Cassandra Rose Clarke

I picked up the Mad Scientist's Daughter by Cassandra Rose Clarke, because "that sounds like your sort of book" as my eldest put it, but looking at other books by the writer I ended up reading the Assassin's Curse first. The Mad Scientist's Daughter was clearly going to be a bit of a downer, and the other book looked to be a bit of an adventure story so I went with that one.

The Assassin's Curse follows the story of Ananna of the Tanarau, a daughter of pirates in a nation of pirates. The book starts with her fleeing an arranged marriage, only to be pursued by an assassin hired by the family of the groom that she has spurned. Ananna is supremely competent and would be the match of anything thrown against her save magic, but at a key moment, a curse on the assassin saves her and condemns both the pirate and the assassin to the curse.

The main character is a delight. When she commits to fleeing her marriage she's all in, dropping everything and immediately making plans for her future, even though it appears that none of her dreams will now be possible. The assassin, Naji, persists on treating her as fragile (partly because of the curse), which she confounds at every opportunity. Other than in terms of magic and knowledge of the magical world, she is the more competent one in every respect.

Available in July
(grumble)

If I have a quibble with the book, it's that it completely fails to tell you that this is part one of a series. That's not something I mind if the series has distinct books (N. K. Jemisin's Hundred Thousand Kingdoms leaps to mind), but this is just part one of a bigger book and leaves it without any resolution. I understand why publishers do it; it's for exactly the reason that I'm cranky about it: I wouldn't have read it until all the books were available. But, in my opinion, it shows a level of contempt for the reader that I personally find frustrating, and which I doubt was the author's intent.

That being said, it just whet my appetite for The Mad Scientist's Daughter which was an even better read (not as much fun though, but then I kind of expected that.) This one is more adult and science fiction rather than fantasy.

The story follows the titular character, Cat, as she grows up. She is the only child of a pair of cyberneticists, although her mother does not appear to be practicing. The story starts with Cat at 5 years old when her father brings home an android to live with the family. The android's name is Finn and he's much more human-like than any of the other robots that are nearly everywhere in this world.

Which brings me to the world-building, which is brilliant. Near future science fiction that attempts to be reasonably extrapolative is quite rare at the moment. A lot of it is like the Hunger Games, not too different from what we have now, but it takes quite a stretch to imagine how the world got like that. This one reminds me a lot of the sort of world-building you see in the Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (except that I don't get an urge to slit my wrists after reading it), only much more optimistic.

The world has been through climate change, and the worst of the Disasters as they are referred to with huge loss of life. Robots are everywhere. They need to be: there aren't enough humans. But all the things that need to be done to maintain a technological society have largely been done. For instance, Kansas is a desert, but it's also a state-encompassing wind farm.

Cat is utterly self-absorbed, which serves the world-building exposition well, because it's all so obviously backdrop. Effectively, everything and everyone but a select few characters, her parents, Finn and a couple of lovers, are nothing but backdrop to her life. The central story of the book is her trying to consign Finn to that backdrop because he's only a robot, and continuously and spectacularly failing to do so. She's also incredibly intelligent, but only interested in art. When she needs to apply her intelligence to something technical, something she wants desperately, it comes as easily to her as any of her artwork.

This is a beautiful and tragic love story that I recommend to anyone.

Currently Reading: The Valerie Dearborn books by Caroline Hanson (because, obviously after reading something as brilliant as these two, I need a sudden sharp drop in quality something lighter.)

Blood Oranges by Kathleen Tierney

Blood Oranges by Kathleen Tierney (who is actually Caitlin R. Kiernan) is nasty, brutal and compelling. Nasty and brutal in both terms of story and commentary on Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance, sometimes quite explicitly. Twilight gets a fair share of bile aimed at it for example.

Siobahn Quinn is a monster hunter and heroin addict, and after the first chapter, a monster and murder addict. She's both a vampire and a werewolf and has the worst attributes of both. She needs to feed as a vampire every few days and vampires in this world kill every time they feed. As a werewolf, she's the classic werewolf, essentially going furry and then waking up naked somewhere covered in blood and choking up body parts of which there is plenty in this book.

A lot of thought has obviously gone into deconstructing the genre, from the dodgy motives of the mentor figure, to the real consequences of taking out supernaturals and the fact that the murderous activities of Quinn are widely noticed among that community. As far as romance with the monsters, that's barely hinted at, including that vampires over a certain age "are as sexless as ken dolls".

Pack that in with Kiernan's brilliant writing and signature unreliable narrator (but nowhere near as bad as Imp, thank goodness).

Currently Reading: The Mad Scientist's Daughter by Cassandra Rose Clarke.

No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

With my eye surgery I've been left with a bit of a no-man's land of poor eyesight between about 20cm up to about a meter and a half out. So I don't need glasses for reading books or driving, but I do need them for working at a computer and it's been a bit of an effort to adapt, for long boring reasons, and I don't have much endurance for long stretches yet.

So, I've read quite a few books recently that I need to blog about.

Every Day by David Levithan was one of the nominees for this year's Nebula YA section (the Andre Norton award) and it had already made it on to my to-read list based on its interesting premise. The story follows an entity which wakes up in a new borrowed body every day. The body is age-appropriate; it seems to have been doing this from birth, and it's now 16 or so. I say 'it' because gender isn't a barrier. The book begins with the entity falling in love with a normal human girl and follows that relationship as the entity continues to move through other people. It's very strange, and moving in places, but the central questions about what the entity is and how it all works are only hinted at - there are no answers here. The book is stand-alone, but there is ample space for a sequel.

A Talent for War by Jack McDevitt which is the first book in the Alex Benedict series. I've been meaning to read this series for a while because four of the six books in the series have been nominated for the Nebula award, Polaris in 2005, Seeker in 2006 (winner), Echo in 2010 and Firebird in 2011. Tellingly, McDevitt has never received a Hugo nomination. Nebulas are awarded by fellow writers and Hugos are awarded by popular vote. The story follows a detective/history story around events of a 200-year old interstellar war between humans and telepathic aliens. I found this one profoundly boring. Even when actually interesting things happened they were written in such a way as to be dull. I may eventually give Polaris a go, but this one in no way recommends it and I felt it was the worst of McDevitt's that I've read.

Tempting Danger and Mortal Danger by Eileen Wilks, the first two books in the World of the Lupi series. This is one of those series that really blur the line between the Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy genres. The main characters (at least in these two) are Lily Yu, a human homicide detective and Rule Turner, a werewolf prince. Predictably, these two are mystically bound mates (eye-roll) which is a bit of a staple in Paranormal Romance books, but the narrative is very much police/FBI procedural which fits more into Urban Fantasy.

Either way, the world-building is interesting, with some good justification for the werewolves in this setting being how they are, and lots of depth to be explored. Wilks takes the action to a hell dimension in the second book and her take on demons and dragons is as interesting as her take on werewolves.

Not too bad, but I'm not sure if I'll bother reading the rest of them. I'm also a really turned off by the gender issues in these books. The werewolves are all male and basically irresistible to women, which is apparently a good thing for reasons that the book goes into. The werewolves are holy warriors in the service of an other dimensional goddess who makes her wishes felt through the women in the werewolves lives. So everyone gets a role - it's just that the roles are pretty much divinely ordained and split on gender lines. That sounds cut and dried, but it really isn't that simple as both Lily and her grandmother are pretty kick-ass. I just don't think that the author has thought some of this stuff through.

 

The City's Son by Tom Pollock is a superb Urban Fantasy with a very Neil Gaiman feel by way of Neverwhere. It's beautifully written, alternately between the titular demigod, the literal son of the Goddess of London Streets, and a young delinquent graffiti artist who seems to have been left or betrayed by everyone she's ever loved.

Here's a quote from the first chapter with Filius (the son of the streets) hunting the runaway spirit of a train in the London underground: 

"I hear the ghost of a steam-whistle, her mournful, obsolete battle-cry, and I hunker down low. Light starts to bleed through the mortar ahead of me, outlining two glaring, full-beam eyes. I hear the clash of her wheels, stampeding towards me on a path of lighting. The scream rises out of my throat to greet her, cursing her by all of her names: Loco Motive, Bahngeist, Railwraith—"

How could you not read this book after that? A word of warning though, this goes to some very dark places.

Currently Reading: Blood Oranges by Kathleen Tierney (pseudonym of Caitlin R. Kiernan of The Drowning Girl fame)

Midnight Blue-Light Special by Seanan McGuire

Anyone who listens to the SF Squeecast or follows Seanan McGuire on Twitter has a pretty good idea of her sense of humor. In the InCryptid books its on full display.

Midnight Blue-Light Special by Seanan Mcguire is the second book in the series following the cryptids of New York and Verity Price, a semi-professional ballroom dancer and crypto-zoologist. This one follows on neatly from the first, with Verity settling into her guardianship of the cryptid community just in time to be warned by Dominic that his bosses from the Covenant of St George are sending a delegation to commence a purge.

This is a fun book, but it's not without issues. It doesn't expand much on Discount Armageddon with mostly the same set of cryptids and characters. The Aeslin mice are brilliant (Dominic: "the God of Absolutely Never Smiling, No, Not Ever."), but a few of the gags are used multiple times in the book with much the same wording and that doesn't work as well.

This also appears to be the last Verity book (at least for a while) as she's continuing the series with a different member of the Price family. Seanan clearly loves writing in this universe as you can see from her Cryptid Field Guide complete with artwork.

Currently Reading: The City's Son by Tom Pollock

Frost Burned by Patricia Briggs

Frost Burned by Patricia Briggs is the seventh book in the Mercy Thompson series which is in a shared universe with her Alpha and Omega series (three novels and a novella). I originally got interested in this series because I came across a graphic novelization of Moon Called, the first book in the series. The art was pretty rough, but the opening scenes of the story has the main character rescuing a teenager from a couple of werewolf thugs, one of which she kills. I felt this was much like early Laurell K. Hamilton whose stuff had been the only Urban Fantasy I'd read that I really liked, so I devoured the whole series in a week or so.

Like many series in the Urban Fantasy genre, these just keep coming, even when the concept is played out. I had actually put Mercy in this category after the sixth book River Marked, but a major event in the universe that occurred in the most recent Alpha and Omega book Fair Game breathed a bit more interest into the world.

Mercy Thompson is a coyote skinwalker in a relatively typical Urban Fantasy world with werewolves, vampires, faeries etc., living alongside modern humanity. In this world the fae have been exposed to the world for some time and have an arrangement with the US government where they live on reservations. The werewolves have only recently been revealed to the general public and people still think that vampires are a myth. It's the werewolves that get the focus in both of her series. Mercy was raised by a werewolf pack (actually the werewolf pack, headed by the leader of all the werewolves in the US) and has a close relationship with a different werewolf pack and particularly with its Alpha.

That's pretty much it for a backgrounder of the series. Obviously, by book seven, things have moved on significantly. In fact, the series could have ended with a few loose ends by the end of the fifth book. The sixth covered Mercy's honeymoon, and while it did wrap up those loose ends, it moved the main characters away from the rich setting and supporting characters developed in the first five books and I felt it suffered for it.

The event that happened at the end of Fair Game shifted the politics of Mercy's world significantly and Frost Burned begins with what looks to be the US government moving to efficiently take out the werewolves in one coordinated strike. That's an interesting premise, and it may yet be taken up in the Alpha and Omega books, but there's more than the obvious at work here. I won't spoil it, but it's a nice return to the world and it's quite enjoyable. I do think the narrative focus for this world has shifted to the other series though.

Currently Reading: Every Day by David Levithan

In Other News: Today's probably the first day I've been able to stand to look at a computer screen for longer than 10-15 minutes so I should be back to posting a bit more regularly.

Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis

Charles Stross had Ian Tregillis as a guest blogger on his blog a little while back and in his introduction he compared this series strongly to his Laundry books. That's high praise in my opinion and when I read that Bitter Seeds is about an alternative World War 2 where the Germans are using people with super powers and the English have employed demon summoners to counter them, it pretty much got added to the top of my to read list.

Just as an aside, I do this a lot. Books often find there way onto my to read list at the top, including the one I'm reading at the moment. I try and counter this by not reading book after book in a series and forcing myself to read something random off the list at least once a week. That's actually how I got reading the Sara Creasy books from last week.

So Bitter Seeds is the first book in the Milkweed Triptych with the next one moving to the next era in world conflict with the Coldest War. The third book will be out later this year.

I thought this book was terrific. It presents the war with viewpoint characters on both sides. From the English you have Raybould Marsh, an SIS (WW2 MI6) operative and Will, a would-be demon summoner. On the German side you have Klaus, one of the Reich's supermen with the ability to walk through walls. His sister Gretel is a powerful precognitive and her visions guide the war down very different paths then the WW2 history most of us are familiar with. That's half the fun if you're at all familiar with the real WW2 events.

At the same time, it doesn't rosy things up at all. The tone of the first part of the book is upbeat when both sides are feeling like the war will be a short successful one, but things get dark very quickly. The methods that the Nazis use to control their pet supermen are brutal and produce people that are either broken, brutish or insane. The English are forced to pay ever more horrific prices in blood to get their demons to do what they want as well. The demons themselves are more like Stross's otherworldly super-intelligences.

Another first in a series that I'm looking forward to following.

Currently Reading: Well I was reading Frost Burned by Patricia Briggs (the new Mercy Thompson book) when I started writing this, but I've been convalescing after eye surgery so I've actually read that and another book since. I'm actually halfway through Tempting Danger by Eileen Wilks at the moment.

In Other News: The James Tiptree, Jr award was given this week and The Drowning Girl by Caitlin Kiernan was the joint winner with a short story collection by Kiini Ibura Salaam called Ancient, Ancient. Honorable mentions went to 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson and Up Against It by M. J. Locke (I guess I wasn't the only one who liked it) among others. I mention those because I've written about them in this blog before. One of the honorable mentions went to Elizabeth Bear's Range of Ghosts which is also on my to read list, so I guess I'd better bump that one up a bit.

Ironskin by Tina Connolly

So Ironskin by Tina Connolly was a nice quick read. It was already on my to read list, but I bumped it to the top with its Nebula Award nomination. I enjoyed it, and it has a very interesting take on the fey (but at the same time, a very dumb one, more on this later).

The story is set in an alternate magical England where humans coexist alongside dwarves and fey. The three races keep pretty much to themselves with dwarves (rather classically) being craftsmen and delvers under mountains and the fey being magical bodiless spirit lights who live in the forests. There was trade between the races, but things changed and the dwarves retreated and the fey went to war with the humans. Humans scarred by fey weapons became cursed and only by covering the curses with iron could the curses be contained. The war is over, but the ironskin remain.

Jane Eliot (the main character) is an ironskin with a fey curse on her face. She wears a half-mask strapped on whenever she's around others and because of it she finds it difficult to keep a job. When she sees an advertisement for a governess position for a child born during the war with special needs she assumes that the child is ironskin as well so she jumps at the opportunity. What she finds at the estate in the moors is a whole lot stranger, with the father of the little girl being a mysterious artist who is somehow taking the unattractive women of high society and giving them fey-like beauty.

I haven't read Jane Eyre which I understand this book is heavily based on, so I really have to judge it on its merits. Jane is a brilliant character; strong through the loss of her brother and parents and also from bearing her curse, but deeply sensitive as well. The little girl Dorie and her father Edward as well as the staff of the house are well-drawn characters. 

I have two big problems though. Firstly, I don't buy the relationship between Jane and Edward. Edward appreciates a governess who doesn't run screaming from his daughter, but that's about it for reasons these two would be attracted to each, particularly given that Edward is barely present in the house. Secondly, while the fey are fascinating and a very clever take on a fantasy cliche, as well as having legitimate reasons to be opposed to the humans, the author pretty much ruins the execution by having them as basically mustache-twirling villains by the end of it.

Regarding its nomination for the Nebula, I don't think it's going to get up. It's an enjoyable book with minor issues, but I don't believe it's at the level of some of the other nominees. However, I think it's also been nominated in the wrong category as it's fairly clearly a Young Adult novel and belongs in the already crowded Andre Norton award nominee list.

Finally, I was going to post a picture of the sequel, but I won't, because there's a great big spoiler for this book on the front cover, so I suggest you try and avoid that one until you've read this.

Currently Reading: Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis

In Other News: I finished Children of Scarabaeus by Sara Creasy which I probably won't review here. It's a direct continuation of the previous story and any plot outline I could give would spoil the hell out of the first book. In short, as good as the first, but wrapped up a bit too neatly. The series could end here but there's room for a sequel.

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente is the sequel to the wonderful The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. It's a few years after the events in the first book and September is now 13 and her father has gone to the war in Europe and her mother is working at a factory building airplanes.

The first chapter ends with September charging across the Nebraska prairie after a rowboat and into Fairyland, just as her mother comes out of the house in tears. These are the sort of profound images that Valente creates in her fiction which displays the issues I have with the Young Adult category. Many of the things that the author is alluding to are going to go over the heads of a YA audience and in many ways this book is more "Adult" than a book that appears on the Nebula award nominee list this year, Ironskin by Tina Connolly (yes, I've read this now, review in the works).

I also think it's criminal that this one didn't get on the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy nominee list, but I have not read anything else on that list as yet (although Seraphina by Rachel Hartman and Every Day by David Levithan are high on my to read list at the moment), so I don't really know where the benchmark sits.

This story deals with the aftermath of September losing her shadow to Fairyland-Below in the first book. Her shadow is now Halloween, the Hollow-Queen, and she's running rampant in the underworld of Fairyland, stealing the shadows of all in Fairyland-Above and their magic in the process. September meets many characters from the first book again (or their shadows at least) as well as some brilliant new ones.

It took me a while to get into the story, but I really appreciated it when I did. It explores themes around abandonment, betrayal and separation as well as reconciliation and as she says in the book, nothing is easy in Fairyland. This one (as well as the first in the series) is highly recommended.

Currently Reading: Children of Scarabaeus by Sara Creasy