Feb 25 2021

The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley

I first read this novella over two years ago, courtesy of the lovely people at Unsung Stories, one of the finest British independent purveyors of weird fiction today. I very much enjoyed it at the time, so when Titan Books told me they were publishing it for the first time in America, I leapt at the chance to revisit the work of one of my favorite little-known (for now) speculative fiction authors, Aliya Whiteley.

And it’s really weird with a re-read seeing what you focused on the last time compared to what you elided, and how things hit you differently after a span of time and experiences. In The Loosening Skin’s alternate universe, humanity moults every seven years or so, shedding with each worn skin the attachments — primarily romantic, but often to their surroundings and modes of life — they’d accumulated while wearing it. For most people, this means a redirection of purpose and often a reevaluation of their lives to date; for a smaller number, this means a dramatic shift in lifestyle. It’s almost universally acknowledged that couples will split up when one moults: there may be a lingering friendship or sense of companionship, but most find the thought of staying with a pre-moult partner physically revolting. All the feelings of love are gone with the moulting, oddly enough staying in the shed skin and accessible for anyone to touch. Most people burn their moultings because of this. Unsurprisingly, there’s also a thriving, quasi-legal market in discarded skins.

Rose Allington has an even more extreme reaction than most to shedding her skin, which she does more often than the average person and usually in times of great stress. After landing a dream job as bodyguard to superstar actor and aspiring director Max Black, she’s amazed to find herself falling in love with him, and he with her. Max is determined to keep their love going despite the odds, and resorts to all sorts of dubious medications to keep them both from moulting. Rose plays along until the night she splits her skin and abruptly leaves a devastated Max behind.

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Feb 23 2021

The Russian Cage (Gunnie Rose #3) by Charlaine Harris

Hurray, Lizbeth Rose is finally on her way west! Unfortunately, she’s going after receiving news that her one-time partner Eli — or Prince Ilya Savarov to the rest of the denizens of the Holy Russian Empire — has been thrown into jail for reasons unknown. The news has been conveyed to her via a coded letter from her younger half-sister Felicia, who’s being trained as a wizard in exchange for providing the occasional life-saving blood transfusion for Emperor Alexei. Lizbeth hops on board a train, unsure of what she’ll meet on the western seaboard of what was once the United States, as she seeks to uncover the truth and free the man she still loves.

This third book in the alternate history Western series starring the gun-slinging Lizbeth Rose features all the rough and tumble shootouts and brawls of the other books but amps up the court intrigue, as Lizbeth has to not only go undercover but also endear herself to the most powerful people in the HRE. I finally got to see my Asian people, even if they don’t figure largely in the narrative; still, representation matters. You probably could enjoy this book without reading the first two in the series, but I don’t particularly recommend it. Book I: An Easy Death sets up not only a 1930s where the assassination of President Roosevelt meant the splintering of a nation unable to recover from economic collapse and widespread influenza, but also filled us in on the background of our heroine. Book II: A Longer Fall explored the era’s version of the Deep South, the virulently racist and sexist Dixie. Now Lizbeth is on Eli’s home territory, looking to bust him out of jail and, perhaps more dauntingly, meet his mother and sisters for the first time.

The Russian Cage is a very fun, fast-paced novel, tho I didn’t think it was as much a page-turner as ALF. It’s really nice to have Lizbeth be the one who has to come in guns blazing to save the man she loves, aided by the people who love him, even tho some of them could take or leave her. Lizbeth figures Eli has been thrown in jail due to political intrigue, so the real reason is an unpleasant surprise. Worse, it doesn’t allow her to escape the machinations of the imperial court. On the plus side, it does give her the chance to get to know the surprising Felicia better, and to realize that shunting her little sister off to the HRE maybe wasn’t the kindest choice she had had available to them.

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Feb 22 2021

The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Poisoner of Underpants, Autocrat of Some of the Russias, in Gessen’s reckoning probably the son of a secret policeman, was born in Leningrad in 1952. Like any proper villain — but also like anyone born in that place in that year — he has a tragic backstory. Hitler’s army completed its encirclement of Leningrad on September 8, 1941, and the siege continued for 872 days. More than a million civilians died during the blockade of the city, vast numbers from disease and starvation. Putin’s parents’ first child was one of them; a second son had died in infancy before the war. Putin’s father was seriously wounded and discharged from the army. His mother nearly died of starvation during the siege.

The Man Without a Face by Masha Gessen

People who grow up in the shadow of great trauma react in many different ways. Putin, even according to authorized biographies, grew up a wild fighter with barely contained anger and a determination never to be humiliated. He didn’t grow out of it. “Putin, it would appear, reacted to the barest provocation by getting into a street brawl—risking his KGB career, which would have been derailed had he been detained for the fight or even so much as noticed by the police. Whether or not the stories are exactly true, it is notable that Putin has painted himself—and allowed himself to be painted by others—as a consistently rash, physically violent man with a barely containable temper.” (p. 51)

Putin grew up in the era of cosmonauts and decided he wanted to be a KGB man. Gessen details why it’s likely that Putin cam from a spy family, and his eventual application of self-discipline to make it into that organization. In the waning years of the Soviet Union, that organization also grew bloated and less effective, with many in its ranks looking for the main chance. Putin was no stranger to this competition, and he finally achieved a prized opportunity: posting abroad. Unfortunately for his ambition, he landed in East Germany, in Dresden. He was still there in 1989 as protests swelled into revolution, with East Germans no longer cowed by the Stasi or their KGB masters. As protesters moved to take over the Stasi offices, Putin made the easy deduction. Geert Mak, a Dutch journalist, writes “Meanwhile, an unknown KGB agent in Dresden, Vladimir Putin, had tried to pile so many documents into a burning stove that the thing exploded.” (In Europe, p. 718)

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Feb 18 2021

A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose #2) by Charlaine Harris

The hallmark of a successful second novel in a series, I feel, is that you turn the pages even faster than you did the first one. While I very much enjoyed An Easy Death, the series debut, it did feel like a lot of time was spent introducing the alternate history 1930s milieu. With the follow up, A Longer Fall, we jump into the action faster for a thrill ride that is unafraid to critique both racism and sexism in America, historically and through the present day.

I’d rather hoped, at the end of AED, that our gunslinging heroine Lizbeth Rose would leave her Texoma home to check out how things were going in the Holy Russian Empire that takes up the majority of the former United States of America’s western seaboard. Instead she’s signed up with a new crew heading east to deliver precious cargo to Dixie. Lizbeth’s never been to the Deep South before, but has a personal mission in addition to her paying gig: to deliver to the parents of her deceased best friend a picture of their newborn great-grandchild. Galilee was a black woman who fled Dixie after being impregnated (forcibly, it’s suggested) by the white son of her employer. Her parents risked everything to get their teenaged daughter to the relative safety of Texoma, where she wouldn’t be judged or worse for having a biracial child. That child, Freedom, has just had a daughter of his own, and wants to make sure his grandparents have some precious proof that their legacy of resilience thrives free of the yoke of ingrained, institutionalized racism.

But dynamite on the train tracks throws an explosive wrench into the works, and when the members of Lizbeth’s new crew are either killed or incapacitated just outside the town of Sally, Louisiana, Lizbeth once again finds herself the only person left to track down their now-stolen cargo and see that it gets to its destination. There’s one pleasant surprise: the appearance of the HRE wizard, or grigori as they’re disparagingly know, Eli Savarov. Lizbeth hadn’t thought she’d see him again after the completion of the job he’d hired her for mere months ago, but now they’re both on the trail of the missing box she and her crew had been hired to protect and deliver, with precious few clues where to look.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/18/a-longer-fall-gunnie-rose-2-by-charlaine-harris/

Feb 16 2021

X-Venture Xplorers #2: Clash of the Titans by Slaium, Meng & The Black Ink Team

Another lighthearted, if educational, look at animals and world conservation, told through the eyes of six children and their two adult mentors, the easily riled and super buff Dr Darwin and his long-suffering assistant Mr Smith. This volume opens with Taizen, the Sumatran kid who grew up in the wild, being dropped off to spend time with his family. Little do his teammates on the X-Venture Xplorers team realize that Taizen’s real family isn’t the humans from the nearby village they’re already familiar with, but is actually the orangutan couple who adopted him while he was lost in the jungle.

Taizen’s happiness at the prospect of spending quality time with his loved ones is quickly shattered by scenes of carnage, as he finds the orangutan tribe in disarray after a highly unusual attack by bears who seem to be in league with the mysterious hunters the Xplorers team encountered in the previous volume. With the help of the bears, the hunters kidnap Taizen and his dad, spiriting them away to parts unknown.

Several days later, with the rest of the team back at HQ,  Sherry is worrying that Taizen hasn’t checked back in for a while. A message from the village headman asking after Taizen’s whereabouts confirms her worst fears, and she drags the team to Sumatra to investigate. Jake seems to take Taizen’s disappearance and the obvious signs of struggle surrounding it particularly hard. When Dr Darwin sends them a message demanding they head straight back to base to regroup before investigating weird goings-on with non-native animals suddenly appearing in the wilds of North America — an event the team is sure has something to do with Taizen’s disappearance — they go around him and take a private plane supplied by Louis’ dad instead, heading directly to Yellowstone National Park. There they encounter not only a superabundance of simians and ursines but also the mysterious figure behind it all…

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Feb 15 2021

Amelia Unabridged by Ashley Schumacher

Honestly, this reads like J. D. Salinger fanfic.

But, y’know, I didn’t think I’d like Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year either, especially with its dreadful prologue, and I’ve since taken to evangelizing that excellent memoir and hoping the upcoming movie does it justice. Ashley Schumacher’s Amelia Unabridged shares a tendency towards gorgeous writing with Ms Rakoff’s book, particularly in the first few thorny chapters, but unfortunately dulls as the book progresses, with too many clever winds and whales flogged to death by repetition, and with a narrative bogged down by utterly nonsense choices.

And okay, a lot of my disagreement with the main character’s ultimate decision comes from being from the same background as her dead best friend Jenna’s family, where of course you go to college, especially if someone is offering to pay for the entire ride. So what if you don’t want to become an English professor: you can take courses in the things you do want and focus on just getting the damn degree, because that’s really all that matters in the marketplace anyway. Instead — and here be spoilers because I’m still incensed at the perfect storm of stupidity that makes up the ending, so you can stop reading here if you’d rather not be spoiled. That said, this is definitely a YA romance novel, and not a comedic, light-hearted examination-of-modern-expectations romance but a fantasy-tinged srs bznz novel that barely deals with the real world as the heroine finds her HEA.

Okay, you ready for some spoilers? Here we go.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/15/amelia-unabridged-by-ashley-schumacher/

Feb 14 2021

The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

Yes, Boromir failed. But he was far from alone. Denethor failed in sending a war leader on a mission meant for a diplomat. Aragorn and Gandalf failed to give him his due, and after that they failed to recognize that they were freezing out their proud companion. Despite their supposed wisdom, they did not see that being right is not enough.

Yet the last words that Boromir hears are words of compassion, a promise to complete his task, words that, perhaps, eased his passing. This time through The Lord of the Rings, I was surprised at how often I encountered that compassion, though Tolkien generally calls it pity. Frodo has pity on Gollum, not only taming him and persuading him to lead Frodo and Sam through the Dead Marshes toward Mordor, but later persuading Faramir to spare Gollum after he has stumbled into the southern rangers’ sanctuary. Gandalf pities Saruman, when they parley among the ruins of Isengard. Sam pities the Oliphaunt, whose appearance in Ithilien foreshadows the presence of many more in the War of the Ring. And though Faramir’s men pity the other men that they ambush, it does not stop them from slaying as many as possible. There is compassion in war, Tolkien says, but it remains war.

The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

Hoom, hoom! Treebeard remains one of the special delights of The Two Towers, at once old even by Elvish standards and at times oddly adolescent. The tale of the Ents and the Entwives did not seem sad to me, more sort of charmingly awkward. The Ents may be thousands of years old, yet somehow they remain tongue-tied boys at their first school dance. The Entwives, I think, gave up in exasperation. The Huorns are probably the scariest life-forms in Middle Earth that are not in the service of Sauron, and a reminder of how much of Tolkien’s created nature is hostile to his protagonists.

As Frodo and Sam draw closer to Mordor, I was surprised how often Frodo seemed to sense events to his west, among the other members of the company. The time in Ithlien and with Faramir was also longer than I remembered. Tolkien uses those chapters to set up the coming War of the Ring from the perspective of people who know little or nothing of the Ring itself. The rangers of the south, like the other men of Minas Tirith see Mordor pouring forth its strength, knowing that they will bear the brunt of Sauron’s wrath for reasons they cannot begin to be aware of. Tolkien makes Ithilien especially beautiful, perhaps a Flanders before the Great War, counterpoised to the Dead Marshes, which are very much like the Low Country mud he would have slogged through during his wartime service.

The book ends with the First Age erupting into the final days of the Third: Shelob is a bane separate from Sauron, no less steeped in malice but without the desire to rule. She is daunted by the phial that Galadriel has given to Frodo, which contains light from the Two Trees from the very beginning of the world. That same scene, though, points toward the next age, with the most important choices being made by the person with the lowest social standing. Not a lord of the Noldor but Samwise the gardener is the person who saves the quest when it is in greatest danger. The orcs make the mistake of thinking that only a great elf fighter could have driven off Shelob. They have the Ring-bearer, but not the Ring; at the end of this middle book (which has classic middle-book structure, solving some problems and ending with a cliffhanger), the quest hangs by a thread. That much, at least, is every bit as gripping as I remember.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/14/the-two-towers-by-j-r-r-tolkien/

Feb 12 2021

An Easy Death (Gunnie Rose #1) by Charlaine Harris

I always vastly underestimate the amount of reading I need to do for work, but I did bet on the fact that I’d be able to catch up easily on Books 1 and 2 of the Gunnie Rose series ahead of the impending release of Book 3, due solely to the fact that Charlaine Harris is a consistently entertaining writer. And y’know, for someone most famed for her contemporary paranormal and mystery novels, her adoption of the alternate history milieu in An Easy Death comes as a pleasant surprise from an author who always seems to have another intriguing bow in her storytelling quiver or, perhaps more aptly given the setting, bullet in her six-shooter.

The assassination of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a Great Depression without a road to recovery led to the fracturing of the United States of America into different nation states. Canada swooped in on the northern Midwest states, while the original thirteen colonies (minus Georgia) pledged fealty to England and renamed themselves Brittania. Georgia and the rest of the Deep South became the virulently racist Dixie, and the rest of the American South that escaped Mexican encroachment formed Texoma. Between Texoma and Canada lie the New States of America, while the West Coast has become the Holy Russian Empire, the new seat of the Romanov family that fled their murderous, godless compatriots. The HRE is notable for being home to open magic users, termed disparagingly outside the HRE as grigoris, after the first wizard of them all, the infamous Grigori Rasputin.

Lizbeth Rose is a gunslinger, a.k.a gunnie, in Texoma. She hates grigoris, but since they don’t often come her way, has no reason to act upon her dislike… until two of them show up on her doorstep, wanting to hire her. Needing the money for what seems like a relatively easy job — tracking down a wizard and his family in Juarez, Mexico — she reluctantly accepts. As they travel south and she learns shocking truths about their mission, a combination of her gunnie code and an instinctive need to protect her own secrets prevent her from bailing like she knows she should. But desperate killers are also on their trail, and soon Lizbeth is fighting to save her own life in addition to her charges’.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/12/an-easy-death-gunnie-rose-1-by-charlaine-harris/

Feb 11 2021

The Future Is Yours by Dan Frey

The reading experience of this was really interesting to me: I spent maybe the first and last fifteen percent of the book deeply skeptical but was absolutely immersed in everything in between.

The premise is simple, for a science fiction novel. Two best friends from college found a Silicon Valley startup after one of them develops a machine that allows people to look for information up to a year in the future. Adhi Chaudry is a socially awkward nerd who happens to be a scientific genius. Ben Boyce is a born salesman with a talent for navigating the vicious world of high-tech venture capitalism. Together, they plan on making The Future available to everyone, to the consternation of governments and big business alike. But when the seemingly immutable future they’ve modeled their entire philosophy on shows signs of changing, the best friends, whose relationship has already been sorely tested by the demands of their business partnership, begin to differ significantly on what they want to do with their technology next, with possibly fatal results.

Told in extremely engaging format — collecting emails, texts, blog posts, transcripts and more — this is a fast-paced novel that works best as an examination of the ways friendships grow and fracture with time and stress. Ben and Adhi are both deeply interesting and flawed people trying to do what they think is best as they’re beset by moral and legal complexities in the attainment of their dreams. The epistolary format is really great for showcasing both their private thoughts as well as how those contradict the public things they say and do. It’s also a great way to philosophize over destiny and free will, as well as conceptions of time and inevitability (with a very cool Hindu perspective, as well.) Bonus points for drolly satirizing how little government understands technology, fitting given that the idea for this novel came from Dan Frey watching Congress (often clumsily) interrogate Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/11/the-future-is-yours-by-dan-frey/

Feb 09 2021

Feathered & Fabulous: Wit And Wisdom From Glamorous Birds by Alison Throckmorton

When I was first pitched this book for review, I was sent a pdf copy. Suspecting that I needed to hold this book to get a better idea of its worth, I requested a physical copy, and oh dear reader, it is absolutely the difference between seeing a picture of a bird and being gifted one!

For this is definitely a gift book, a beautifully produced confection of glossy, imperious bird portraits paired with pithy sayings that might have come straight from your favorite bitchy reality television program. Attention has not been spared from any aspect of this volume, from the foil-embossed cover to the delightful endpapers. It isn’t a deep or a long read, but it’s a delightful coffee-table-esque book for grownups that’s sure to elicit a smile and a chuckle from any bird lover who also happens to love pop culture (or vice versa!)

It is available as an eBook, and while I don’t necessarily recommend it in that format (the hardcover version is just so darling!) I can see where someone who needs a quick pick-me-up of sassy bird humor might prefer that. But I’ve never really cottoned to reading magazines digitally either, so YMMV! I do rather wish that the species of birds photographed had been included with each one, but it does make a good jumping-on point for finding out more about these gorgeous creatures.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/09/feathered-fabulous-wit-and-wisdom-from-glamorous-birds-by-alison-throckmorton/