THE GIRL WHO CIRCUMNAVIGATED FAIRYLAND IN A SHIP OF HER OWN MAKING (Fairyland #1)
Catherynne M. Valente
Feiwel & Friends
$16.99 hardcover, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Twelve-year-old September lives in Omaha, and used to have an ordinary life, until her father went to war and her mother went to work. One day, September is met at her kitchen window by a Green Wind (taking the form of a gentleman in a green jacket), who invites her on an adventure, implying that her help is needed in Fairyland. The new Marquess is unpredictable and fickle, and also not much older than September. Only September can retrieve a talisman the Marquess wants from the enchanted woods, and if she doesn’t . . . then the Marquess will make life impossible for the inhabitants of Fairyland. September is already making new friends, including a book-loving Wyvern and a mysterious boy named Saturday.

With exquisite illustrations by acclaimed artist Ana Juan, Fairyland lives up to the sensation it created when the author first posted it online. For readers of all ages who love the charm of Alice in Wonderland and the soul of The Golden Compass, here is a reading experience unto itself: unforgettable, and so very beautiful.


My Review: Magic is real.

Hello? Are you all right down there? Nothing broke in the fall, did it?

Magic, as I was saying, is real. Magic, not the stupid majgicqk of the boring nonillion-ologies of million-paged forest-rapers about the Queen of the Orc's long-lost son's Qwest to Fynd the Hynd or whatever. That shit should be banned. Or very very heavily taxed.

Ahem. Trying to find polite again.

So yes, September is magic, and Fairyland is magic, and Valente is a sorceress whose incantation is this book. The real deal, laddies and gentlewomen, le pur sang, descended from the right hand of the lawrd (which always sounded vaguely naughty to me, but I'm incurably low-minded). This YA fantasy novel is what y'all who need magic should aim yourselves towards like lodestones to the pole. Look no further, this is it.

Seriously, should I call someone? This falling down while gasping is a smidge alarming.

September is Ravished from her mother and her life, goes on a quest to find a Spoon for a Witch, meets the Magical Helper and overcomes the Magical Foe, and in the process saves Fairyland, grows into a wise woman, and goes home for a nap. That's the plot. Basic government-issue story.

So why am I, YA-averse and phauntaisee-phobic, giving it five stars? Because. It's magic. The real deal. Every one of us begins life in a universe of unbounded possibility and slowly but surely submit ourselves to the chains and locks and gears of adulthood. Fairyland, that state of unbounded possibility, recedes from us as each nasty rule and wicked, spiteful decision made by or against us does its grim work.

We use our unique, indescribable, polymorphous magic tools to sever and close and shut off, just as September is gulled into thinking she must do to uncouple Fairyland from reality, from our world of machines and banks and school. We're taught that the painful and nasty process is necessary, will save us and everyone we love, is right and just and correct. So most of us mangle and chop away, thinking the pain is growing up and growing wise and becoming adult.

Some few of us, like September, are given a moment of magic, and see the process for what it really is: Death with slow rotting, oblivion enough to be bearable but shot through with the awareness of the loss we've been tricked into suffering at our own hand. And some fewer still retain, magically, access to that other and better world. They come and they go, leaving us trapped souls for just long enough to be noticeably changed on their return, if we're sharp and attentive. Which, to my utter shock (not), most of us do not.

Valente's work, in the main, is polished prose telling interesting stories. Her adult tales will repay your reading time, and even (for many who Don't Read Such Things) be a revelation of quality work taking place in fields far from the ordinary haunts of dull adults. Seek that out, do, and firmly squelch the lip-curling until one full book has passed before your eyes.

But here? This? This is magic. The real deal. Approach it slowly, with a heart open and a mind clear, and it will enfold you in its warmly feathered, hard-muscled wings, and bear you away to that place you cut off so long ago. March in with your expectations set on stun, your ideas loaded like rocks in a slingshot ready to let fly, and your experience will resemble that of the US Army in Afghanistan: What hit me? Ow! Stop that! Ow!

I speak from (happily changed) experience.


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Banned Books Week, Censorship, and the High Price of Apathy

CHRISTIAN NATION: A Novel
Frederic C. Rich
W.W. Norton
$25.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5 appalled, terrified stars of five

The Publisher Says: “They said what they would do, and we did not listen. Then they did what they said they would do.”

So ends the first chapter of this brilliantly readable counterfactual novel, reminding us that America’s Christian fundamentalists have been consistently clear about their vision for a “Christian Nation” and dead serious about acquiring the political power to achieve it. When President McCain dies and Sarah Palin becomes president, the reader, along with the nation, stumbles down a terrifyingly credible path toward theocracy, realizing too late that the Christian right meant precisely what it said.

In the spirit of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, one of America’s foremost lawyers lays out in chilling detail what such a future might look like: constitutional protections dismantled; all aspects of life dominated by an authoritarian law called “The Blessing,” enforced by a reconfigured Internet known as the “Purity Web.” Those who defy this system, among them the narrator, live on the edges of society, sustained by the belief that democracy will rise to triumph over such tyrannical oppression.

My Review: It's Banned Books Week, so we are well advised to think about what the ability to ban a book really means. In Rich's novel, banning a book is no longer a concern. The apparatus of theocracy has taken over the libraries. Nothing so trivial as banning A book is necessary, slate entire areas of human knowledge for destruction. Pulp those books that don't tell the story you want told. Knowledge dies, after all. We saw that after the fall of the Roman Empire. The only libraries were in monasteries, and the only works supposed to be preserved were dogmatic, didactic christian texts. Fortunately, some subversives hid works by Lucretius, Epicurus, Juvenal, Suetonius, in their stacks. As theocracy self-destructed, as all -ocracies (including dem-) inevitably do, sharp-eyed secularists found these works and brought them out into the public gaze for the first time in as much as a millennium. (For more about this, see my review of The Swerve.)

Think about that. For a millennium, a thousand years, knowledge that might have led the world out of pervasive hunger, away from destructive hatred and war over trivia, was hidden away so it would at least survive as words on paper. It couldn't be discussed, because it couldn't be read. It was banned. Very effectively and efficiently banned. When the ban was lifted, the world's best brains went into overdrive and they've never slowed down since.

Yet we still, after this excellent example of the benefits of freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom from the fear that censorship breeds, we still have to fight the well-meaning, well-intentioned, and always wrong "moral protectors" and "nicey-nice police." It doesn't have to start big, and in fact, that is author Rich's point in this novel. His story, of a subversive in the Christian Nation, a convert to the Church of God in America from the losing side in the Seige of Manhattan, starts with the run-up to the 2008 election. In Rich's horrifying nightmare, McCain and Palin won, and then they did what they said they would do: They "restored American to a Christian Nation." They used your smartphone with its eternal connection to communication satellites to track you. It's the law that you must have it on you. It's the law that every device you use must be connected to the Purity Web (which we call universal wi-fi connectivity, and long for!) that your every utterance or interface with another person be monitorable.

Imagine how many gigaflops of information this state collects. And sifts. And uses against its citizens, but only in the kindest of spirits and in the expectation of their draconian rules and totalitarian controls bringing all souls to the Rapture as pure as is possible.

This kind of nightmare is all too possible. Look at the Taliban in Afghanistan. Look at the rhetoric coming out of the Tea Party. No, no, says the complacent and lazy citizen, who can't be bothered to vote for school board members or participate in electioneering, no way can that happen here.

“The biggest mistake that we can make is that we don’t believe that they believe what they say. And for many of them, they do mean exactly what they say," says author Rich in his Politico.com interview from this past July. Look at the Texas school textbook adoption wars over presenting creationism as a scientific theory. All of those folks are elected...by the few who bother to show up, and those are usually the wingnuts from the religious right with an agenda to impose.

This novel is set in a world that didn't happen, where the battle against censorship costs lives. Those lives are lost because, in that world like this one we live in, so very many of us can't be bothered, don't want to, are too tired or bored or stressed or lazy to, stand up and say NO MORE when censorship is proposed or imposed. And Rich, a high-powered financial industry lawyer, works with the kind of people whose money-making and self-interest are tightly bound up with the trends in thought and speech around the world. In short, if he doesn't know from the inside whereof he speaks when he speaks about the consequences voicelessness, of stifled freedom to speak and think as one desires, no one alive does.

Start where you are. Do what you can, what you're capable of doing. Fight the small battles and, win or lose, the war's course will change. Maybe you'll even live long enough to be glad that you did. I only hope you won't live long enough to regret that you didn't.


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REPOSTING LOST REVIEW Ninth Jay Lake Pre-Mortem Read-a-thon.

KALIMPURA (Green Universe #3)
JAY LAKE
Tor Books
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: This sequel to Green and Endurance takes Green back to the city of Kalimpura and the service of the Lily Goddess.

Green is hounded by the gods of Copper Downs and the gods of Kalimpura, who have laid claim to her and her children. She never wanted to be a conduit for the supernatural, but when she killed the Immortal Duke and created the Ox God with the power she released, she came to their notice.

Now she has sworn to retrieve the two girls taken hostage by the Bittern Court, one of Kalimpura’s rival guilds. But the Temple of the Lily Goddess is playing politics with her life.

My Review: That's a fine summary, as far as it goes; but it doesn't touch on the fact that Green, our first-person narrator, spends her entire coming-of-age in thrall to capricious, unkind gods and goddesses who can barely be arsed to help her stay alive, and will at the drop of a hat turn on her to harm her for mysterious (sometimes not so mysterious) reasons.

Yay religion.

There are three things I liked about this book: First, I love the world that Lake builds. I mean, I don't necessarily love *the*world*, but the world-building yields results that feel real to me. I find the fact that Green really inhabits that world, really notices and attends to it, an effective device for a character who is a species of assassin. It makes perfect sense that she would be vigilant and attentive and well-informed. So is James Bond, for many of the same reasons. It's believable that Green says this to us:

For all the imposing glory of the frontage of the Temple of the Silver Lily, the rear facing was as anonymously crowded and busy as the back of any other substantial institution. Carters, beggars, small tradesmen--a steady traffic passed in the alley behind. We slipped into the stream, walking briskly with our heads turned down. Most of the servants in this city or any other walked briskly. A shuffling step would have cried out that we wished not to be recognized.
Swiftly we merged into the crowded streets beyond, losing ourselves away from the Blood Fountain with its swarm of angry Street Guildsmen. After about six blocks, I pulled the limping {fellow traveler} into someone's walled garden to rest a short while beneath the shade of a papaya tree. It was a shame about the latch on their gate, which I was forced to cut through with the god-blooded dagger.

I feel the alley traffic jostling me; hear the angry crowd noises, see Green testing gates surreptitiously, finding one her extraordinary dagger can be used in the ordinariest of ways, to cut the latchstring on; strain with her in supporting a lamed companion in an effort to escape unnoticed from people who wish to harm both of them. It's an economical passage typical of many that make Lake's imaginary city of Kalimpura such a layered and believable place.

At multiple points in the series, but most notably in this last book of three, Green passes casual comments that can stop you in your tracks if you're paying attention. She muses that the Prince of the City's thugs would, in a city that wished its streets to be policed, be a watch; here in Kalimpura, it suits the rich and powerful that the streets not be policed. Green also notes that her struggles against the enemies of the Lily Blades (her order of assassins) are those of a have-not against haves; she muses that the poor hide from the powerful and administer their own forms of justice exactly as the powerful do among themselves, as well as attempting to on the powerless. How pefectly observed, and apt for us in the twenty-first century "land of the free," too.

Again, it makes sense that an assassin would think these thoughts, or at least a top-ranking and powerful one would. She has to have a clear picture of the ground in order to negotiate its twists and curves successfully, not getting herself killed.

And this is all a succinct evocation of Green's state of mind, hypervigilant, as well as an expression of the reason she's so very good at her killing. She does not miss a trick, her eye is sharp and her grasp of what she needs to do to survive this godless passage is firm. Her self-directed wryness is catnip to me, too.

As Green is in a religious order, and in direct communication with her goddess (a fact that many in power in her order and her world find extremely threatening), she finds herself needing to put religion in a place, a slot, in her world-view, with borders and limits:

The memory of the divine is like the memory of pain--you know you have experienced it, but you cannot relive the experience...I have come to realize this protects us all from the sharp edges with which the world is filled. Every day dawns like shattered glass, then passes to depart on bladed wings, which only the ignorant and the lucky survive unscathed.

Yes, indeed, this is true. Anytime the divine touches a human being, the consequences are dire. Look at the fates of all the prophets! But also, and tellingly, Green equates the experience of divine communication with pain. It causes her pain, it gives her pain, it spreads pain in the world. When a particularly terrible problem needs solving, Green summons the sea from its bed and smashes the problem, causing much death, bringing much pain to the survivors, and wracking her with guilt.

But it accomplished her purposes, and nothing else would have. So the guilt and pain are, of necessity, borne and worn away. Like all pain, Green's pain wears her edges down, sharpens her inner blades and polishes her outer ones, and carves her a new shape.

This is called adulthood. She achieves it. She survives the process, where many do not. They succumb to addiction and fantasy and apathy. Green does not. She accepts that her future won't look like her past or her plans, and moves into it without undue drama.

Note the word "undue." She fights and kicks against the demands of the universe, like we all do, but she doesn't give way and fill the skies with her whining. Goodness knows she has a right to. She chooses instead to get on with the work in front of her.

And that is the third thing I truly appreciate about this trilogy, and this volume in the trilogy. A story where someone comes of age is common as pig tracks. (My mother's memorably sniffy dismissal of my almost-third wife.) I love the fact that this woman comes into her full growth by embracing her own power and choosing not to rely on anyone or anything outside herself. I love that she loves her children, her companions, and her world enough to do what needs doing despite the fact that some people can never forgive her or understand what she has done.

In the end, I love the fact that this novel, likely Jay Lake's last published in his lifetime, expresses better than any I've read in a long, long time the simple truth that, "In the end, so is the beginning. In the beginning, so is the end:"

The first thing I can remember in this life is my father driving his white ox, Endurance, to the sky burial platforms. His back was before me as we walked along a dusty road. All things were dusty in the country of my birth, unless they were flooded. A ditch yawned at each side to beckon me toward play. The fields beyond were drained of water and filled with stubble, though I could not now say which of the harvest seasons it was.
Though I would come to change the fate of cities and of gods, then I was merely a small, grubby child in a small, grubby corner of the world.

And so does the time spent with Green, and Jay Lake, end where Green begins. Hail, and farewell. You and your creations have enriched me. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.


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Jay Lake Pre-Mortem Readathon, Review #8

ENDURANCE (Green Universe #2)
JAY LAKE
Tor Books
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Green is back in Copper Downs. Purchased from her father in sunny Selistan when she was four years old, she was harshly raised to be a courtesan, companion, and bedmate of the Immortal Duke of Copper Downs. But Green rebelled. Green killed the Duke, and many others, and won her freedom. Yet she is still claimed by the gods and goddesses of her world, and they still require her service. Their demands are greater than any duke’s could have been.

Godslayers have come to the Stone Coast, magicians whose cult is dedicated to destroying the many gods of Green’s world. In the turmoil following the Immortal Duke’s murder, Green made a God out of her power and her memories. Now the gods turn to her to protect them from the Slayers.

Jay Lake brings us an epic fantasy not “in the tradition of Tolkien,” but, instead, sensual, ominous, shot through with the sweat of fear and the intoxication of power.

My Review: How on earth does Jay Lake do this? He writes a series of first-person narratives from a female late-adolescent person's PoV and makes me like it.

The man is a sorcerer. I feel more sure of it now than ever. No other fact explains his ability to snare me in something I am not automatically a fan of.

Green, in this entry in the series, is as embattled as she was before. The difference is that, as an older and "wiser" character, she's battling for something outside herself. Yes, the battle will still benefit her in the winning. But she is not, unlike in Green, solely on a personal vendetta.

My main issue with Green was how frustrating I found it not to have a fuller, richer sense of the world that she inhabits. I put this down to first-person narration.

I was wrong. It was Lake working his magic. Green is a younger person in the first book, and like every single younger person on the surface of any planet, she is self-absorbed. We all were. Some of us get past it, some don't. And for some who get past the self-absorption of adolescence, it's a demanding external process that sets the gears turning.

With Green, the external source is...epic. Godlike. (You'll get the pun in the last 40pp of the book.) (Which you need to read.) (No, really.) And once we're acquainted with the quest Green needs to follow, once we're back in the leftover first-book conflict with Mother Vajpai, once we're involved and eager to follow the thread to its new, startling, and still inevitable conclusion...
...
...
...pages 317, 318, and 319 happen. I was so glad that I was reading this book AFTER the next one, Kalimpura, was published and was in my hot, grubby fists, I cannot adequately inform you of the good feeling.

A guy who can write from a girl's perspective, a young woman's perspective, and make a mean old misogynist care, not just care but CARE and want to know what happens next, is a sorcerer.

Light the torches. We need to get a stake put up. Who's got the pitchforks? Road trip to Lake-land, there to demand explanations for his powers.


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Jay Lake Pre-Mortem Read-a-thon, Review the Fifth

TRIAL OF FLOWERS (The City Imperishable #1)
JAY LAKE
Night Shade Books
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The City Imperishable's secret master and heir to the long-vacant throne has vanished from a locked room, as politics have turned deadly in a bid to revive the city's long-vanished empire.

The city's dwarfs, stunted from spending their childhoods in confining boxes, are restive. Bijaz the Dwarf, leader of the Sewn faction among the dwarfs, fights their persecution. Jason the Factor, friend and apprentice to the missing master, works to maintain stability in the absence of a guiding hand. Imago of Lockwood struggles to revive the office of Lord Mayor in a bid to turn the City Imperishable away from the path of destruction.

These three must contend with one another as they race to resolve the threats to the city.

My Review: What a trip. The back cover copy calls it an "urban fantasy," which to my mind doesn't conjure images of Perdido Street Station (which this book reminds me of) so much as it does Dead Until Dark et. seq. But the key factor here is to be found in the word "fantasy."

I read a fantasy novel.

There, I said it.

I not only read it, I enjoyed it. BUT DON'T FOR GAWD'S SAKE TELL ANYONE. I will swear an oath that you're lying and that you must be the one who hacked my account and wrote a glowing heap of praise for a book with dwarves, an ancient city declining under an empty throne, a reluctant hero...well, you see my predicament. I can't admit out loud that I liked this kind of guff. "The city is," runs the motto Lake gives the City Imperishable. Yeeesh, really? Portentous much?

But seriously, who wouldn't like a book with this in it:

There was nothing left of himself that he wanted, save the vague glimmer of peace that he found somewhere inside the violet smoke. Finally he understood the place to which his wife had long since retreated.
Sometimes, when the snow was not so deep and he'd managed a little soup or coffee, {he} thought about making his way {home} and apologizing to his wife. He wasn't sure she'd understand him though--the crap dust had begun to rot his teeth, getting in all too quickly through the breaks, and his tongue was always dry as leather and twice too big.

The abjection of a powerful character, the absolute fall, the hitting bottom with a resounding *crunch* is unsettlingly well-limned.

And some regulars among you might recall my utterances on the subject of majgicqk. They have been uniformly derisory and occasionally cachinnatory. But here again Lake subverts and alters my wall of defense against balderdash:

"Everything carries the seeds of its own opposition, in equal measure. Have you ever toppled a wall? ... You must press as much as it takes to move the stones. They react as they are pushed. What people care to call magic works the same way. No one calls lightning from the summer sky without burning a hole in something, somewhere."

When you put it that way....

The City Imperishable is, like all places and cultures, built on a bargain. The bargain has costs and it has benefits. Those who pay the costs aren't always the ones who reap the benefits. Each main character, Bijaz the dwarf, Imago the Lord Mayor, and Jason the fector, pays dearly for the City Imperishable to derive the final benefit: Remaining alive. But each of these men, in their turn, finds a greater benefit in his sacrifice. They become whole in their brokenness, and anneal the metal of their character, and in the testing of their different mettles, bring life raging anew through the City Imperishable.

The city is.


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Jay Lake Pre-Mortem Readathon, Review the Fourth: PINION

PINION (Clockwork Earth #3)
JAY LAKE
Tor Books
$26.99 hardcover, available now
Reviewed by Richard, 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Rejoin the adventure in the third novel of Lake’s Clockwork Earth series. Paolina Barthes, young sorceress, is crossing the Equatorial Wall, attempting to take herself and her magic away from the grasp of powerful men in the empires of the north. Emily Childress is still aboard the renegade Chinese submarine, along with her devoted Captain, and the British chief petty officer Angus al-Wazir. They are all being sought most urgently by the powers that secretly rule the Northern Earth--the Silent Order and the White Birds. And a third power, of the Southern Earth, has its eye on Paolina; she will not be allowed to bring the political turmoil of the North into the more mystical South.

My Review: It's been my habit to put these Jay Lake Pre-Mortem Read-a-thon reviews up early on my appointed blog-posting day. This one's going up almost the next day. It's been very hard to write.

I started this project as a way of making sure that one reader of Lake's novels says a public thank you to the man before he finishes his journey. To my pleased surprise, he's noticed this and graciously acknowledged it. The Jay Wake, his self-hosted funeral festivity, is in the immediate future; I'll have another review before then; but Pinion, the final Clockwork Earth novel, brought home to me just that: Finality.

While the story lines of Boaz, the Brass man from the days of King Solomon's court, Paolina the brash miracle-worker, Emily Childress the librarian-turned-avebianco-Mask, Wang the librarian and traitor whose destiny is at right angles to his desires, and even Hethor, the clockmaker's apprentice who saved the world, are wound into a charming tassel herein this is the last visit we'll pay to this marvelous, blasphemous, gorgeous alternative Universe with its radically different laws of physics.

Oh heavy heavy sigh.

Well, that said, let's get on to the story. The Chinese Empire and the British Raj are, as great empires are wont to be, on the brink of war. The Chinese want to (re)build the Golden Bridge that once connected the industrial and mechanistic Northern Earth to the Edenic, spiritual Southern Earth. The British don't want them to do that before they themselves build a tunnel to accomplish the same purpose.

Both sides want the prize, the booty, the imperial power over the Southern Earth. The avebianco and the Silent Order, opposing mystical societies with special and nonmaterial means of control, don't want the Wall that the Earth's gears travel atop (remember I spoke of the alternative physics of this world) breached for their own reasons. No one takes much account of what the Southern Earth's peoples might want. (This should sound familiar.)

At the heart of this conflict are the actors on our literary stage, the wild Paolina and the librarian/Mask Childress. They spend their efforts to prevent a ridiculous war, release a dead Queen from mechanical bondage to earth, and preserve God's ordered construction against the day that the sides can be brought together without ill will or evil intent.

What a great thing this Wall is! The almost-accidental destruction of colonialism prevented by a physical, insurmountable barrier that is peopled by scary monsters. I love this idea, and the idea of the Brass people created by King Solomon and vivified by his Seal! It's a beautiful Earth, this one. The Seal of Solomon (Place me like a SEAL upon your heart, like a SEAL on your arm. For love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Song of Solomon 8:6) set the Brass into action in the world, and in their immensely long lives the world's peoples benefited from the wisdom of their detached-yet-present perspective. The slow, inevitable decline of any powerful people has come upon them. Now Boaz, a rebel from their midst and an uncontrolled actor in their controlled society, finishes King Solomon's plan for the world:

The threads within his mind were a chaotic stir, not unpleasant, but not simple. He tried to listen, to pick out what they were saying, but just as he'd wanted them quiet before, now he wanted them to speak out.
Was this what it meant to be human? To wish for the impossible, to never clearly hear the tenor of one's own thoughts?
If that was the price of love, he was willing to pay it.

And that, really, is the message of the books of the Clockwork Earth. It's fitting that the series end here, with that clear insight into the murk of having a soul, and that clear acceptance of the price a being pays for being capable of insight. Resistance is, in fact, futile: Run away, hide as best you can, life comes down to that. Do you accept the price of being conscious and aware, or do you dream your life away?

Maybe it takes a Clockwork Earth, a created artifact of a divine mind omnipresent, to make the starkness of the choice we're all required to face this clear and sharp.

Sharp things cut. Never forget that.


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Jay Lake Pre-Mortem Read-a-thon, Review the third: ESCAPEMENT

ESCAPEMENT (Clockwork Earth #2)
JAY LAKE
Tor Books
$25.95 hardcover, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 4.4* of five

The Publisher Says: In his novel Mainspring, Lake created an enormous canvas for storytelling with his hundred mile high Equatorial Wall that holds up the great Gears of the Earth. Now in Escapement, he explores more of that territory.

Paolina Barthes is a young woman of remarkable intellectual ability – a genius on the level of Isaac Newton. But she has grown up in isolation, in a small village of shipwreck survivors, on the Wall in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. She knows little of the world, but she knows that England rules it, and must be the home of people who possess the learning that she so desperately wants. And so she sets off to make her way off the Wall, not knowing that she will bring her astounding, unschooled talent for sorcery to the attention of those deadly factions who would use or kill her for it.

My Review: You know an idea is good when the rating for the middle book in a trilogy is this close to the first book. The Clockwork Earth is a fine idea. It can bear the weight of different viewpoints and stories set in its boundaries and constrained by its rules, which means it's about ten times better thought out than most books in any genre.

Hethor's inspiration in Mainspring, the librarian Emily Chambers, shows up here; so does the Basset's Chief Petty Officer al-Wazir the Scot (!); and out third main actor, Paolina Barthes, is met at her native village on a Muralha -- the Wall that the great brass gears of the Universe run atop.

You see, the Universe is a clockwork mechanism, a brass-bound orrery of a place, and the Wall separates for all eternity the halves of God's Creation into Northern and Southern worlds. They are largely unknown to each other, and the Wall that separates them, in addition to being quite dauntingly high, is rife with God's odds-and-sods of Creation: monsters, to the English who rule the Northern Earth.

Paolina, on meeting the shipwrecked loblolly boy from the Bassett when he's brought to her village, receives her summons to greatness. She is a genius, you see, a wasted force in her tiny village. She knows it, the village knows it, but Clarence merely knows he can't go on and can't quit either. He divests himself of his chronometer to Paolina, in thanks for her rescue of him from certain death at the hands of the village elders.

And thus begins the tale of the gleams, the clockwork mechanisms that Paolina (a quick study and a brilliant scientist) creates. They are capable of resonating with the clockwork gears of the Universe, of influencing and controlling them. Of course the avebianco, Emily Childress's order of mystical practictioners and wardens of the balance of the world, wants to know what is going on. As do the Chinese, the enemies of the British. And of course the child's immense giftedness causes problems and creates death and chaos.

And in the end, isn't that where we all are? A giant gap between North and South, an absence of even the possibility communication, and vast power that can change or destroy the entire Universe as we know it, is wielded by a mere child. (Keep in mind this book was written during the Bush presidency.)

As Lake weaves a story of Paolina's voyage in the world beyond the Wall she grew up on, it pays to think a bit about what she is doing. Her immense native talent is sought after by the powers that be in her world. She's never given a moment to think through her actions to create results. She has to move, keep moving, stay one step ahead of people who want to control her and thus her gift for one purpose only: Their own gain. Victory for them. Dress it up how you like, Paolina is expendable so long as her knowledge is secured for Us to use against Them.

Her moral quandary (is it ever right, ever moral, to hand one party to a competition the full and complete means of winning?) is, but by bit, honed into a sharp blade for her defense of herself. Merely asking the questions she's forced into asking herself is an act of fiercest rebellion in a clockwork universe, ordered by God.

Emily and al-Wazir play their roles in moving Paolina from place to place, and face a few difficult moments themselves, but make no mistake: this is Paolina's book. That's it's strength and its weakness. The characters are as fully realized as the authorship of Lake can make them, which is well and truly rounded. That doesn't prevent them from being means to an end. Emily, as a powerful figure in the avebianco (White Birds), is a woman in charge of a huge amount of influence in the world; her interest in Paolina is natural; but the demands of the story leave Emily in a teacher's role again, as with Hethor in Mainspring. It's true that this time she plays a more central and significant teacher's role, but she's still mostly a means to move the story from pillar to post.

Which is what happens a lot. We're on the move at all times. Sometimes that feels more like being on a transcontinental train trip than it does like a walk through a garden. That's a good thing, of course, for interest's sake, but not always comfortable reading. The Chinese don't come in for much development, and the settings can become a bit blurred together because the drama is so high.

Why complain about that? Because the settings are so unbelievably COOL! I want more! More! Each time we're in an airship, I want more. Each port of call, I find out enough to make me want more! I have expositionus interruptus and, like the thing that phrase is modeled on, satiation and satisfaction are not to be had.

Bad Jay Lake! Bad!

So I knocked a few points off the score, so what. It's still a terrific book. And one thing I am sure of, the sequel (Pinion) and me are gonna have some quality time together. Soon.
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Jay Lake Pre-Mortem Readathon, review the second: MAINSPRING

MAINSPRING (Clockwork Earth #1)
JAY LAKE
Tor Books
$24.95 hardcover, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Jay Lake's first trade novel is an astounding work of creation. Lake has envisioned a clockwork solar system, where the planets move in a vast system of gears around the lamp of the Sun. It is a universe where the hand of the Creator is visible to anyone who simply looks up into the sky, and sees the track of the heavens, the wheels of the Moon, and the great Equatorial gears of the Earth itself.

Mainspring is the story of a young clockmaker's apprentice, who is visited by the Archangel Gabriel. He is told that he must take the Key Perilous and rewind the Mainspring of the Earth. It is running down, and disaster to the planet will ensue if it's not rewound. From innocence and ignorance to power and self-knowledge, the young man will make the long and perilous journey to the South Polar Axis, to fulfill the commandment of his God.

My Review: Several things militate against my discovery of pleasure in this book, such as a Low Tolerance for Capitalization Errors, a complete and oft-expressed disdain for the kind of god present in this book, and its celebration of the Love that Should Shut The Hell Up Already, aka heterosexuality.

But there's an exception to every rule, and this is one.

I confess that the thoroughly requited love story elicited weary, disgusted sighs, and I did a bit of flippity-flip to get past the bits that made me most annoyed, but there's not a whole helluva lot of it, thank goodness. And working for the couple is the fact that she's a different species, sort of.

But the central joke of the book, the mainspring (!) of the humor, the drama, and the action, is the brass track in the sky that the Earth runs on. The Universe IS the clockwork that the famously disproved watchmaker-parable proof of god's existence posits! (If one finds a watch, that is proof there is, somewhere, a watchmaker...the rest is just as silly, so no need to go into it here.)

This I love. This alone gets five whole gold stars with an oak-leaf cluster. This is a new Universe, not just a warmed-over Operation-Sealion-worked yawnfest of an alternative history. (Side note to writers: WWII? Done, done, done, done, done. Aliens even. DONE. Pick something else! ANYthing else!) (Except the American Civil War, also DONE.)

Also because of this complete re-imagining of the laws of physics (good one, Mr. Lake!), I put aside my abiding mistrust of majgicqk as deus ex machina. After all, there's a giant brass track in the sky that emits a mechanical rumble forming the backdrop of all life, the gears of the track must be navigated to go from Northern to Southern Hemisphere, and there are airships! In for a penny, in for a pound. Majgicqk it is.

But it's like all the other tropes that annoy me in fiction (indeed in life), it's *used* in Lake's novel. It's not a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. It's a necessary component of the kind of world this clockmaker god would create. It makes sense. And it happens to be made of desperate needs, which is more like the way the world works anyway.

Hethor, like all heroes, suffers on his quest to save the world, and loses his sense of himself outside his quest. He defines himself as his quest, and is forced to confront the inevitable end of such a self-definition: Complete and utter aloneness and alienation. Because Lake is on the Hero's Journey, the Hero must lose it all.

But Lake is on the Hero's Journey. So, in losing it all, Hethor is rewarded with his heart's desire, and it is not the one he started the quest desiring. That, in my well-read opinion, is how a writer of great gifts ends a Hero's Journey: Wishes granted; now what will those be?

A quarter star off for a villain who isn't a villain but a collection of nasty until far too late in the story to matter. His villainy, as finally expressed, would've launched me into six-star orbit had it been explicit earlier in the narrative.

Whipping back through Mainspring convinces me that a thoroughgoing re-read cannot come amiss. It's that good. It's that rich and dense and satisfying. Just wonderful, and thank you for it, Jay Lake.


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World War II Alternate History...but GOOD!

HITLER'S WAR (The War That Came Early #1)
HARRY TURTEDOVE
Del Rey Books
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five, all for the delicious idea

The Publisher Says: A stroke of the pen and history is changed. In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, determined to avoid war at any cost, signed the Munich Accord, ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. But the following spring, Hitler snatched the rest of that country and pushed beyond its borders. World War II had begun, and England, after a fatal act of appeasement, was fighting a war for which it was not prepared.

Now, in this thrilling, provocative, and fascinating alternate history by Harry Turtledove, another scenario is played out: What if Chamberlain had not signed the accord? What if Hitler had acted rashly, before his army was ready–would such impatience have helped him or doomed him faster? Here is an action-packed, blow-by-blow chronicle of the war that might have been–and the repercussions that might have echoed through history–had Hitler reached too far, too soon, and too fast.

Turtledove uses dozens of points of view to tell this story: from American marines serving in Japanese-occupied China to members of a Jewish German family with a proud history of war service to their nation, from ragtag volunteers fighting in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain to an American woman desperately trying to escape Nazi-occupied territory–and witnessing the war from within the belly of the beast.

A novel that reveals the human face of war while simultaneously riding the twists and turns that make up the great acts of history, Hitler’s War is the beginning of an exciting new alternate history saga. Here is a tale of powerful leaders and ordinary people, of spies, soldiers, and traitors, of the shifting alliances that draw some together while tearing others apart. At once authoritative, brilliantly imaginative, and hugely entertaining, Hitler’s War captures the beginning of a very different World War II–with a very different fate for our world today.


My Review: The "Master of Alternate History", per his jacket copy, takes on one of the most popular subjects in all of alternative hitory: WWII. Equaled in numbers of treatments only by the American Civil War, WWII is a target rich environment for armchair historians to play with: Operation SeaLion succeeds (invasion of the UK); the 1944 coup against Hitler succeeds; the 1940 US election returns an isolationist President and the UK reaches terms; Battle of Midway goes the other way; Japan doesn't get nuked, much loss of life in conquering it; etc etc etc blah blah blah. Since 2001, I've read the nasty, hostile, but very interesting posts on the old USENET group soc.hist.what-if, so it takes a LOT to get me interested in something about WWII. Turtledove's fame in the field wouldn't be enough to entice me, I assure you, since I can't *abide* one of his most popular series about aliens landing on earth during WWII.

Here, however, we have something that really piques my interest. It's an actual historical possibility: Chamberlain of England and Daladier of France refuse to hand over Czechoslovakia instead of buying themselves a little longer preparation time by waving bye-bye to their ally as they did on our timeline. (The antique USENET convention for representing alternative history events is to do this: *WWII means the MODIFIED version of the war, where WWII is understood to be the one departed from by the modified version; henceforward, if you see the asterisk, that's what it means.) So *WWII starts in 1938, not September 1939. Poland isn't the first country attacked, and in fact ends up allied to Germany in opposition to its very long-term enemy Russia. The *Spanish Civil War (remember now!) is run by a General Sanjurjo, instead of Franco; the man died for his vanity in OUR reality (called OTL in USENET terms, so again: "OTL" = Our Time Line, the world we learned about in history books). This means for some very cogent reasons that the *Spanish Civil War isn't over when *WWII begins, and there are some significant results from that. The *Japanese, busy raping China into submission as in OTL, realize that one of their longterm ambitions is in easy reach: The conquest of Siberia, with its **astonishing** riches, to add to Manchuria. It's all very plausible, and it's all very tidily constructed.

What Turtledove usually does, he does here: He tells his story through the lens of many different viewpoints on all sides of every conflict. He makes sure the reader sees through American, Russian, Czech, French, Spanish, Japanese, Jewish eyes what the causes and results of *WWII are. All that tidy construction feels quite fragmented, and seems to be an excuse for chaos. In fact, this book could simply not have been written had Turtledove not had a tight and complete grasp of the facts he's departing from, in order to create the modified world. His success is close to complete.

Oh, but the price one pays for following so many, many characters. Nothing ever gets more than set up; the payoff is pages and pages away, several stories of great interest intervening, and sometimes the action sounds quite repetitive because after 40pp the author or his editor thought it'd be a good idea to give a little review of where we left, for examply, Luc Harcourt and Sergeant Demange. Wearing. Action-slowing. Not usually necessary, IM(never-very)HO. But nonetheless, the suspense manages to build, because unlike the OTL history of WWII, the *WWII has events in it we never even heard of! I like that. I like that I can trust Dr. Turtledove to build those events from sound conjectures. And most of the time, I overlook the little inconsistencies (a character bound for Romania suddenly turns up in Berlin, no explanation offered). I like alternative history because I like OTL history, and I like seeing what a storyteller can do with the astoundingly rich vein of material there is in any historical account.

But will this book make converts among those who have not drunk the historical Kool-Aid? No, on balance, I suspect not. I'd never suggest that someone start reading alternative history here. But for those of us already In The Cult, it's a damn good outing and the beginning of a series that promises some very rich rewards.


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Spencer Quinn's Chet and Bernie mysteries, doggone good fun!

A CAT WAS INVOLVED (Chet and Bernie #0.5)
SPENCER QUINN
Atria Books
$0.99 eBook, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Spencer Quinn’s first original e-short story reveals how everyone’s favorite detective duo—Chet the Dog and P.I. Bernie Little—came to meet before their first big case in Dog On It.As fans know, Chet first met Bernie on that fateful day when he flunked out of K-9 police school. The details of that day though have always remained a little vague (like so much in Chet’s doggy brain). All we know is that Chet had been the best leaper in his K-9 class, but for some reason he failed his final leaping test...and that a cat was involved...and that there was some blood. But whose? The test, the cat, the blood—all pieces of a puzzle that, when solved, will bring down a dangerous gang of thieves—and signal the start of a beautiful friendship.

This fateful day has been alluded to in every book in the series, and now fans of Chet and Bernie will finally get to find out what actually happened. For these two beloved characters, it was something like love at first sight—and, for Chet, at first smell, too.

My Review: Here's what you need to know...it's exactly as much fun as you'd expect it to be; it's got the trademark Chet narration that leaves nothing to a human imagination except why we don't get to think this way; and it breaks from the canon of history set up in the first two books about Bernie's marriage and Chet's place in it.

Like all !&$^!%(^%!$*$$(^$)&%)^(%*!$ ebooks, I can't quote anything to you because how? But the story's only 39pp or so, and it blows by faster than one actually wants it to, and it costs a whopping ninety-nine cents. It's actually not necessary to read from a series standpoint, but heck, for chump change, buy it, read it, and smile for a half-hour. Sounds like a win to me!


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DOG ON IT (Chet and Bernie #1)
SPENCER QUINN
Atria Books
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: As sidekicks, Maxwell Smart and Agent 99 have nothing on Chet and Bernie. This charming detective duo make their debut in Dog On It, the first volume in Spencer Quinn's new mystery series. The fast-paced and funny tale is narrated by the inimitable Chet, Bernie's best friend and canine partner, whose personality and preferences are never in doubt: "I liked to sleep at the foot of Bernie's bed, but my favorite napping spot was in the breakfast nook, under the table with my back against the wall, all cool and shady, plus there was often good snacking around Bernie's chair."

Bernie's enterprise, the Little Detective Agency, limps along, waiting for the next job to arrive. While Chet freely admits that he doesn't always understand the humans around him, the mutt who failed to graduate from the police academy quickly establishes that he's got a nose made for sniffing out trouble -- as well as the tasty morsel.

When the story begins, Chet and Bernie are settled into the companionable routine they established when Bernie got divorced and lost custody of his son. Riding shotgun for stakeouts in Bernie's beat-up convertible (and snarfing up doughnuts and beef jerky) is the perfect life for Chet, though he knows Bernie's worried about cash flow.

But their luck is about to change. During a nighttime stroll through the neighborhood -- an older enclave in the southwestern desert that Bernie fears will soon be eclipsed by new development -- the pair encounter a panicked neighbor, Cynthia Chambliss. Waving a wad of bills, she beseeches Bernie to find her daughter, Madison, a 15-year-old who has been missing for several hours.

Bernie heeds the call of cash and the urgency of parental concern, but Madison soon returns home on her own, only to disappear again in short order -- this time for several days. Cynthia frantically rehires Bernie, but her ex, Damon Keefer, refuses to cooperate, insisting that Bernie be taken off the investigation. Nevertheless, intrigued by the young girl's apparent connections to a group of Russian thugs, Bernie and Chet follow a trail of clues that leads them into more danger than they'd bargained for.

As Chet and Bernie race across the desert toward Las Vegas in their sandblasted Porsche, Quinn's narrative unfolds with mounting suspense. At every stage of their journey, readers will warm to Chet's loyalty and courage -- to say nothing of his delightfully doggy digressions -- and be captivated by Spencer Quinn's deft blend of humor and thrills in this enormously entertaining tale, bound to be the first of many adventures.

My Review: Chet and Bernie. Say it with me, now. Chet and Bernie. Get used to saying it, because once you read this book, you'll be saying it a lot to others who haven't read it yet.

Chet's a dog. Bernie's a schlub. They're a team, crime solving magic of a team. In a mystery world dominated by cat cozies, they're very unusual and very much a pair of guys. This makes them a breath of fresh air at the least, and a cold Alberta Clipper to blow the cobwebs full of cat-dander out of the bookstores. Come back to the fold, gentlemen, there's a voice a lot like the one in your head all ready to talk to you, and it's a dog's!

It's wonderful to read something that's got a new slant on an established trope (read: hoary old cliche), and slants it well enough to keep a cynical old sourpuss like me leaning forward in his seat, eager to see what Chet's going to do next, what Bernie's brain's going to wrest from its depths to help the innocent and land on the wicked with all six feet (four Chet's). LT member cameling gets all the credit for shoving this book into my awareness. Bless you, dear madam.

Oh yeah...the schlub gets the girl, too. The right girl. Never mind that she's a vegetarian...who among us is without major character flaws?...she loves Chet.

Fetch! Sit! Read!


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THEREBY HANGS A TAIL (Chet and Bernie #2)
SPENCER QUINN
Atria Books
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The second book of an irresistible series narrated by a loveable and wise dog. In the newest Chet and Bernie mystery, Chet gets a glimpse of the show dog world turned deadly. "We run a detective agency, me and Bernie, called the Little Detective Agency on account of Little being Bernie's last name. My name's Chet, pure and simple. Headquarters is our house on Mesquite Road, a nice place with a big tree out front, perfect for napping under, and the whole canyon easily accessible out back, if it just so happens someone left the gate open. And then, up in the canyon -- well, say no more."

Praised by Stephen King as "a canine Sam Spade full of joie de vivre," Chet and his human companion Bernie have both had some setbacks in life -- Bernie in combat, Chet in K-9 school, but together they make up a team like no other. In Thereby Hangs a Tail, Bernie and Chet are called on to investigate threats made against an unlikely target -- a pretty, pampered show dog named Princess. What seems like a joke turns into a serious case when Princess and her owner are abducted. To make matters worse, Bernie's on-again, off-again girlfriend, reporter Susie Sanchez, disappears too. When Chet is separated from Bernie, he's on his own to put the pieces together, find his way home, and save the day.

With genuine suspense and intrigue, combined with humor and insight into the special bond between man and dog, Thereby Hangs a Tail will have everyone talking.

My Review: Cute! Very cute! Chet is such a clever boy I want to give him Milk Bones until he faints!

And that's kinda the problem under the fun: Cute. It's fun, yes, and it's pleasantly written with a well-imagined dog's point of view. But I think this is a series that needs to be taken in annual doses, and in the proper mood. I am, admittedly, as curmudgeonly as the day is long. But I'm not immune to charm. The series has charm.

It's just, well, it's wearing a bit thin at the elbows. Also, I hate Suzie. But I would, wouldn't I, being a dour old gay guy?

But then there are moments like this, and I can't help grinning:

All at once, I was kind of tired, too. I lay down under the hall table. A roof over your head is always nice. I realized that the house had a roof, of course, so in fact I had two roofs over my head, even better. And what about the ceiling? Under the roof, right, but still a kind of roof, too? I got a bit confused.

That's Chet, a bright dog, narrating. The snap-snap-snap of a dog processing into dog-think the idea of roof-house-safe and making it better by getting under a table rings completely true to me. And the magic for me is in Quinn's rendering that into non-cloying humanspeak.

And then there's the ending. Whee dawggie. White knuckles and bright flashlights exciting, and even though I was pretty darned sure I knew whodunit, but please forgive me if I don't tell you the bit I was most tensed up about and the bit that Chet, for all his smarts, didn't see as scary and troubling as I did.

Read 'em one at a time, in order, and these books will give you thrills and grins and not a few gnawed knuckles. Like the one skinless, bloody nubbin I've got workin' over the unresolved plot line that I can't tell you about. GAH!


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AMERICAN HONOR KILLINGS: Desire and Rage Among Men
DAVID MCCONNELL
Akashic Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In American Honor Killings, straight and gay guys cross paths, and the result is murder. But what really happened? What role did hatred play? What were the men involved really like, and what was going on between them when the murder occurred? American Honor Killings explores the truth behind squeamish reporting and uninformed political rants of the far right or fringe left. David McConnell, a New York-based novelist, researched cases from small-town Alabama to San Quentin's death row. The book recounts some of the most notorious crimes of our era.

Beginning in 1999 and lasting until the 2011 conviction of a youth in Queens, New York, the book shows how some murderers think they're cleaning up society. Surprisingly, other killings feel almost preordained, not a matter of the victim's personality or actions so much as a twisted display of a young man's will to compete or dominate. We want to think these stories involve simple sexual conflict, either the killer's internal struggle over his own identity or a fatally miscalculated proposition. They're almost never that simple.

Together, the cases form a secret American history of rage and desire. McConnell cuts through cant and political special pleading to turn these cases into enduring literature. In each story, victims, murderers, friends, and relatives come breathtakingly alive. The result is more soulful, more sensitive, more artful than the sort of "true crime” writing the book was modeled on. A wealth of new detail has been woven into old cases, while new cases are plumbed for the first time. The resulting stories play out exactly as they happened, an inexorable sequence of events—grisly, touching, disturbing, sometimes even with moments of levity.

My Review: It is no secret that I'm a leftist, anti-religion queer. I loathe the existence of the systems of "Rightness" that the murderers in these crimes use to justify their actions. The mere ability of a person to point to a bible and have any segment of society secretly or not-so-secretly justify or even agree with the heinous crime of murder is shameful to us as a society.

That said, it's still true. These accounts of the motives and actions of some seriously mentally ill young men, certain that they are Right and they are Correct in the actions, are enlightening and chilling.

I spent most of the time I read this book alternating between scaring my dog with loud, rasping screeches of outraged indignation that such stupidity is allowed to exist by this gawd person most of these boys, their families, and their communities profess belief in, and miserable, hopeless weeping of sympathetic pain at the agonies of loss, grief, and longing that the families, the parents, the loving friends of the murdered men will spend the rest of their lives experiencing, because the holey babble and its hellspawn idiot-friendly "culture" don't like the idea of men having sex with each other.

Who cares what you think? Did someone ask you? Drag your mind out of the prurient gutter of thinking about what other people do in their bedrooms.

McConnell has written a book as horrifying and as necessary as [In Cold Blood], and as likely to stand the test of time as a document of the consequences of sociopathic thinking. I can't recommend that you read it; but really, you should. Depressingly, most of you won't. It's not YOUR friend, brother, cousin, so why bother?

Because until people confront the horrible consequences of their smug, exclusionary language of "salvation" and the like, this won't be the last time a book like this is necessary.

I received a review copy of the book from Akashic Books.

Introducing a horror trilogy the right way

BROTHER'S KEEPER
Glen R. Krisch
Stray King Publishing
$2.99 Kindle only, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Growing up, Jason and Marcus Grant were close as only brothers can be. As they reached adolescence, they started to drift apart, taking opposite paths into adulthood. Jason went to college before getting a job at for the local newspaper. Marcus chose a path littered with drugs, violence, and self-destruction.

Now adults, Jason has cut Marcus from his life and considers himself an only child.

Clean and sober, Marcus finds his true calling when he joins the Arkadium, a secret society dating back millennia. They plan on setting history back ten thousand years by unleashing a world-wide calamity that will destroy modern man's domination of the planet. As the Arkadium set their plan in motion, Marcus reaches out to his brother, wanting him by his side to record the new prehistoric era. Jason is forced to make a choice, join his brother in the time of humanity's descent, or die like so many others.

A 16,000-word novella that introduces the forthcoming Brother's Keeper trilogy of novels. Book 1 is due Winter 2012.

My Review: Jason and Marcus are dysfunctional brothers from a dysfunctional family. Mom's a cold fish, borderline sociopath; dad's a dishrag, cries easily, and clearly dissociates from his life with a cold woman whose affections he simply can't engage. Neither "parent" spares much time for their sons, and Jason, the elder and the family fixer/achiever, tries to make it all work...until the day Marcus basically kills himself with a heroin overdose the same time as Jason's full scholarship to Washington University is announced.

So Marcus sinks into a self-destructive spiral, Jason struggles with his emotional scars, and the story opens with Jason reconnecting with one of Marcus's few good efforts: His girlfriend Delaney, an ex-goth chick and cutie who convinces Jason to go with her in a search for a new, improved Marcus, who has found God.

Boy howdy, has he found God. God has told Marcus what to do, and he's setting out to do it: End the world, one dam at a time. Jason is unwillingly roped into Marcus's millennarian plans, with a secret and unorthodox role to play in the Brave New World that Marcus is calling into being. Whether he wants to play that role or not.

This novella is a very quick read, and it's far more assured and well-made than much of its competition. It's clearly only a small piece of a larger mythos, which the author's promotional materials suggest will be coming online soon.

The pace is brisk; the characters are quickly and efficiently limned; the plot is firmly and boldly erected.

This is a solid effort from a writer to watch. Get your Kindle edition and pass a pleasant hour in the company of Krisch's creation.


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The Thirteenth, and Last, Sookie Stackhouse Novel

DEAD EVER AFTER (Sookie Stackhouse #13)
CHARLAINE HARRIS
Ace Books
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Sookie Stackhouse finds it easy to turn down the request of former barmaid Arlene when she wants her job back at Merlotte’s. After all, Arlene tried to have Sookie killed. But her relationship with Eric Northman is not so clearcut. He and his vampires are keeping their distance…and a cold silence. And when Sookie learns the reason why, she is devastated.

Then a shocking murder rocks Bon Temps, and Sookie is arrested for the crime.

But the evidence against Sookie is weak, and she makes bail. Investigating the killing, she’ll learn that what passes for truth in Bon Temps is only a convenient lie. What passes for justice is more spilled blood. And what passes for love is never enough...

My Review: Parting is such sweet sorrow. Sookie is not to have another annual entry in the Sookieverse after this.

I got my first Sookieverse bite in 2001. I was dating Andy, who worked at the Half Price Books near my house. I stopped in after work one fine afternoon to make goo-goo eyes at him, and his boss complained. Andy handed me Dead Until Dark and told me to go wait in the bar down the strip mall.

I barely noticed when he came in. I was hooked.

Andy had some troubles, vanished, reappeared twice, then vanished for good. Sookie, on the other hand, has been with me, amusing me, sometimes making me mad, for twelve years. So thanks, Andy, for the longest relationship of my entire life! Even though it wasn't with you.

And now Miss Charlaine has snapped that branch. She's whacked me in the readerly kneecaps. She's stuck the shiv into my pageturnin' shoulder. And, after I get my copy of After Dead this coming October, the what's-next wrapup of everyone in the Sookieverse's life or undeath, it will be all True Blood all the time.

That's not a bad thing, I hasten to add, since there exists the possibility in each episode that either Alexander Skarsgard or Ryan Kwanten will get naked, but the series is real, real, real different from the books. And I loved the books first. And I will miss the books.

I'm past the point in life where re-reading stuff seems like a good use of my eyeblinks. I'm well and truly past middle age...not a lot of 106-year-old men around...and there are squillions of books I want to read. Lucky me, in a weird way, that I can't work anymore as that leaves time to read. Not much money, but time! None of which I want to use re-reading even the most wonderful books.

The events of this book are fast-paced. The people from Sookie's past are effectively deployed to move the plot along while also tying up the loose ends. The entire ending made me smile through tears. The last line? Well, sentimental old fustilugs that I am, that last line was a dam-breaker.

Yeah. I am FOR SURE gonna miss these books, all Sookie's Jesusiness aside, all the moments I've thought Harris had lost interest or lost the thread or just lost me, all the emotional rollercoaster-ride queasiness...all of it is over now.

Unlike every other relationship of my life, this one ends well. I'm smiling because it happened, if also sniveling a bit because it's over. It's been a terrific ride.


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Larry Watson's Amazing Bentrock, Montana, Stories

MONTANA 1948
Larry Watson
Milkweed Editions
$14.00 trade paper, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The events of that small-town summer forever alter David Hayden's view of his family: his self-effacing father, a sheriff who never wears his badge; his clear sighted mother; his uncle, a charming war hero and respected doctor; and the Hayden's lively, statuesque Sioux housekeeper, Marie Little Soldier, whose revelations are at the heart of the story. It is a tale of love and courage, of power abused, and of the terrible choice between family loyalty and justice.

My Review: Another one I'd give six stars to if I could.

This book has a deeply personal connection to me and my life. I have given many copies of this book away, because of its role in helping me through a horrible emotional crisis of a year. I was given heart, comfort, and guidance by this work of fiction, such as no corporeal person could have given me.

But to consider this as a book, a novel written for an audience by a writer, is to appreciate anew the benefits of craftsmanship and the ungovernable lightning of talent. There are very few books I can give the accolade of "I wouldn't change a single thing" to, and this is one of them. Not one word out of place, not one simile or metaphor ill-used, unused, or overused, nothing could be added without compromising the beauty of the book, and nothing need be removed to clear aside clutter.

If brevity is the soul of wit, it is also the soul of wisdom, and this book is wise, so wise, to its child narrator's painful coming to adulthood. It's also wise to the nature of love as lived from day to day, and how it so often can curdle into acceptance of what one cannot change...but should, or should always strive to, because some things are simply, inarguably, Right.

As a meditation on one's remembered past, this is a crystal clear and unsparing récit; as a story, it's so simple as to be mindless, except that it's mindful of the role of unadorned narrative in making the world a better place.

I would like to know the characters in this novel, really know them, sit in their kitchens and listen to their stories and drink their vile percolated coffee. I loved each of them, yes even the one whose bad deeds set the story in motion, loved them for being real and nuanced and far more vulnerable than most of the real people I know.

I can't recommend this book to you, because it's very strong meat; I can encourage you to read it if you care for justice, the horrible cost of it and the terrifying price it exacts from those it visits; but you will come away from it changed, as I was, possibly for the better but changed. Don't ever ask questions you don't want the answers to...and this book answers some very, very nasty questions with grace and beauty and forgiveness.

==============================================================================================================================================


JUSTICE
Larry Watson
Milkweed Editions
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Larry Watson's bestselling novel Montana 1948 was acclaimed as "a work of art" (Susan Petro, San Francisco Chronicle), a prize-winning evocation of a time, a place, and a family. Now Watson returns to Montana 1948's vast landscape with a stunning prequel that illuminates the Hayden clan's early years and the circumstances that led to the events of Montana 1948.

In Montana, the Hayden name is law. For the Hayden boys, Wesley and Frank, their legacy carries an aura of privilege and power that doesn't stop at the Montana border, even when an ill-fated hunting trip makes them temporary outlaws. But what it means to bear the name is something each generation must discover for itself. From Julian, the hard-bitten and blustery patriarch, to Gail, Sheriff Wesley Hayden's spirited wife and moral compass, Larry Watson gives breath and blood to a remarkable family's struggles and rewards, and opens an evocative window on the very heart of the American West.

My Review: A collection of previously published short pieces, Justice tells the backstory of the Haydens of Bentrock, Montana, the family at the center of Watson's one bestselling novel Montana 1948. We meet patriarch Julian Hayden in 1899, barely dry behind the ears and ready to take on the world; his shy, retiring, high-strung wife Enid on the day she married him; his two sons on the day childhood ended for both, in which the seeds of Montana 1948 are explicitly sown; Wesley's short, abortive run for freedom from the weight of expectations sparks at a terrible family Thanksgiving dinner; Julian's and Wesley's deputy and general sad-sack, Len McAuley, comes in from the pointlessness of secondary characterization in unexpected and poignant ways; and then the marriage and parenthood of North Dakotan steel magnolia Gail and Wesley, a life started in, and blighted by, the shadows of the Hayden family legacy.

This is decidedly not Montana 1948. It's perfectly good read on its own, actually, just as character sketches of a family and its effects on the world at large, and its costs to the members thereof. I can't complain about anything here, because Dr. Watson is a prose stylist whose direct, pared down artistry is very appealing to me. I can't urge all and sundry to rush out and buy a copy, either, because the book is a collection of short stories with all the cultural freight implicit in that description. Tastes and hints and pieces are the stuff of short stories, and that is both a strength and a weakness. Here, it's perfect, because the novel they prequelize (a rather lumpish and ungainly neologism, but "prefigure" is so stuffily snooty) is in itself a marvel of tight, concise storytelling that leaves acres of room to wonder about the people in it. But on its own, under its own steam, it's very good but not great. Good writing, interesting characters, but nothing...well, nothing to launch it to that next level, say like American Salvage or Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

Still. You have definitely done worse by yourself than reading these seven stories. I'm glad I finally made room for them on the nightstand. Recommended.

The Blighted Lives of Heroes

WHO FEARS DEATH
Nnedi Okorafor
DAW Books
$24.95 hardcover, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An award-winning literary author presents her first foray into supernatural fantasy with a novel of post- apocalyptic Africa. 

In a far future, post-nuclear-holocaust Africa, genocide plagues one region. The aggressors, the Nuru, have decided to follow the Great Book and exterminate the Okeke. But when the only surviving member of a slain Okeke village is brutally raped, she manages to escape, wandering farther into the desert. She gives birth to a baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand and instinctively knows that her daughter is different. She names her daughter Onyesonwu, which means "Who Fears Death?" in an ancient African tongue.

Reared under the tutelage of a mysterious and traditional shaman, Onyesonwu discovers her magical destiny-to end the genocide of her people. The journey to fulfill her destiny will force her to grapple with nature, tradition, history, true love, the spiritual mysteries of her culture-and eventually death itself.


My Review: Who fears Death? I suppose most living things fear death. Onyesonwu, our title character, is the product of a genesis no one should have to carry with them: She is a child of rape, a product of brutality that should have made her mother hate her. Instead, her mother names her “who fears death” and never from that moment on, despite the both of them being outcast and made into The Other, never fears anything again.

I had a very hard time with this book, wanting to Pearl Rule it on average three times per reading session. I did in fact abandon it when a major major major anti-man hot button issue occurred near the end. But this is what earns the book four stars from me: I could not not read the rest. I had to know why what happened, happened.

Am I happy I read it? Not really. It was harrowing for me. I don't like man-bad-woman-good books. There are two unforgivable things in my moral universe: Abusing animals and rape. I'm no fan of supernatural/magjicqkal stuff (Onye's a shapeshifter). What on the surface of the earth persuaded me to read this thing?! I mean, it's even praised by Luis Alberto Urrea forevermore! I shoulda stood home, as the saying goes.

But Dr. Okorafor is a sorceress. She cast a spell on me. She reached out from inside this book and she made sure my brain needed to know this, and needed it so much I'd overcome my prejudices and make it part of my mental furniture.

I will step on her foot if I ever meet the Doctor in person.

She set the book in a post-nuclear-holocaust Africa! I love postapocalyptic fiction! How am I gonna resist that? And she made explicit a disdain for the rotten, evil-souled uses of religion in oppressing and abusing people of all types. I think I purred. I know I smiled.

It's also a joy and a pleasure to me to see women, and women of color, and women of immigrant parentage, enter the lists of American English-language speculative fiction. It makes me feel that this world has a shot at survival after all. Writers are not ignored because of their bodily plumbing or skin color or weird names. (Sorry, but I'm still an old white man, and this lady's name is really seriously weird to me.) This is the world I grew up wanting to live in, and now I get to...for a while anyway...and that, more than any other factor, made me stick with the book long past my usual stop.

Should you read it? Should you turn page after page of non-European-named characters, landscapes bursting with heat and searing miseries of spirit, heroes whose lives are blighted by origins beyond their control?

Yep.


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Historical Western. Wait! Come back, it's good!

BLOOD KIN
Henry Chappell
TTU Press
$22.36 hardcover, available now

Reviewwd by Richard, 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In Blood Kin, Isaac Webb, a young Texas ranger, struggles for decency amid the violence of the Texas Revolution and the early days of the Republic. Still in his teens when he joins the legendary ranger captain Noah Smithwick, Isaac discovers in himself extraordinary mettle in battle and a fierce yearning for young war widow Catherine Druin.

But victory over Mexico does not bring the new Republic nor Isaac the peace and stability he fought for. Escalating Indian depredations forestall Isaac’s hopes to work the farmland he’s cleared near Bastrop, and to marry Catherine. Pressed into accompanying Smithwick as Sam Houston’s peace emissary to the Comanches, Isaac befriends Looks Far, a young warrior at whose side he fends off Waco Indian attacks and with whom he learns to grieve. As the Texans’ hunger for land and the Comanches’ penchant for raiding imperil Isaac’s friendship and thwart peace negotiations, Isaac returns to Bastrop prepared for the worst.

When his future with Catherine is confounded by her father’s blind hatred of the Comanches and his own commitment to the indomitable Inez, a Lipan captive, Isaac must confront a brutal dilemma and a painful secret. So achingly honest and culturally sensitive is Chappell in his telling of this epic story that every image, every characterization rings true. It is hard to believe that he did not live it himself.

My Review: I loved this book. It's about a fascinating time in Texas history, and a group of men who can often be reviled with justice...told from the perspective of a young, innocent man who joins the Texas Rangers almost by accident, it traces his development into an upstanding husband (of a Waco Indian woman) and father, a fighter for justice for all, not just all whites, and a friend of several of the founders of the Republic.

I loved the descriptive power of the author's prose, and felt his characters were limned in fast, sure strokes. He comes at the subject from a deeply personal perspective, a love of his native Texas in all its warty glory. He makes the landscape, one I'm familiar with since Bastrop is close to my hometown of Austin, more real than I would ever have thought possible. He's describing the frontier, the time when there was nothing urban about anyplace much in Texas. And I can see it in my mind's eye, fitting over the modern small-town exurban reality of Bastrop.

Chappell does an excellent job of making the dilemmas of his characters come to life. It's amazing to me how much drama and passion there truly is in history and how the way it's taught to kids makes that seem impossible. Novelists like Chappell see the story in history, choose a thread in the tapestry, and showcase it for us. It cuts through the propagandizing and malarkey of most works of historiography, when done properly and well. It's done both properly and well in this book.

I can't recommend it strongly enough, especially to non-Texans.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Mars Colonization Done Right

DESOLATION ROAD
Ian McDonald
Pyr SF
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: It all began thirty years ago on Mars, with a greenperson. But by the time it all finished, the town of Desolation Road had experienced every conceivable abnormality from Adam Black's Wonderful Travelling Chautauqua and Educational 'Stravaganza (complete with its very own captive angel) to the Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar. Its inhabitants ranged from Dr. Alimantando, the town's founder and resident genius, to the Babooshka, a barren grandmother who just wants her own child-grown in a fruit jar; from Rajendra Das, mechanical hobo who has a mystical way with machines to the Gallacelli brothers, identical triplets who fell in love with-and married-the same woman.

My Review: Earth can't sustain its current population in the style to which all 7 billion of us wish to become accustomed, and no one is predicting a sudden outbreak of common sense and birth prevention to bring the numbers down. What are we to do?

Move, of course. Where? More than one place. There's the Metropolis, the geosynchronous city in space reached by fixed space elevators; but that's filling up too; wherever shall we go?

Well, Mars, for one. The Remote Orbital Terraforming and Environmental Control Headquarters (ROTECH for short) consortium is created on the Motherworld, sent into a moonbelt orbit around Mars, and given a thousand years of development, has finally produced a planetary ecosystem that can sustain unsuited humans in the open.

ROTECH governs Mars as lightly as any frontier is governed. People, let loose from cities and rules, pretty much do what comes naturally. They have babies, they make farms, they organize themselves into Us and Them, and they do it all at breakneck speed without worrying too hard about consequences. When Consequences rain down from the Heavens, well, adapt or die.

Ian McDonald does in 363 pages what others do in 1000. He makes Mars come alive, he peoples it with fabulous characters (human and cyborg and robotic), he creates a logical thought experiment...how can humanity survive its inevitable wearing out of the Motherworld?...and uses it to tell us about ourselves, about what we are *actually* made of, and about what triumphs and tragedies flow naturally and inevitably from that.

I adore this book.

There.

No, really, that's it. I adore this book. You should read it, especially if you point your booger-holder at the sky when science fiction is mentioned. I don't read THAT people should read this. If you don't, then you should be ashamed of your inflexibility.

I even re-read Jane Austen recently. And liked it. So. What's that “I don't like THAT” stuff again?

The messy, beautiful India of 2047

RIVER OF GODS
Ian McDonald
Pyr SF
$26.00 hardcover, $17.00 trade paper, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 5* of five

The Publisher Says: As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their business—a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, and a dropout. And so is—the waif, the mind reader, the prophet—when she one day finds a man who wants to stay hidden.
In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation.
River of Gods teems with the life of a country choked with peoples and cultures—one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. Ian McDonald has written the great Indian novel of the new millennium, in which a war is fought, a love betrayed, a message from a different world decoded, as the great river Ganges flows on.

My Review: Ian McDonald. This is a name to conjure with, boys and girls. This is one fearless Irishman. This is a major major talent doing major major things. How dare he, how dare I, warble his praises when he, a white guy from the colonial oppressor state, has the temerity to write a science fiction novel about INDIA?!? There are scads of Indian writers and it's their country! Let *them* write their stories!

Codswallop.

Read the book. Then come and tell me it should have remained unwritten because of some nonsensical national pride hoo-hah.

It's got every damn thing a reader could want: A new gender, the nutes, pronoun “yt;” a wholly new form of energy harvested from other universes; a political scandal-ridden politician who falls for our main nute character, despite his long marriage, and pursues yt desperately; a civil war a-brewin' over water rights in the now fragmented subcontinental political world; aeais (artificial intelligences) that are forbidden by law to exceed the Turing Test that establishes whether an entity is human or human-passable; and, as with any law, the lawbreakers who inevitably arise are hunted by a new breed of law enforcement officers, here called “Krishna cops.” Krishna being the Original God, Supreme Being, One Source in many parts of India, there is some justice to that, one supposes.

Recapitulating the plot is pointless. This is a sprawling story, one that takes nine (!) main characters to tell. I felt there were two too many, and would entirely prune Lisa, the American physicist, and Ajmer, the spooky girl who sees the future, because those story lines were pretty much just muddying the waters for me. I thought the physicist on a quest, who then makes a giant discovery, which leads her back to the inventor of the aeais, could easily have been a novel all on its own, one that would fit in this universe that McDonald has summoned into being. I simply didn't care for or about Ajmer.

The aeais' parent, Thomas Lull, is hidden away from the world in a dinky South Indian village. Yeah, right! Like the gummints of the world would let that happen! I know why McDonald did this, plot-wise, but it's just not credible to me. He could be demoted from player to bit part and simplify the vastness of the reader's task thereby.

So why am I giving this book a perfect score? Because. If you need explanations:

--The stories here are marvelously written.

“And you make me a target as well,” Bernard hisses. “You don't think. You run in and shout and expect everyone to cheer because you're the hero.”
“Bernard, I've always known the only ass you're ultimately interested in is your own, but that is a new low.” But the barb hits and hooks. She loves the action. She loves the dangerous seduction that it all looks like drama, like action movies. Delusion. Life is not drama. The climaxes and plot transitions are coincidence, or conspiracy. The hero can take a fall. The good guys can all die in the final reel. None of us can survive a life of screen drama. “I don't know where else to go,” she confesses weakly. He goes out shortly afterwards. The closing door sends a gust of hot air, stale with sweat and incense, through the rooms. The hanging nets and gauzes billow around the figure curled into a tight foetus. Najia chews at scaly skin on her thumb, wondering if she can do anything right. -- p388

Krishan barely feels the rain. More than anything he wants to take Parvati away from this dying garden, out the doors down on to the street and never look back. But he cannot accept what he is being given. He is a small suburban gardener working from a room in his parents' house with a little three-wheeler van and a box of tools, who one day took a call from a beautiful woman who lived in a tower to build her a garden in the sky. -- p477

Some of my favorite passages I can't put here, because they contain some of the many, many words and concepts that one needs—and I do mean needs—the glossary in the back of the book to fully appreciate.

--The concept of the book is breathtaking. Westerners don't usually see India as anything other than The Exotic Backdrop. McDonald sees the ethnic and religious tensions that India contains, barely, as we look at her half-century of independence ten years on (review written 2007) and contemplate the results of the Partition. He also sees the astounding and increasing vigor of the Indian economy, its complete willingness to embrace and employ any and all new ideas and techniques and leverage the staggeringly immense pool of talent the country possesses.

--McDonald also extrapolates the rather quiet but very real and strong trend towards India as a medical tourism destination: First-world trained doctors offering third-world priced medical care. This is the genesis of the nutes, people who voluntarily have all external gender indicators and all forms of gender identification surgically removed, their neural pathways rewired, and their social identities completely reinvented.

Think about that for a minute.

If your jaw isn't on the floor, if your imagination isn't completely boggled, then this book isn't for you and you should not even pick it up in the library to read the flap copy. If you're utterly astonished that an Irish dude from Belfast could winkle this kind of shit up from his depths, if you're so intrigued that you think it will cause you actual physical pain not to dive right in to this amazing book, you're my kind of people.

Welcome, soul sibling, India 2047 awaits. May our journey never end.




















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