novella

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

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Started: 12/1/18
Finished: 12/2/18

Third in the Wayward Children series.  The first book set up the premise (which is great).  The second and third explore some of the worlds and follow some of the first book’s characters.  I still love these books, both for the ideas and the characters.  These are some real teenagers going through some real emotional issues.

The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang

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Started: 6/13/18
Finished: 6/15/18

This is silkpunk, which I believe is Asian steampunk, with some tech, some magic, a twin fated to die with the other determined to save them both.  It’s an intro to the author’s novel-length series, but I’m not in a hurry to read those.  Good, but not for me.

The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard

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Started: 4/13/18
Finished: 4/15/18

Another Holmes and Watson take, but this time the Holmes character is an unstable Vietnamese woman and Watson is a sentient spaceship.  It’s a novella, just long enough to solve one mystery, but while I liked the characters, I found the mystery (so basically, the story) a little…not hard to understand exactly, because I followed the plot, but hard to explain, maybe?  Like, I read it, but I don’t think I could describe what happened.

The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne Valente

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Started: 1/21/18
Finished: 1/23/18

There’s a trope in comics, movies, TV, books, everything, about how the hero’s love interest has to die or be raped or whatever in order to give the hero a reason to go be heroic. The love interest is an object, a plot device, not a character. The trope (and there’s a website) is called Women in Refrigerators because a particularly egregious example involved a Green Lantern comic where the girlfriend was killed and actually stuffed into a fridge for the hero to find. This novella, focused on the comics aspect, is about turning those women into characters. Pretty darn good, too.