Mar 05 2021

Forget Me Not by Alexandra Oliva

A genre-bending novel, when done right, can really reshape the way we think about what’s possible both in fiction and in real life. Much like Sara Faring’s The Tenth Girl, this layered blend of literary genres has the reader reconsidering the processes of our everyday existence, what it takes to live in (or buck) the societies around us, and what we owe our parents in addition to ourselves (tho unlike in Ms Faring’s excellent debut novel, the parents of our protagonist here are unfortunately varying shades of awful.)

Linda Russell was born to fill a hole left in the lives of her parents with the death of her older sister, Maddy. As is sadly the case with too many deaths of children, her parents’ marriage did not survive for very long after Maddy passed away. Lorelei, her mother, grew more and more obsessed with rebirthing her beloved girl. And so Linda was born, to be raised on a remote, walled-off estate, her only companions her mother and her twin sister, Emmer. One day, an incident occurs that has Linda fleeing the estate in a panic: when she returns to an empty house, she decides to strike out for help. Her arrival in the nearby town of Cedar Lake causes a hubbub, drawing unwanted media attention as questions swirl around who, and what, she really is.

Fast-forward almost two decades and Linda is living alone in a Seattle apartment building, listlessly following the health-maintaining instructions sent to her via her Sheath, the wearable smart device that’s a logical extrapolation from modern technology to a reasonable near-future conclusion. The media firestorm that surrounded her emergence into the modern world has left her shy of other people in general and of strangers in particular. So when a friendly extrovert moves in on her floor, Linda’s first instinct is to avoid her.

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Mar 04 2021

Down Comes the Night by Allison Saft

To give you an idea of how much I hated the heroine, the first time she’s in mortal peril, I was hoping she wouldn’t survive. When she unfortunately does escape the potentially fatal consequences of the (self-inflicted) accident only to be later gravely wounded by a villain, I literally shouted with laughter because I was so over her nonsense and wanted her to die.

Honestly, I can put up with a lot from my reading, but to have a heroine — in this case Wren Southerland, a healer for the Danubian army — start out stupid and just keep doing stupid things while holding on to the bizarre idea that her stubbornness and selfishness come from being emotional instead of being a moron was almost too much for me to handle. I had to put the book away at the 92% mark when the heroine does something so idiotic that I needed to just sit by myself and take deep breaths in order to handle the swelling in my breast of rage, both at the author and at my need to persevere to the end of this deeply ludicrous book.

I mean, any sympathy I might have had with this protagonist was strained very early on in the book. Wren and her hardass commanding officer, Major Una Dryden, are out on patrol when they scare a spy right out of a tree. The spy breaks his arm rather grotesquely and Una makes the questionable, on many levels, decision to shackle him to the tree by his broken wrist. Wren wants to heal the boy, protesting sepsis and the need to interrogate a living subject, but Una tells her not to be so soft-hearted (!) and to guard him while she goes off to scout.

At this point, I was all “only assholes torture prisoners” and I was super glad Wren disobeyed orders and went to magically heal him anyway… except that the only way this complete numpty could think of to do so was to free him altogether from his shackles, NOT restrain him in any manner whatsoever, and then be terribly, horribly surprised when he runs away as soon as she heals him. I was aghast at how this allegedly seasoned military veteran could make such a rookie mistake but thought to myself, well, her heart’s in the right place, and surely the author is only having her start out daft only to redeem herself by learning to make good choices by the end…

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/04/down-comes-the-night-by-allison-saft/

Mar 02 2021

The Conductors (Murder and Magic #1) by Nicole Glover

Such an excellent premise, such an underwhelming execution!

Hetty Rhodes was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, helping other enslaved people escape slavery as she once had, using the magical abilities she was gifted with. Once the Civil War ended, she settled in Philadelphia with her husband and co-conductor Benjy Rhodes, but never gave up looking for her younger sister Esther, from whom she’d been separated on their flight to freedom. Now she works as a seamstress by day and, with Benjy, an investigator by night, solving the cases the local police won’t touch, whether out of fear or, more usually, prejudice.

When the body of a friend of the Rhodes’ is found with a cursed sigil carved into his skin, it’s only natural that they’re the first (and unsurprisingly only) people called in to investigate. Charlie Richardson was a man constantly on the make, who downplayed his own history in order to better mingle with the elites of Black Philadelphia. Hetty had once been bosom friends with his wife Marianne but the two had grown distant, and the fact that Hetty and Benjy had been less than enthusiastic about responding to Charlie’s recent worries increases their guilt at not having been able to prevent his murder. With the help of friends such as mortician Oliver and herbalist Penelope, the Rhodes are determined to find justice for their dead friend, even it means explosive consequences.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/02/the-conductors-murder-and-magic-1-by-nicole-glover/

Mar 01 2021

Machinehood by S. B. Divya

Set at the end of the 21st century, this sci-fi novel follows the stories of two sisters-in-law who will both prove pivotal in the fight against the terrorist organization known as the Machinehood.

Eighty years from now, people are heavily reliant on technology and weak artificial intelligences (known as WAIs) to perform the most mundane tasks, leading to increased joblessness as humans need to dose themselves with all manner of performance-enhancing pills, often mini-machines that work inside the body, in order to keep up with the Joneses, human or AI. American Welga Ramirez is the daughter of a bioengineer who died a painful death due to her genetic code’s incompatibility with flow, a common mind/focus enhancer: on her deathbed, she made her kids foreswear the drug, leading to Welga washing out of college. So Welga enlisted in the US Armed Forces instead, eventually retiring as a result of her disgust at a botched operation in the Maghreb. Now she works as a Shield, essentially a telegenic bodyguard for the rich capitalist class or funders, as they’re known, to differentiate them from giggers, the majority of the world labor force who must rely on the gig economy to make ends meet.

Her brother Luis is married to Nithya Balachandran and lives in Chennai with his wife and their daughter Carma. Nithya is a biogeneticist, and the first person Welga turns to when she starts to suffer from tremors, likely caused by the constant pill usage required in her line of work. But all personal issues take a back seat when a shadowy organization proclaiming the equality of humanity with AI targets the funders of several successful pharmaceutical companies simultaneously, resulting in death, destruction and mass panic as the terrorists’ demands make their way to the global populace. Soon, Welga will have to question her own beliefs and boundaries as she embarks on a desperate hunt to stop the organization calling itself the Machinehood from killing again.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/01/machinehood-by-s-b-divya/

Feb 27 2021

The Swimmers by Marian Womack

It’s kind of hilarious how the back cover of this volume calls it a reimagining of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea even as Marian Womack’s afterword candidly discusses how she doesn’t want to compare The Swimmers to what was for her a seminal text. And I can see for both arguments: the comparison is a huge hook in getting readers to pick this up, but the story itself, while having many parallels to that reimagining of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, is really quite different from both novels.

Which isn’t to say that I didn’t spend the first few chapters trying to get the two plots to sync together better in my brain. Pearl is a young surface-dweller who lives with her loving, if distant, mother and ill younger brother on a rambling estate almost wholly given over to the encroaching wilderness. Her memories of her father are fragmented and unreliable, but she knows scandal followed his death by suicide in a military base. Growing up nearly feral, socializing mostly with those of the beanie and shuvani classes considered lower in status than her own, she’s in for a surprise when her mother suddenly remarries.

Anton VanLow is kind but also obviously in need of Urania’s fortune. He moves their family to Old Town while he remodels the estate, gradually introducing them to modern civilization as he wheels and deals with their fellow techie caste members and the higher-status ringers who live in orbit over earth. Tragedy strikes when they move back to the estate, tearing their family apart and causing Pearl to eventually seek refuge in an Academy that trains her for work in the Ring, or so she hopes.

Years later, a ringer named Arlo comes down to Old Town to marry the stepdaughter of an industrialist his father means to court. Arlo is attracted to Pearl but doesn’t understand her life or her world, and she will soon leave him in an attempt to make sense of her place on this planet… or above it, no matter the consequence to her or to the baby she reluctantly carries.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/27/the-swimmers-by-marian-womack/

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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/25/the-loosening-skin-by-aliya-whiteley-2/

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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/22/the-man-without-a-face-the-unlikely-rise-of-vladimir-putin-by-masha-gessen/

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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/16/x-venture-xplorers-2-clash-of-the-titans-by-slaium-meng-the-black-ink-team/