Network Effect, by Martha Wells

The Murderbot Diaries is pretty reliable as entertainment.  This one rolls along nicely, but it might have been a bit better as a novella like the others.  We get a lot of description of frenetic battles, with Murderbot processing a lot of inputs at once.  It's very true to the character but gets tiring to read after awhile.  Murderbot was kind of growing up over the last four books, but at least the pace of that development is slowing--seems like fans really enjoy the petulant adolescent thing.  If you're waiting for him to grow out of that you might get tired of this series after awhile.  I wish that some of his clients were more memorable--I have trouble keeping them straight in the stories.  But I crack on it too much--it's fine entertainment.

My Goodreads Review

The City We Became, by N. K. Jemisin

Jemisin took some chances with writing this book, and it's apparent from reading some of the other reviews. The core of the book is about deeply identifying with a place, specifically a city, so much so that the place itself takes on an identity. New York City is the most written about example in America, but there are other places (Chicago, Los Angeles, Albany NY, etc) that get that treatment in literature. But if you're a suburban reader or simply more rootless (pretty common) then your experience with that kind of place identification is second hand.

The context of the book is people from various oppressed groups viewing the city through the experiences they have had there. White supremacy culture is named and held up as toxic, personified by Staten Island but pervasive in the story. If you are white, consider yourself liberal, and have not "done some work", this story is going to grate on your "ally" sensitivities (non-liberals are not a target audience for this book, and would mostly read it in order to troll it). If you've read and digested books like Ta-Nehesi Coates' "Between the World and Me" you're better prepared to appreciate the road this book is traveling.

Since I have that context I was better able to appreciate how the book was written. It's not perfect, but it's pretty darned good. The fantasy world construction is pretty thoroughly subordinated to the social justice context--see above. But the characters themselves and their stories are absolutely engrossing. I tend to read late at night and set time limits but I had a really hard time putting this one down.

One can learn a lot from this book if one is open to it, but it's not about teaching. It's telling a story very much in today's context. It will be interesting to see where it sits 20 years from now. 

My Goodreads Review

The Midnight Bargain, by C. L. Polk

This was nominated for a Nebula award for 2020. Not sure why. Not that it's a bad book. It's reasonably fun to read.

But it's pretty much a standard romance novel, maybe elevated a little bit. The setting is basically Regency England, though all country names and geography are changed. Lots of attention to the layers and layers of clothing that wealthy women of the time wear. Including its social implications--the stays and stomachers that forced women into artificial shapes.

Women are severely oppressed in Chasland, prevented from studying magic and forced to dull their powers with "warding collars" due to very real danger to unborn babies. The danger is spun into a whole social structure that oppresses women. Pretty familiar. It's an uplifting story, and would have been a cutting-edge plot 80 years ago. Not so much now. The author does try to flip the racial script, but having the desirable people be dark-skinned with no other discussion of racial dynamics at all doesn't really help.

It's a fun read, a little slow early on but it picks up. The ending is a bit pat, romance-novel style. 2.5 stars rounded up.

My Goodreads Review

Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse

Really happy I read this one, and am looking forward to the rest of the series. What I really like about reading Rebecca Roanhorse is how her important scenes, whether they are action sequences or dialogs, draw you in and make you hold your breath. The opening of this book is one such scene. An interesting note for me is that it relies less on actual fights than some other books of hers. There's some violence and even gory stuff, but in this book the combat is more long-term chess moves, especially the process of creating Serapio. Teek, where Xiala is from, is going to be particularly interesting to develop in later books. Right now it comes off as pretty much Lesbos, but I'm sure there's more to it.

Roanhorse kind of telegraphs the cliffhanger through the book, but it still works really well. The plot itself, at least at this stage, is pretty much hero's journey/vengeance/love affair, but those are a pretty strong triangle and Serapio and Xiala populate it very well. The other main character in the book, the Sun Priest Naranpa, has not grown on me yet--she seems pretty naive early on--but is coming along well.

Fun stuff! Pick it up if you like fantasy at all.

My Goodreads Review

Mexican Gothic, by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia

Well, to be honest, horror is not my genre, so for me it was hard to like. It was hard to like for a lot of other reasons too. Our protagonist, Noemi, is a hero but not an engaging one, and the villains are kind of cardboard. Francis, younger brother of main villain Virgil, has a little promise of development but until the last few pages it really doesn't happen.

It's interesting to know that the town Moreno-Garcia describes is based on a real place and in many ways close to it. Mexico is a colonial society so in that way how events unfold (especially for privileged people like those in the story) is going to be familiar. Like other reviewers, I'm not sure what is particularly Mexican about it other than Noemi's fashions--but that may be pretty accurate. Given that the setting is transplanted England I guess it is not surprising that there's not much that's identifiably Mexican--adding it in here might have been artificial.

The writing is good, other than characters that don't develop much. The scenery is evocative, and the sciencey explanation of the supernatural elements works OK. In the end, I'm not sure why I read it. Oh well. 2.5 rounded up.

My Goodreads Review

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

It's just about impossible to describe anything about the actual content of this book without pretty much spoiling it. The process of the reveal starts at the beginning and slowly unrolls, so anything said after the first paragraph gives it all away. So I'll do that.

The story fits in the "lost worlds" genre. Piranesi lives in a world of statues. He obviously has background of living in a more normal world, but he has forgotten it and is in the moment in the statue halls. He contentedly keeps a journal of his findings on the statues, and meets with The Other, the only other living person in the world, who is attempting to find Great and Secret Knowledge.

Bit by bit the story gets darker as Piranesi discovers or remembers more about where he lives. The Other accuses him of losing track of time, and what he is doing. He starts to question how he knows about things he has not seen, like the police, or more people than the 16 he knows about (14 of them dead). He eventually discovers that he is in a place that others (including The Other) only visit. And the dark past of the world, mostly dark because of its discoverer (a practitioner of "transgressive thinking", scholarship for perversion) and how he manipulates people.

So it's not my normal kind of read, but it is something that as it unfurls I can say I have seen before. I think Clarke brings it off quite well, and the protagonist's awakening by slow degrees is very well done. Another reviewer said this book would appeal to "a certain kind of reader". I think that's true, and I don't think I'm it, but I can still appreciate the craft involved. 

My Goodreads Review

Luna: Moon Rising, by Ian McDonald

When I finished New Moon (the 2nd book), I had become fascinated but also somewhat frustrated and worn out with this story. It felt like there were no grownups present--the members of the Dragons, the 5 oligarchies that ran the Moon, broke big expensive things in extravagant feuds without regard for consequences for their employees. It seemed like half the Moon made a living as soldiers (blades or dusters) in the various private armies. All with very colorful names (escoltas, jackaroos, etc) to make it seem very cool.

The start of the third book was kind of awkward and made me think the trend was going to continue. The violence gets ever more picturesque. But as the story goes along, some human elements finally emerge, and those human elements get handled very well at the end. It made me happy that I had persevered and read the whole series. Character development that seemed tedious to me on first reading explains itself as I think about the ending. All in all, good stuff.

I am not surprised to see that this series was optioned for television--it's very visual, and a feud of wealthy and beautiful families always seems like it's going to be a winner.

My Goodreads Review