Arctic Light

This book absolutely charmed the pants off me. Am I a sucker for a bunch of prickly weirdos with extremely valid reasons for not trusting each other (starting with about half of them being demons of one sort or another) who are forced into reluctant sympathy for each other via repeated incidents of saving each other's lives? Yes, yes I am.

We first meet our protagonist, Claire, head librarian at the Library of Unwritten Books in Hell, returning a wandering character to a book by sliding a knife between its ribs. (Books that have not yet been written by their authors, therefore not having their plots and characters locked into place yet, have a tendency to get restless and go wandering.) So Library of the Unwritten had me at hello because who doesn't want to read more about a damned soul librarian-assassin who wanders around stabbing escaped book characters, but I also had two other reactions to the first couple of chapters:

#1: Oh god, not another book about magical libraries.
#2: I really did not expect this book to focus quite so heavily on Christian Heaven/Hell/fallen-angel worldbuilding (I mean, the protagonist is Hell's librarian so it's not a stretch, but it really revolves around it, even though there's a lot of other magical stuff going on - it's kind of like Good Omens that way).

But it wasn't long before I didn't care; the book swept me along and caught me up in the characters to the point where I was wildly over-invested in their fates by about the 1/3 mark.

( A little more about the setup and general vibe of the book; not that spoilery )

I loved this book so much that when I got to the end I went straight back to the beginning to reread a bunch of scenes to pick up on all the character stuff I didn't catch the first time around. I would happily read a 15-book series about these people. Fortunately there is a second book in the series and a third coming out this fall. Expect a post about the second book when I read that one (I've already started it) and possibly an all-spoilers post about this book because I absolutely have to talk about some of the character reveals but I don't want to get that mixed into the rec post.


The Library of the Unwritten on Amazon - the ebook is currently on sale (at least for me; I can't tell if it's for all customers or if it's a Prime deal or what, though.)

Cozy mysteries about a lesbian chicken farmer in rural Yorkshire? Sign me up, please!

I stumbled across Chicken Run, by Alma Fritchley, somewhat randomly in the library this week while looking for something else. (Our library shelves everything together rather than separating books by genre, which tends to lead to serendipitous discoveries like this one.) I'd never heard of it; apparently it's the first of a series from the 1990s and I remember that the library had the next couple, so I'll be back for those too.

The actual mystery part of the plot is like 5% of the book randomly shoehorned into the last chapter, made all the more wtf because it's actually like a major mystery/action plot ( Cut for a couple of light spoilers, no clues about whodunnit ) that just sort of drops in and out of what is otherwise a sweetly charming book with romance and humor that meanders between rural Yorkshire and the Manchester gay scene (which the author clearly knows inside and out; you know, there are a lot of books with queer pairings that could be easily have been written by authors who are gay or straight, but this book is CLEARLY written by an author who is using her own life as partial inspiration or at least as research).

Which is actually a big part of the draw for me! I love a strong sense of place in books, and this book has a fantastic sense of place along with a delightful narrative voice, charming characters, and an engaging romance between the butch farmer heroine, Letty, and the local small-town librarian that entwines with Letty's complicated relationship with her ex. (I gotta say, of the various F/F genre romance I've picked up off Amazon lately, none of it struck me as particularly hot, at least in terms of things I personally find hot. This book, on the other hand, I found incredibly hot even though the sex scenes aren't particularly explicit. Just Letty's description of her love interest's legs, say, really got to me. I think the fact that the protagonists are both mature women in their 30s/40s was helpful with this.)

If I have any caveats at all about this book, it's that it's very 1990s-gay-scene in some ways (the protagonist has Firm Views on things like femme lesbians and bisexual women married to men, for example) but it didn't really bother me in context; it all felt of a piece with the narrative voice and ambiance. YMMV, though.

This book made me think of rachelmanija's post awhile back about not enough picnics in books. This is a book composed almost entirely of picnics, with characters who are delightful enough to follow along to every picnic. I'm looking forward to the next one.

Mystery of the Witches Bridge by Barbee Carleton

So as rachelmanija mentioned in her review of this book, we were able to get together in person recently (which was awesome; hi Rachel!) and we got into a conversation about childhood book favorites, which led to discovering that she's the only other person I know (at least the only one I've talked to about it) who remembers this book! I really loved it when I was a kid, despite having a copy that was missing the cover and a few pages, which meant it took me forever, as an adult, to figure out the title and author in order to pick up a used copy on Amazon. But eventually I got my hands on it, and I remembered that I'd enjoyed rereading it, but it's been long enough that I've forgotten most of the details, so we decided to reread and post about it at the same time.

It's not hard to see why I liked this so much as a kid. It's got good character arcs, a nicely plotted little mystery, and a very strong sense of place. It's set in the salt marshes off the coast of Massachusetts, which as a kid, I didn't even realize was a real place (although there are distinct references to real places, particularly Boston, that are obvious to me now). I remember thinking of it the same way you think of a fantasy land, as a sort of vague coastal "somewhere" with stone causeways, old hayfields gone back to treacherous quicksand, and waterways winding through endless fields of grass punctuated with islands. Rachel and I were trying to think of other books set in that area, and couldn't come up with any. The unique setting, vividly described, is half the fun of this book. I've been in similar places to this -- not this exactly, but marshy river estuaries along the sea, and this book really gets that eerie, lonely feeling of the grasslands and wide-open sky.

The general plot is Treasure-Island-esque kids-adventure-story catnip. Thirteen-year-old orphan Dan Pride comes home to the rambling stone house of his Puritan ancestors, filled with secrets, neighborhood feuds, and possibly buried treasure somewhere on the old Pride property. The emotional plot and mystery plot go together well, and I really enjoyed Dan's building friendships with the other characters in the book. Basically it's a fun, fast read with a fantastic sense of place, and I can tell I'll be reading it again.

... okay, seriously, I gotta get on this Yuletide thing, if I'm going to do it this year. Signups close tonight!

One of the things I wanted to do before I get my letter up was post recs for the more obscure books I'm requesting, since it looks like most (all?) of my requests this year are for book fandoms, and hey, if I liked them, maybe you will like them too! And maybe I'll have more people to talk to them about!

Let's start with Never Trust a Dead Man by Vivian Vande Velde. It's recently back in print ... with an absolutely terrible cover. The cover on the older edition was a bit young for the book itself, but at least it was cute and generally fairly accurate to what happens in the book, even if they aged the protagonist down by about 5 years. (The writing style is middle-grade-ish, but the characters are in their late teens.) The new one looks like it should be the cover for a self-published YA vampire romance. Not that there's anything wrong with YA vampire romance, but that's really not what this book is.

This book has been one of my comfort reads for at least a decade or more. It's fast, funny, sweet, has a surprisingly well-crafted mystery given the simplicity of the style, and it never fails to make me happy, despite the book's somewhat dark premise. It's about a young man in a rural, medieval-ish village who is accused of murder, and because they don't know what to do with him -- murder isn't something they have to deal with very often -- the villagers wall him up in an ossuary cave with the dead man's corpse. Luckily for him, he's not the only person in the cave; there's also a witch (sarcastic, hyper-competent, and AWESOME; she's great) who sneaks in every so often to steal bits of corpses for spells.

She agrees to help him, and so the accused murderer and the dead man's ghost team up to solve the murder. Complication #1: they can't stand each other (which is why he was accused of killing the other guy in the first place -- they had a longstanding and very public feud). Complication #2: due to a necromantic spell gone wrong, the (sarcastic, annoyed) ghost came back trapped in the body of a bat. Meanwhile the witch just wants to know what she did to deserve being saddled with these two idiots. Things pretty much go (hilariously) downhill for everyone from there.

I love this book; it's been one of my perennial Yuletide recs for ages. Parts of it still make me laugh, no matter how many times I've read it, and it's a lovely riff on the general theme of misjudging people based on first impressions -- everyone from the dead guy to the witch to the main character's love interest turns out to be more than they appear at first. It's also a short book and a fast read, so it's not that much of a time investment, unlike the fantasy doorstopper I'm about to rec in the next post.

Lately I've been trying to work my way through my unread paperback box. These are a grab bag of books acquired from used bookstores, garage sales, and heaven knows where else, most of them by authors I've never heard of. Usually this results in a lot of dreck with some tolerable reads, but sometimes I'll stumble onto a gem.

Like this one: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin. It's partly a murder mystery and partly a slice-of-life glimpse of small-town Mississippi, moving back and forth between the early '80s and the present day.

Thirty years ago, a secret friendship develops between Larry, a white redneck farm kid, and Silas, the son of the black squatters who live on their land. Things blow up between them in ways that are probably predictable given that it's rural Mississippi. Three decades later, Silas got out, went to college and became a cop, while Larry got sucked into the downward spiral of small-town poverty and is now the town pariah, blamed for the rape and murder of a young woman who went missing after a date with him.

Now another girl has gone missing under similar circumstances, and Larry is the prime suspect. Silas has to figure out whodunnit while also confronting everything that happened between him and Larry all those years ago.

Content warning: the plot revolves around the rape/murder of two young women, and this is very much Silas and Larry's book, so there are only a handful of female characters anyway and all of them are in the background. I know that's an understandable dealbreaker for some. Also, due to the book's setting and theme, there is a ton of textual racism and racial slurs to be navigated, as well as the sharp edge of rural poverty.

However, this book hit my friendship/family/reconciliation buttons hard, while also managing to avoid (at least I felt so) most of the cliches that I would expect to run into in fiction about race relations in the South in a book written by a white author. The characters are flawed and unpredictable, the general depiction of life in small-town Mississippi (the good and the bad) felt believable for both the black and white characters (the '80s are not the '50s are not the 2000s, and the different flavor of life in different eras was well done, I thought). Nobody learns a ~valuable lesson about racism~, and Larry's unconscious racism and Silas's cutting defense mechanisms are both realistically portrayed. It's a painful book at times, an uncomfortable one at others, but overall there's a sense of warmth and optimism that flows through the book -- a feeling that things could either careen headlong into tragedy or come out okay, and at any point, individual characters' choices could give it the push that's going to turn it one way or the other: is this the time we do the right thing, the humane thing -- the time we manage to be better than our past selves, better than the people we grew up around ... or not?

On the basis of this book, I also checked out The Tilted World from the library, co-written by Franklin and his wife Beth Ann Fennelly, and set during Prohibition in rural Mississippi. Very good so far, with a female bootlegger, a pair of prohibition agents investigating a murder deep in moonshine country, and an Accidental Surprise Baby they acquire after a shooting.

Night Over Water by Ken Follett. My expectations weren't that high, but I really loved it.

This book falls squarely in the "group of strangers, each with their own agenda, trapped together by circumstances beyond their control" genre. In this case, circumstance is a fictional flight of a real plane, the amphibious Boeing 314 Clipper. Pan Am's first trans-Atlantic flights were luxury "sleeper" flights (the seats folded into bunks) and the book fictionally extends the extremely brief tenure of the commercial Boeing 314 flights into the early days of WWII. The passengers include a family of fascists fleeing the U.K., a German scientist escaping the Nazis, saboteurs, criminals, a runaway bride, etc etc. It's a lot of fun and seems to be pretty well researched as far as I can tell. I particularly enjoyed the way the characters' storylines wove in and out of each other, and that the female characters were as fleshed out and had as much agency and interesting backstory as the guys did.

The book also did something I really liked with sexual consent, although this is slightly spoilery and slightly NSFW, so I'll put it under a cut.

( Consent issues in the book - some spoilers )

I haven't done a book report post in a while.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein - This is an absolutely brilliant, cannot-put-it-down book even though parts of it turned me into a sobbing mess. Every mention of this book that I saw on my flist prior to reading it said, basically, "This book is awesome! Do not let yourself be spoiled for anything that happens!" and they are SO RIGHT. (Well, okay, you should know that it's set in a French prison camp during WWII, and it's a very harrowing book, because some of the things that happen to the characters are unspeakably awful. But it's very very good.) ETA: I figured this went without saying, but based on comments, apparently not: the above only applies if being surprised, as a reader, is part of your reading pleasure. Which you probably know about yourself by now, so if not, hey, knock yourself out and spoil yourself all over the place.

Seraphina by Rachel Hartman - Lovely YA fantasy with beautiful worldbuilding, great characters, and AWESOME dragons. Dragons and humans exist in an uneasy state of truce, but when a murder threatens the tentative peace, the main cast of humans and dragons have to solve it or their two species will be plunged back into war. Which is an overly simplistic description of a book that really has quite a lot more going on, including nicely understated magic and a fantastically original take on dragons that I don't want to spoil, since it is revealed slowly through the first half of the book. If you do want it spoiled: ( click the cut tag and then highlight the text. ) (I feel like sticking in a small caveat, because I know the author and I always feel a bit weird when I'm talking up my friends' books as the BEST THING EVAR! But I would have loved this book even if I didn't know the author. It really is fantastic.)

Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch - Third book in an urban fantasy series that is getting right up there with Dresden Files and the Ben January books as my favorite series that I'm collecting right now. I adore the characters, and these books hit my "crew of misfits" and platonic-living-together narrative kinks really hard. They just keep accruing more misfits, but there's enough of a dark underbelly to the series that I'm always a little nervous that some of them won't make it out alive. In this book, there are weird doings afoot in the London Underground, Peter (our hero) is adorable, Leslie (his best friend/sidekick/kinda-girlfriend) is snarkily awesome, and I want a Nightingale of my very own. (ETA: one of the things I absolutely love about this series is that it portrays a realistically diverse London in a very convincing, authentic and above all respectful sort of way. As one small example, this book includes in its supporting cast an observant, hijab-wearing Muslim cop and an evangelical Christian cop, neither one of whom is presented as an intolerant fanatic or any of the other negative stereotypes that you might get with characters like that.)

Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler - A really interesting twist on the buddy-cop genre: in the first chapter, one-half of the partnership is killed, and the book alternates between his surviving partner and friends trying to solve his murder in the present day, and flashbacks to the first case they ever worked together, 50 years earlier during the Blitz. Which probably sounds like the most depressing book EVER, but actually it's twisty and funny - a little overly quirky-for-quirkiness's-sake in places, but I liked it. Another thing I liked is that, while the characters all belong to a special unit of the London police that solves "peculiar" crimes (i.e. paranormal and other weirdness), the book never comes down specifically on the side of whether or not magic and the supernatural are "real" or not; everything has a rational explanation, but every once in a while there are little hints that magic might be real (but in a way that can still be explained rationally if you're so inclined). It's sort of like anti-urban fantasy, and I liked it. If you're still on the fence about reading the book, under the cut is a major spoiler, which you really shouldn't read if you like being surprised, but if you're unsure about the book, this might make a difference: ( click on through and then highlight. )

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell - This is a really neat book that takes the form of a series of separate, but connected stories. Each of them breaks off in mid-story and then you jump forward in time to a new character who is discovering the previous story: for example, the first story is in the form of a journal written by a traveler in the mid-1800s; the next one is a series of letters written 50 years later by someone who has found the journal among some old books; and so on. It's a very meta book, and beautifully written. It's also a movie - here is the trailer (which gives you a good feeling for what the book is like, but also spoils a number of things).

... and there were a few other books in various series that I'm working through (I read a couple more Didius Falco books, for example), but the above are the standouts and the main ones I recommend from the last couple months' reading.

Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch - The second book in the series that starts with Midnight Riot a.k.a. Rivers of London. I'm still absolutely loving this series; Peter Grant and his mentor/boss Nightingale make a fabulous bantery team, and the supporting cast is just great. This book directly continues some of the plot and character threads from the first book, as well as bringing back minor and major supporting characters, which is one of the reasons why I love it so; it's really frustrating to be introduced to an interesting character only to have them wander offstage when their part of the story is done, and these books do a great job of fleshing out the world and making each minor character a fully realized person.

The Whitefire Crossing by Courtney Schafer - This was great! Although my favorite parts of the book were mostly concentrated in the first half, which totally hit all my "wilderness survival against all odds" kinks, I'm definitely going to pick up the next book in the series when it comes out, because I really like the characters and the world. It's adventure fantasy, but very different from your typical elves-dwarves-and-wizards epic fantasy. The characters are traveling with a merchant caravan trying to cross a dangerous mountain pass in early spring. Having to contend with avalanches and other hazards is bad enough when you don't have also have to deal with spies, secrets and an angry magician trying to kill you. The book is tense, fast-paced, and just when you think things can't get worse for the characters, something even more dire happens. (Also, one of my very favorite characters in the book only appears in a few scenes - he and his female sidekick/second-in-command remind me SO MUCH of Mustang and Hawkeye from FMA - and the ending of the book gives me a great deal of hope that they'll have a pretty big role in the next book. ^^)

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales - This book analyzes a number of life-threatening situations, from a mountain climber breaking his leg on a 20,000-foot peak to the World Trade Center collapse, and tries to draw conclusions about what causes some people to do all the right things and survive, while others panic and die. I think some of his reasoning is a little spurious (the author is a journalist, not a neuroscientist, but he tries to write like he's both) but a lot of the conclusions are really interesting and thought-provoking. I think this book also does a really good job of dismantling the idea that people die in life-threatening situations because they "did something stupid"; he spends a couple of chapters developing the thesis that "stupid" behavior in a crisis is simply our brains doing what has always worked for them in the past (in a person's individual past, as well as our past as a species) - however, some people are able to break out of that cycle and survive, and the book has a lot of interesting things to say about what might enable anyone to be able to do that. (I'd be happy to go into more detail in comments if anyone is interested, because speaking as someone who lives in a state - Alaska - that tends to throw life-threatening crises around at the drop of a hat, I got a lot of useful tips out of the book!)

Thirteen Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson - Aww man, if you like to travel or if you daydream about traveling, this YA book is like crack. The main character, Ginny, receives 13 blue envelopes from her deceased aunt, and is instructed to open each one only after completing the instructions in the previous one. The envelopes take her all around Europe, doing things like leaving an offering for the Vestal Virgins or visiting an artist who lives in a castle in Edinburgh. The book doesn't have a whole lot of dramatic tension, but it's a wonderful road-trip story, all about the places she goes and the people she meets and the way that her adventures change her. There is a sequel, The Last Little Blue Envelope, that I have on order from Amazon right now. \o/

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Book rec: Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch. I think I've found a new series to love. :D I've been looking for ages for something else that hits me the same way Dresden Files does, and I think I've figured out what it was that wasn't working for me in so much of the urban fantasy I've been reading -- it's either hyper-serious, gritty and dark, or so silly that it verges on parody. Midnight Riot hit the exact right balance of funny/absurd and serious for my tastes, plus I really loved the cast of characters, and the world-building (and sense of place) is absolutely first-rate. Peter Grant is a rookie cop in London who discovers that he has a talent for magic, which leads to the subsequent discovery that there is a branch of the London police force that handles magic-related crimes, which he is now a part of, whether he wants to be or not. Aside from the fact that it was a little disconcerting reading a book in which the protagonist is named Peter while concurrently fanning on White Collar like a mad fanning thing, I had a blast with the book and I've just ordered the sequel, Moon Over Soho, from Amazon. If you're looking for something generally Dresden Files-like, I strongly recommend!

fkficfest/fkficfest has just started posting stories. Somewhere in the mix, there's one by me (and one for me, too!).

I posted my official stepping-down notice over at sga_genficathon. I've been reluctant to admit that I've wandered pretty far afield from SGA these days, but I think it's become increasingly obvious from the content of my journal that this is, in fact, the case. I still consider SGA a "home" fandom for me, and I suspect that I'll continue to wander in and out of it over the years (like I do with ST:TOS and a couple of others), but I don't think I'll be participating in any more SGA fic exchanges/challenges/etc. in the near future -- the inspiration is no longer there. It's been a good long run, though.

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Reading my flist, I came across this announcement and wanted to pass it along.

Little White Mouse is a very fun comic about a girl trapped on a space station with nothing to keep her company but homicidal robots, the memory of her dead sister, and a ghost who may or may not actually be there. It's sweet, poignant, funny, and fascinating, as well as full of sci-fi goodness like space pirates, alternate timelines, street punks on hovercycles and bad guys in battle cruisers.

I started reading it when I was still doing the self-publishing convention circuit back in 2002 or so; Paul and I both lived in the Midwest and had tables at a lot of the same shows. And then he married one of my best friends and turned out to be a really awesome guy as well as simply a very nice guy when I'd say hi to him at cons. At the time he was publishing LWM through a small-press publisher; since then he's regained the rights to it and moved into self-publishing, which is a tricky game at the best of times (believe me, I know) and is downright rough with the economy like it is.

I suspect that an all-ages comic with a female, PoC heroine would be Relevant To The Interests of quite a bit of my flist, either for yourself or maybe a Christmas present for a kid, niece, sister, sci-fi-addicted older relative or whatnot. It's all available online for free (ETA: Okay, the cover link doesn't click through to the rest of it: start here instead and let me know if you have any further problems; I'll pass them along.) And if you sample and like it ... get the book! If possible, ordering it through a comic shop would help Paul out a lot -- there are details at the above link, but basically, you bring the Diamond order code "DEC100959" into your comic store and ask them to order it for you. That way, Diamond gets good sales figures for the book, and they carry more of his books in the future. (But I know most of you aren't really comic-shop-going people, so, you know. Get the book wherever it's most convenient for you. :))

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