, and the presence of several characters who could have given Zachary answers but never did felt like they were being kept from the readers.

Morgenstern's prose was enjoyable, and both Zachary and deuterogonist Dorian were decent characters (no one can stop me form envisioning Dragon Age's middle-aged Dorian Pavus, side shaves and all, when thinking about Dorian in this story). I will also give The Starless Sea a shout-out for including video games explicitly in its conception of story-telling (Zachary begins the "real" start of the book as a graduate student studying games with an interest in branching narratives).

Morgenstern does a solid job of weaving together the various parts of the story which start out feeling quite disparate, though as noted, greater clarity would have improved things. It was fun to see how seemingly irrelevant things eventually fell into place. However, themes and descriptions at times felt circular, particularly given that the plot feels stalled for large portions of the story. It's often unclear what Zachary is doing here, besides hanging out.

Perhaps owing to the absence of clarity about the point of these goings-on, the story rarely grabbed me. I liked it and I was curious about what happened next, but I was almost never truly gripped. It was never the kind of book I'd stay up late for. I also was not a huge fan of Kat's sections of the book. To have made it through so much of this audiobook only to have the long-awaited climax repeatedly interrupted with Kat's diary was driving me crazy by the final story segments. She gave us some interesting perspective from the "real" world, but the timing of it was incredibly frustrating.

I certainly don't regret the time I spent with The Starless Sea, and I was pleased with the final scenes for Zachary and Dorian, but it's not something I'll ever read again, and it makes me a little wary of The Night Circus, which is loosely on my TBR and has received significant praise. Maybe this one was just not quite my cup of tea. I'll still give Morgenstern another chance though; maybe a shorter book of hers will be more focused.

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Book #7 from the "Women in Translation" rec list: Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith.

Trying to accurately describe the plot of this book is an exercise in futility, so I'm not going to bother. All I can say is it centers around Ayami, a woman who is an actress, or maybe a poet, or possibly both, and is on her last day of work at an audio theater for the blind in Seoul.

This is a book I feel like I'd have to read at least one more time all the way through to be able to really discuss the themes and motifs at play. It's an incredibly cerebral novel that never gives up a clear answer about what's happening. What's real or not real changes from scene to scene. Is Ayami an orphan? Did she have a wealthy aunt? Is she the poet from Buha's youth? Is the director the bus driver? Who really got hit by the bus, and who was the murdered woman in the attic? Is Ayami Yeoni? The book leaves you to your own conclusions.

This is a book that I feel you'll either love or really hate. I enjoyed the trip, but it's hard to explain why. Reading this felt like running a fever in August; the whole thing is a sweaty, sticky dream where you can't tell if a conversation you had was real or not or real and supplemented in your memory by the dream. Early in the book, Suah presents one of the best descriptions of living through a heat wave I've ever read as she describes being in Seoul at the height of summer. I'm going to quote a few lines here just to give you an idea:

"The midsummer metropolis was a temple of benumbed languor, the home of long-vanished, cult-worshipping tribes. Rarefied sleep sucked bodies into a burning crater lake choked with sticky flakes of black soap ash and honeycomb chunks of grey pumice. In cramped rooms unrelieved by air conditioning or even a fan, if you opened the window hot air heavier than a sodden quilt rushed in, clogging your pores like the wet slap of raw meat, but with it closed the oxygen would quickly evaporate, disappearing at a frightening rate until the air was filled with nothing but heat. Nothing but the ecstasy of ruin."

Suah's language is vivid and brilliantly evokes specific, sometimes very obscure feelings. The conversations between characters swerve between the practical and the deeply abstract and philosophical. Overhanging the whole surreal experience is the memory of the military rule of Korea and the ever-present shadow of North Korea. The characters are rarely directly concerned with these things, and yet, their presence crops up: when Ayami describes helicopters flying overhead; the citywide blackouts; when Wolfi, a German tourist, keeps asking to visit a particular area that Ayami repeatedly tells him is inaccessible because it requires passing through North Korea. South Korea isn't really a peninsula, she tells him, it's an island.

It's a short novel, just 152 pages, but I still felt like I'd been on a journey by the time I finished it. I think this would make a great work for discussing in a book club or class, because it's one of those stories where everyone is going to pick up on different details and have different explanations for the various strange phenomena at play. What is this book about? I can't really say. It reminded me a little bit of the short film Genius Loci in how the characters interact with the city and the constantly-changing story landscape.

If you do give it a read, I definitely recommend reading the translator's note at the end, it adds a little something and she explains some of her translating choices. This book, like several of the others from this rec list, presented a translating challenge, I imagine, and I think Smith did an excellent job capturing Suah's surrealist world. This is not the first book of Suah's that Smith has translated and I'm sure her familiarity with Suah's particular writing helped make this such a wonderful translation.

Another win from this list!

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My latest commute audiobook was A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson, a vampire novel that strides along at a brisk 5 hours run time. I have to admit upfront I did not have high hopes for this book. I somewhat warily added it to my TBR list, but I feared tired romantasy tropes that don't hit for me, and that the queerness which had landed it on my radar would turn out to be little more than additional titillation for a straight audience looking for a tale of decadence and indecency. I'm quite pleased to report neither of those concerns came to fruition!

As the title might suggest, there's a level of melodrama in this book you have to accept to enjoy the story. It reminded me in some ways of AMC's Interview with the Vampire in its shameless embrace of all those usual vampiric tropes and in the extravagances of its characters and its prose. Throughout the introduction, I was trying to decide if this was fun, or overwrought. I came down on the side of fun.

The story is told in the form of a memoir, narrated by Dracula's first wife, Constanta, to her husband. Dracula is never named in this story—Constanta says outright in the beginning that what the world remembers of him is now up to her, including his name, and so she never gives it—but of course, we readers know who he is (and I did laugh out loud at a reference to "all that business with the Harkers").

The beginning of the story does give off some of those romantasy vibes. Constanta is immediately drawn in by Dracula's dark beauty and power, and she's willing to submit herself entirely to be saved (he finds her dying after some form of raid on her village). She finds his possessiveness romantic, his rages and moods evidence of his wounded heart, and his controlling behavior a sign of care and love. However, based on the introduction, we know that her viewpoint changes. I don't know if I can call this book a deconstruction, but it certainly paints a grim and realistic portrait of where that type of behavior ultimately leads. Constanta's naivete is also understandable. As a young woman from rural 15^th century Romania, she does not have the background most readers have that might inform her that Dracula's behavior is concerning. Where we might expect a protagonist of our own era to have her guard up immediately over some of his statements or actions, it makes tragic, perfect sense that Constanta doesn't see the red flags.

Constanta is eventually joined by additional spouses of Dracula, and there is such tension and heartbreak in watching how all of them are at the start of their engagement with this dysfunctional family, and where they end up. Gibson creates such a captivating tableau of how Dracula breaks these people down day by day until they are little more than beautiful ghosts in his shadow, dependent on him for everything, and unable to imagine a life outside of his control.

On the relationship front, all four of the main cast appear to be bisexual and the story has room for their individual relationships with each other as well as with their group dynamic and their relationships with Dracula. Constanta's relationship with her sister-wife Magdalena is every bit as layered and complex (and lustful) as her relationship with Dracula, and when brother-husband Alexei enters the picture, he and Dracula have their own fraught and simmering romance.

This book obviously isn't long, but it never felt short in that I felt it took just as much time as it needed to tell the story. Could it have included more details? Certainly. Did I think it lacked for not having them? No.

We know, based on Constanta's introduction, the biggest story beat coming down the road, but Gibson still manages to elicit delicious tension and a rising fervor as we know we must be approaching that moment. There was something that felt, to me, so realistic in Constanta's admission that there was no one big blowout fight or dramatic moment where she realized what Dracula was doing to them was wrong, but that it just made itself apparent after centuries of racked up abuses—both towards herself and her fellow spouses.

The writing itself is, as noted, melodramatic, but it suits Constanta's viewpoint I think, as well as the genre. I ended up enjoying it quite a lot, and Gibson has some very Romantic turns of phrase that fit the story and its themes quite well.

I would so love to know what these characters get up to after the denouement, but I think the places Gibson left them make perfect sense. I was so pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this one, and very glad I gave it a chance! I really enjoyed Abby Craden's narration in the audiobook as well. Very entertaining!

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Current Music: All that Remains; Bastille

Book #6 from the "Women in Translation" rec list was Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton. This novel is about a journalist seeking to score an exclusive interview with convicted 3-time murderer Manako Kajii. Kajii is in prison for killing three of her lovers, all older, well-off, lonely men, and with her retrial coming up soon, journalist Rika Machida thinks it's the perfect time for another focus feature on the famous murderess. However, the more time she spends with Kajii, the more she wonders if maybe Kajii is the only one seeing the situation clearly.

This book has been billed in some places as a crime thriller or murder mystery, but it's not really, so if you go into it expecting that, I fear you'll be disappointed. The core of the book isn't really whether Kajii killed her lovers or not. What this book really was is to interrogate societal attitudes in Japan, which it does through a lot of introspection on the part of Rika.

Butter tackles fatphobia - Rika notices how much of the disproportionate vitriol leveled at Kajii concerns her weight. The idea that a fat woman could command the level of desire expressed by her victims repulses society, even more so as Kajii considers herself attractive and desirable, and thinks losing weight is a waste of her time. When Rika starts putting on weight too, she suddenly sees other sides to her peers, friends, and even her boyfriend that surprise her.

Butter attacks sexism - Over the course of the novel, Rika hones her criticisms of a sexist society that demands utter subservience and perfection from women, while coddling men who refuse to take care of themselves unless a woman is doing it for them. Kajii herself subscribes to this view—declaring in one fit of rage with Rika that she hates feminists—and yet despite having striven most of her life for this domestic ideal, she sits lonely and despised in a prison cell, convicted of killing the very men she claims she was so happy to care for.

But to me, most of all, Butter is about loneliness. Loneliness haunts every character in this book, from Kajii sharing in a moment of vulnerability that she's never had a female friend; to Rika, utterly convinced she'll die alone in an empty apartment like her father someday; to Reiko, Rika's best friend, languishing in an increasingly distant marriage; to Shinoi, one of Rika's sources, who feels unable to reconnect with his estranged daughter or otherwise fill the holes in his life left by her departure along with his ex-wife. Butter shows the extremes to which loneliness can drive a person, and the way it can twist a life up into something ugly and unrecognizable.

Throughout the novel, Rika is seeking connection, whether with Reiko, whom she struggles to connect with as much now that Reiko has left her job to be a cheerful full-time housewife; or with her casual boyfriend from work, whose greatest attribute to Rika is his willingness to leave her alone and not bother her when she doesn't want him around; or even with Kajii herself, who Rika finds herself increasingly desperate to understand.

I really enjoyed the ending of this book, where Rika comes to understand the intention required to build and maintain community, and with several characters moving away from the nuclear family-centric concept of not being alone. Particularly touching was Rika's purchase of a three-bedroom apartment near the end of the novel—to make sure she has room for friends who need a place to stay. It's really touching and rewarding to see these characters come together, touched by Rika's presence in their lives in ways even she didn't fully realize, and going on to touch each other's lives in ways Rika could never have predicted.

In many ways, the novel invites you to sympathize with or even pity Kajii, and through Rika's shifting attitudes towards her it does a great job of showing how someone like Kajii could manipulate as many people as she did. Watching Rika be drawn into Kajii's orbit can almost convince the reader at times that Kajii's onto something with her perspective! But the final portrait is of someone so warped by loneliness and feelings of rejection that she had to divorce herself from reality to make life livable, and was willing to hurt people to keep up her fantasy.

Butter leaves a lot of things open-ended, which suited me just fine. It felt real, and at its heart, like I said, the book isn't about either condemning or absolving Kajii. It's a lot more about Rika's journey, and the changing attitudes of the cast of characters towards basic assumptions of Japanese society, like the place of women, or the responsibilities of men, or the role of a romantic partner in your life.

I was not as impressed with the translation this time around as I have been with some of the earlier books. Butter retains a lot of the stilted, excessively formal language I'm used to seeing in anime subtitles. The characters often speak in a way no Anglophone speaks, which makes their conversations sound unnatural to the ear, even if I see what they're getting at. I think this could have used another pass to make the language flow better. However, I also think there were some tough aspects of the prose translation, since the book is packed with extremely detailed descriptions of food and the experience of eating.

On the whole, a great dive into the psyche of these characters as a reflection of a broader society, and, for me, a satisfying ending! I can see why this book took off in Japan when it first released.

Yesterday I wrapped up one of my few anticipated non-fiction reads of the year: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter.

This book reaches back to America's foundation to trace its often hostile relationship with its own intelligentsia and the impact that's had on American society and development. This book was published the year my mom was born—1963—and was reflecting on the political attitudes of its day, yet much of it, particularly in the introductory chapters, feels like it could have been written yesterday. Plainly, America is still struggling with a recurrent animosity towards the very concept of an educated class.

Because it was written in 1963, parts of it are dated, in terms of attitudes and terminology. But on the whole, Hofstadter provides a thoughtful and comprehensive look at the influence of various individuals and groups, both the good and the bad (for instance, while he notes the well-documented shortcomings of Puritan society, he also notes they placed much more value on an educated populace than the Evangelical traditions which eventually overpowered them.)

The book is obviously well-researched, and Hofstadter does a thorough job of documenting his sources and influences, as well as recommending additional reading on a broad range of topics touched on in his own book. So much of what he establishes here makes perfect sense when looking at modern American society. He so neatly threads the needle between where we started and where we are now that at some moments, it felt like the fog was lifting on something I should have seen ages ago.

While I would love to read a more modern, updated version of Hofstadter's exploration, even this dated one provides ample useful information for the current political state of the country. In short, there has always been a significant interest in this county not only in not glorifying education, but in resisting education (and Hofstadter elucidates the tension between these attitudes and the country's commitment to free childhood education when such a thing was not common).

It does make for heavy reading; Hofstadter's prose does not breeze by, but the points he's making feel important enough that it was more than worth it to take my time. Would not recommend reading right before bed though.

Highly recommend for fellow Americans and anyone seeking to understand the current climate of idiocy and rule by clowns to which we are subject. I'm not sure how we can definitively put down these attitudes of anti-intellectualism, but understanding their sources and history must be a start.

My latest commute audiobook was Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie R. Rendon, a book about a woman on an Ojibwe reservation in Northern Minnesota who hears a woman scream while out for a run in the woods, and everything that happens after that.

The main focus of this book is the plight of missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW), so it necessarily deals with some very dark subject matter, but I felt that the book always handled it respectfully and with empathy. The protagonist, Quill, becomes fixated on solving the mystery of the scream in the woods, and in the process becomes wrapped up in the greater issue of trafficking of Native American and First Nations women.

The writing itself is very simplistic. I think this book falls prey to the sort of "I went to the fridge. I took out the jam. I set it on the counter. I picked up a spoon." type of writing which is very detailed without being remotely poetic. I think it could have used some sprucing up to make it more engaging and with better flow.

However, I did feel that Rendon captures very realistic emotion in her characters. From Quill's frustration with the seeming lack of action on the issue of MMIW to her growing obsession with providing closure herself to her anxieties for her community, all of her responses to the situation felt believable, if not wise.

Some reviews on StoryGraph have expressed frustration with Quill's willingness to charge into danger and aversion to relying on law enforcement, but I found her actions believable. Were they good decisions? Hell no—Quill does some things that are outright foolish, but at the same time, her desperation and anger make those actions unsurprising, and much of her criticism of institutions makes sense within the structure of her experience. And when you look at Quill's actions as the concern for her overall community that they are, her fixation becomes as much about trying to create a safe environment for her friends and family as about a personal commitment to this one missing woman.

I was also engaged by the dynamic between Quill and her family. Moms don't usually get to be the hero. Moms are there to give advice and fret. If anything, dad gets to be the hero and mom is the nagging wife at home reminding him he needs to be careful because he has a family to think about. Rendon reverses this dynamic, and I am a bit tickled with such reversals of gender-based narrative roles. Here, it's Quill's husband Crow constantly exhorting her to be careful, to think of him, to think of the children, to stop chasing leads and seeking the resolution we're all looking for.

The focus on community within the reservation and across indigenous populations in the area was also touching and grounded the novel in Quill's cultural perspective. It kept the story from ever feeling like Quill was completely on her own and gives the reader insight into a close-knit community processing generations of trauma.

At the same time, Quill pushes back against the "shit happens on the rez" attitude she comments on in the beginning of the novel. Quill believes in a healthier, safer future for her community and that commitment comes across strongly in her anger towards the MMIW issue and what she sees as the failure of institutions, even local ones such as the tribal police, to protect indigenous women.

Overall, I found this an enjoyable thriller which also tackles a relevant and often overlooked issue. There was no part of it that was particularly earthshaking, but it was a solid read and I was watching with great interest at the crumbling of Quill's personal life as she chases her leads harder and harder. I thought the ending fit well, providing some but not complete closure, and sounding a hopeful note without glossing over the fact that MMIW is an ongoing problem with no clear solutions in sight.

A few months back for Native American Heritage Month, my library had a list of recommended books by Native authors, so I added a few of those to my TBR. This week I finished the second one, Fire Exit by Morgan Talty. (The first was Bad Cree by Jessica Johns, but I did not get around to writing a review for that.)

Fire Exit is a family-focused story. The protagonist, Charles, is not Native, but was raised on the Penobscot reservation in Maine by his Penobscot stepfather, Frederick. When Charles comes of age, he's required to move off the reservation, but he stays nearby, just across the river. As a young man he fathers a child with a Penobscot woman, who chooses to leave him and claim another man—a Penobscot—as the father. Now later in life, Charles is wrestling with whether or not the child, now an adult, is owed the truth of her parentage.

The storyline is not complicated, but this is not a light book. This is a book full of unhappy people struggling to do their best and overcome their pasts. Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they don't, but it all comes off realistic.

Charles' relationship with his child—Elizabeth--parallels well with his relationship with each of his own parents. Both Charles and Elizabeth were fathered by non-Native men who were never a part of their lives. Both had a Penobscot stepfather who by all accounts did a wonderful job raising them, and whom they consider their true father. The difference is that Charles is aware of his family's truth, while Elizabeth has been purposefully kept ignorant.

As Charles ponders whether or not he should tell Elizabeth the truth against the wishes of her mother, Mary, he is also seeking to reconnect with his own mother, Louise, a woman in the early stages of dementia. In his relationships with both women, Charles is hampered by the past and often wonders if it's ever possible to overcome.

That is also a theme that repeats throughout the book: all of these characters are weighed down by their pasts to various degrees. I've seen other reviews describe the novel as "meandering" and "ponderous" and I would agree. It doesn't proceed in a linear fashion but is mixed throughout with Charles' recollections of past events, usually woven in with how he views them as influencing the present. Much of the novel is introspective; there's not a lot of action, and Charles is not an especially decisive person. He often feels very passive, which felt realistic to me for the sort of person he seems to be, but may be grating to other readers.

It eschews any notion of therapy-speak, which was a relief, and characters often felt believably cagey about their feelings and motivations, or even that they didn't fully understand themselves. It makes for a juicy kind of messiness among them, and a grayness to the whole thing which I enjoyed. For instance, when Charles' friend Bobby—who has been begging Charles to move away from Maine with him—tours a house in Florida, he returns claiming it's an absolute no-go. Charles accuses him of lying about the reasons why, but the book never tells us if Bobby was lying or not, and if he was, why, and what really happened. Like Charles, we can only take Bobby's word with the sneaking suspicion it's not the real story.

Charles' efforts to reconcile with Louise and Elizabeth hit similar roadblocks, and I enjoyed what I felt was the realistic awkwardness with which these played out.

The prose is blunt and unadorned, which suits Charles' first-person narration, although at times I did get a bit worn out of Talty's penchant for running through mundane details ("I went to the sink. I set my bowl down. I turned on the water and rinsed the bowl out." etc.) However, on the whole, I thought the prose fit the story and it can be poignant in its simplicity.

It's not a very long book (8 hours on audiobook) and I enjoyed it. The ending felt appropriate, and on a hopeful note, one can believe there is some element of Charles and Elizabeth laying the past to rest in these final chapters.

Current Music: Thousand Eyes; FKA Twigs

This was my second read-through of Tevinter Nights, the short story collection released for Dragon Age; the first came in 2020 not long after it was published. I wasn't super impressed with it at the time, but I was eager for any updates on the Dragon Age franchise, so I ate it up anyway. Having played through the latest game release, Veilguard (review here), it seemed like a good time to revisit Tevinter Nights, conceived undoubtedly as a way to keep fans interested and engaged with the coming story when, six years after the release of the last game, Inquisition, there was still not a crumb of news about the next game. I stand by my original assessment.

First, let me say this: if you are not already a fan of Dragon Age, this book is unlikely to have anything remotely interesting for you. It is steeped in its own lore, which it assumes the reader's familiarity with, and the quality of the works are simply not worthwhile if you are not already invested in this world.

Tevinter Nights is emblematic of so much of Dragon Age's writing. That is to say, it's deeply uneven in quality, with parts that are genuinely exciting and emotional, that give you exactly what you're looking for on your hunt for fantasy adventure; and parts that leave you scratching your head about how this cleared quality control (and whether the people writing it are familiar with the worldbuilding of their own franchise).

It confused me last time and still does why the book opens with Three Trees to Midnight by Trick Weekes, one of the weakest stories in the book, and I can only assume it was for the name recognition, and so they could bookend the collection with their work (Weekes also writes the final story, Dread Wolf Take You, which is a much stronger piece). Three Trees is cliche in ways that never let you forget it. A cliched plot can still be fun and interesting, but Three Trees made me feel like I was reading something rote; it hit every beat of "two trapped men who hate each other forced to work together to escape" (and raised questions, for me, about why Strife isn't better at his job).

On the other side of the coin is The Horror of Hormak (Or is it Hormok? The book spells it both ways in a sign of editorial carelessness) by John Epler, which drives home my firm belief that the Dragon Age team's best genre is horror. This piece cleverly hints at the truths Solas suggested to the player in the Dragon Age Inquisition "Trespasser" DLC about the true nature of the elven "gods" and the escalating horror throughout really sets the stage for Ghilan'nain's entrance onto the scene in Veilguard. (My favorite moment is how the protagonist initially takes a mural in this "abandoned elven temple" as a scene of a benevolent goddess healing her people and gradually realizes she's not offering healing, but drawing something out of them.)

Already creeping up in Tevinter Nights are some of the same issues I had with Veilguard, like its need to constantly reassure the audience of the unproblematic nature of its heroes, such as through the whitewashing of the Antivan Crows (particularly egregious were the moments in The Wigmaker Job by Courtney Woods when Lucanis Dellamorte, heir to House Dellamorte and noted blueblood, castigates the excesses of the nobility as if he were not a beneficiary of that same generational wealth).

I will say that Tevinter Nights was a more fun read having played Veilguard and been more formally introduced to many of the characters and locations featured in the book. Seeing Neve and Rana in action, getting the story behind Bharv, and catching a glimpse of Emmrich in his natural environment were particularly enjoyable after having played through their featured game (and I'll always, regrettably, be a sucker for the kind of Inquisition nostalgia at play in Callback by Lukas Kristijanson or the many references to Cassandra and the Pentaghasts in Caitlin Sullivan Kelly's Murder by Death Mages).

There are also hints of things present in Tevinter Nights that I wish had gotten more focus in Veilguard. For instance, Epler's Half Up Front has its two protagonists encounter the agents of Fen'Harel—two of whom kill themselves rather than be captured. The agents of Fen'Harel have been an interest of the fandom since they were first mentioned in the epilogue of Trespasser, but Veilguard drops them entirely, claiming Solas decided to work alone instead. It makes little sense, particularly given his history with leadership, except if the devs decided they did not want the moral quandary of players killing or deciding whether or not to kill these agents, given that they are made up primarily of some of Thedas' most mistreated people.

Weekes' Dread Wolf Take You, the final story in the book, also raises interesting aspects of Solas that do not get attention in Veilguard: his efforts to chase down necessary tools for his ritual, his ability to command loyalty (here agent we see agents of Fen'Harel at work), his efforts at intrigue (infiltrating a meeting with the Inquisition agent Charter himself rather than delegating), and his assault on the Mortalitasi and Tevene mages using blood magic to bind spirits. In Dread Wolf Take You we see why Solas is feared in Thedas; this story demonstrates not only his conflict (he concludes by noting his sincere apologies to the inquisitor for how things are, and he includes in part of his disguise a callback to a joke among the Inquisition) but also his power. It is a delicious reminder of what the stakes where the first time Solas took up arms (as we recall Solas himself has said he is far less powerful than even the lesser of the Evanuris), and what that fight between the Evanuris and the Dread Wolf's rebellion might have looked like, as well as why the modern elves—downtrodden, disrespected, longing to reconnect with their history—would be in awe of him and want to support his cause (though in Veilguard they are not permitted to). The Solas in in Dread Wolf Take You reminds us why Rook really ought to be careful in how they deal with him more than almost anything he does in Veilguard.

On the whole, the writing is mediocre. There are parts of it that are enjoyable, but it reads like something hastily cobbled together and thrown at fans to make sure they didn't forget about Dragon Age in the interminable wait for news of the next game. You can see where they were already building parts of Veilguard here, such as the start of Neve's history with Aelia and the adventures of Antoine and Evka, which is interesting for hardcore fans. However, like Veilguard itself, it left me ultimately uninspired and wishing for something better. Once again, I wonder what the Dragon Age team might have come up with if truly left to their own devices.

The great thing about online communities is you can get a lot of book recommendations from a broad swath of people that cover niche books you might never have heard of otherwise. The bad thing is that a lot of these books are simply not good. Nevertheless, I've plowed through quite a few net-recommended fantasy books, and I still think it's worth it for the occasional gem you overturn. I had the chance this last week to enjoy one of those gems: The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez.

Upfront, the style of this book is not going to be for everyone. It has an edge of the cerebral, being told primarily in second-person, from the perspective of an unnamed person watching a play performed by spirits in their sleep about the events of the adventure. Perspective can change suddenly and without announcement, and the book occasionally slides in thoughts of random third parties experiencing the events of the text.

I found all of these narrative tools a delight, although I admit I was skeptical for the first few pages. I think Jimenez does a wonderful job of using them effectively and the overall effect adds to the surreal/mythological energy of the entire story.

Jimenez's writing is beautiful and vivid—for good or for ill, as there are some gruesome events that take place—and really sweeps you up in the events of the story. He also does a wonderful job capturing the emotional mindsets of the characters. In particular, I thought the way he handled the relationship of the two main protagonists, Jun and Keema, was very realistic given who they are, and the emotional payoff of his taking the time to work through that was so worth it.

The plot of the novel is pretty simple: Jun and Keema are escorting the empress, the Moon goddess, from point A to point B. But Jimenez shows how a talented author can take a simple quest plot and transform it into something sweeping and epic. The story takes us across this fictional country, which has been laboring under the oppression of the Moon Throne and its emperor, known as the Smiling Sun. We see up close the impact of this emperor and his government, and the various ways that the populace is pushing back or knuckling under, trying to survive.

The empress herself is a fascinating character, and Jimenez handles so well this character who both possesses the power of a goddess who transformed the world, yet is deeply weakened after generations among mortals. She walks a compelling line between a being who wants to do right by the people, but still possesses the selfish impulses of a god.

He blends the truly mythological—the Moon goddess used to be the moon, and after she fell from the sky, the people named the black hole where the moon used to be "the Burn"—as well as the more intimate story beats we expect from modern storytelling, such as Jun's complicated relationship with his father. I thought this intermixing worked very well, allowing for both a grand scale, transformative tale as well as very personal, small-scale stories.

Even the side characters grab your attention, so that their parts of the story never feel like unwelcome intrusions and asides from the main plot, but rather equally interesting stories playing out alongside our protagonists' (I'm still thinking about Uhi Araya).

This story grabbed me from very early on and held on tight throughout the book; I was riveted to the end. A truly wonderful tale; I may end up buying a copy to have to reread later.

We are continuing our way through Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series, this time with book #4, Tehanu. This book picks up literally like a day after the end of The Farthest Shore, although it wasn't published until about 18 years later. Tehanu's description is:

Years before, they had escaped together from the sinister Tombs of Atuan—she, an isolated young priestess, he, a powerful wizard. Now she is a farmer's widow, having chosen for herself the simple pleasures of an ordinary life. And he is a broken old man, mourning the powers lost to him not by choice.

A lifetime ago, they helped each other at a time of darkness and danger. Now they must join forces again, to help another -- the physically and emotionally scarred child whose own destiny remains to be revealed.

Tehanu is radically different from the three Earthsea books that proceeded it, and I understand its reception was controversial, and I see why. The first three Earthsea books are pretty classic adventure novels, aimed at a youthful audience and celebrating the courage, virtue, and exploits of their protagonists. And they were enjoyable! They were great adventure novels, I really liked them. Tehanu is not that.

Tehanu is in many ways a much darker, more adult novel and far more philosophical than the other three. We return to Ged and Tenar as main characters, but as noted in the description, they are not the plucky young people we met before. Tenar is a 40-something widow with two grown children who rejected the chance to learn from Ogion in her youth and instead chose to spend two decades as a farmer's wife in Gont. Ged is, I would estimate, in his late fifties-early/mid sixties dealing with the sudden and complete loss of his magic, and with it, his entire conception of who he is.

They are both asking questions about their lives, about the choices they made, and the regrets they do or do not have, and most of all, they are trying to help Therru, a young child Tenar adopts in the first chapter after an act of horrific abuse leaves Therru at death's door. This is where the book feels darker than the earlier trio. Those dealt with fantasy violence and terror--which certainly are scary, especially if the author writes it in a believable way, but Tehanu deals with practical, real-world violence, and doesn't shy away from it: Therru was raped, by her father and by other men in her community, and then they attempted to kill her, and failed. Much of the book deals with Tenar simply trying to keep Therru's abusers away from her on this relatively small island.

There is also the visceral entrance of bold-faced misogyny onto the scene, which before has only been in the background. This book very much reads like Le Guin working through her own feelings on feminism and the sexism she baked into Earthsea earlier in the series. But as with our own world, attitudes in Earthsea that lead to colloquial sayings like "wicked as women's magic" almost inevitably lead to the kind of brutal bigotry displayed by some of the men in Tehanu. Prejudice starts small, with insisting women cannot be great wizards, but are only capable of small witcheries, and builds into the belief that women are lesser, and owe obedience to their male masters. Tehanu then deals with Tenar and other women's responses to that. And they aren't all right! Moss posits some thoughts that read very much like "divine feminine" mumbo-jumbo, but you can also see how she landed there after a lifetime of being discarded and disdained by the men in her community.

Even more than Tombs of Atuan, this book centers women and their struggles, but unlike Tombs of Atuan, those struggles aren't ancient darkness and cult control, but more philosophical questions about the place and nature of womanhood in the world of Earthsea. Le Guin tells us that she knew right after The Farthest Shore that Tenar rejects Ogion's mentorship and chooses an ordinary life with a farmer on Gont instead, but that she didn't know why, and it took her almost twenty years to figure it out. After Tenar's childhood, it makes perfect sense, I think, why she rejects a more fantastical life. It is entirely believable that an 18-20 year old Tenar doesn't want to be tutored by another "great" adult, she wants to have romance and a husband and a normal life where she can just be Goha, the farmer's wife, and not Tenar, the former priestess of Atuan, and enjoy all the basic pleasures she was denied as Arha.

It also makes sense that at the start of Tehanu, with her husband dead and her children adults out of the house that she is reflecting on the choices she made even before Ged re-enters her life.

In the afterward, Le Guin tells us that many fans, particularly those who had identified with Ged as a male power fantasy, felt that in Tehanu she "betrayed" him for the sake of some feminist agenda. Le Guin rejects this characterization, instead explaining that in this book, Ged learns to be himself and to be a man without the power that has sung in his veins since he was a child. I felt that throughout the book she stayed true to what she had written of him before, and seeing Ged return to his roots in Gont when all else seems lost to him was very believable, and it was enjoyable to see that even now, after everything he has accomplished, he is not too proud to do so. Although Tenar is at times very short on patience with him in the throes of his personal crisis, I found him as likeable as ever.

Tehanu is a slow book. It's not that nothing happens--obviously for these three, Ged, Tenar, and Therru, some very dramatic things happen--but it is interspersed with long stretches of Tenar fretting and wondering, and lengthy, sometimes opaque conversations with other characters. There are no real great acts of magic or grandeur here; the entire novel takes places in rural Gont and it's very much a story about what happens to ordinary people on the fringes of great magic in fantasy stories. Ged and Tenar aren't looking to take power from anyone or defeat any great evil, they just want to live their lives and keep Therru safe.

It's a very short book, fewer than 200 pages, and I can't say the ending was especially satisfying. It did not feel that we learned anything about who Therru is or why she's special, and even I will admit to being disappointed that Ged and Tenar play no practical role in the resolution of the main conflict. I know this book is them passing the torch because they don't want to be heroes anymore, but still. Although I think it is fair to say that their nurturing of Therru is what allowed her to play the role she does in the conclusion.

Tehanu is a well-written book overall, and I did enjoy getting to see Tenar and Ged again as middle-aged adults. I think it was a great choice by Le Guin to revisit this former heroes when their fantasy protag days are done, and see what they're up to and how they feel and act now, and I thought both Ged and Tenar were very believable despite the many years that passed between the publishing of book 3 and Tehanu. The subject of Ged and Tenar's relationship I will save for another post, in the interest of keeping this review spoiler-free. If I were ranking them, though, Tehanu would be last because I simply did not find it as enjoyable as the earlier novels.

I'm interested to see where Le Guin takes it with the next two, which I understand were published some 10 years after Tehanu, marking another long break in the series.

Frontier by Grace Curtis is a space western, which takes place far in the future after much of Earth's population has abandoned it due to catastrophic climate change.

Then a ship falls from the sky, bringing the planet's first visitor in three hundred years. This Stranger is a crewmember on the first ship in centuries to attempt a return to Earth and save what's left. But her escape pod crashes hundreds of miles away from the rest of the wreckage.

The Stranger finds herself adrift in a ravaged, unwelcoming landscape, full of people who hate and fear her space-born existence. Scared, alone, and armed, she embarks on a journey across the wasteland to return to her ship, her mission, and the woman she loves.

I really enjoyed the way this novel revealed its story. Rather than simply track the traveler from place to place, the story shows us the traveler's journey through the eyes of the people who encounter her: a small-town librarian at odds with the local mayor, the young son of a preacher with a nasty secret, a shady woman on a quest of her own. Each chapter opens with setting the perspective of this onlooker before the traveler comes into the scene, and I felt like this was a very fun and creative way of telling her story, as well as giving us a lot more information about the world and culture of Earth in this story's universe than we could get from the traveler's perspective alone.

The traveler herself is an excellent blend of competent and human: as an astronaut among a deeply Luddite population which has technologically stagnated for centuries, she has certain advantages, like her advanced weaponry, which can quickly resolve some situations. However, she can be divested of these advantages without enormous effort: if she loses her gun, if she's facing too many enemies, if she succumbs to bodily weakness like exhaustion or injury, she's no better off than any Earthling in her situation would be.

She certainly possesses a skillset that helps her through her journey, but she's also a person. She feels fear, anxiety, weariness. She has tells when she lies, she has moments of awkwardness, she makes mistakes. She's not Terminator in a cowboy hat blasting her way to victory while the challenges slide off her without a mark.

The romance was fine. Sweet, but unremarkable. I do enjoy more queer fantasy that doesn't center romance though, so that's a win!

Some other reviews felt the ending wrapped up too quickly, but personally I was satisfied. I didn't need a confrontation with the main antagonist drawn out any more; he was such a loathsome character that I simply wasn't interested in seeing more of him. I was content with where the book left things.

On the whole, I enjoyed this book more than I expected. It was just long enough to tell its story satisfactorily without overstaying its welcome. I enjoyed the detours into side characters that gave us colorful glimpses into what life is like on Earth for the locals rather than relegating us merely to the traveler's outsider perspective. It does leave lots of loose threads behind, but it felt realistic and never, for me, unsatisfying. Life goes on after the traveler has moved onto her next goal.

A fun read!

Another book I got off a queer fantasy recommendations list. And, unfortunately, a disappointment. I kept waiting to sink into this plot, but I never did. I never felt the urgency of any of the things that were happening and it remained dull the entire time I was reading it. This is a rare did not finish for me—I got a little more than halfway through when I realized I just didn't care what happened next.

The description for The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley is:

1883. Thaniel Steepleton returns home to his tiny London apartment to find a gold pocket watch on his pillow. Six months later, the mysterious timepiece saves his life, drawing him away from a blast that destroys Scotland Yard. At last, he goes in search of its maker, Keita Mori, a kind, lonely immigrant from Japan. Although Mori seems harmless, a chain of unexplainable events soon suggests he must be hiding something. When Grace Carrow, an Oxford physicist, unwittingly interferes, Thaniel is torn between opposing loyalties

I don't think the multiple POVs did this book any favors. Grace feels entirely irrelevant and the book was too boring for me to want to find out how and if she eventually connects to the rest of the plot. The one random flashback to Mori in Japan felt similarly irrelevant, like the author couldn't find a way to express Mori's personality and background without resorting to a discombobulated flashback.

I did enjoy the characters—I thought it was particularly bold and realistic for Pulley to include Grace, a woman pushing back against the sexism of her time while also expressing misogynistic views herself (though, regrettably, she is the ONLY woman in the story, which doesn't look great on the feminism front)—but I never much cared about any of them.

Maybe this book gets good in the end, but I've given enough of my time to it already.

Book #4 of the "Women in Translation" library rec list has been In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women are Still on Trial by Mona Chollet, translated from French by Sophie R. Lewis.

Centuries after the infamous witch hunts that swept through Europe and America, witches continue to hold a unique fascination for many: as fairy tale villains, practitioners of pagan religion, as well as feminist icons. Witches are both the ultimate victim and the stubborn, elusive rebel. But who were the women who were accused and often killed for witchcraft? What types of women have centuries of terror censored, eliminated, and repressed?

Celebrated feminist writer Mona Chollet explores three types of women who were accused of witchcraft and persecuted: the independent woman, since widows and celibates were particularly targeted; the childless woman, since the time of the hunts marked the end of tolerance for those who claimed to control their fertility; and the elderly woman, who has always been an object of at best, pity, and at worst, horror. Examining modern society, Chollet concludes that these women continue to be harrassed and oppressed. Rather than being a brief moment in history, the persecution of witches is an example of society’s seemingly eternal misogyny, while women today are direct heirs to those who were hunted down and killed for their thoughts and actions. With fiery prose and arguments that range from the scholarly to the cultural, In Defense of Witches seeks to unite the mythic image of the witch with modern women who seek to live their lives on their own terms.

There's no doubt that Chollet has done her research here. I appreciated how often her claims and arguments were supported with quotes, events, other studies, and even the occasional fictional novel giving a display of attitudes of the times (although I do think we could have used fewer fictional examples).

However, as other readers have remarked...the book doesn't really have much to do with witches. I was most engaged at the start, when Chollet was digging into the witch trials of 15^th and 16^th century Europe, giving details on the events and attitudes as well as sharing the stories of some individual women. She validly criticizes how no other mass killings in history so broadly get the "haha well that happened" treatment.

She also traces quite effectively how the attitudes developed during the witch hunts persisted long after. The disgust with the female body (witches were often accused of copulating with the devil, and frequently shaved head to toe before their trials to find the "devil's mark"), the policing of women's behavior (being too gregarious could be a sign of being a witch—but so could being too withdrawn and isolated), the mistrust and revulsion around old women (whose accumulated knowledge and low tolerance for mistreatment made them particular targets during the hunts).

But after the first chapter (the book is divided into four chunky chapters), witches mostly fade into the background and the book becomes a generalized critique of misogyny, mainly in French and American society. I would have liked to see her draw more on the legacy of the witch trials to at least parallel with some more modern instances of misogyny, such as the lingering mistrust of career women, especially those without children.

The witch, at her core, represents things society still struggles to accept in women: she is usually single (and therefore not affiliated with or under the dominion of a man), often educated (many accused witches were practicing midwives or healers), generally childless (potentially rejecting the "natural calling" of all women to motherhood), frequently post-menopausal (and therefore undesirable--an unforgivable crime in a woman) and in short: independent. The witch is not beholden to anyone—father, husband, church, or child (thus, medieval witch hunters had to place her under the ultimate control of the devil, a male figure)--and acts solely in her own interests and in pursuit of her own pleasure, which made her intolerable, and in many ways, women are still viewed this way.

Chollet makes a lot of good points about historical and lingering misogyny, but I do feel she belabors the point in some cases, and by the fourth chapter feels like she's lost the thread entirely on the original thesis, becoming more of a diatribe against the medical field and the "cult of rationalism" than an examination of "women on trial" or the legacy of the witch hunts.

However, on the whole, the book was still interesting. It's not a fun read, to be clear: being reminded of the many ways in which women have been hated for merely existing and are still looked down on today is not enjoyable--but it is important to remember these things, not only to see what progress we have made, but to understand what progress is still needed.

This week I finished When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill, a low-fantasy pseudo-historical novel where women occasionally and spontaneously become dragons.

Alex Green is a young girl in a world much like ours, except for its most seminal event: the Mass Dragoning of 1955, when hundreds of thousands of ordinary wives and mothers sprouted wings, scales, and talons; left a trail of fiery destruction in their path; and took to the skies. Was it their choice? What will become of those left behind? Why did Alex’s beloved aunt Marla transform but her mother did not? Alex doesn’t know. It’s taboo to speak of.

Forced into silence, Alex nevertheless must face the consequences of this astonishing event: a mother more protective than ever; an absentee father; the upsetting insistence that her aunt never even existed; and watching her beloved cousin Bea become dangerously obsessed with the forbidden.

I have mixed feelings on this book. On the one hand, I think the metaphor does work well and the theme of reclaiming power is rewarding. On the other, I think the book loses the plot partway through and I didn't find the author's prose particularly engaging.

Within the book, "dragoning" as it's called serves as an analogy for basically anything about women that society, historically, has not liked to discuss. This can be brutal things like domestic abuse, sexual assault, and harassment, but it can also be more seemingly mundane yet equally "uncomfortable" topics like ambition, lack of motherly sentiment, queerness, and menstruation/women's bodies generally. One woman dragons because she feels trapped in a marriage to an unpleasant and ungrateful husband. Another dragons because she realized she was in love with another woman. Thus, while dragoning can be analogous to female rage, it can also be analogous to female joy, expressed in a way that society finds unbecoming.

Some spoilers below.

( Read more... )

Ultimately, I agree with the conclusion that this book would have worked better as a concentrated short story focusing only on the Mass Dragoning of 1955. There's just not enough here to fill out the 340 pages in a satisfying way.

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A couple weeks ago I finished book #3 on the "Women in Translation" list from my library. This book was Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu, translated from Spanish by Julia Sanchez. The book description is:

It’s summer, 2005, and our ten-year-old narrator is consumed by thoughts of her best friend Isora. Isora is rude and bossy, but she’s also vivacious and brave; grownups prefer her, and boys do, too. That’s why sometimes she gets jealous of Isora, who already has hair on her vagina and soft, round breasts. But she’s definitely not jealous that Isora’s mother is dead, nor that Isora’s fat, foul-mouthed grandmother has her on a diet, so that she is constantly sticking her fingers down her throat. Besides, she would do anything for Isora: gorge herself on cakes when her friend wants to watch, follow her to the bathroom when she takes a shit, log into chat rooms to swap dirty instant messages with strangers. But increasingly, our narrator finds it hard to keep up with Isora, who seems to be growing up at full tilt without her—and as her submissiveness veers into a painful sexual awakening, desire grows indistinguishable from intimate violence.

Dogs of Summer is a stream-of-consciousness style novel told from the perspective of a 10-year-old girl living on the Canary Islands. We never learn her name; we only know her by the nickname she's called by her best friend, Isora, who terms her, in English, "Shit."

To be upfront, this is a deeply unhappy book. Isora and the narrator live in poverty on the edge of a tourist village, where rich visitors from the Spanish mainland stay during the summer months and where the narrator's mother works cleaning houses. The atmosphere throughout the book is true to its title: it feels like the hot, humid, oppressive days of late summer (the "dog days"). There are many moments of childhood joy, like splashing around a scummy pool with a neighborhood friend or recounting telenovelas with dolls, but there is also a deep discomfort that pervades the entire novel, which is not a complaint—I think it's exactly what Abreu intended.

The narrator finds herself in the uncomfortable position of noticing that her only friend appears to be maturing faster than she is. She notes how Isora already has breasts and pubic hair, and how she likes to draw the attention of boys, and knows things about dieting and money. The narrator stands on the cusp of understanding difficult things about the world—class consciousness, queerness and homophobia, the abusive nature of diet culture—but she's just barely still in the shelter of childhood, which makes her a fascinating perspective.

She is not yet old enough to call herself a lesbian, or even to truly recognize the sexual component of her attraction to Isora, but it is budding rapidly. By her own admission, the narrator barely knows who she is without Isora.

From relatively early in the book, it's easy to see there cannot be a happy ending for Isora and the narrator's relationship. The narrator is almost obsessively attracted to Isora, Isora's interest in the narrator that way is possibly there, possibility not—but her interest in boys certainly is, and there are heavy-handed hints throughout that the girls do not live in an accepting community. You have the feeling throughout, as we follow the girls' sometimes tumultuous relationship, that it is barreling towards a miserable end. There is no version of this story that ends with the narrator and Isora a happy couple accepted by their community.

My only true complaint with the book was the ending. It felt like a cop-out, given the above, as if Abreu couldn't figure out how to end it, or how to resolve the girls' codependent relationship.

The narration of the novel is visceral, not shying away from the grossness of childhood, puberty, and being human in general. There is nothing that seems to be enough to really repulse the narrator, especially if it involves Isora. In this way, it feels very honest and raw, which suits the awkward time of life the narrator is in, not fully in childhood anymore, but also not fully in the throes of puberty yet, and the awkward wording perfectly fits the narration of a child. It feels in some ways like the last dregs of her innocence, before she's forced to confront too many ugly realities about the world.

On the whole I thought it was well done, but do mind your trigger warnings with this one, it deals with some heavy subject material.

About nine months ago I plowed my way through Samantha Shannon's The Priory of the Orange Tree and reviewed it immediately after. Today, I went to post my review on StoryGraph, but looking through that original review, I find that it doesn't at all capture my thoughts on the book after many months of reflection. So I wrote a new review and I'm posting here for posterity, and in case anyone who read my first review took an interest in the book because of it.

Here is the original review, which highlights the things I liked about the book in the immediate aftermath. The following is the new review, which is a lot more critical.

I am a fantasy fanatic and hearing the way this was described online and what with my never-ending quest for more queer fantasy, I had to give it a go. Unfortunately, I have to report it is incredibly mid-tier. Nothing about this book stands out to me several months after having finished it. It's not bad, it's just not good. It was an entertaining read, but on the whole a mediocre work.

It has some very intriguing things going for it, and Shannon has obviously put a lot of thought into her fantasy world, but it lacks finesse in a lot of ways that make it far less entertaining than it could be.

Kill Your Darlings: First of all, bloat. I love a good long book; I love a plotline that starts off snail-slow and builds to a crescendo over hundreds of pages. But that enjoyment is predicated on the story being engaging. "Priory" feels like a textbook case of the author being so in love with her own characters and worldbuilding that she refused to cut or minimize any of it, even if it would have improved the book to do so.

Niclays Roos is an interesting character, and obviously a favorite of the author's. However, axing his entire plotline would change virtually nothing about the story. He's almost completely irrelevant, and so every time we were saddled with his POV it felt like wasting time from the more interesting and relevant other POVs.

Similarly, Loth's chapters were incredibly dull, barely important, and the most interesting things that happened to him happened off the page.

This also relates to:

Pacing: A lot of people have hit on this, and I agree. Niclays and Tane have zero relevance to the core plot for most of the book. Not until the very end does Tane become relevant, so it's often hard to care about what they're doing, because Sabran, Ead, and Loth are dealing with world-altering issues and Niclays is like. Having a day in the city.

The final conflict wraps up at lightning speed relative to its alleged importance, making it feel like it was never that big a deal in the first place, and the travel times around the world are all over the place; it felt like it took them however long the author wanted them to be traveling to get anywhere.

Characters: Someone else pointed out that Ead and Tane are effectively the same character, and it's rather true. Also, this feels like a book where the author is hyperconcerned with the characters being Moral and Likeable. Even Niclays at his worst oozes Shannon's desire for us to like him, and he never does anything truly bad (although the novel castigates him for his shadier dealings, apparently in an effort to make us see him as Problematic, but not Too Problematic).

All of them are morally upstanding and Ead is right about literally everything. Initially, I thought the religious aspect would involve both Ead and Sabran discovering they had been wrong, but no, one culture is objectively right about the religion and the other is just wrong. And for Sabran to simply accept, on Ead's word, that her entire religion, on which her power is based, is a lie--an ugly lie--boggled the mind a little.

Stakes: The outcome of the final battle, in addition to happening too quickly, lacked any real sacrifice. Nobody important dies or is even injured; nothing major changes. I did enjoy the ending for Ead and Sabran's romance and how it eschews a simple solution for them, but otherwise it made the whole affair with the Nameless One feel like a bump in the road.
The Power of the Bloodline: This is a personal gripe. I just despise storylines about someone who's remarkable because of their super special bloodline. One of the things I liked about Tane was how she'd fought her way up to where she was based allegedly on talent and hard work. So for it to turn out in the final hour that she only really matters because she's related to someone special was incredibly disappointing to me. I actually liked her less after that. This felt like it undermined all of her achievements up to that point because it wasn't really her, it was her special powerful bloodline that made her worthy.

On the whole, I don't regret reading it, but I do regret buying it instead of just getting it from the library. I will not be reading more from this author, and I think there is better queer fantasy out there. Although I liked Ead and Sabran's romance, and Sabran as a character, the rest of the book lacked much else to compel me. With more polish, I think this could have been a better book.

A+ Library is my bit where I review books with asexual and aromantic characters. The most recent book I've read was To be Taught, if Fortunate by Becky Chambers. The book description is:

At the turn of the twenty-second century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. With the fragility of the body no longer a limiting factor, human beings are at last able to journey to neighboring exoplanets long known to harbor life.

A team of these explorers, Ariadne O'Neill and her three crewmates, are hard at work in a planetary system fifteen light-years from Sol, on a mission to ecologically survey four habitable worlds. But as Ariadne shifts through both form and time, the culture back on Earth has also been transformed. Faced with the possibility of returning to a planet that has forgotten those who have left, Ariadne begins to chronicle the story of the wonders and dangers of her mission, in the hope that someone back home might still be listening.

The character: Chikondi Daka, asexual

Final verdict: Thumbs up, a new favorite for this exercise

( Full review below )

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