Books Read in 2023: Four-Star Fantasy and Sci-Fi

I am not feeling on top of the world physically. Still hacking until I throw up a little at least once or twice a day. Made a doctor's appointment for Thursday morning (I would have tried to go Saturday morning but the plow hadn't come by yet and our street was impassable). I also have my January headache and I'm out of migraine meds. This is actually not a complaint, because I still made it to work every day last week and got my dad to his hand surgeon appointment and made dinner, um, a couple times at least, I actually can't remember but I'm pretty sure we ate stuff, so... my point is, it's January and I'm sick and I'm still not in the depths of despair. Yesterday (I mean Saturday) I mostly read in my reading chair, because if I don't move I cough less and I've been longing for a reading day for weeks, and it was perfect and I did not feel restless or guilty by the end of the day. So for now, the dosage increase on my antidepressant is doing its job, which is really freaking cool. 

You know that feeling when you think you're out of something and then you find a brand new of that something? This has happened to me three times in recent memory. The first was a bottle of dry shampoo from Lush, right after I had ordered some Lush stuff for Eve for Christmas and not re-ordered my dry shampoo because we had spent so much in December already. Then a can of my hairspray which is not as easy to find as it used to be, and, just to break the hair theme, a refill container of foaming liquid soap. This is one of the best feelings in the world (if you are a white-ass, middle-class, basic bitch with not a lot of real problems, I guess). 

I did have to buy a new bottle of moisturizer. How do you deal with pump bottles of body lotion when the lotion gets too low for the pump to work anymore? I shake the bottle around until I get a couple more pumps, then take the pump out and try to shake out the lotion, end up with a giant glob that over-moisturizes whatever I start with and under-moisturizes whatever I finish with, and then the top of the bottle gets crusty and gross, I buy a new bottle but still leave the old one sitting there for a couple days, and then throw out the old one while feeling guilty and wasteful. Anyone have a better system?

Four-Star Fantasy and Sci-Fi

Into the Light by Mark Oshiro. Synopsis from Goodreads: When you're like me, you have to lie. It’s been one year since Manny was cast out of his family and driven into the wilderness of the American Southwest. Since then, Manny lives by self-taught rules that keep him moving―and keep him alive. Now, he’s taking a chance on a traveling situation with the Varela family, whose attractive but surly son, Carlos, seems to promise a new future. I can't let anyone down. Eli abides by the rules of his family, living in a secluded community that raised him to believe his obedience will be rewarded. But an unsettling question slowly eats away at Eli’s once unwavering faith in Why can’t he remember his past? What am I supposed to do? But the reported discovery of an unidentified body found in the hills of Idyllwild, California, will draw both of these young men into facing their biggest fears and confronting their own identity―and who they are allowed to be.

-"I know I can't be too picky when I have almost nothing to my name. So I take the bill, and guilt rages as I stuff it next to the twenties I lifted from the Varelas. Turns out I would have been fine without stealing from them. I'm not a good person. But I can't really afford to be."

-"'Why would he listen to you about my life but not me?' "The Lord works in mysterious ways,' she says, nodding. 'Well, could he stop being such a fucking mystery to me?'

Oops, I believe this is probably also YA, but I don't feel like screwing with the finished posts, so here it shall stay. There is a lot going on in this book, and for the most part Oshiro keeps it together, although the pacing goes a tiny bit wonky in the middle. At times it it almost too earnest, but for the most part it's uncomfortably, viscerally vivid about how it must feel to be ostracized by your family and community and have no one to rely on - until you do, and then you're afraid to trust it. Even without the mystical dimension it would have worked as a novel. Gay Latinx unhoused youth representation.

VenCo by Cherie Dimaline. Synopsis from Goodreads: Lucky St. James, a Métis millennial living with her cantankerous but loving grandmother Stella, is barely hanging on when she discovers she will be evicted from their tiny Toronto apartment. Then, one night, something strange and irresistible calls out to Lucky. Burrowing through a wall, she finds a silver spoon etched with a crooked-nosed witch and the word SALEM, humming with otherworldly energy. Hundreds of miles away in Salem, Myrna Good has been looking for Lucky. Myrna works for VenCo, a front company fueled by vast resources of dark money. Lucky is familiar with the magic of her indigenous ancestors, but she has no idea that the spoon links her to VenCo’s network of witches throughout North America. Generations of witches have been waiting for centuries for the seven spoons to come together, igniting a new era, and restoring women to their rightful power. But as reckoning approaches, a very powerful adversary is stalking their every move. He’s Jay Christos, a roguish and deadly witch-hunter as old as witchcraft itself. To find the last spoon, Lucky and Stella embark on a rollicking and dangerous road trip to the darkly magical city of New Orleans, where the final showdown will determine whether VenCo will usher in a new beginning…or remain underground forever.

I didn't love The Marrow Thieves as much as I felt like I should (from what friends with similar reading tastes had said), so I was a bit hesitant. Then my friend Nat (HI NAT) was reading and loving it, so I took a crack at it (we were Facebook messaging about it, and I tried to type "VenCo" into Google to see what it was about, and instead typed "BenCo" into the message box and Nat was like WTF and I laughed so hard I almost peed). 

I liked it very much. Lucky and Stella are an appealing motley crew of two, I love a quest (I used to collect spoons too, from different places, and there were dedicated spoon racks for them, that is so weird, now that I think of it), and the gathering of female power is shivery good. The building of intensity towards the final confrontation is measured and effective, and the payoff is satisfying. Stella is also a great character, although like all characters of this ilk, she annoyed me at first. 

No Gods, No Monsters (Convergence Saga #2) by Cadwell Turnbull. Synopsis from Goodreads: One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother has been shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality soon reveals something much stranger. Monsters are real. And they want everyone to know it. As creatures from myth and legend come out of the shadows, seeking safety through visibility, their emergence sets off a chain of seemingly unrelated events. Members of a local werewolf pack are threatened into silence. A professor follows a missing friend’s trail of bread crumbs to a mysterious secret society. And a young boy with unique abilities seeks refuge in a pro-monster organization with secrets of its own. Meanwhile, more people start disappearing, suicides and hate crimes increase, and protests erupt globally, both for and against the monsters. At the center is a mystery no one thinks to ask: Why now? What has frightened the monsters out of the dark? The world will soon find out.

-"Something is not right at all. Her mother smells dirty, as if she hasn't showered in some time. But something else too. A sharp note of something at the heart of her mother. Muddy and sweet. Devotion, heart-deep and rich. Pungent and insane. A dark staircase reaching down forever."

-"He could have said, 'No one is safe, not really.' He could have said there are things in this world that can pull you apart and turn your body to smoke. That the universe sometimes walks on two legs and peers at you through distant clouds of stardust. But that won't do either of them any good."

I got the author's previous novel (his debut) from NetGalley and loved it, so immediately requested this when it came out. I struggled with it quite a bit, and only picked it up again in December because I wanted to get it finished before the end of the year. I skimmed through it again last night, which pretty much cemented what I felt the first time around - there were several different storylines, and each one was impactful in its own way, but I had trouble figuring out how it all fit together and would lose the thread at times. In Turnbull's afterword, he straight-out apologizes for having too many characters, which made me forgive everything. The Lesson takes place in The Virgin Islands, while this one takes place there and in the U.S. This lent a different flavour to the themes of colonialism and racism. The "monsters", naturally, add another dimension to the subject of othering, causing division between friends and parents and children. 

There is representation for race, asexuality, transgenderism, and werewolfery etc. The secret society and parallel universe elements were rich and strange, and I hope the second book pulls everything together somewhat, or that my focus is better, because I really love what Turnbull is going for, enough to overlook a few bumps. 

The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart. Synopsis from Goodreads: An impossible crime. A detective on the edge of madness. The future of time travel at stake. January Cole’s job just got a whole lot harder. Not that running security at the Paradox was ever really easy. Nothing’s simple at a hotel where the ultra-wealthy tourists arrive costumed for a dozen different time periods, all eagerly waiting to catch their “flights” to the past. Or where proximity to the timeport makes the clocks run backward on occasion—and, rumor has it, allows ghosts to stroll the halls. None of that compares to the corpse in room 526. The one that seems to be both there and not there. The one that somehow only January can see. On top of that, some very important new guests have just checked in. Because the U.S. government is about to privatize time-travel technology—and the world’s most powerful people are on hand to stake their claims. January is sure the timing isn’t a coincidence. Neither are those “accidents” that start stalking their bidders. There’s a reason January can glimpse what others can’t. A reason why she’s the only one who can catch a killer who’s operating invisibly and in plain sight, all at once. But her ability is also destroying her grip on reality—and as her past, present, and future collide, she finds herself confronting not just the hotel’s dark secrets but her own.

-”And for the briefest moment, I think the same thing I think every time I see her: a five-minute tram ride. That’s all it would take. I just have to be willing to break the rules I’ve sworn to uphold and maybe destroy reality in the process.

Some days, it seems worth it.”

-”’It’s my responsibility to say that your behavior is making it very clear you’re hiding something from me, and…’

‘You are a flying toaster. Save the commentary.’

It doesn’t respond. I hope I hurt its feelings. Does it have feelings? Should I program in some feelings so I can hurt them?”

It's a hotel where people come to set off on a cruise to a different time, and yet all the action takes place in the hotel. You might have thought I would find this excruciating, but I did not. Much. Kidding. This is a beautiful story about guilt and remorse, and the hope for redemption. January Cole is the kind of irascible heroine whose drunken, verbally abusive veneer clearly covers a deep well of pain. The host of wonky events showing that time is out of joint are entertaining except for the fact that you know the big reveal about why January is so angry and tormented is going to be searing.

 Anomaly by Hervé le Tellier, Adriana Hunter (translator). Synopsis from Goodreads: A virtuoso novel where logic confronts magic and that explores the part of ourselves that  us. In June 2021, a senseless event upends the lives of hundreds of men and women, all passengers on a flight from Paris to New York. Among them: Blake, a respectable family man, though  works as a contract killer; Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star tired of living a lie; Joanna, a formidable lawyer whose flaws have caught up with her; and Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet commercially unsuccessful writer who suddenly becomes a cult hit. All of them believed they had double lives. None imagined just how true that was. This witty variation on the doppelgänger theme, which takes us on a journey from Lagos and Mumbai to the White House, is Hervé Le Tellier's most ambitious work yet.

-”They left nothing out; if the pentagon had asked them to present all the possible outcomes of heads or tails, they would have come up with three: heads, tails and the rare incidence of the coin deciding to balance vertically on its edge. But in April 2002, ten days after the report was submitted, the DoD sent it back with a question written in red felt pen: ‘What if we’re confronted with a case that fits none of the situations covered?’

Tina rolled her eyes: How about the hypothesis where the flipped coin stays suspended in the air?”

Any book that deals with time travel or parallel realities, I will snap up first and ask questions later. Some of them are more plot based, trying to describe how the actual science might work and going from there. Some are much more philosophical and literary, investigating the existential implications, (as Cadwell Turnbull writes in No Gods, No Monsters, "If any old universe can exist, then what is the value of this one?") This is the latter type, which sometimes I find tedious, but here it really works. There is a conversation about what makes a person - the qualities they are born with, or the way they are shaped by the events in their life? And then the bureaucracy of a place - how does it deal with something completely inexplicable by logic or science? This plays out through the eyes of several very different characters, and it was fascinating and melancholy and lovely.

A House Between Earth and the Moon by Rebecca Scherm. Synopsis from Goodreads: Scientist Alex Welch-Peters has believed for twenty years that his super-algae can reverse the effects of climate change. His obsession with his research has jeopardized his marriage, his relationships with his kids, and his own professional future. When Sensus, the colossal tech company, offers him a chance to complete his research, he seizes the opportunity. The catch? His lab will be in outer space on Parallaxis, the first-ever luxury residential space station built for billionaires. Alex and six other scientists leave their loved ones to become Pioneers, the beta tenants of Parallaxis. But Parallaxis is not the space palace they were sold. Day and night, the embittered crew builds the facility under pressure from Sensus, motivated by the promise that their families will join them. Meanwhile, back on Earth, with much of the country ablaze in wildfires, Alex’s family tries to remain safe in Michigan. His teenage daughter, Mary Agnes, struggles through high school with the help of the ubiquitous Sensus phones implanted in everyone’s ears, archiving each humiliation, and wishing she could go to Parallaxis with her father—but her mother will never allow it. The Pioneers are the beta testers of another program, too. As they toil away two hundred miles in the sky, Sensus is designing an algorithm that will predict human behavior. Tess, a young social psychologist Sensus has hired to watch the Pioneers through their phones, begins to develop an intimate, obsessive relationship with her subjects. When she takes it a step further—traveling to Parallaxis to observe them up close—the controlled experiment begins to unravel.

-”Why had she let herself care about them so much, so completely? She was drilling down into the human experience in a way no one had before, ever, and she’d expected to be full, overflowing with it. Instead she felt hollow, like something rotting from the inside. Getting to be so many people at one time had made her into less than one.”

-”It took them nearly twenty minutes to get to the ladder. They took turns dragging Mozgov by his feet, very slowly, so that he could stay on his stomach.

‘I can get him up,’ Carl said, leaning on the wall and panting. ‘The bottom is the hardest part.’

They strapped Mozgov’s wrists together around Carl’s neck, and Carl hauled him up the ladder on his back. For the first two rungs, Alex watched in silent terror of the two men falling, Mozgov landing on his back. 

‘Every rung, they get lighter,’ Macy said quietly.”

So four stars definitely don't translate to "I really liked it" because Jesus, even if it's not an accurate snapshot of our future, it's probably not too far off, and it is terrifying. The human faces rang really true here - there was corruption and self-interest, but also courage and longing, and heroic efforts to make "meager, human-scale abilities" count, even in the face of "screaming catastrophe". If nothing else, it makes it really clear that even if the billionaires are able to escape to space, it's probably not going to be the luxurious dream they're anticipating.

Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk. Synopsis from Goodreads: A magical detective dives into the affairs of Chicago's divine monsters to secure a future with the love of her life. This sapphic period piece will dazzle anyone looking for mystery, intrigue, romance, magic, or all of the above. An exiled auspex who sold her soul to save her brother's life is offered one last job before serving an eternity in hell. When she turns it down, her client sweetens the pot by offering up the one payment she can't resist―the chance to have a future where she grows old with the woman she loves. To succeed, she is given three days to track down the White City Vampire, Chicago's most notorious serial killer. If she fails, only hell and heartbreak await.

A poignant and touching novella. Did you watch Supernatural? If you did, you know how Sam or Dean were forever stupidly sacrificing themselves to save each other, and then one of them would die but it never took, and then they'd fix that brother and then the other brother would do the same thing? Well, this is like that but gay and less sibling-ish. I love the title particularly because I am often very bad at reading or watching things where I know the end. Even though I love beautiful writing and I do believe the journey is at least as important as the destination, and how things happen is just as important as what happens, I have to push myself. Of course the meaning is slightly different here - do you throw your whole self into loving someone even if you know the relationship is ultimately doomed? Do you find joy in the present even when the future is certain pain and torment? 

Am I selling it?

Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey. Synopsis from Goodreads: “Come home.” Vera’s mother called and Vera obeyed. In spite of their long estrangement, in spite of the memories -- she's come back to the home of a serial killer. Back to face the love she had for her father and the bodies he buried there. Coming home is hard enough for Vera, and to make things worse, she and her mother aren’t alone. A parasitic artist has moved into the guest house out back, and is slowly stripping Vera’s childhood for spare parts. He insists that he isn’t the one leaving notes around the house in her father’s handwriting… but who else could it possibly be? There are secrets yet undiscovered in the foundations of the notorious Crowder House. Vera must face them, and find out for herself just how deep the rot goes.

-”Each time she presses her hook down into tender flesh – each time a worm turns into a tense thrumming fighting thing in her hand – she feels that same lush thrill. Here is something that she controls. Here is something that responds to her with the kind of frantic immediacy she’s always wanted from the world.”

Once again I confused one author for another, so I had in my head that I had read and liked one Sarah Gailey book and then struggled to find another, when in fact I don't tend to mesh with this author. This was very, very slow to pick up, and I came close to DNF-ing multiple times. The big secret about Vera's father is given away from the outset, but then it wasn't quite what I was expecting after all. I read at least one reviewer who said the last third of the book was worth getting through the first two-thirds, and by and large I agree - the payoff feels vital and strange and effective in a way I wasn't expecting. There is atmosphere to burn here, and the characters are memorable and compelling. It was probably not the best choice to read it in January.

The Mimicking of Known Successess (Mossa and Pleiti #1) by Malka Ann Older. Synopsis from Goodreads: The Mimicking of Known Successes presents a cozy Holmesian murder mystery and sapphic romance, set on Jupiter, by Malka Older, author of the critically-acclaimed Centenal Cycle. On a remote, gas-wreathed outpost of a human colony on Jupiter, a man goes missing. The enigmatic Investigator Mossa follows his trail to Valdegeld, home to the colony’s erudite university—and Mossa’s former girlfriend, a scholar of Earth’s pre-collapse ecosystems. Pleiti has dedicated her research and her career to aiding the larger effort towards a possible return to Earth. When Mossa unexpectedly arrives and requests Pleiti’s assistance in her latest investigation, the two of them embark on a twisting path in which the future of life on Earth is at stake—and, perhaps, their futures, together.

Something about the world-building here - the cozy, academic, sheltered indoor spaces with the harsh, unforgiving alien weather outside - was really enchanting to me. I immediately wanted to enroll in a college or become a professor on a planet with an inhospitable atmosphere (Nicole - hygge life on Mars, you and me babe, how about it?) I'm not sure if I'm just dense, but I had to go back and read the description of the story as a "Sapphic romance" to be sure that Pleiti was also a woman - the perils of unusual sci-fi character names?

Truthfully, as I'm sitting here a couple of weeks after finishing this short piece, I'm having trouble remembering exactly how the mystery was resolved, but it doesn't really matter to me - the beautifully complicated dynamic between the characters, along with the setting,  were enough for me to willingly follow this author wherever she goes next.