fantasy

The Dollmaker by Nina Allan

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Started: 12/16/19
Finished: 12/28/19

Dolls are scary, right?  So I assumed this book would be creepy.  It’s not, although one or two parts are a little bit weird in a scary way.  It was good, but I don’t think it stuck the ending.  It’s about a man who goes on a cross-country trip to meet the woman he loves, who he has only corresponded with via letter.  Along the way, he reads a book of short stories by an author the woman is interested in, and the stories are part of this book, too.  Those are the parts that get a little creepy, and the main character and his love both think the stories parallel their own lives a little too closely.  Unfortunately, the ending doesn’t do anything with that, and I was left hanging.

Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce

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Started: 12/14/19
Finished: 12/16/19

First in a series a girl who wants to be a knight.  I would have eaten this up if I’d found it when I was 10 (it was published in 1983).  I enjoyed the first book (and I’ll keep reading), but I’m having a little bit of a hard time believing that this 10-year-old girl would talk the way she does, have the power (magical) that she does, know all these things, be able to do all this stuff, etc.  She makes it to age 14 or so by the end of the book, so hopefully her ability to master EVERYTHING will get a little easier to swallow as she gets older.

The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig

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Started: 10/9/19
Gave up: 10/12/19

 

In my calendar, I wrote that I put this book “on hold”, but who are we kidding?  I gave up.  I liked the idea of it – the protagonist is the daughter of a pirate captain who, with her help, can navigate to any place, real or imaginary, in any time, as long as the map is well-drawn and the mapmaker believed in it.  That’s a cool idea.  The issue I had was with the writing.  The author kept talking about maps, but ships use charts.  I can get ignore the use of walls instead of bulkheads and floors instead of decks and doors instead of hatches, but for some reason, despite my near-total memory loss of everything I learned in the Navy, I can’t get past saying maps instead of charts.

Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman

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Started: 9/14/19
Finished: 9/23/19

 

This is billed as a companion book to Seraphina (which I liked a lot), but it really is a sequel, and it’s just as good, if occasionally a little weirder, than the first one.  Although it is a little hard to remember that the main character is supposed to only be about 17 or 18.  She’s written older than that, I think, but as long as I didn’t focus on that, I was fine.

Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones

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Started: 8/12/19
Finished: 8/18/19

Another book that was good but one I don’t know if I liked.  It’s a coming of age story, but the framing device was a little confusing…and then I was totally engrossed in the story, and the framing device sort of starts to make sense near the end (most of the story is within the frame, so it doesn’t matter in the moment), but then the very end made NO sense to me.  The book includes an essay by the author about the themes and inspirations, and I can tell you I missed all of that. It did make everything make more sense, and I don’t mean to say that the book didn’t make sense (except for the end, which was confusing), and now I’m not making sense, so I’ll end by saying that this book could be taught in a literature course and the students would get a lot out of it.

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

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Started: 8/4/19
Finished: 8/12/19

A gender-swapped take on The Picture of Dorian Gray, but with magic (okay, like explicit magic).  And demons.  And sword-fighting!  I didn’t love it.  It was slow to start, and the two main characters were pretty annoying (they got better), and the demon plot took FOREVER to roll, and the two main characters got the same information from different sources, but the information was identical, and WE, the lucky readers, got to read about it both time, and okay, maybe I didn’t like it, either.  I mean, I didn’t hate it.  But I probably won’t read the sequel.

Cloudbound by Fran Wilde

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Started: 7/28/19
Finished: 8/3/19

Sequel to Updraft, which I enjoyed, but I have nearly put this down more than once.  It’s plenty good, and the main character is a somewhat realistic 20-year-old (which is kind of annoying, but I guess good?). The problem is that I DO want to know how this world is constructed (at the moment, my best guess is that the towers these people live on and fly between are spines on the back of an enormous turtle), but I don’t care enough about the plot to keep reading to find out.

Update: I kept reading, I DID finish it, and I’ll tell you offline what I know about how the world is constructed if you ask nicely.  Also, I don’t plan to read the third one.  These books aren’t bad, but I just don’t care that much.

If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again by Zen Cho

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Started: 7/28/19
Finished: 7/28/19

This was the very last Hugo-eligible story I read, and it took a serious run at the top of my novelette list (I landed on #2 for it, but it was close).  It’s a refreshingly NICE story, and I am moving the author’s novels higher up my to-read list.

The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington by P. Djèlí Clark

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Started: 7/28/19
Finished: 7/28/19

The style of this short story was interesting – like encyclopedia entries – and I appreciate how each of the “donors” affected George Washington, but this was both a little too weird for me (I’m shuddering at the whole teeth thing) and a little not enough.

The Thing About Ghost Stories by Naomi Kritzer

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Started: 7/27/19
Finished: 7/27/19

LOVED this novelette – the style, the voice, the story.  It’s about a woman who has just returned to her academic research after losing her mother (who she took care of for years).  It rocketed to the top of my voting list for novelette this year.

The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat by Brooke Bolander

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Started: 7/24/19
Finished: 7/25/19

I loved the voice of the narrator in this short story.  Same author as the sad elephant novella, but I would never have guessed that.  I feel like the plot is given away in the title, and I’m okay with that.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

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Started: 7/1/19
Finished: 7/8/19

I read this a LONG time ago.  Like, I think I bought it in an airport bookstore on our honeymoon in London in 2000, and I didn’t like it.  I wasn’t ready for Terry Pratchett, and it was my first experience with Neil Gaiman.  This time I was totally ready, reaching for it with both hands and a foot (the other foot was preventing a crawling Jack from reaching for the trash can), and I read as quickly as I could in an era where I’ve lost my free time.  Ridiculous, absurd, and funny.  I am ready for the TV show.

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

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Started: 6/1/19
Finished: 6/7/19

I’ve been meaning to read this one for a year, and then it got nominated for a Hugo and I got it in the voter’s packet, so yay for me!  It’s a story about monsters and monsterslayers in a post-apocalyptic US, set on a Navajo reservation, and it’s pretty great.