cahn | Entries tagged with books:2026

The chances I finish this before the voting deadline (tomorrow) are zero, but I wanted to put in a plug here because I also think this is a very strong book, and the first bit taught me that we think of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as the beginning of the SF genre (and not, idk, Voltaire's Micromegas?) because Brian Aldis apparently declared by fiat that it was so. However, unfortunately for Kincaid it turns out that I do not actually want to read that many reviews of other people's writing about science fiction, even though he is a very good writer who also strikes me as very meticulous and thoughtful.

Unfortunately none of the other nominees are in epub format, so... yeah. I'm sorry for being a super lazy person but I just am, I need epub!!

I think I'm probably going to go with Vice > Renaissance > Colourfields, but am willing to entertain arguments for other rankings.

OKAY I am trying to make my way through Related Work! I did read this in record time, because I found it extremely interesting!

This is a survey of Neil Gaiman's work, with a marked emphasis on his work in comics and Sandman in particular. I found this fascinating because I read Sandman relatively recently -- 2021, as it turns out, which I guess is not all that recently -- and that's a major subject of this work. I guess I'm glad to have read Sandman, so it was good I read it then because there is no way I would have gotten through it after the whole Gaiman stuff broke. Like, it's possible (though not probable) I might still have tried, but I would have hit the first horror segment and noped right out.

Anyway, it was really interesting to read about from the viewpoint of someone who clearly loves and knows a lot about comics, because I know nothing about comics, so when she explains stuff about what artist did which parts, and what to look for in their work, and how to judge the arc as a combo of text and art, well, I just think that's really cool and I kinda wish I'd had this info when I read it.

Also, occasionally you get a line like "Blake [provided] a set of twelve illustrations for Paradise Lost... filling Hell with demons who ripple with idiosyncratically proportioned but coruscatingly homoerotic musculature," which I enjoy :D

I wondered, when I began it, how the text would deal with the Gaiman stuff that's come out since I read Sandman, and I felt like the book handled it exactly right. It's scrupulously fair (as far as I can tell) about giving fair credit to Gaiman where credit is due, for example putting a trans woman in a comic in 1991. Sandifer talks about various criticisms one may have (spoilers: the trans woman dies, Gaiman says something that sounds like she is only there "for cis people to have emotions about") and then Sandifer points out, "it cannot be forgotten that this was 1991. Gaiman may pat himself on the back for his readers' turnarounds [from being turned off by a trans woman to feeling for her], but the fact of the matter is that putting a trans woman in a comic was going to alienate a portion of the audience, and that getting that same audience to instead be outraged on Wanda's behalf was a significant accomplishment." Which I think is very fair: in the early 90's if you got a sympathetic storyline about a gay person you were doing well! (And in those days they all died, too, in my experience.) Sandifer does not, in the earlier part of the book, accuse him of anything for which there isn't evidence, and she draws a line from the boy who was inside the abusive cult of Scientology to his early work involving POV characters in messy situations...

But Sandifer is not in the slightest a Gaiman apologist; she is a chronicler and an analyst. Which means that when the text then, in a logical and measured presentation (but with definite feeling underneath), lays out what's known about the horrific man that this boy became, and the line from that man to the characters in his later work -- well, it hits rather harder, for me, than if the book had been terribly loud and emotional about it.

The only thing I quibble with is that one of the only other Gaimans I've read is The Graveyard Book, which she doesn't even name by title and is very dismissive about, and I liked it a lot! :P Also Sandifer says that she formatted it for the Hugo packet hurriedly and to expect typos, etc., and there were some, as well as a few times of rough transitions that I would presume that something that had had more editing time would have worked out.

But anyway as soon as I finished it I really wanted to read her work on Watchmen, which is probably the graphic-novel work I have the most strong feelings about but have really no insight into the graphic part of! I am trying to contain myself because I have to read more Hugo stuff! (And then Redwall for A., which may take a while... there are a lot of them...)

I feel as if Best Related Work is an embarrassment of riches this year and I'm glad I made myself go through it. I want to vote Palmer very high but this is also really good and I also want to vote this at the top!

Okay so I'm really happy that this showed up on the Hugo list, because it's the kind of book that took enough sustained effort (it took me forever!) that I probably wouldn't have read it otherwise, but it was an enjoyable experience and I'm really glad I read it. This is a book about the Renaissance (obviously) and has a lot of content about what happened and various characters (especially her favorite Machiavelli) but it's also about what the word means, what the related word "humanist" means, and by the way what it means to study history, and what it means to participate in history.

( I cannot possibly do justice to this book in this entry, so I will just meander on, as I do. )

ahhhhh I have so. many. conflicting feelings about this book. I spent the first, oh, two-thirds being actually kind of angry at it, because I could see that it was so close to being a good book and yet it didn't quite hit the mark for me... although also, though it didn't actually hit the mark it was still a book that I was snarfing through when I should have been doing Hugo reading, so it clearly still had a lot going for it. Then I spent the last third really liking it, to my surprise.

The idea is awesome. In a Magick AU of Cambridge, Alice's celebrity magick thesis advisor, Professor Grimes, dies. Alice is responsible through negligence, plus which she needs her advisor to write her recommendation letters and get her a tenure-track position, so she goes to Hell to rescue him. Her fellow student, Peter (everyone in my family felt he should have been named Bob, or at least Robert, but I suppose that would have been Too Much), comes with her at the last moment.

(I told D. about this book and his first reaction was, "The author is clearly a grad student." Of course Kuang is.)

The grad school part, and Hell as academia: this conceit was just brilliant and I loved it a lot. The execution varied, but I will say that Dis as a dissertation writing group was, I thought, completely awesome and hilarious! Magic academia is a mix in this book of kind of fun and hilarious but also kind of "but would it actually work that way?" Alice is a magician who seems to do magic based on historical research with a giant dose of philosophy. Bob -- I mean Peter -- is a magician who seems to do magic based on logic and mathematics. Like, okay, both of them sort of overlap in the philosophy realm, but it makes zero sense to me that both of them would be working with the same advisor. How does that even work? I did love that magic was bound up so much with paradoxes and what you could bring yourself to believe (and details such as that Alice could get out via the paradox of the Unexpected Hanging but Peter could not, because she could be confused by it, while he's a mathematician who knows how to resolve it so he couldn't be "fooled" by it).

I think the real issue I had with this book was one of character consistency. For example, we get this reveal about Alice a third of the way through the book that should have strongly informed everything about her characterization up to that point. I can see vague pointers to it but not the sort of strong characterization I would have expected.

Spoilers

That is to say, Grimes having cut the pentagram in Alice's skin to give her perfect recall should have meant that from the very beginning she should have had extremely acute memory and also an extremely acute sense of things that she can't forget but wishes she could. The latter is vaguely alluded to as anxiety a couple of times, but like... I literally flipped to a random page near the beginning and got this: "She did not recall any archival information about queuing to depart Asphodel -- Orpheus and all the rest seemed to just walk right into the courts --" If she has perfect memory, she shouldn't be thinking so tentatively! She should be much more confident about it! I should have had no doubt that she had a superlative memory by the time that reveal drops, and I had no idea.

The worst offender is Professor Grimes. I felt like I got whiplash because sometimes it was like he was supposed to be plausibly not terrible (while still being terrible inside), and then it would be like "haha, no, just kidding, he is the WORST" in such a way that he was like a caricature of evil thesis advisors.

Spoilers

When the pentagram thing came up, I quite liked it -- it seemed clear to me that it was a non-sexual and potentially non-gendered stand-in for sexual harassment in the way that it violates her bodily autonomy in a way that depends on very dubious consent with power dynamics -- and that would have been fascinating to explore, especially if Grimes had been painted as an interestingly flawed person in power who went too far and didn't admit it -- but then, nope, we get the actual sexual harassment / attempted rape with Alice (as well as another woman from the department), and then also for an encore he steals Peter's work, because why not, and in neither case is there any plausible deniability at all, just "yeah, this is just because I am Evil Thesis Advisor."

Alice's view of Grimes also flip-flops constantly, seemingly without any awareness either from her or any other character that it's doing so. One chapter she'll be all "I hated him, I just wanted to bring him back to life so I could torture him," and a couple of chapters later she'll be like, "I just wanted him to be proud of me." Now, I'm not saying those reactions can't coexist, clearly they can, but any individual reaction always seems to be treated in the moment like The One True Reaction. In the first two-thirds of the book, when she hates him, she never really thinks about any of her positive or conflicted feelings, and when she's feeling like she wants him to be proud of her, she isn't channeling any of the hate. And whoever she is with latches on to whatever she's thinking in that chapter, as if that's the only thing she's ever thought. Kuang clearly, in retrospect, meant for it to be more of a nuanced viewpoint rather than a flip-flop, but I definitely experienced it while reading as a flip-flop.

On Peter: I'd been spoiled for the reveal of what's going on with him, and it didn't bother me as much as I'd thought it would.

Spoilers

Peter turns out to have Crohn's disease, plus a Childhood Trauma where he hated people feeling sorry for him so he never told anyone he had Crohn's, so no one knew that's why he was disappearing for months and also he was sometimes very distant with people because of it. I didn't get the sense that he wasn't still brilliant, but it was hard for him sometimes to get anything done when he was in pain and he had to work hard to make up for it afterwards (yeah, fair), and sometimes he glossed over how hard he had to work in general (also fair, this seems to be a thing that happens).

One of the things I thought was odd about this book was how much Kuang seems not to actually care about hell, which was surprising given that, y'know, the whole conceit of the book is, well, hell. We get a long description of the first level, Pride (+), a pretty short description of the second level, Desire, we skip the third one entirely (Greed, I think), the fourth one (Wrath) gets pre-empted by a trap, fifth, sixth, and seventh (Violence, Cruelty, Tyranny) are so short (maybe a page each) that I almost missed them. I mean, it's OK with me (I always preferred Purgatory anyway), but it just seems odd.

But the last third of the book did a lot to reconcile me to everything. It turns out Kuang and the novel do not care much about the levels of Hell because it wasn't about that, it was about the people we met on the way, and also about the last Court of Hell, and facing what you fear. And Alice does, in fact, finally have both the feelings of "I want you to approve of me" and "I want to destroy you" (though even here the two reactions seem curiously divorced from each other). I still felt rather as if Grimes was a caricature of Evil Thesis Advisor. I would have preferred him to be humanly evil, though I can see why that would be hard to do in this novel, because in the end the whole point is that it's not about him, not in the slightest; it's about Alice, it's about Elspeth, about even Gradus and the Kripkes. It's about the different ways to -- I won't call it redemption, because the book doesn't deal in that sort of thing, not really -- to be human. To be more human, which may in the end turn out to be the same (thematically, at least) as emerging from Hell.

(+) One more thing: I imagine this is a niche view, and because I know this, by itself it wouldn't have sunk the book, though I do think it speaks to a certain viewpoint, but gosh this one thing irked me for the first two thirds so much. Soooo... in this AU, all the journeys to the underworld in literature are literally that, as you might imagine. And Dante, of course, is the master of journey-to-the-underworld Western literature, so he is namechecked quite a bit. And the thing is, Dante is my boy, and every time Dante came up in the first two-thirds I would kind of writhe a little.

Dante! and the last line

The circle of pride is NOT first in hell (although I did find that segment of the book, with prideful scholars, rather amusing), and it is absolutely not next to "desire," which Kuang correctly states is a quite light sin. Pride is the most fundamental terrace in Purgatory, because Pride is the most fundamental sin, the one that takes us farthest from God. Also: Dante never said heresy is the deepest circle of hell, wtf!! Dante was WAY more sophisticated than you would think from Kuang! (It's possible that this was AU!Dante, but I would absolutely have needed more to have convinced me of this.)

That being said. Once we got to the city of Dis, it was all right, because Kuang clearly put a lot of thought into Dis and what it meant, and it just lands absolutely right for me. And then, and then! the last line is, And together they emerged, to rebehold the stars. And. It turns out I am easy: if you just evoke e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle to me, if you show me that you understand that of Dante, I will forgive you all manner of sins. Which -- learning to move beyond pettiness-- I suppose is the point of both hell in the book, and the book as a whole, so... this response of mine is thematic, I suppose?

So... yeah. If I'd read this in 2025 I would have nominated it for the Hugos (and I definitely would have voted for it over Everlasting or Raven Scholar, and probably some other ones too). But I still wish that the first two-thirds had been a little... less... irritating? In any case I think I come down on really liking it, in the end, on the strength of that last third, though certainly with reservations, and a big part of me still wishes for a book that engaged with Dante in ways this book was clearly not interested in doing. (For instance, it would have been very interesting to me if pride had been a big deal, and Grimes had got caught in that, with his other sins really being unmasked as sins of pride. And Alice too! But anyway!)

I read this a while ago (and even wrote the vast majority of this up a while ago) but am just getting around to posting it. This book is about a "tradwife" influencer (heh, my fingers automatically type "tradewife," that's interesting, yes I don't know what a tradewife would be but that sounds super cool, I would actually like to read all the books about tradewives please), Natalie Heller Mills, who has a gorgeous, highly curated life on Yesteryear Ranch with her handsome husband Caleb and homeschooled five children. (This is not really a spoiler as we find this out in the first couple of pages, but this highly curated life turns out to be propped up by a LOT of external help, like nannies (yes, plural).) One day, she wakes up in a more gritty, primitive version of her tradwife life, with a man who is vaguely reminiscent of her husband (and who is also named Caleb) and different (though somewhat similar) kids. The book pursues both tracks via flashbacks: in the "flashback" timeline, we see how Natalie came to become a tradwife influencer in the first place, and in the "present" timeline, we see Natalie trying to deal with living in a more primitive time and trying to figure out wtf is going on.

rachelmanija advised me to read this book and I mentioned that I tend to have a hard time with books where the awful protagonist gets her comeuppance. I never finished, say, Yellowface, because of this reason. (I like books where the awful antagonist gets her comeuppance! It's the awful protagonist that bothers me. I think Yellowface made me sympathetic enough to the protagonist that it set off my humiliation squick.) And Natalie is awful! But somehow Burke manages to walk the tightrope, for me:

On one hand, I find her sympathetic enough that I was willing to read a whole book about her. The flashbacks do a lot to explain how she ended up the way she did, and you can see that she has a lot of internal problems. And Natalie herself, while she has awful takes on things, actually does see some things in a way that's maybe not correct but where there is in fact some perceptiveness. There were several times where I chatted Rachel and was like, "so, actually... I know she is awful and she's going too far here but she does kind of have a point about this" and/or "okay, this is funny." Oh, here's one: "The truth is that whoring yourself out can take you pretty far, if you do it with intention. Look at Mary Magdalene. Now there is a woman who understood the assignment." (I thought this was hilarious, okay?)

And on the other hand, Natalie is super awful enough that I was totally okay with her getting her comeuppance. She is occasionally perceptive but she is also sometimes mistaken about some things and even more than that, she lies to everyone around her and, mostly, herself, about everything.

Anyway, that's a really hard balance to keep going through a whole book, but it worked for me. I think it helped that we know at least some of what that comeuppance is from the very first chapter, and we're reading the book to find out how they all got there. I think the other thing that helped is that this is clearly and intentionally coded as a trashy revenge novel, only where the revenge is on the protagonist. (I had a very interesting talk with someone who hated the book because they kept wanting it to be deeper than it was, and while I can see where they're coming from, I had no trouble with that at all because it is so very clearly coded as trashy-revenge to me that I didn't expect it to be particularly deep.)

The climactic confrontation scene is -- I also chatted this to Rachel -- the most satisfying confrontation scene I've read in a long time. Maybe ever. I expect a lot of this has to do with having to have lived in Natalie's head for almost an entire book and feeling sorry for all the people around her -- some of whom are equally as bad, but some of whom, especially her kids, don't deserve any of this -- and feeling like she really did need to be confronted, and the confrontation actually having some compassion mixed in with the smackdown.

I will say, Natalie is in theory a conservative Christian but this is not what I would call an accurate replication of a conservative Christian in the details, and if you're looking for that you will be disappointed. Hilariously, there is a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints-coded line in the middle: "Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith," which is a very famous line in my church (Hi there Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf!) and as far as I can tell nowhere else at all. Natalie isn't LDS and neither is Burke, but I know a lot of tradwife influencers are, and it sounds like Burke has been listening to a lot of them... Some people don't like how it was all mixed together. I didn't mind, because it was more about the feel of it to me than the details.

I also read some reviews of how Natalie didn't even believe a lot of what she was saying, or was cynical about it. This for me was a plus rather than a minus because my mom is actually exactly like this; she does all the things that she's supposed to do societally and religiously and all that, but she's pretty hard-edged practical and really to a large degree cynical about it all.

Every few chapters I would chat my plot theories to Rachel. I was... confused.

Spoilers:

Holy crap, I had a lot of theories (mainly time travel) but I did NOT guess AT ALL that they were just hanging out in a more primitive version of their tradwife lives fifteen years later, and that Old Caleb was just... older Caleb. And also I laughed so hard that they weren't even self-sufficient, Caleb was just picking up food from his kids!

I loved loved that Mary and the other kids got to ESCAPE. Natalie says, when they leave Yesteryear, "Mary will never be normal. All our children will suffer, but it is Mary, I think, who will suffer the most." I was so relieved that this was just Natalie lying to herself again -- that the last word came from Mary and she'd managed to be all right in the end, and actually so much all right that she could have a little compassion for her horrible awful mother.

Really quite impressive that this is a first novel -- everything seems to just slot into place so well.

I am honestly a little hesitant to recommend this book because it really does feel very trashy, but at the same time it was also extremely entertaining, at least for me. I think both of these qualities are evident from the summary I wrote above -- and as I said earlier, I think the trashiness is incredibly intended -- it's exactly that vein that Burke is tapping into. So, like. If this review sounds like something you would like, you probably would like it, and if it doesn't, you probably wouldn't. :)

I also tried reading Trad Wife (Schaefer) but I gave up kind of early on. I did skim the last, idk, third, and it seemed like it was doing pretty much what I expected. There I think the husband is too awful... I mostly just wanted her to divorce him.

(part 1 is here)

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom) - cozy-feeling novella about robots making a noodle restaurant work in a post-apocalyptic-feeling California still dealing from the fallout of its war with the US. This was by far my least favorite of the novellas, even though I often really like books about robots. I think though that a big part of what I like about robot books is that robots are not humans, and honestly all of these robots seemed pretty much indistinguishable from humans to me. At this point I'd rather have had a novella about humans putting together a noodle restaurant.

Cinder House by Freya Marske (Tordotcom; Tor UK) - Cinderella (Ella) is a ghost connected to her house after being murdered by her stepmother. I was actually a little mad at myself for liking this one as much as I did, because I read it right after The Summer War, and Cinder House doesn't have the themes as strongly as Summer War of how everyone is multifaceted and no one is really a villain of their own story, and how even people who have hurt each other can figure out how to love each other after all. (The evil stepmother and evil stepsisters are pretty much just evil.) But I just loved Ella, and how she grows into herself, and I absolutely adored her relationships with the other people in the novella (who aren't her stepmother/stepsisters). I really loved the prince and princess. Probably my second favorite of the novellas.

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom; Arcadia UK) - A fairy-tale novella that is a retelling of "The Bonny Swans" with a much nicer sister relationship. This was pleasant to read and I liked the sister relationship. I honestly don't have a lot to say about it, though -- I don't have strong feelings about it either way. There's nothing about it that really stands out to me.

I think I'm actually committed to a ranking!
Summer > Cinder > Murder > River > Stalks > Noodle

Zelunjo Onyenezi-Onyedele (Zelu) is a (Nigerian-American, parapalegic) writer who hasn't had much luck with getting her first litfic book published. She throws caution to the wind and writes a post-apocalyptic SF novel about dueling robots, Rusting Robots, that becomes a runaway best-seller, and then starts having to deal with that fame, while she also deals with her loving and sometimes stifling family, as well as the rest of her life. Meanwhile, all of this is happening against the backdrop of a near future where robotic exoskeletons have started to become possible and space travel is opening up...

So yeah, some of these thoughts are in reaction to discussing with

ase --

I liked the near-future and (except for one thing in the spoiler section) thought it was quite well done -- a reasonable extrapolation, compelling, and also getting that sort of "hey the future is cool!" feel while still showing some of the underside as well.

I thought the chapters about Zelu were compelling and I enjoyed them, although I will say that I think I am no longer interested in character arcs involving adult children who struggle with their (especially immigrant) families not taking them seriously. Like. If I want that I can just pick up the phone, you know? (The last conversation I had with my mom before writing this paragraph, literally, went like this: "You're going on [trip], right?" "Yes--" "Did you remember to get a hotel??" "...yes." "Did you remember to get a rental car??" "...yes." It's nice that my mom is concerned about me, but I've in fact been traveling without my parents for more than a quarter century now...)

I also felt like Zelu, while a reasonably compelling character that held my interest for a book, is not actually a protagonist that I like all that much (and for this reason I probably wouldn't have finished the book if it hadn't been for Hugo voting). She may have reasons to be whiny but she is whiny; she makes questionable decisions; one of her questionable decisions that she makes multiple times is that she repeatedly does not tell people she loves about decisions she's making that will be things they will want to know. Now, I see why -- I've been known not to tell my parents things because I know they'll flip out (and those things aren't always bad things, even!) and I have my own quirks left over from that -- but Zelu does seem to take this to extremes. I got the sense of her as a somewhat selfish person who has to work pretty hard (and often doesn't) to overcome her selfish tendencies.

The Rusting Robots chapters bothered me; I found them hard to get through (though they got easier as the book went on) and I kept getting thrown out of the book by not being able to imagine at all how Rusting Robots was a best-seller. (I admit that these chapters were sufficiently non-compelling to me that I didn't really think too much about how they might or might not hold together, so I can't speak to that.)

Then the last chapter happened, which retroactively made me like everything better! ( Spoilers. )

Okay, so (especially if you don't read the spoilers, which I would recommend not reading if you're actually going to read the book) this sounds like I'm saying negative things and actually I think I liked it least of the books on the ballot, but at the same time I actually think it's going on the top of my Hugo ballot. It's the one book on the ballot that I feel like really embodies the kinds of things I want to see in a Hugo winner -- complex and interesting near-future-worldbuilding combined with characters who feel like real people, frustrating though real people may be. And the things that didn't gel with me are exactly that -- not things I thought were bad about it, but things that didn't gel with me personally.

This is a very interesting ballot. I think Drop of Corruption is probably the most technically perfect writing, and has a lot of interesting things about it, though in some sense is playing everything rather straight; Incandescent has a flawed ending but I adore it the most of all the nominees and feel like it's doing good and interesting things within the magical-school framework; Everlasting is perhaps the most compelling to read but the weakest as a book; Raven is doing some interesting things (inside of an epic fantasy outline that is even more bog-standard than any other nominee), but is significantly weaker than the other nominees I've read in terms of craft. And then Death of the Author, which has the prose and the big ideas and an interesting ending and a protagonist I don't vibe with... and then there's Shroud by Tchaikovsky, which I haven't read. It is on my shelf looking at me. Maybe I will. It doesn't look THAT long and the print is large.

Anyway, so far I think my ranking is pretty firm at
Author > Incandescent > Drop > Raven > Everlasting.

3+/5. The Emperors of Orrun have been chosen for hundreds of years by a multi-part contest between candidates from the different ~~Houses~~ factions of the Empire: Raven, Fox, Tiger, Ox, Bear, Monkey, Hound, and Dragon. It is now time to pick a new Emperor, and ~~this AU Triwizard tournament, as isis put it in her review and now I can't unsee it~~ these Trials are about to begin again. Neema Kraa, the emperor's brilliant and socially awkward Raven High Scholar, who obtained her position from an act in her past that causes everyone else to look at her askance, is drawn in to the Trials in a way that she didn't expect.

Before I start going on, a couple of things: The first thing you should know about this book -- and fortunately I did look this up halfway through -- is that it is the first book of a trilogy, and though it comes to a coherent conclusion, it's sort of like saying The Empire Strikes Back comes to a coherent conclusion.The second thing I should say: I was "spoiled" for this before I read it and it was a good thing -- the prologue of this book (which is very very long) is not an accurate representation of what the rest of the book is about (see the first paragraph). (I have my doubts as to whether the prologue should even be there -- I see why the author felt it should be, but it just feels like there might have been better ways.) Okay, onward!

This was a very interesting book to read after The Everlasting, because although it's not a perfect book, it's a book and not a fanfic, and I ended up liking it much better than Everlasting as both a book and as a Hugo candidate (and probably ended up liking it much better in general than I might have otherwise, in fact). There's a ton of worldbuilding, a ton of characters -- the world feels much more lived-in -- and a ton of plot, and it was rather a relief after dealing with ersatz worldbuilding and only three characters.

The thing I do find that it shares with Everlasting is its compelling nature. After the prologue (which did drag for me), I always wanted to know what happened next, and I never thought "gosh this is going on too long," even though it's a long book. Then again, I am an absolute sucker for the whole Triwizard-ish setup of "the candidates have tests, the tests say something about them, plus which there's external weirdness going on that they have to navigate" (see also: Gideon the Ninth) so, I mean, I was never going to really get tired of that. But also there's enough plot, and even though the prose is a bit odd (see later) it is compelling, which counts for a lot, for me.

One aspect of it that becomes more and more important as the book goes on has to do with the anthropomorphic-animal factions of the Empire, which are also worshipped as gods. There was a bit in the middle where I was kind of unsure about the integration, but I was mostly convinced of it by the end. Though I do sort of roll my eyes a bit at books like this one where half the characters are atheist, and then oh, hey, it turns out that the gods have a long-standing history of involving themselves in the world. Yeah, actually, I think the culture of the world would be different in that case, especially considering it took thousands of years for our not-so-god-involved world to get to the point where large numbers of people were atheist! People would still have religious issues in such a world, they'd just be different -- are the gods actually good? do we have free will? what does that even mean? etc. -- it's one of the reasons I really like Bujold's Chalion books -- anyway...

I mentioned it's not perfect. It's really actually quite flawed in a number of ways. First, it's a long book, and there are parts that just aren't consistent in terms of characterization, etc. For example, there's a passage where Neema ruminates on how the emperor is the only person she trusts without question, and I'm all, "wait, you mean the guy who literally condemned you to death a few chapters back? That guy?" (I do wonder whether I should blame this on the author or the editor -- seems like a lot of this kind of thing should have been caught during edit.) Gaida Rack, the Galinda-type figure, is also very weirdly characterized; half the time as "everyone loves her," and the other half of the time as "she's so mean that everyone should hate her," and I am still not quite sure what was going on with her. These kinds of things sound nitpicky but are actually really important for a book such as this that lives or dies on its plot and characterization-as-plot (which is a big part of it). There's a major plot element I'll talk about in the spoiler section that doesn't land like it could have because of it.

Neema, the main character, is written rather oddly to my eye; she's self-aware enough to sometimes realize she's not doing things in the way calculated to win friends and influence people, and she also has been in the Emperor's court long enough to analyze a lot of the social games that are being played, but at the same time she is all angsty that people don't take her seriously because she's not playing the court social games at all... which is an odd combination. (And sometimes I wanted to just shake her; look, if you're making the choice not to play the game, then fine, but own it, don't just sit around unhappily angsting about it, you have been around court long enough that you demonstrably know what's going on!) Also I was shocked to realize, after reading reviews of the book, that she's in her 30s; the whole time I was reading (since chronology is not my strong point) I thought she was in her early 20s, in the way of being very un-self-aware and very angsty but also the way that she's so concerned with fitting in, at the same time as she's clearly not fitting in at all. (Saffy, in The Incandescent, is maybe a decade older, I think? but is a much much more realistic character in my opinion, in the sense that she both understands and plays the game sometimes, and sometimes doesn't do either, and also has kind of dispensed with worrying about fitting in and has mostly accepted that sometimes she does and sometimes she's just going to be unhappy about not.)

The tone is also weirdly inconsistent. Sometimes you have, you know, standard Epic Fantasy tone. Other times you get stuff like this: Cain had to admit, she looked hot. They both did. Rivenna was like an evil butterfly and Ruko was like a big, sexy wardrobe that might kill you, and these were both very much Cain's type. Cain had a lot of types. Maybe it's just because I grew up reading 80s-90s epic fantasy, but I'm weirded out by this kind of tone! (Also, I always am annoyed by fantasy books where everyone speaks English and uses Arabic numerals and an English-introduced symbol for infinity: did you worldbuild in such a way that any of this makes any sense? No you did not!)

( Book-destroying spoilers )

This review makes it sound like I didn't like it, and I did! I think it's the kind of book that is super entertaining but it's very interesting to discuss its flaws (whereas for The Everlasting I found it more interesting to discuss why it was compelling). I think it's sufficiently flawed that I don't want it to win the Hugos, but I enjoyed it enough that I will definitely read the sequel if it pops up on Hugo lists next year, and I am also interested in voting for Hodgson for the Astounding award, because I think it's ambitiously flawed. Ack, this means I need to read the Astounding part of the packet now. We'll see if I get around to that.

So, more Hugo reading! So I just finished The Everlasting and I have Feelings and I have to talk about it. In fact, I unexpectedly had so many feelings that I then made the mistake of telling D about it. And you will all just have to suffer with me --

D: Is it about gobstoppers?
Me: No! It is not about gobstoppers!

-- the thing is, I had not been expecting all that much from it, having had previous experience not-intensely-negative-but-not-particularly-positive with Harrow Hugo reading, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the first quarter of the book more compelling than I'd thought it would be. Though I did have this sort of constant low-level irritation during that first quarter because -- well. It takes place as a secondary-world fantasy, taking place in a kingdom called Dominion, that's concerned with two time periods: what I have been calling the "modern era," which is a post-industrial, vaguely early-twentieth-century-feeling sort of place where the best and bravest young men are sent off to fight wars, remembering their semi-mythical founding myth... and the second time period is that distant 1000-year semi-mythical "past era," where there is a semi-mythical queen and her best-beloved knight, Sir Una the Everlasting, whose tragic death is instrumental in constructing the founding myth of the country.

And the thing is, it's probably not 100% obvious from that one-sentence description, but the "modern" era is extremely evocative of WWI-ish Britain what with the young men going off to war and coming back with shell shock and everyone keeping a stiff upper lip about it (except the protesters) and so on, and the "past" era is extremely evocative of Arthurian mythology, what with the once and future queen and the knights she gathers around her and the green hill and the sword in the ~~stone~~ tree that can only be unsheathed by the right person (although it's Una and not the queen who does it), and lots of mentions of a Savior (religion, though, is otherwise completely ignored except when it's useful for resonance), and so on --

D: Are there coconuts?
Me: No! There are no coconuts!

And it just so happens that I have an absolute crapton of feelings about Arthurian mythology (over many decades at this point) and also a whole lot of feelings about WWI Britain (many of which are rather more recent, but even if it weren't for recent media consumption, would have had some feelings about it from general cultural literacy and other media) and it was very clear that Harrow was cheerfully just using all that to make me have feelings about her characters/world, and I was rather annoyed about this because it felt to me like she got to exploit all the resonances without actually having to do any work to, well, actually think hard about the historical/mythical parallels she was exploiting, and also annoyed because, of course, it worked, because I do have quite a few feelings about all these things.

D: Is there a holy grail?
Me: ...yes. Yes, there is a holy grail. There actually is.
D, unfortunately now encouraged: Is there a holy hand grenade?
Me: NO! There is no holy hand grenade!!
D, a little later: Well, is there a Black Knight?
Me: ...kind of.

ANYWAY. The book starts out being narrated by Owen, who is an idealistic, nationalistic, conflicted young man, back from the wars and trying to make his way as a historian. He's also obsessed with Sir Una Everlasting and her story ~~in not all that different a way than the way I was obsessed with all things Arthurian as a kid/adolescent, though rather more shippily~~. So due to plot reasons, Owen goes back in time to meet Una herself, and is with her on her last quest to find the holy grail (no really) and then goes back with her to what he knows will be her death; his role is to be the one who chronicles her quest and her death.

Me: See, the idea is that he's kind of a Malory figure --
...wait. His last name is literally Mallory. GAH.
D: *laughs at me*

Then I got past the first quarter mark, and it abruptly got both quite a bit more compelling to me -- so I didn't mind the above appropriation nearly as much (plus, by that time it had done its work), and also I started feeling very baffled by exactly how much it was giving off increasing vibes of being a really compelling shipfic. The thing is. I've actually spent quite a bit more time than usual in the last couple of months reading and thinking about fanfic, especially shipfic, for Reasons, and in particular thinking about what I seek out when I seek out fanfic, and what I want to see in a fanfic, and how to create the effects of a shippy fic I would like, and... this book is doing... a LOT of that.

For one thing, it's just piling on tropes on top of tropes (weak geeky man with strong tough woman, mutual pining, competence kink, loyalty kink, fealty kink, road trip, pulling back from betrayal, not pulling back from betrayal, hurt/comfort of course, lack of sleep, protection, nightmare comforting, bathing together, the list goes on, at one point there's even freaking Must Huddle Together For Warmth). And it's deeply satisfying to me because these are all tropes I eat up with a spoon.

And the ship is really very much a fanfic kind of ship, where we sort of assume we're starting out with UST between the two main characters and just building from there. (There are a couple of in-universe reasons for this, starting (but not finishing) with Owen's lifelong obsession with Una, but, like. The vibe!!) And over-the-top UST that goes on for quite a while is something that I am just really really fond of for shippy tropey fics. (Look, my fandom genesis included The X-Files, okay?)

Me: So by the 50 percent mark I was feeling kind of desperate for them to just have sex already.
D: ...uh, okay.

-- and the whole thing was doing this very fic thing of really just being there for the tropes and resonances. Worldbuilding, yeah, fine, great, as long as it reinforces the tropes! And yeah, this was sort of one thing about this book: I was never entirely convinced, I think, that the world existed outside of where the characters happened to be at the time... partially because it had borrowed so much from our world. (There was a bit more unique-worldbuilding near the end, as there sort of had to be.) But it didn't really matter... because you don't really read fic for the worldbuilding, right?

Character development, sure! As long as it reinforces the tropes, which means a lot of dwelling on the three main characters. I do think it's a natural tendency, mind you, especially in a shipfic, to really limit the number of people who have major roles in the fic, because each successive character means more interaction and more inner life that has to be constructed, and anyway you mostly just care about the ship and maybe the antagonist, sure. But I'm kind of amazed that Harrow wrote a whole novel in which there are three actual characters. And there are three more characters who do get screen time and whom I love very very much (Owen's dad -- does he even ever get a name??; Owen's long-suffering thesis advisor; Ancel -- the three of them are probably my favorite characters, in fact) but they do seem to me to have this aura of being taken a little for granted.

It also sort of reminded me of, you know, how you get these >100k fics in a fandom where it's really basically doing the same thing multiple times, or playing with the same fandom dynamic multiple times and stretching it out in ways that it didn't necessarily really have to, and the readers love it, because that's what we're here for. Right up to doing basically the same scene from two different POVs. (Again, there is an in-universe reason, but... very fic vibes, is all I'm saying!)

I believe this explains why I've been seeing such differing opinions of the book on my DW list -- because if you really like the particular tropes Harrow is piling on, you're probably going to be deeply satisfied by it regardless of whether you might have other issues (me, this is me), and if those tropes don't do much for you you're going to be like "what was even the point of that?" and if you like the tropes just fine but aren't particularly into them, the issues might bother you more.

( spoilers! )

Anyway. In conclusion, if you like a particular kind of tropey fic, then I think you will really love this book! (And if you don't, you will probably find it way too long and over-the-top.) Also it has more things to say about nationalism and national myths and fate and heroism and so on than I have really talked about here! I am just here for talking about shipfic, I guess.

D: I still think it should have been about gobstoppers.
Me: NO it should not have been about gobstoppers!!

look at me gooooooo (I have more, but I will probably not continue to be this fast, we'll see)

- 10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days by Samantha Mills (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 63) - I mean, I thought this was nice and I don't regret reading it, but I think I like a little more plot to my stories? It's... basically what the title says.

- "In My Country" by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld, Issue 223) - Hm. I thought this story, set in a fictional and somewhat allegorical-sounding country, was trying to do something interesting with the ambiguity of stories, but I think it would have benefitted from... being less allegorical and more ambiguous, perhaps? Like, I think part of the power of the ambiguity of stories comes from the part where people are real and also ambiguous, and that didn't quite come through so much for me here. But I thought it was interesting, anyway.

- Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything”] by Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots, May 16, 2025) - One-note amusing disabled-superhero story with a Point. It was fun!

- “Missing Helen”( by Tia Tashiro (Clarkesworld, Issue 226) - This one I really liked. It asks interesting questions about clones from the human standpoint: what would it be like to know you had a clone out there, what would it be like for the clone, what would it be like for someone who knew the original you? How does that play into human relationships?

- “Six People to Revise You”( by J.R. Dawson (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 62) - okay, so, the conceit of the story -- you can be "revised," which I guess overhauls your whole personality, and the data for doing this comes from asking people around you -- is rather interesting. The story itself didn't engage with the things I wanted it to. Why do you have to ask other people how they would revise you? What does it mean to overhaul your personality, is what makes you you still there? And what does it mean to feel about yourself that you would want to be revised? (Would I want to be revised? The devil is in the details, of course. I could imagine details where I'd jump at the chance, and other details where I'd definitely not want to.) So, yeah, very interesting concept and I wish it had played more with the ambiguities inherent in it; the story clearly feels a certain unambiguous way about it which made it not very interesting to me. As a paired read with "Missing Helen," I thought "Helen" did a much better job of engaging with the humanity in its premise.

- “Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld, Issue 229) - This is the only one of the six I read before nominations, and I didn't like it enough to read it again sooooo these thoughts are a few months old and my memory is terrible. But my recollection is that it was sort of an interesting comment on AI (I must confess that LLMs have gotten to the point as of now, June 2026, where I do have to constantly remind myself it's an algorithm even though I know very well it is... I wonder what it will be like for the people who are kids right now, growing up with AI that sound like people) with an ending that had a bit too much shock value to it.

Helen >> Wire Mother > Revise > Country > Visions > Laser, I guess? idek. Everything under Wire Mother I'm sort of ambivalent about.

Hey, I am reading Hugos stuff! I am behind on posting, though. Have the novelettes!
I must confess I was not particularly taken by any of these, but it may also be that I read them mostly while traveling and probably at least slightly grumpy :)

- “Kaiju Agonistes” by Scott Lynch (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 62) - this was the one that took me longest to read. I think... this could have been a lot fewer words. Basically, this is satire-esque AU Cold War with kaijus. It was fun, when I finally got through it, if a bit in-your-face.

- “Never Eaten Vegetables”( by tH.H. Pak (Clarkesworld, Issue 220) - Story about a ship carrying embryos that abruptly finds it has to parent a number of them. I think somehow I was the wrong audience for this story and I don't quite feel like I can articulate why? [ETA 6-1: oh wow. See discussion below. This story clearly hit me in a very particular way that I couldn't handle, and I'm retroactively feeling like it's a much stronger story than I could consciously give it credit for when I read it.] I felt like it was very "corporations are bad! They are the bad guys! Have we mentioned this??" and also was trying to get me to feel things via parenting, but I never really did because the parenting didn't feel real to me, and I was not very surprised to find the author is not themself a parent. idk. I think for some reason, that may not really have been the writer's fault, I never quite gelled with the characters enough, even though sentient ships and things like that are usually my jam.

- “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” by Martha Wells (Reactor, July 10, 2025) - Martha Wells, like several other authors on this list, is very hit or miss for me, and this one was a miss. I was vaguely aware that this takes place as sort of a Murderbot-adjacent story, but it turns out that Murderbot itself is the draw for me; I couldn't really make myself care that much about the people or the ship, for some reason -- perhaps because I didn't remember enough about Murderbot, I didn't really get why I should care.

- “The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For”( by Cameron Reed (Reactor, April 2, 2025) - This story just kind of confused me. It started out life as a Cyteen-esque story about genetics and environment and its intersection with a corporate sort of mentality (which was fine, although I think I'd rather just go read Cyteen again) and then veered somewhat sharply into

I guess this is a spoiler

a desperate flight narrative where they have to run for their lives from a rival corporation who has demolished the one they were working for

. I felt like the sharp change made the story a bit incoherent to me? I guess it's trying to say something about different bodies, but I never quite caught up to the plot shift to get to the point where I was engaging thematically, I guess?

- "The Millay Illusion” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 67) -- so I feel like Pinsker can be very "is this story meant for you or not" but this story about two girls in a traveling show together, one of whom is a mentalist and the other of whom is an illusionist, was very much meant for me. It's not a story that has well-defined answers, but that's kind of the point (and perhaps now I know to expect that from a Pinsker story so I don't get blindsided by it any more), and I really enjoyed the relationship between the two girls and all the unspoken depths of it (which although complex is not written as explicitly romantic, which I highly approve of and I want more stories with complex friendship that isn't explicitly romantic yes please thanks!).

- “When He Calls Your Name” by Catherynne M. Valente (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 65) - I always sort of brace myself when I see Valente's name, but for this piece about a vampire/succubus in rural America (which apparently is a Dolly Parton songfic?), she actually toned down her trademark over-the-top-ness enough that I actually liked it?? I did feel like it didn't quite draw the characters vividly enough that the end scene really felt earned -- and what's wrong with people who make the best of their circumstances anyway?? The way the story kind of denigrated that didn't sit well with me, as someone who tends to want to complain about my circumstances rather than make the best of them (and who very much admires people who do the latter).

Gosh, I don't know how I'd vote on this?? Probably something like this:

Millay > Kaiju > When He Calls > My Mother Is Leaving > Vegetables > Rapport > No Award, I guess?
6-1: I think I'm moving Vegetables up. Millay > Kaiju > Vegetables, I think? I feel like I should move the Millay down but I still like it better than the others...

Hi happy somewhat delayed Hugo season!

I have been flirting with the novels but I guess my attention span these days is novella-sized, so that's all I've managed to get through so far.

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite (Tordotcom) - On a starship where the inhabitants manage the long travel by recording their minds and swapping out bodies, a detective wakes up in another body and must investigate a murder, not just of a body but also of minds... I liked it! It wasn't super deep, and I was a bit side-eying the nod towards a potential ship at the end given what we know, but there was a lot of fun worldbuilding and yarn (knitting is both a character point and a minor plot point). I loved Ruthie and John, my faves.

The Summer War by Naomi Novik (Del Rey US; Del Rey UK) - A fairy tale where Celia, the youngest of the Grand Duke Veris' three children, deals with the aftermath of the summer war with the magical faerie-like summerlings and the fallout in her own family while navigating her own heritage.

I really really liked this one, actually. I just think Novik matches up very well with what I want, thematically, and of course her writing is great. There was one character I was like, well, this is obviously the most interesting character, and was pleased that the author was not uninterested.

Spoilers!

I am of course talking about Veris here. From Argent's POV he seems like a run-of-the-mill homophobe, but even though Celia kind of thinks so too, she also sees that he actually doesn't particularly care about the gay thing, he just cares very very much about having to be very very careful as he has had to be his whole life (in other ways). So I really liked that characterization which I thought was quite interesting (much more interesting than if he had just been a regular homophobe), and I loved that he came back at the end and was able to redeem himself a bit. And then of course the recurring theme of "let's save everyone, not just the people we love," which I always adore, and also I absolutely positively adored how the whole family figured themselves out and came together. I am SUCH a sucker for that. I really loved how Novik had such empathy for each one of them, and understood that sometimes people can be jerks (and in fact each of them behaves badly at one point or another) but it doesn't mean that's the entirety of their character.

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (Nightfire; Titan UK) - I always like Kingfisher's writing but I think I can get a tiny bit tired of it? So I read the first of these, What Moves the Dead, a couple of years ago and enjoyed it a lot but then didn't feel like I needed to read any more in this series. Then I read this one and I enjoyed it but felt like I'd already kind of read it? Alex Easton, the narrator of these books, is a sworn soldier (with ka/kan pronouns) in the fictional country of Gallacia. Ka helps investigate odd horror-ish events... so, yeah, that was the plot of both of them. This one is set in the US. I guess the difference is that

Spoilers for both books

in the first book they destroyed the fungus, and in this book, they saved the organism, yay! In both books it was very clear that Kingfisher's sympathy was with the non-human character, so it was nice for it to end well for it here.

5/5. I am having SO many feelings about this book that I am not sure I can actually articulate them all. But also I am very aware that my feelings are entangled partially in, uh, currently being obsessed with a fanon ship that maps super easily on to this one, so you know, as usual, I am not to be trusted about my feelings and I'm very willing to believe that it might not hit quite right if one doesn't happen to be exactly in that situation? Anyway... it's about these two eighteen-year-old boys who start the book at boarding school together in 1914. Sidney Ellwood is half-Jewish, social, charismatic, demonstrative, loves and writes poetry. Henry Gaunt is half-German, intense, introverted, anxious, loves ancient Greek. (...I also have Feelings about characters who quote poetry. And, as it turns out, ancient Greek.) The two of them have strong and more-or-less repressed feelings for each other. (Gaunt's feelings are particularly repressed.)

But. It being 1914, it rapidly starts being about something else than boarding school.

I should probably also mention a huge, extremely gigantic content note for trench warfare and historical levels of wounds and death.

( no spoilers, perhaps mild meta-spoilers, but at least I am more-or-less coherent )

Major spoilers, starts reasonably coherent but rapidly devolves into word-vomiting

I was so sure that one or both of Elly and Gaunt would die because it struck me as That Kind of heartbreaking book plus which I guess I've been socialized to understand that Teh Gays Always Die (and Carruthers and Sandys died so early on!! :( :( ), and I really REALLY wanted them to have a happy ending, I can't actually think of the last time I've wanted that so much for a couple, and when they got together I felt like, okay, at least they got one happy time before one of them died! All I wanted was for someone somewhere to get some happiness in the end.

The only thing that surprised me was that Gaunt died when the book was only half over. (BURGOYNE.) I was sure then that the next half would be Ellwood writing poetry about him, like Tennyson, or like Sassoon. I was SO surprised when he turned out to have survived! And then my reaction was that the book was now going to find new and exciting ways to break me (true, but not in the way I thought), and I spent most of the second half of the book worried Gaunt would die in some other way, and expressed that I was never going to forgive Winn if Gaunt died, or Ellwood did, without Ellwood finding out that Gaunt was still alive.

I absolutely absolutely adored Hayes and his friendship with Gaunt and his more prickly friendship with Ellwood and the contrast between him and the public schoolboys (who always get promoted over him, the poor guy), and him looking after Ellwood (both physically and e.g. warning him away from Watts) even though he thought Ellwood was looking down on him. I was also convinced he was going to die because I loved him so much (I actually said that I thought he would make it to the end of the war and then die, just to spite me. I actually said this!) And he didn't die but he ended up with BOTH LEGS (or at least 1 1/2) gone! I was like. Winn. Could you not have left him ONE leg?! COME ON. I would rather Gaunt or Ellwood had lost their legs. HAYES.

(Also Hayes panicking to Ellwood and Ellwood trying very very badly to reassure him (no wonder Hayes doesn't want to write him), then Ellwood having that exact panic after he's invalided out, omg)

I absolutely loved that Elly was into poetry and used poetry to basically articulate his emotions (I do the same kind of thing -- a lot of how I understand the world is made up of quotations from novels and poems and songs; my head has been full of Sassoon and Owen writing this post) and that moment when he declaimed Keats at Gaunt and Gaunt had to accept that he was in love with him, except that was when Gaunt knew he was going to die, auuuuugh. And also when Elly lost his poetry and then -- that little glimpse of how he might be getting it back at the end -- auuuuuugh

And also Gaunt and his ancient Greek and how sometimes he just quotes in Greek and I love it

And also I love that Winn doesn't just give us the one side, when Gaunt gets captured by the Germans it's a very stark reminder that although we've been POV English, the English aren't the only ones dying in this war and that even if it's easy for the English soldiers not to see the German soldiers as people and vice versa, they both are. And Gaunt being half-German of course knew this from the beginning, which adds another layer. This line, augh: Had it not been for his khaki uniform, no one should have known he was the enemy.

(And that shattering German POV, for just a minute.)

And also the prisoner-of-war scenes which are almost comic, we needed some of that at that point in the book, and ALSO Pritchard and Devi totally being like oh, yeah, no big deal at all about Gaunt being an "invert," and making ordinary jokes about it like they would about anything else and being totally accepting, instead of all the rejection and awfulness Gaunt's been fearing (and might have gotten from someone else), and that healing something in Gaunt so that he can face his love for Elly and actually tell him that, and be okay with it even if Ellwood can't love him back, I LOVE THIS and I know it's absolutely wish-fulfillment, but we already saw the part where Caruthers basically committed suicide so he didn't have to deal with the terrible consequences of being homosexual (augh!), so yeeeeeah I didn't need that to happen again, that was quite all right.

And then I read the bit where Maud says she's not going to marry Elly and I was cheering for her and also thinking that okay, even if everyone else's life is messed up (I still worried that Ellwood and Gaunt wouldn't find each other again, at this point) maybe Maud is the one character things will work out for, because it would be awful if she married Ellwood

AND THEN THEY DID MEET AGAIN
And they were both so damaged! Except that Gaunt, having been in the POW camp instead of fighting for a while, had recovered a bit mentally if not physically, and Ellwood was completely broken, augh. I had not thought that they would have to deal with shell shock instead of death, but of course they did

And Maud and Gaunt making up, and Maud being supportive and Gaunt apologizing (he really has been awful to her) and them speaking in Greek to each other <3

This bit: "Sometimes I think the War is harder on parents than on soldiers," said Pritchard. Gaunt could tell he was lying, but Gaunt would have lied too, if he had thought of it. And then, having learned from Pritchard, he says it to Mrs. Ellwood AUUUUUGH

(I said this before, but, now that I have the spoilers to back me up: all the little moments of kindness between characters that didn't have to happen, but did anyway, are I think what make me so hopelessly a fan of this book)

I think as we get close to the ending my thoughts just get more and more incoherent as Winn breaks my heart over and over again and I hadn't at all thought it would be because things were more-or-less going to be okay except that they can't exactly be okay but they can be as okay as possible:
Devi being ALIVE
CYRIL ROSEVEARE giving them the Brazil out!

"You don't have to give me your answer now, of course," said Roseveare. "I've already written to my uncle about you, just in case--"
He didn't finish. They both knew what he meant: in case I'm killed before I can help you.

Also: KEATS
Gaunt giving Hayes a JOB (and not a job as his freaking valet, either, not that I don't love Lord Peter but... like, let's let Hayes have a little class mobility here, that's the LEAST we can do)
"I'm not playing, either."

I mean, the rational part of my brain knows that the book is doing a few backflips to give them an ending where they can be alive and together ~~and not be Alan Turing~~ (although hi I found while writing this post that Robert Graves actually had the experience of almost dying of a lung wound and being reported dead, like Gaunt, though not because he was a pow, so it's not like she's completely making UP backflips, either) but the rest of my brain does not really care -- I think because we saw all the ways in which things could go wrong, it's a little like Carruthers and Sandys ( :(((((( ) and Aldworth and the Roseveare brothers and Lantham and -- and everyone else -- are the other stories that didn't work, that ended tragically, so in a sense my brain thinks of it like survivor bias; not everyone did die in WWI, or even most of everyone; someone had to survive; it might as well be them.
And also because they didn't survive unscathed. At all. Either physically or mentally. Which also seems -- reasonable, statistically speaking.
Also because no one should be Alan Turing (including especially Alan Turing) and I don't at all mind a universe where my characters ARE NOT (now, can I have a fix-it AU for Turing)

Physically speaking: Sassoon (who admittedly did not get his face shot off) lived until age 81 and Graves lived until age 90 after getting shot in the lung, so my headcanon is that Ellwood and Gaunt lived a very long time together :P

And then that last, awful twist of the knife. OH COME ON, the book was DONE and we were all going to live happily (or at least hopefully) EVER AFTER and now the third Roseveare brother is dead (as he dreamed back in the beginning, that was a shoe I had been bracing to drop for forever and when I finally let my guard down...). (While I was reading about WWII poets... I guess this happened to Wilfred Owen. Augh!)

And the LAST PARAGRAPH which didn't even register for me the first time -- I might not have actually read it properly then, because I was too busy trying not to throw the book across the room because Cyril was dead: Let us, like the soldiers of Waterloo, have our century of peace and prosperity, for we have paid for it in blood.

:(
Well, I'm thinking about that a lot this week.

( Here, have the Sassoon poem 'They', because it's been rattling around in my head for days now )

And I suppose reading this book, now, is: well: I think this should be required reading for anyone who tells the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

idek, I am continuing to fall so hard for the musical of Operation Mincemeat in a way that I sometimes do with theater-plus-music but haven't done for a while (I think the last time I got so fannish about something like this was Don Carlo(s) but for completely different reasons; hey, I can't really predict these things). There are clearly a lot of reasons (okay so yeah the whole hot-charismatic-women-in-suits thing is definitely still a thing), but one of them has to do with the tension between what is actually happening in the musical (a comedy/farce but with a lot of strong feelings bubbling under the surface) and what is happening on a meta level, as it's the kind of musical that cheerfully plays with semi-breaking the fourth wall whenever it feels like it, and the very nature of the way all five actors have to continually interlock and sing together in different combinations and switch from being in conflict to being in sync or vice versa gives a very strong meta vibe of teamwork/found-family.

Operation Mincemeat (Macintyre) -- so I read it! about the actual historical operation using a corpse with faked invasion plans to fool the Nazis, and it was very good and I don't feel like writing it up properly, so, here, instead, have a few totally random things that may or may not make sense:

- the part that I found most compelling was the bit about Baron Alexis von Roenne, whom I had never heard of before but who was Hitler's favorite intelligence analyst and who seems to have been quite intelligent and cautious, and also who wrote a report basically saying, "welp, so, these random invasion plans, found by our not-known-for-detail-or-for-incorruption guys, and which additionally haven't really been examined at all for, say, any kind of counter-espionage tells, contain information that is CLEARLY ALL TOTALLY TRUE." It turns out that he actually had become anti-Nazi and by 1943 "was deliberately passing information he knew to be false, directly to Hitler's desk," and although von Roenne (understandably) did not leave any actual documentation, Macintyre thinks it is very very possible that von Roenne did not believe a word of the Mincemeat faked papers... but... figured he might as well help out the British in their far-fetched plot. As far as I can tell from Macintyre, Hitler did not actually find out about the part where he was passing false information, but he was friends with the guy who tried to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, which unfortunately was enough reason for him to be executed horribly in October of that year. :(

- Macintyre mentioned that in the documentation, Glyndwr Michael, the man whose body lent itself to the Mincemeat deception of the "man who never was," ("Bill Martin") was considered a suicide by rat poison, but Macintyre postulated that it was just as possible that it was an accident, e.g. if Michael had gotten hungry enough to eat poison-laced bait. And I rather appreciate -- which I am sure is 100% intentional -- that the musical lyrics say "This homeless chap in Croydon / Accidentally ate rat poison."

- I found it absolutely hilarious that the musical scene switching between Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley partying and the seriousness of the submarine going to Spain to release the body is actually something Macintyre spells out! (They did not do a bar crawl as in the musical, but rather attended the theatre with the tickets used to flesh out Bill's cover story, with dates, one of which was Jean Leslie.) No wonder they wanted to make a musical of this!

Finding Hester (Edwards) -- I also read this, on the recommendation of

troisoiseaux and

nnozomi. This was just really sweet! And I super appreciated reading it after the Macintyre. It's a love letter to the power of internet fan groups who can Find Things Out -- here, they tracked down Hester Leggatt (who was first erroneously called Hester Leggett), the MI5 secretary who wrote Bill's love letters, and found out who she was and a lot of cool things about her life, including that she was not the embittered spinster that Macintyre portrays her as, nor the long-bereaved-fiancee that you might think from watching the musical, but someone who had a rich social life and a long-term lover (who was married, and it sounds like they may have eventually separated because he wouldn't divorce his wife). And who wrote a lot of letters! <3 It's a great counterpoint to Macintyre's book and a good reminder that people, in general, are more lovely and complicated and multi-faceted than they look, and than they might come across in a cursory first glance at their life.

I had to laugh at this bit near the end of the book:

The story of Operation Mincemeat seems to be cursed to carry with it inaccuracies and mistakes in books, articles, documentaries and any other form of media that features it. It even continues into media about the musical now, with articles continually getting things wrong regarding the writers, the actors or the show itself. Perhaps it is simply a matter of us now knowing far too much about the musical and having accidentally become Hester Leggatt experts, and the errors on these subjects specifically stick out to us. Maybe every book and article out there is wrong at least once, and we just don't have the knowledge to pick up on it.

I am here to tell you courtesy of salon, or at least

selenak and

mildred_of_midgard are here to tell you, that last sentence is true!

On the musical itself: I have been listening to the soundtrack somewhat nonstop in the car, and this means my poor A. has also been listening to it somewhat nonstop. He is not particularly a fan of the musical, but now he recognizes a lot of the lines... Anyway, so, this happened:

There's a song, "Making a Man," where the MI5 team is talking about constructing and describing the persona of the fictitious-man-behind-the-corpse who will be used in Operation Mincemeat. The first time it came on in the car when A. was there, he had his own thoughts on it:

Montagu: A mind that is stronger than iron
A: Alan Turing!
Montagu: That shines like a light in the dark
A: Yep!
Montagu: And a body that could wrestle a lion
A: ...never mind.

Hey so remember I talked about Lyssa Fairbanks' first book, Love Medley, about med school romance hijinks? Her second book is now out: Love Dramedy. Signed hard copy available here (immediately) and ebook available here (pre-orders will be delivered March 5).

Love Dramedy is about the same group of med school friends as Love Medley and is F/F and I love it a lot.

Isabelle Sutton has always been "the pretty one" and always feels like she needs to prove that she's good enough for med school, which is getting harder as she has not been doing well on her med school exams -- and she needs a project to help her show that she's a good residency candidate. Trix Winstead is a neurodiverse software CEO who is just coming off of a friends-with-benefits relationship that imploded spectacularly, leaving behind a scandal for her company -- and needs a project to help her rehabilitate her company's reputation. You'll never guess what happens next! (You have guessed. Yes. Well, you might not have guessed about the hot lesbian bar encounter/one-night stand that happens first, but there's that too, it's great!)

I love Trix's spectrum-ish self, and Isabelle is a sweetheart. And I really like about Lyssa's writing how it's not just about the romance, but also about the friends and the story.

As for Love Medley, I was one of the major betas for this book. And also as for that one, please don't talk publicly about Lyssa's real name or how I know her :)

thistleingrey mentioned that it was a solid depiction of academia and characters in academia, which immediately piqued my interest. I have read Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis and enjoyed it, and I know Hazelwood is in academia, but I sometimes thought... well, let's just say that it's a romance between a grad student and the young hotshot professor in her department, and... okay... that part... is totally realistic actually... but I feel like I kind of got stuck a lot in all my feelings about the potential deep pitfalls. Hypothesis was also, I think, much more concerned with primarily being a romance novel and secondarily a novel about academia.

Anyway, this is unabashedly a romance novel, complete with marriage-of-convenience and sometimes even the one-bed trope, but without any particular kinks like professor/student :P But the thing that makes it interesting (to me) is that it's at least as interested in both the experiences of the precariat (*) and also familial relationships as it is in the romance itself. In fact, it does not have a conventional romantic Act 3; here the Act 3, as well as the understandable but frustrating misunderstandings that prolong it, is passed squarely on to the familial relationships rather than the romantic ones. Which I personally really like!

The two main characters, Jonah and Sadie, are adorably academics. (**) I laughed out loud when Jonah said, "I'm all for radically revised gender roles in the heteronormative institution of marriage, but I should still pay for my wife's engagement ring," if only because I've never heard anyone else talk that way in a romance novel -- though if you have, please rec it to me. (Their engagement is the aforementioned engagement-of-convenience and the ring is $27.99, I hasten to append, and she pays for his ring.) (lol, I think I actually paid for my engagement ring, because it was an important transaction involving me and an important piece of jewelry -- what?)

Anyway, I rarely like romance novels, but I liked this one!

(*) I did not know the term precariat: the precarious proletariat, that insecure class of unstable work and low wages -- but I was familiar at least by reputation with the academic pre-tenure-track life that the term describes, in the sense that it is one of the many reasons why I did not pursue academia

(**) Jonah likes using footnotes; I guess your mileage may vary but I found it adorable, perhaps inevitably

okay, I was not expecting to have quite SO MANY feelings about Operation Mincemeat, the musical, but indeed I do. (I have listened to the cast recording about seventy times and have not been able to see it live, though I, uh. Have now seen it, see end of post.) I don't think I have had so many strong feelings about a musical since Hamilton, only in many ways they are wildly different feelings?? Hamilton is a fancy big-chorus-dancing musical that is concerned predominantly with valorizing a particular hero (Alexander Hamilton) in a eh-mostly-historical way while offering up somewhat revisionist-considerations of some of the other US's famous Founding Fathers, with a major thematic concern of race, but which adheres to pretty standard gender considerations. OM is a budget-vibe musical starring five people who are both the big parts and the chorus, that is concerned predominantly with both rather revisionist-considerations, in a mostly-historical-fiction way, of a particular type of hero (a heavily fictionalized Ewen Montagu) who is known for his part in the WWII shenanigans of Operation Mincemeat, while at the same time offering up larger parts to people who were not at all famous, with a major thematic concern of gender.

( Starting with: There are FIVE people in the cast! )

This book, via

selenak, was just very relevant to my interests and I adored it so much! It's one of those books that I didn't really want to end. It's a retelling of the Aeneid from the point of view of the Sybil, with nods towards making it Bronze-Age historically plausible.

Gull begins her life as the daughter of a slave in Pylos, and is apprenticed to the Pythia, the oracle of the Lady of the Dead, becoming Pythia herself when the current Pythia dies. After Troy (here called Wilusa) is sacked for the second time, the black ships of the Wilusan prince Aeneas and the remnants of his people land in Pylos to try to capture back some of their people who had been slaves (including Gull's mother, though by that time she has died). When they depart, Gull/Pythia goes with them as their Sybil on their sea adventures as the People search for a home...

I just really loved so many things about this, starting with that retellings of epic poems are always my jam. I loved Gull/Pythia and the way in which centering her and her experiences centers the lived experience of the women of Wilusa. I loved the way that Aeneas and the Wilusans are portrayed as refugees, because that's what they are. I loved that the gods, while they do appear on the edges, are mysterious beings that may be real and may be wholly belief; and that they aren't toddler-level petty and vindictive like in the Aeneid. I loved how Pythia and Xandros had that sort of fealty-love thing going with Aeneas, uh, not that this is a hardcore thing I love or anything.

Of course I was very curious about how Dido would be portrayed, even without knowing (as Graham says in her afterword) that Carthage didn't... actually... exist during this time period, so that Aeneas & Dido would have to at the very least be revamped. ( Mild thematic spoilers. )

One of the things that's really interesting here is the through-line of how the world is getting worse, piracy is getting worse, civilization is crumbling. Gull/Pythia can see that all of this is getting worse during her journeys with the black ships, and has gotten worse since the previous Pythia's days. And yet, as the reader knows, and as Pythia comes to dimly see, the arc of civilization since that time will curve upwards, and Aeneas will be part of that. (And I find this a somewhat comforting thought in some ways...)

I'm rather impressed that this was Graham's first book, which I had no idea about until I finished and went looking for more books by her! Occasionally there may have been a tiny bit of unevenness, but it just manages to weave together so many things in a way that I admired so much, and I thought it was extremely strong, much less as a debut! Sooooo now I'm gonna reread Judith Tarr's Lord of the Two Lands to get myself in a proper Alexander mood, and then I shall go on to read Graham's Stealing Fire :D

Via

selenak <3 This book is a novelistic look primarily at the women (specifically the wives and lovers) associated with the most famous Romantic poets (Byron, Shelley, Keats). It is well-written and compelling, extremely relevant to my interests, and also part #12345 or so of an ongoing series of "Reasons why I, especially as a woman, am glad I did not live hundreds of years ago" (which... I guess... is probably a good thing for me to keep in mind, these days...) and, as sort of a corollary to that, an implicit stirring polemic in favor of no-fault divorce and antibiotics. (Neither of which existed at the time, of course, but gosh, no-fault divorce and antibiotics would have made SO many people's lives so much better in this book!) Also against bloodletting :PP

Our best-beloved high school Brit Lit teacher, Dr. M, told us all kinds of stories about these people. He was, I think, a proponent of the "teach the kids literature and literary history through sensationalistic gossip" mode that I found in salon many years later -- and it works! Even decades after Dr. M's class, I came in knowing enough that the names and many of the love-affairs (especially the most sensationalistic ones) were familiar, though of course I didn't know very many details. Even (especially?) Byron; though we never read any Byron in class, he was certainly a very sensational figure. (I think Dr. M's plan was that we would go off and read Byron on our own -- the same way that he announced, when we did the Canterbury Tales, that he was forbidden to teach us "The Miller's Tale" because of it being too R-rated, and we all promptly hared off and read it outside of class -- although I found Byron enough not to my taste that I never read very much of him even with that.)

What I was struck by most about this book was just how trapped the women are by... everything, by societal expectations, societal disapproval, family situations, the constant spectre of sickness and death; all the women were more-or-less (sometimes less) sympathetic but were placed in situations where they were either miserable or making other people miserable or both. (I can't quite say that about the men -- there were a couple of men that were not very sympathetic -- but at the same time you could see them all being trapped too.) But I didn't get the impression that the author was trying to make a point about that in particular, or at least not any more than any other point; I think this was just how it was.

A few notes about some of the women POV characters:

Augusta Byron (Leigh) - I knew enough to draw in a breath when her half-brother George was mentioned, even before the reveal of her last name :P Anyway, she is awesome, my favorite -- a truly nice character but never boring, and you can see why she and Byron got along so well; their bantering conversations in the book are really some of my favorite bits. Definitely one of the characters where I was Put Out that her life was as miserable as it was :P Lord Byron himself was charming and dark and you could both see why everyone fell in love with him and also that it must have been awful to have been his wife or lover (though in Augusta's case, mostly because of the societal issues).

Mary (Godwin/Wollstonecraft) Shelley - Intellectual and intense, the Mary POV sections were perhaps the most compelling for me, and also could be frustrating, in the way that when you empathize with a character, you don't want the character to do the stupid things that you know you would do (or maybe actually did as a young person) in her place :P I felt like she had a lot of extremely understandable strong feelings! And often you could see how the strong feelings were acting against her best interests! Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the other hand, was... well... there's an xkcd about guys like him :P I also really enjoyed her scenes with Byron, of all people -- very platonic, no attraction, and that's actually very refreshing, to me as well as to the characters.

Caroline Lamb - these were my least favorite sections. I remembered from Dr. M that she had some struggles with mental illness, and Morgan makes her manic behavior quite as sympathetic as possible -- but it still wasn't all that fun to read for me. William Lamb was less of a presence in the book but seemed, well, passive and patriarchical but mostly pretty reasonable, especially in comparison to Byron and Shelley. Not that this is saying a whole lot!

Annabella Millbank (Byron) - Byron's long-suffering wife. Annabella is clearly -- in fact textually -- even less of a reliable narrator than the others. I found the style of her sections really interesting -- they're distant and mannered and very distinct from the other characters' POV, and really point up how she fabricates her own story that may or may not (often does not) match up to reality, but certainly matches up to her own interests. And at the same time Byron was just terrible to her! But one can see how she is almost optimally ill-suited to him!

selenak told me about how she was absolutely horrible to their daughter, Ada Lovelace, and that is certainly consistent with the way her character is delineated here.

Fanny Brawne - I think part of why Fanny was here was just as a contrast to the other characters. (Keats doesn't interact particularly strongly with Byron and Shelley.) She seems to be the only one, out of all of them, whose issues don't arise out of an intensely conflicted adolescence, whether it was because of her circumstances (Mary -- I haven't mentioned her father, William Godwin, but he was a piece of work in the novel, one of those guys who can totally twist everything to "rationally" argue how it benefits him; the type is familiar) or because of her personality (Caroline). She is the only one where it seems like she actually maybe had fun. (Well, Augusta may have had fun in her childhood -- but the way the chapters are laid out, the awful parts of her life get a lot more documentation.) Of course one knows it all has to go wrong, because Keats and Brawne, but after reading about everyone else it's almost a relief to just be dealing with death instead of death plus a whole ton of dysfunction. (Of course, there are hints that if he had lived, perhaps this love story too would also have devolved into dysfunction. But maybe it wouldn't have. For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!)

But, in conclusion: no-fault divorce for Harriet Shelley and Annabella Byron, please and thank you, and hey, I'll take it for Mary Shelley too, and alllllll the antibiotics and NO bloodletting for not just Keats and Byron but also all the babies and small children who died in this book >:(

Also, I did a little reading about the next generation and they all seem rather interesting too; I want the sequel :PP