Across the Green Grass Fields, by Seanan McGuire

This series has a really good formula and Seanan McGuire puts out solid work. She understands and is writing for girls just crossing that line from girl to woman. This time bringing some diverse understanding in by making the main character intersex. Folks like this are near and dear to me so I have stuck with this series as a way of understanding them.

The setup and characterization are fine here, if slightly threadbare at this point. It's a concept that's been worked pretty hard now, and I find myself paying attention to the fact that "our world", the one these children come from and go back to, is central, and all others are relatively simple expressions of one kind of fantasy space or another. In this one it's fantasy equines. Why privilege our world, without doing that explicitly?

Have to say this one disappoints due to the ending. It's just kind of lame. Ending books is hard, and it just seems like McGuire was on deadline to get this out and start on the next one. 2.5 rounded up for a sensitive story.

My Goodreads Review

Comfort Me With Apples, by Catherynne Valente

This is a jaw-dropper of a book. I have tended to think of Valente as a kind of lightweight, but not any more. The style of the book is horror, but there's a whole lot more going on here than jumpscares. It is deeply allegorical, and the reveal of the allegory is gradual. I should have read it more than once. I didn't pick up on a lot of the references until I read other reviews with spoilers in them.

Between this and "The Past Is Red" it looks like Valente is ready to move into a powerful writing phase. It's always been fun to read her stuff--lots of action and adventure, and she's not afraid to be feminine in her writing. This was better than fun.

My Goodreads Review

Defekt, by Nino Cipri

The world really needed an anti-capitalist Ikea parody, and we knew it, and Nino Cipri really delivers. I thought the first book was a good try, and worthy of encouragement. This one is pretty darn solid, though I'm a little confused by it. I'll come back to that.

Here we revisit Derek, the LitenVarld employee who has totally drunk the Kool-Ade and has no life outside the store. This book explains why he is living in a shipping container in the LitenVarld parking lot. He meets many versions of himself (herself/themselves) working for LitenVarld as Special Employees, charged with wrangling/eliminating defecta--experimental furniture that has gained consciousness and mobility.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, it builds on the first one without really depending on it. I would recommend reading Finna first, in part because if you read Defekt then Finna will suffer a bit by comparison, and it doesn't deserve to. But they don't depend on each other, which is weird. Finna definitely ends with several plot points untidied--it absolutely reads like a first book in a series. But in Defekt's acknowledgements Cipri says he never intended to write a sequel. Really? Maybe he meant it--he still hasn't written the sequel to Finna because Defekt is not that. It's set in the same LitenVerse and builds on the foundation of Finna, but those dangling plots are not continued. Derek has moved on. So now I don't know what he does with that first one.

These are tremendously fun and trenchant books to read, am looking forward to more as long as Cipri has ideas to explore there.

My Goodreads Review

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

Andy Weir sure has the extended science experiment genre covered. I haven't read Artemis yet, but Project Hail Mary definitely works the same vein of hard SF gold as The Martian. This time with rather more spectacular experiments, involving space life that stores a gazillion New-York-City-power years (enough energy to power NYC for a year).

Some of the reviewers knock this book down a little for the extended "nerdgazm" (borrowed that, love it) episodes with Rocky the mineral-like alien, but this is a book for enthusiasts and it really brings that content. We also have a real try at a more complex character--Ryland Grace is not a perfect man, he's revealed to be emotionally immature and not really up to what's expected of him, but he also has a lot of real feelings for his teammates. Plenty of material for screenwriters to work with.

It's really not lacking much--not quite as deep as Ted Chiang or Kim Stanley Robinson, authors who have had many years refining their voices. But Andy Weir definitely has a sense for science adventure. Maybe he'll collaborate with Randall Monroe on a book sometime...

My Goodreads Review