Finna, by Nino Cipri

The McGuffin in Finna is the hidden, perhaps confusing space that ends up leading to an alternate universe--I remember these well from Roger Zelazny, Seanan McGuire, C. S. Lewis (Narnia), etc etc. It lets you get a story going without a lot of complication, and that's what is done here. Finna is definitely a book for our times--these crappy service jobs probably pay $1 over minimum wage so they're *good* jobs, and you should be lucky to have one, you ingrate. A lot of reviewers complain about the characterization--I thought it was actually the good part, the characters grew on me a bit through the book. Maybe it's just a little densely packed.  There's some obvious motivation stated about why the missing grandma analog actually wants to come back to the crappy universe with our protagonists, but it seemed a bit cut off. Probably because it's the first in a series. Overall it's kind of lightweight, but it's fun and I'd probably read the next one.

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Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey

I feel like I am supposed to like this book because I was a librarian and work to be an LGBTQ+ ally. I share the disappointments of some readers that the story wasn't filled out more. The Librarians seem superhuman (the whole thing with superpowerful women who are better at violence than men seems vaguely misogynistic to me--it sets up expectations for female performance that should not need to be met in order to be considered equally human), taking down multiple gangs of men while sustaining only a flesh wound. The perspective is historically underrepresented but there's a lot of it available right now, so a new entry has to stand out in some way and I can't see where that special something is here.

I rate it a bit better than the disappointed set, though, because I think the protagonist has potential to be more complex than the rest of the book setting, and I do think there's a series being set up here. Esther is oppressed by her situation and looks to blossom as a librarian, but she's also got quite a bit of moral and personal flexibility. Some wonder why she took to Cye so quickly after losing Beatrix--I read the story as Esther having started to distance herself from Beatrix before she was killed. Her character could go any which way, possibly simultaneously. Not sure if I am motivated to pick up the next one, but I might if someone else reads it and says this is what happened.

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Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

Well, I finished it. Took a very long time, relatively, and I guess I am glad I did. Most of the book is both confusing and brutal. It's not just the second person perspective. The reveal on why it is written that way is actually pretty cool and helped make sense of some parts for me. But then it keeps going, and the perspectives all mush together. Also, the same characters go by a lot of different names with only the barest connection to bring them together.

All the emotions in the book are awful, and described as hyperbolically as possible, with relief being the only tiny respite. And it's not enough. There's a lot of "You're wrong, and impossibly stupid" "No, YOU'RE wrong, and impossibly stupid". Back and forth. With all this going on it's really hard to pick out how the plot is driven--I sort of think I figured out that Resurrection Beasts are a consequence of some actions the Emperor undertook.

There's some good fight scenes toward the end that get the blood going, but the subsequent reveal is more of the same--confusing, "everything you know is wrong" "No, everything YOU know is wrong".

Hard to say if I'm going to read the last one in the series. I'll have to hear that it's better.

My Goodreads Review

Ring Shout, by P. Djeli Clark

Ring Shout is in the horror/fantasy category, but I really began to enjoy it when I started to read it as a fable. The way the book works through its moral arc leads directly to its final lesson, that if we give back all the hate we receive then we lose ourselves in hatred. Come for the great storytelling but stay for the history--Clark has all his ducks in a row and delivers a real education in with the fable. The Gullah translations were really valuable to me. You kind of see things coming, but if you let go of the notion that you shouldn't then you will fully enjoy the book. TIL what a Ring Shout is, and I am better for it.

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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