Karen Lord – THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

The Sadiri were once the galaxy’s ruling élite, but now their home planet has been rendered unlivable and most of the population destroyed. The few groups living on other worlds are desperately short of Sadiri women, and their extinction is all but certain.

Civil servant Grace Delarua is assigned to work with Councillor Dllenahkh, a Sadiri, on his mission to visit distant communities, looking for possible mates. Delarua is impulsive, garrulous and fully immersed in the single life; Dllenahkh is controlled, taciturn and responsible for keeping his community together. They both have a lot to learn.

What the fuck is this shit.

I was lukewarm toward Lord’s previous book, though I didn’t hate it. It was an easy read. There was a lot of hubbub surrounding The Best of All Possible Worlds enough that I was interested, even though the synopsis frankly sounds like shit.

Turns out, it’s really absolutely fucking shit. My nickname for this book is The Best of All Eugenics. 

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TENDER MORSELS – rapetoberfest and bears

Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. Liga lives modestly in her own personal heaven, a world given to her in exchange for her earthly life. Her two daughters grow up in this soft place, protected from the violence that once harmed their mother. But the real world cannot be denied forever—magicked men and wild bears break down the borders of Liga’s refuge. Now, having known Heaven, how will these three women survive in a world where beauty and brutality lie side by side?

RAPE AND CHILD ABUSE TRIGGER WARNING

This is a complicated book. It’s about surviving abuse, about love, about recovery, about being women. It’s also quite a flawed book in many ways, and goes on for many pages too long.

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Thanhha Lai’s INSIDE OUT AND BACK AGAIN

No one would believe me but at times I would choose wartime in Saigon over peacetime in Alabama.

For all the ten years of her life, HÀ has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by . . . and the beauty of her very own papaya tree.

But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. HÀ and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. In America, HÀ discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food, the strange shape of its landscape . . . and the strength of her very own family.

This is the moving story of one girl’s year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next.

This book is an onion. It has many layers and it induces tears.

Good tears, okay?

But let me say first that I share no common experience with Lai, or any of the experiences depicted in Inside Out and Back Again. I’m not an immigrant; I live in a country where I’m part of the ethnic majority–though that doesn’t mean, no, that I’m immune to racism (as you know, Bob…)–and that I am not going to review this book as though I have any right to talk about the experience of a Vietnamese girl fleeing Saigon for the US. There are some points of commonality (and cuisine!) that resonated with me, though.

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guys guys guys, let’s talk about Christine Love!

I adore Christine Love. She blogs about a lot of lovely stuff, much of it wonderfully queer-lady friendly. Er, not least because she is a queer lady! I’ve discovered many a yuri title through her blog.

My first exposure to her was via don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story, a visual novel. Now there’s some thematic weakness to it, and the very odd tangent into privacy and the future, and a creepy teacher-student relationship you may potentially pursue… but it’s just a lovely lovely thing in spite of all that. It’s well-written, well-told, quirky and sweet and insightful. It’s about adolescence and love, and mostly it’s about queer teenagers finding love (Kendall and Charlotte! oh Kendall and Charlotte), and it incorporates Internet culture in an amusing fashion with a nod to 4chan subculture. Kendall talks pretty much entirely in memes.

Forever laughing. Love at first said she kind of hated Kendall, but then discovered the opposite. Which makes me happy, because I quite enjoyed Kendall. Yes, she’s obnoxious, but on the other hand she’s bright and bold, and very forward in her pursuit of getting back together with her girlfriend.

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DELIRIUM’S MISTRESS: in which Tanith Lee makes me cry

In the age of demons, when the Earth was still flat, a daughter was born to a mortal beauty and Azhrarn, Demon Lord of Night. This Daughter of the Night was called Azhriaz, and she was hidden away on a mist-shrouded isle, spirit-guarded, to spend her life in dreams. But Azhriaz was destined for more than dark dreaming. For if her father was the Lord of Night, her mother was descended from the Sun itself. 

And her beauty and power soon called to another mighty demon lord, Azhrarn’s enemy, Prince Chuz, Delusion’s Master, who worked a magnificent illusion to free Azhriaz from her prison and transform her into Delirium’s Mistress. 

As Mistress of Madness and Delirium would she become known in realms of both demon and humankind. And her destiny would make her goddess, queen, fugitive, champion, seeress – and her to whom even the very Lord of Darkness would one day bow down…

Tanith Lee, Tanith Lee. Why are you such an inconsistent writer?

Delirium’s Mistress is part of the Flat Earth series, which is Tanith Lee’s take on sword and sorcery. I’ve never been able to really tell if Lee identifies as a feminist, but her output varies wildly. There are really excellent female characters in her stories, and then there are really passive ones, and then there are ones whom the narrative shafts 24/7. Death’s Master is a terrible saga of gender essentialism and sword-and-sorcery misogyny. And yet, at the same time, she’s written Disturbed By Her Song which is amazing in many kinds of ways. I’m willing to attribute it to her growth as a writer, but again, I don’t know enough about her.

Delirium’s Mistress is, for the most part, of the “gender essentialist” category with borderline misogyny. And then… it becomes something else and it almost made me cry sad, sad tears. Like the balloon things in Dan Abnett’s run of The Authority only subtler.
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HUNTRESS, Malinda Lo

Nature is out of balance in the human world. The sun hasn’t shone in years, and crops are failing. Worse yet, strange and hostile creatures have begun to appear. The people’s survival hangs in the balance. To solve the crisis, the oracle stones are cast, and Kaede and Taisin, two seventeen-year-old girls, are picked to go on a dangerous and unheard-of journey to Taninli, the city of the Fairy Queen. Taisin is a sage, thrumming with magic, and Kaede is of the earth, without a speck of the otherworldly. And yet the two girls’ destinies are drawn together during the mission. As members of their party succumb to unearthly attacks and fairy tricks, the two come to rely on each other and even begin to fall in love. But the Kingdom needs only one huntress to save it, and what it takes could tear Kaede and Taisin apart forever.

I gave this one a fair chance. By page 111 out of 269, they are still traveling, the plot is going nowhere, and not only do I not care what happens next, I have developed an utmost wish for all the characters to die in a fucking fire. By page 116, I truly, truly could no longer give a fuck. Maybe it gets better–certainly it can’t get worse–but short of paying me you can’t make me endure another page of Malinda Lo’s exercise in boring people to death.

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Kelly Link’s PRETTY MONSTERS

Through the lens of Link’s vivid imagination, nothing is what it seems, and everything deserves a second look. From the multiple award-winning “The Faery Handbag,” in which a teenager’s grandmother carries an entire village (or is it a man-eating dog?) in her handbag, to the near-future of “The Surfer,” whose narrator (a soccer-playing skeptic) waits with a planeload of refugees for the aliens to arrive, Link’s stories are funny and full of unexpected insights and skewed perspectives on the world. Her fans range from Michael Chabon to Peter Buck of R.E.M. to Holly Black of Spiderwick Chronicles fame. Now teens can have their world rocked, too!

It’s nominally a YA collection. Which is a little odd, since–as this Strange Horizons review points out–many of the stories didn’t first appear in particularly YA-oriented anthologies or zines. What they all have in common are children or teenagers for protagonists; apart from that, put next to my previous exposure to Link (Stranger Things Happen), it doesn’t seem more or less YA.
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Tanith Lee’s DISTURBED BY HER SONG

Disturbed By Her Song collects the work of Esther Garber and her half-brother Judas Garbah, the mysterious family of writers that Tanith Lee has been channeling for the past few years. Possibly autobiographical, frequently erotic and darkly surreal, their fiction takes place in a variety of eras and places, from Egypt in the 1940s, to England in the grip of the Pre-Raphaelites, to gaslit Paris and to the shadowy landscapes carved by the mind and memory. The themes of youth and age stream through these tales of homosexual love and desire. These stories recall, at times, the work of Lawrence Durrell, Colette, and Angela Carter.

Oh my god I had to review this. It’s an obligation. It’s a public service. Because you should read this. You should.

That is how good, intelligent, and beautifully written this is.
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FEVRE DREAM and VENUS PRESERVED

George R. R. Martin: Fevre Dream

When struggling riverboat captain Abner Marsh receives an offer of partnership from a wealthy aristocrat, he suspects something’s amiss. But when he meets the hauntingly pale, steely-eyed Joshua York, he is certain. For York doesn’t care that the icy winter of 1857 has wiped out all but one of Marsh’s dilapidated fleet. Nor does he care that he won’t earn back his investment in a decade. York has his own reasons for wanting to traverse the powerful Mississippi. And they are to be none of Marsh’s concern–no matter how bizarre, arbitrary, or capricious his actions may prove.

Marsh meant to turn down York’s offer. It was too full of secrets that spelled danger. But the promise of both gold and a grand new boat that could make history crushed his resolve–coupled with the terrible force of York’s mesmerizing gaze. Not until the maiden voyage of his new sidewheeler Fevre Dream would Marsh realize he had joined a mission both more sinister, and perhaps more noble, than his most fantastic nightmare…and mankind’s most impossible dream.

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