Apr 06 2021

The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

In 1999, Gail Simone made a list “when it occurred to [her] that it’s not healthy to be a female character in comics. … These are superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator. Some have been revived, even improved — although the question remains as to why they were thrown in the wood chipper in the first place.” Once you start to notice how often female characters exist merely to motivate male characters you can’t stop seeing it.

In The Refrigerator Monologues, Catherynne M. Valente gives voice to six such women. It’s a ferocious deconstruction of comic-book tales, undertaken by a true fan who wants them to be better, who knows they could be better, and who is utterly indignant about the laziness that keeps them from being what they could be. And in an age when comic-derived stories make billions at the box office and spawn many more tales on smaller screens, improving the source matter is hardly a trivial notion. Valente explains in her acknowledgments:

From the bottom of my heart, I would like to thank the pantheon of comics writers, artists, and creators—great and small—who built the grand superhero universe in which we have all been swimming in over the last century. None of my girls and none of my heroes could possibly exist without them, and even when I get my anger on, I have nothing but respect and honor for the monumental feat of deliberate mythology that they have, and continue to, accomplish. …
More specifically, the deepest bow and greatest thanks must go to Gail Simone, who first noticed, named, and collated evidence for the phenomenon of Women in Refrigerators and brought it to the attention of the culture at large and who has fought the good fight for decades. … On the other side of the coin, thank you to Even Ensler, whose The Vagina Monologues detonated the theatrical scene when I was coming-of-age as a young feminist-actress type of thing. Both in title and structure The Vagina Monologues gave me a sturdy framework on which to hang my frustration with the roles of women in superhero stories. (pp. 149–50)

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/06/the-refrigerator-monologues-by-catherynne-m-valente/

Apr 02 2021

Murder At Wedgefield Manor (A Jane Wunderly Mystery #2) by Erica Ruth Neubauer

After the events at Mena House, Egypt, in the first novel of this 1920s-set historical mystery series, our heroine, the widowed American Jane Wunderly, and her (obnoxious) Aunt Millie decide to take up residence at Wedgefield Manor, an estate in the English countryside owned by Lord Hughes, a former and possibly future paramour of Aunt Millie’s. But they aren’t just there for the sake of Aunt Millie’s romantic prospects. Lord Hughes’ adopted daughter, Lillian, is actually Millie’s child, and Millie wants to get to know her now-grown daughter a little better.

While Millie is working on her social life, Jane is taking advantage of the presence of a genuine RAF pilot and his Moth to take flying lessons, much to Millie’s disapproval. But it’s a far more mundane vehicle that causes tragedy for their household, when estate mechanic Simon Marshall goes for a nighttime drive and ends up the victim of a fatal crash. After the police discover that the car’s brakes were cut and that evidence points to Lord Hughes being the culprit, Jane must solve another murder mystery, as her aunt begs her for help in clearing his name and protecting their daughter.

This is a tidy puzzle of a murder mystery with some excellent ace-aro and lesbian representation. And while I did side eye Jane asking the veteran with the West Indies accent if he didn’t want to go “home” after the war, I thought the race and class consciousness throughout were pretty good. The main issue I had with this book is that it drags considerably in the middle third: fortunately, it picks up towards the end, even before I figured out whodunnit and why.

Overall, a decent cozy mystery that does the required job of cleansing my reading palate between books. Not too challenging, but better than half the stuff out there today (and I say that as someone who reads at least one cozy mystery a week.)

Murder At Wedgefield Manor by Erica Ruth Neubauer was published March 30 2021 by Kensington Books and is available from all good booksellers, including

Want it now? For the Kindle version, click here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/02/murder-at-wedgefield-manor-a-jane-wunderly-mystery-2-by-erica-ruth-neubauer/

Apr 01 2021

Chargés d’Affaires by Cordwainer Smith

When Cordwainer Smith first began publishing stories in the early 1950s, the genre was much further from the mainstream than it is today. Writing for magazines such as Galaxy or Worlds of If would have been considered extremely odd for one of America’s leading experts on psychological warfare and a Johns Hopkins professor of Asiatic Studies. And so he remained pseudonymous for most of his science fictional career, for that is exactly who Smith was in his day job: godson of Sun Yat-Sen, political science PhD at age 23, colonel in the army reserves, adviser to politicians and to secret services. Yet by the end of his life, cut short at age 53 in 1966, he was more open in his relations with the science fiction community. Chargés d’Affaires reflects this growing rapprochement.

His tales of the Instrumentality of Mankind had a wide range and sophistication about culture that displayed, or at least reflected, his extensive experience outside the United States. Smith drew on the myths and forms of Chinese storytelling, and he gave his stories a lyric solidity that implies a wholeness even for those that are the only one of vast periods of his future history, or the only one in which a particular planet appears.

It would not be quite right to call Chargés d’Affaires a novel; in total length it’s more like a novella, and its six parts are each fairly short, though their lyricism invites the reader to linger. It’s possible to read Chargés also as an oblique celebration of Smith’s own behind-the-scenes roles in his homeworld’s politics and history. In contrast to most of his other stories, the parts of this tale are not about the leaders or instigators of major events, they are about those who are in second in command. The title comes from the number two in an embassy, who is often the real power behind a figurehead ambassador or the person left in charge when the ambassador is recalled or incapacitated. Another hint that this work is more than usually autobiographical is in the third section, “Schuhmacher and the Cobbler.” Schuhmacher is not just a surname, of course, it’s German for “shoemaker,” which is exactly the modern term for the more archaic word “cordwainer.”

Unusually for a late Smith story, Chargés takes place in the first age of planoforming, a period when humanity settled thousands of worlds, but which is little explored in his published stories, which tend to cluster around the Rediscovery of Man some 7,000 years later. The six parts are linked by recurring themes, and a few common names that may or may not be the same characters appearing on different planets. Ambiguity is one of the joys of Smith’s work.

Each part is a full story, some thrilling, some tragic, all enchanting and unmistakably Smith. One final feature is the way that he structures the overall work. Although six different settings are involved, temporally they form a single earth year, with each part taking up themes and seasons at two-month intervals. True to his tendency to see the world as falling, he begins with the long, bright days of an extraterrestrial June. It’s possible also to read the Cobbler of the third part, which corresponds to October in the overall scheme, as a transposed Ray Bradbury; it’s equally possible that Smith is referring to a Chinese writer unknown to me; or indeed both. The fourth, “Calling Down the Rain” is funnier than most Smith tales, and no doubt draws on court comedies of the Ming era. So he continues through the planets and the months, ending Chargés with a sympathetic portrait of the key figure of April: a fool.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/01/charges-daffaires-by-cordwainer-smith/

Mar 31 2021

Down World by Rebecca Phelps

And here I thought I’d broken my streak of being grumpy with the science in speculative fiction novels! Granted, my last read, Oliver K Langmead’s terrific Birds Of Paradise, never pretended at being scientific, to its credit. But here I am reviewing another novel with half-baked scientific ideas that could have just been hand-waved entirely once we’d gotten past the quantum planes theory: instead, we’re fed the idea that the protagonist’s mother is secretly a groundbreaking physicist a la Marie Curie whose one! ONE! act of science is the ONE-time building of a chemical key that opens a portal to a parallel plane of existence much like our own.

Down World starts out really well. Marina O’Connell is transferring to East Township High School, built over the site of a 1940s military installation. It’s a weird, twisting complex, and when she gets lost on her first day, she’s relieved and flattered to be rescued by Brady Picelli, who’s happy to help her figure out how to get to her classes. But making friends turns out to be harder than she’d expected, so when she notices him and his girlfriend Piper sneaking off campus one day, she impulsively decides to follow. She’s somewhat taken aback when they head to the railroad station where her brother died several years ago. Piper gets on a train west, before Brady notices Marina spying on them.

The next day, the entire town is abuzz: Piper has gone missing and her distraught parents don’t know what to do. Marina wants to come clean but Brady begs her not to, and brings her to Down World by way of explanation. Located deep beneath the school is a portal to an alternate reality that the students — or those students in the know, at least — call Down World. Marina walks through to a world where her brother is still alive and her parents aren’t mere shells of themselves, grieving their lost son. When she comes back out, Brady explains that Piper did something terrible in relation to Down World and has gone west to seek an answer. Little do Marina and Brady know that the answer will soon come back to their town and turn their entire lives upside down.

Very cool premise, lots of twists and turns, but the plot relies too much on Marina doing stupid things in order to advance it. And the second half or so of the novel is just so seriously under-baked. So many excellent ideas and beats are smushed into the last ten percent of the book especially. I wanted to empathize with the characters as they faced all these sudden reversals and revelations but it was like watching scenes unfold outside the window of a speeding train, racing past so quickly that I could barely register what happened, never mind how anyone felt about anything. The book is readable but the pacing is weird, especially in relation to Marina’s suddenly super-genius mom. It’s a complete book, but it doesn’t feel like a finished book to me, more’s the pity.

Down World by Rebecca Phelps was published March 30 2021 by Wattpad Books and is available from all good booksellers, including

Want it now? For the Kindle version, click here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/31/down-world-by-rebecca-phelps/

Mar 30 2021

Birds Of Paradise by Oliver K. Langmead

A gorgeous, almost dream-like meditation on dissociation, love, belonging and grief, punctuated by flashes of violence and pain, Birds Of Paradise follows the first man, Adam, as he’s making his way through modern life. When a Hollywood security gig goes awry, he’s hustled out of the country by Rook, who along with several other of the first birds have formed the legal company Corvid & Corvid to secure the interests of the original inhabitants of Eden. The first animals can all switch seamlessly to human form and, like Adam, are undying.

Rook needs a favor from Adam, whose many millennia of existence have trained him in all manner of skills including fighting and survival. While each of the Corvids are individually wealthy, Magpie has started spending more of his brother’s money than usual, and has proven difficult for the busy Rook to track down. With Crow, Adam is sent to Edinburgh to find Magpie and find out what’s going on. But Scotland is also where Eve is, and Adam doesn’t know if he’s ready to face her again. As Adam traverses the British isles, he discovers both wondrous news and a grave threat to the scattered inhabitants of Eden. How far is he willing to go to get to the bottom of it all, and how much of his own long and painful past is he willing to face?

For being about an immortal — hardly the most immediately relatable situation — this book is such a mood. Adam is the ultimate survivor, and it’s taken an extraordinary toll on him, one that he wears like a buffering suit against the world. He is often baffled by modern life and modern people, so far removed from the simplicity of the original garden, when his life was one of tending to his charges and living in harmony with them and with his beloved. While Eve through the ages chose to study the human pursuits of medicine and architecture, Adam was content to garden and provide what necessary labor, for fighting or building, that their situation required. While Eve chose to actively engage with her descendants, Adam preferred books and to live at a remove. So the scenes where Adam is forced to interact with great numbers of his children should feel weird but instead come across as almost magical, whether it’s at a Pride parade in London or with a group of football-playing kids in Manchester. Positive social contact, especially for someone as singular and alone as Adam, is depicted as a gift, a reason for Adam to keep choosing to stay amidst humanity despite the horrifically negative contact he’ll occasionally encounter.

I don’t really want to say too much about the rest of the book for fear of giving the plot away, but I must say that the entire concept of dominion was really, really well handled here. Oliver K Langmead pulls no punches in his critique of certain aspects of Christian society — the kind that think that being white and wealthy conveys an innate superiority over everything else — so the clash between modern evil and a timeless, necessary violence feels cathartic to those of us unwilling to submit to an oligarchy that views the out-group as being lesser or even less than human. BoP is a bold fable rooted deep in religious mythology that holds up a mirror to modern society for all our good and evil, touching on climate change and inclusion, and urging stewardship over dominion, all wrapped up in a beautiful, sad parable for the ages.

We’ve been given the opportunity to interview Mr Langmead, so look out for that April 9th!

Birds Of Paradise by Oliver K. Langmead publishes today March 30th 2021 by Titan Books and is available from all good booksellers, including

Want it now? For the Kindle version, click here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/30/birds-of-paradise-by-oliver-k-langmead/

Mar 29 2021

Greek Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, And Heroes Handbook by Liv Albert with illustrations by Sara Richard

Gosh, this is just such a beautiful book. The cover is both gorgeous to look at and lovely to touch, and the interior illustrations exceptionally good-looking. Kudos to Sara Richard for her terrific illustrative work here, depicting the old stories in flowing lines that blend the best of Arts Deco and Nouveau for a fresh, modern feel that’s still visibly rooted in the classic.

Text-wise, Greek Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, And Heroes Handbook entirely lives up to its cover, featuring accessible, informative biographies of the major deities, heroes and monsters who populate the ancient Greek mythology that lives on still in the popular imagination. Liv Albert’s chatty tone points out the problematic nature of a lot of these handed-down stories, which serves to underscore a theory I read about — and bear with me here for a second — how the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Avengers are a modern-day equivalent of the squabbling, dramatic but ultimately heroic pantheon and their supporting characters and villains. The most popular stories a society tells are the ones that reflect their own values, and how that changes through the ages is a fascinating, and I’d say vital, field of study. As such, the upcoming and more explicitly Greek-mythos-based The Eternals will be such a boon to enthusiasts like myself and Ms Albert, who also runs the popular podcast Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby, which brings these ancient stories to the masses and breaks them down into ways we can better understand and evaluate them in modern contexts.

While GM:tGGaHH is squarely aimed at people just now wanting to get to know the deal with Greek mythology, it also provides a wealth of interesting material for those more familiar with the subject. I hadn’t realized till this book, for example, that Dionysus was the only one of the main Pantheon with a mortal parent! While the scope of this book can only hint at why, it makes for an excellent jumping-off point for people who want to learn more.

Overall, this is an impressive package lovingly put together by people who clearly know their stuff. It serves as a primer that makes it a point to not forgive the rampaging misogyny of ancient times, thereby impressing upon readers that that stuff has happened but is not okay, which honestly is a reassuring thing for readers who might be alienated by said misogyny from delving into the riches of mythos. It also underscores the fact that you can love the classics without buying into their baser aspects, as Ms Albert does here by not sugarcoating any of the bad stuff. Bonus: she also points out the sex-positive and queer aspects of the myths that have often been obscured in the last few centuries. It’s so fascinating to see her do the work of viewing these stories explicitly through the eyes of modern progressive society. The only flaw of this book is that it made me hungry for so much more.

Greek Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, And Heroes Handbook by Liv Albert with illustrations by Sara Richard will be published tomorrow March 30th 2021 by Adams Media and is available from all good booksellers, including

Want it now? For the Kindle version, click here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/29/greek-mythology-the-gods-goddesses-and-heroes-handbook-by-liv-albert-with-illustrations-by-sara-richard/

Mar 28 2021

Georgia: In the Mountains of Poetry by Peter Nasmyth

In his preface to this, fourth, edition of Georgia: In the Mountains of Poetry, Peter Nasmyth writes that he has seen the book migrate from the Travel section of bookstores over into History. Likewise Nasmyth has transformed from a footloose twentysomething seeker, happening to stop in Moscow on his way from India back to England, into a star in the firmament of Georgia’s resident international community, curator of exhibitions for the British Council and Foreign Office, one of the founders of the National Trust of Georgia. (I don’t know that I have met him, but I don’t know that I haven’t either. His bookstore, Prospero’s, was a wonderful oasis during the three and a half years I lived in Tbilisi. The extended diplomatic community there is not very large, and I may well have bumped into him in one place or another. My friend Elizabeth from fencing club is there in the acknowledgments, as are others I know more fleetingly.) And while the big division in the book is historical — before and after independence from the Soviet Union — most of the chapters within the two parts focus on particular regions. This is less true of the second half, where not quite half of the chapters have been added through subsequent editions of the book. Those are naturally more chronologically oriented.

Georgia: In the Mountains of Poetry remains one of the two best introductions to an amazing country, read by nearly every international person who engages with Georgia and a great many more casual visitors. My interest is plain: Georgia was home for several years, crucial ones for both the country and my family, and remains vivid and beloved in memory. While my judgements are not congruent with Nasmyth’s, I have great respect for his experience and his important positive contribution. Seriously — running a bookstore is never easy, running an English-language bookstore in a non-Anglophone country raises the difficulty considerably (for instance, as I understand it the publishers’ credits and returns policies that absorb a great deal of bookselling risk are not available in non-Anglophone countries), running an English-language bookstore in a non-English-speaking country where utilities were intermittent for many years and doing it for more than 20 years through both a revolution and a Russian invasion is some off-the-scale difficulty level.

Nasmyth himself was pulled almost gravitationally to Georgia. He repeated his first pass through Moscow some years later during the heady years of glasnost and perestroika. At a party in Leningrad, which had yet to revert to St. Petersburg, Nasmyth met “a remarkably frank, well-informed man at a party” with “a thick plack moustache [and] excellent, relaxed English—from two years in Pakistan, so he said.” (p. 5) He dismissed Gorbachev’s reform with a wave of his hand. “If you really want to know about rebellion away from this huge imperialist power you should look at Georgia. In fact it’s better you go there.” (p. 5) And so he does, following his Russian literary heroes such as Lermontov, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gorky and others to the High Caucasus. Nasmyth arrives by bus in 1989, sputtering up the Georgian Military Highway, up from Pyatigorsk through the Daryal Gorge and the Alan Gate into a different world.

To arrive in the spacious Kazbegi valley straight out of the Daryal Gorge — is to transfer from one absolute of landscape into another. From the shadowy claustrophobic cliffs of the canyon we sped out into a brilliant white arena of peaks and luscious Alpine meadows. Before us a transparent green grass rolled out like a welcome mat across the valley floor, climbing up the steep hillsides toward the white line of snow, then finally ebbing away into the frosty blue firmament. … Beside the road the Terek had also changed. From a violent, streaming attack on rocks hundreds of feet below, to an obedient river burbling along quietly beside the road. (p. 33)

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/28/georgia-in-the-mountains-of-poetry-by-peter-nasmyth/

Mar 27 2021

The Unbroken (Magic of the Lost #1) by C.L. Clark

The Unbroken starts out extremely promisingly, telling the tale of Touraine, the young Qazali who was taken from her home as a kid and raised in the Balladairean empire as a member of the colonial forces, meant to be the first troops sent back to quell any uprisings in their land of birth. And here she is now, on a boat back to El Wast, a lieutenant in charge of troops known as Sands for their desert origin, accompanying Crown Princess Luca on a tour of her empire’s Qazali holdings.

But Luca has an ulterior motive: with her uncle on the throne as her (unwanted) regent, she wants to prove herself worthy of replacing him by investigating Qazali healing magic and finding a permanent solution for the deadly plagues that ravage Balladaire. Her own homeland has long since turned its back on magic and faith, considering both “uncivilized”, but Luca is convinced that her people will embrace any remedy that frees them from devastation, and by extension will embrace her own ascension to the throne.

When Touraine’s quick thinking saves Luca from an assassination attempt, the soldier comes to the princess’ attention. Needing a go-between who will prove acceptable to the local rebels as well as loyal to the Empire, Luca decides that Touraine perfectly fits the bill. Unfortunately, Touraine soon finds herself struggling with both attributes, betwixt and between dissonant aspects of her own identity.

This is such a fantastic premise, based on the French history of colonizing North Africa, and the first third or so is really gripping, compelling stuff. The almost out-of-body feeling Touraine has upon returning to her homeland is something I felt in my bones, as is the complicated relationship she has with colonial Balladaire, feeling both grateful to and resentful of it for all that it’s done to and for her. In this respect, it’s very much reminiscent of the excellent Baru Cormorant series it’s been compared with.

Unfortunately, the similarities end when it becomes disappointingly clear that Touraine is no Baru. Whereas Baru was often too clever for her own good, Touraine is very much not. Touraine has to make several hard choices — and with the first big one about the guns, I empathized, as that was not a clear line to navigate — but she keeps making progressively worse and worse choices as the narrative continues. It’s really hard to sympathize with a character who keeps doing dumb things. I was also less than thrilled with what seemed to me an inconsistency in the science of the book (ha! I’ve gotten really tetchy about science in speculative fiction recently) as it flip-flopped over whether Balladaire understood vaccines — tho perhaps that was just an error in the Advanced Reader’s Copy that has since been edited out in the finished product.

I did appreciate how C. L. Clark shows that choosing violence is almost always a race to the bottom. While I thought the ending somewhat unlikely, or at least too sudden to be likely, I am glad that Ms Clark hints at how unprepared the rebels are for what comes next. I’m curious to see if she’ll explore the workings of government from there on in, both in Qazal and Balladaire. I’ll probably read the next book, but am not looking forward to it with any great enthusiasm.

The Unbroken by C. L. Clark was published March 23 2021 by Orbit Books and is available from all good booksellers, including

Want it now? For the Kindle version, click here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/27/the-unbroken-magic-of-the-lost-1-by-c-l-clark/

Mar 25 2021

Shadows of the Short Days by Alexander Dan Vilhjalmsson

Hrimland, an alternate Iceland, sighs under its exploitation by Kalmar, a Nordic union that in history lasted from 1397 to 1523 but extends into the unspecified present of Shadows of the Short Days. Garún feels that exploitation more keenly than most; half human and half huldufólk, she’s an outcast among the oppressed. Worse, she left what little support she could have counted on in the countryside — since it came with a heaping helping of enforced servitude — so she is on her own in the big, walled city of Reykjavik.

The city hides behind Kalmar-built walls because Hrimland is far more filled with magic than Iceland, and that magic is typically much more malevolent. Not that people haven’t found ways to deal with and use the extradimensional forces, from little folk spells and ways all the way to an established school of sorcery. As Shadows of the Short Days opens, Garún’s ex-boyfriend Sæmundur has just gotten himself expelled from that school for refusing to follow the strict protocols of spell working, protocols that, in the school’s view, are the only things that keep magic under control at all and save people who work with it from death, or worse.

Vilhjálmsson conjures up a dark and gritty atmosphere for Reykjavik and Hrimland, a place where many scrape by but only a very few prosper. Humans share the world not only with the huldufólk, who are human-like exiles from another time and place, but also raven-people called náskárar and fish-folk called marbendlar. Vilhjálmsson originally wrote the book in Icelandic, and he translated it into English himself. Some of the linguistic choices he made for the original carry over into the English version. The náskárar speak in a harsh and archaic style, and in scenes involving them Vilhjálmsson retains even more of the original language than he does elsewhere. The meaning is never opaque, but the sense of dealing with another intelligence is unavoidable. Throughout the book, he retains a lot of Icelandic names for things, or words that were also neologisms in the original because they are unique to the fantastic aspects that Vilhjálmsson portrays.

The setting and the atmosphere were, for me, the most effective aspects of Shadows of the Short Days. Reykjavik is confined and close, with portals that lead into a Shadow Downtown that’s even more claustrophobic. Characters mostly find release at bars and parties, with the occasional rock concert and the even more occasional political demonstration.

For Garún is an artist, and she thinks she is also a revolutionary. She’s in touch with other artists and revolutionaries, and they put out an underground newspaper and hope to inspire rebellion against the Crown to replace a patently unjust order with independence and … something. She goes through the book hopped up on righteousness and rage, and seldom leaves that register. Sæmundur is a selfish asshole, heedless of the costs of his pursuit of esoteric knowledge, quite willing to commit murder just to show the uptight know-it-alls who are keeping him down. He, too, seldom leaves that register until at the end of a series of increasingly despicable deeds, the author hands him an apotheosis. The other characters mostly struck me as NPCs, shuffled around to provide the two leads with props, motivation, or sidekicks.

Vilhjálmsson’s Hrimland is a vivid place, established in detail and made to feel real through an accumulation of detail. If he writes again in this setting, as seems likely, I hope to meet characters who are less set from the start, and whose companions feel more like equals with their own weight. Maybe the longer days of a Hrimland summer will shed more of that kind of light.

+++

Doreen’s review is here; she liked Shadows of the Short Days more than I did.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/25/shadows-of-the-short-days-by-alexander-dan-vilhjalmsson-2/

Mar 25 2021

Deathless Divide (Dread Nation #2) by Justina Ireland

Thank God for Katherine! I was pretty fond of her in the first novel of the series too, and am so, so glad she gets entire viewpoint chapters in this novel, alternating with Jane’s.

Deathless Divide begins with the girls fleeing Summerland and trying to figure out, with their small band of survivors, where to go next. Jackson, Jane’s sometime lover, is cagey about their original plan to head to the nearby utopia of Nicodemus, and wants to press on to Fort Riley, further away but more heavily fortified with military and escape routes along the Mississippi. Given that they have barely any supplies tho, the closer destination wins out.

Tragedy strikes before they even reach the safety of Nicodemus, which appears a welcome balm after the horrors of Summerland and their journey. Jane and Katherine are surprised to discover that Gideon, the young scientist who is their occasional ally, is already well established here — perhaps too well established. A suspicious set of circumstances leaves the town open to the shambling horde, causing Jane and Katherine to go on the run again.

Fast forward nearly a year and Katherine is ready to leave the relative safety of ocean travel for a shot at establishing herself as a seamstress in San Francisco. But the California promised land isn’t quite as welcoming as expected, so she must fall back on her still sharp martial skills in order to find a haven… and to bring a killer to justice.

The strength of this series lies in the unshakeable, at least on Katherine’s end, bond of friendship between her and Jane. Katherine is aro/ace and it’s so great to have her be such a kickass main character, a woman of principle and a steadfast friend. She’s just as awesome as she was in the first book, if not more so. Sue also gets more time on the page and is also fun to be around, especially when she’s telling off Jane and Katherine for being ninnies.

Unfortunately, the other main characters from the first book suck really hard here. Gideon, I imagine, sucks by design: the evolution of his character is fascinating to see. I don’t remember Jackson being quite this annoying in Dread Nation tho, picking idiotic fights at the worst times.

And Jane. Oh, Jane.

Jane spends most of this book being angry and mean, focusing on revenge and pushing away the people who love her. And while she’s 100% entitled to her rage, and 100% correct in wanting to stop scientists who experiment recklessly and unethically, it is also 100% no fun to be in her head while she’s stalking around the country, so bitter that she can barely string coherent thoughts together. If it weren’t for Katharine’s more even-handed chapters, I doubt I would have been able to finish this book. Jane hates science, hates Chinese people and Native Americans, hates Black people who think they can live in harmony with people of other races. Jane thinks everyone else is stupid but won’t tell them why. Someone else in the book points out that Jane is a huge hypocrite, like that’s a charming character trait. While hypocrisy is hardly the worst fault known to man, when it means our heroine is essentially a Jane supremacist whose idea of dealing with situations is to get angry and go off instead of informing the other person why they’re wrong so they stand a chance of correcting themselves — and we’re not talking about microaggressions here but situations like trying to save the lives of hundreds of people — it’s really hard to care about, much less sympathize with, such a self-centered petty tyrant.

So thank goodness for Katharine, who manages to care about Jane and to make readers like myself care about what happens in this novel, which is worthwhile even with one of the main characters sucking the joy out of everything with her incessant “everyone sucks except me” attitude. While there are no plans for more books in the series, and it has a good ending, there’s still room for more of Katharine’s adventures, which I’d like to read. I’m just baffled and annoyed still that Jane went from being so much fun to spend time with in the first book to being an absolute chore here, as incoherent and malevolent as the zombies she strikes down and just as uninteresting.

Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland was published February 4 2020 by Balzer + Bray and is available from all good booksellers, including

Want it now? For the Kindle version, click here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/25/deathless-divide-dread-nation-2-by-justina-ireland/