Books and comics read in May 2024

[usuallyhats]

The Feast Makers - HA Clarke
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake - Tiya Miles
Have You Eaten? - Sarah Gailey
The Pilgrim of Hate - Ellis Peters
Displeasure Island - Alice Bell
Song of the Huntress - Lucy Holland
Liberty's Daughter - Naomi Kritzer
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory - Ben MacIntyre
The Witches of World War II
Seeds of Mercury - Wang Jinkang / 水星播种, 王晋康, translated by Alex Woodend
Abeni's Song - P Djèlí Clark

Getting on with some Hugos reading now the voter packet is out! Liberty's Daughter is reviewed below, The Witches of World War II I liked but I thought needed a few more issues to flesh everything out a bit, Seeds of Mercury had some great ideas but also a fair bit of ableism, and Abeni's Song was lovely, but feels like middle grade to me, not YA.

Displeasure Island (five stars), Song of the Huntress (three stars), Liberty's Daughter (three stars)

Displeasure Island
Sequel to Grave Expectations! I absolutely inhaled this. Loved the sense of humour, loved how well all the characters and their relationships were drawn, cannot wait for more.

Song of the Huntress
I liked a lot of things about this book. I enjoyed all the point of view characters very much - Aethul, Queen of Wessex; her husband Ine; Herla, former lover of Boudica, now leader of the Wild Hunt - and their relationships, especially Ine and Aethul and their struggles to connect and reconnect. And the prose was pretty good, if not quite as absorbing as I wanted it to be.

But it did feel a bit ahistorical at times, especially when it came to its queer characters. I did love that there was so much queerness (Aethul is bi, Herla is queer, there's a non-binary character, Ine is ace and it's GREAT), but the attitudes to that queerness just didn't quite ring true for me: as much as I don't want "everything is terrible in the Awful Homophobic Past", there is a lot of interesting ground between that and "everything is basically fine" that I love to see explored in fiction based in history.

ALSO. I did not love the idea of a magical power of kingship transmitted through bloodlines and originally bestowed by a being named Sovereignty. Again, this could have been interesting if explored and challenged, but as it was it was basically "divine right of kings, but it's pagan rather than Christian so it's FINE". It's still not fine!

Liberty's Daughter
This is very readable, but it also felt extremely disjointed (probably because it started life as a set of short stories), which made it hard to connect to anything that was happening, because the narrative kept making sudden swerves and failing to follow up on the consequences of previous threads. It's also RIDDLED with typos, my favourite being the secret stash of gold bouillon (and my least favourite being the mysterious disappearance of every 'd - I spent a while wondering if this was meant to indicate a Future Speech Pattern, but I think not?).

Comments

[happydork]

DISPLEASURE ISLAND HAS BEEN OUT FOR A MONTH AND I'VE ONLY JUST NOTICED??? Sure, I've been distracted, but that's no excuse!

[usuallyhats]

Honestly I feel like that's on me for not telling you about it! <3

(One thing it occurs to me you might want to know about in advance:

mild spoilers

a toddler briefly goes missing

outcome

and is found upset but otherwise safe and well

)

[lokifan]

I didn't get along with Abeni's Song at all, but I loved Unraveller - I'd nominated it - and honestly I think both those books are middle-grade, yeah. That kind of 9-12-year-old bracket, which I personally much prefer anyway but I don't know if I should be voting for it to win the Lodestar!

Herla, former lover of Boudica, now leader of the Wild Hunt

Ooh. I think I might feel similarly on the queerness but that's a deeply intriguing sentence.

I did not love the idea of a magical power of kingship transmitted through bloodlines and originally bestowed by a being named Sovereignty. Again, this could have been interesting if explored and challenged, but as it was it was basically "divine right of kings, but it's pagan rather than Christian so it's FINE". It's still not fine!

It's absolutely still not fine! I actually specifically am noodling at a book idea that's very much "what if magical divine right of kings is real but actually monarchy is still bad!"

This is very readable, but it also felt extremely disjointed (probably because it started life as a set of short stories), which made it hard to connect to anything that was happening, because the narrative kept making sudden swerves and failing to follow up on the consequences of previous threads. It's also RIDDLED with typos, my favourite being the secret stash of gold bouillon (and my least favourite being the mysterious disappearance of every 'd - I spent a while wondering if this was meant to indicate a Future Speech Pattern, but I think not?).

LOL, same on all counts!

[usuallyhats]

I think Unraveller is a bit more borderline - it feels like the older end of that age group at least! - but I also felt a bit conflicted about voting for it. I do think there's a bit of an issue with getting unambiguously YA stuff onto the Lodestar shortlist, but I don't read a huge amount of YA myself so it's hard to be the change!

Ooh. I think I might feel similarly on the queerness but that's a deeply intriguing sentence.
Right? Some of the good stuff in that book is REALLY good.

I actually specifically am noodling at a book idea that's very much "what if magical divine right of kings is real but actually monarchy is still bad!"
Ooooooh I love that idea.

LOL, same on all counts!
Every now and then I remember the secret stash of gold bouillon, and crack up all over again.