The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, by Sylvia Garcia-Moreno

This book is an interesting intersection of her previous book, Mexican Gothic, and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Moreno-Garcia is retelling the H. G. Wells story with a young female lead, one very similar to Noemi in Mexican Gothic. She is a child of privilege, living the life of an upper-class Mexican girl, but this time the isolation is caused by her father's vivisection experiments. Although you wouldn't have to do it that way now. You could go more steampunk, with Moreau somehow coming up with a CRISPR process.

What I find interesting and compelling about this work is that in writing it Moreno-Garcia seems to be channeling Wells' style in a very period-authentic way, but with a strong female lead who shapes the tale. The book really feels like Wells could have written it with input from a woman. This shows most clearly in the character of Montgomery, the new mayordomo at the hacienda. He is a classic British sort of anti-hero, troubled and self-doubting but highly capable. He, like the other men in the story, shows no sign of 21st-century feminist influence. He is constantly trying to put Carlota in her place. But he reveals his inner life in a way that builds him powerfully as a character.

Carlota's growth from a meek teenager to a young woman rising to the occasion makes her a powerful character as well. Moreno-Garcia takes more time revealing Carlota's depths, with her capabilities maturing in time with the plot.

The move of the experimental facility from an isolated island to the isolated Yucutan peninsula feels very authentic as well. It is not quite as isolated as the island, which gives Moreno-Garcia the opportunity to situate it culturally.

This is about as good as a conscious retelling can get. I can't quite give it 5 stars--maybe because it's so tied to Wells' style that it reads kind of stilted to me in the same way that Wells does now. It's a real achievement and deserving of the attention it's getting.

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Babel, by R. F. Kuang

This is an incredible piece of work. The author says it is her most ambitious work yet, and I agree. I thought The Poppy War was pretty good--this book amazed me with Kuang's command of writing and the way it kept me turning pages through a very long volume. In a year where so many of the award-nominated books seem to have very little depth, and that's on purpose, this one goes all out. I come away from reading the novel and the comments of other readers much smarter than I was before.

The book is meticulously set in Oxford, England in the 1830s. The author spends a lot of effort on getting the details right, except for planting the tower of Babel in the middle of Oxford and having silver magic being the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution and colonialism of the time. A spot-on critique of this work is that the power of silver, which would pull it in the direction of a kind of fantasy cyberpunk, instead changes nothing at all--except maybe to create a single point of failure for the British Empire.

The setting is early 19th century Oxford but in every other way the book reads as something written today, with 2021 understanding of racial issues (Not gender. I think Kuang was aware of how much shoehorning it would have taken to include it in some affirming way). So it's not going to be a classic, and is best read as a novel of its time. That time is pretty dark. The protagonists of the story are taken as children from their countries and presented with a life of ivory tower (literally) privilege with no awareness of any other choice. That bubble is broken early on and the description of the shattering process is gripping. The colonialists will never let go of their privilege, and will destroy everything to keep it or at least deny it of other lesser beings.

Britain did release the Jewel in the Crown (India) through the mostly nonviolent resistance led by Ghandi, but there's no hint of that Britain here. The white men of privilege are uniformly vicious and ruthless. The book is in no way subtle. Pretty much a club all the way through. I align with its conclusions on systemic racism but it's fairly recent that this perspective has come to the fore in racial justice. Previous generations of reformers for the most part repeatedly asked for equal treatment by the oppressors unless they were forthright Marxists.

It's a good book, and well worth reading. The expositions on translation are lengthy but never boring, so you come away learning something new. I think the setting held Kuang back. She knows the setting and culture like the back of her hand (degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, studying at Yale) but this turns into a trap. It is a work worthy of deep reading and critique, which is a great achievement in this time when we so desperately want to turn away from what is expressed here.

My Goodreads Review

Nettle and Bone, by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)

This is really a strong book, very character-driven and the protagonist, Marra, is truly relatable.  The book starts in the middle of Marra performing the three impossible tasks the dust-wife asks of her in exchange for her help dealing with the abusive Prince of the North.  The story in its way is pretty familiar--Marra, the dust-wife (a keeper of cemeteries who can speak to the dead) and her demon-possessed chicken go on a hero's journey to save Marra's sister Kania.  They pick up an unwillingly evil godmother and a heroic knight along the way.  All of these characters are fully developed in the book, and I was attached to them by the time it was finished.  She also scores some solid points on the patriarchy and the pain being imposed.  It's a cozy yet powerful read.  Good stuff.

My Goodreads Review

Spear, by Nicola Griffith

This is a very good after-dinner read, a solid re-telling of one of the Arthurian stories, the tale of Percival (the afterword is very worth reading where Griffith goes into the naming). A historical name for Percival is Peretur, which our protagonist goes by. In this telling Peretur has a secret (though not a plot twist, so I'm not giving anything away)--Peretur started out as a girl, Dawnged or Tal depending on her mother's mood. Peretur's pronouns remain female throughout, she is simply built and destined to be a knight in a circumstance where women aren't knights.

Queer retellings still fill a void, though they are not as new and fresh as they were a decade ago. Now you have to seriously bring the narrative skills in order to expand the space. Nicola Griffith is a master and does this effectively.

Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

It took me forever to read this book. Superlative and plot overload. There is so much going on, and I was able to relate some of it back to the earlier books but the whole thing just never did resolve and make sense to me. Could have to do with it being kind of an impromptu book wedged in between Harrow and Alecto. Nona is kind of a cute character, but I was really distracted trying to relate what she was narrating, and what the others were doing, back to Gideon and Harrow. Gideon Nav appears but is really someone else (happens a lot) and Harrow might be appearing? "Dead" is a term of art, dead people walk around and act pretty much like anyone else (except in John's interludes, which are the most interesting part of the book since they give it a little structure)(are we on Earth for this one?), and the word and idea are used so much, with so many different kinds of fairly animate people, that the word loses its meaning.

Layered snark also loses its effect with repeated use. Again, the other books push the line in interesting ways, but this one just goes over.

There are complex plots and there are confusing ones, and it's a fine line an author has to walk to write a book like this. The other two in the series just barely pulled it off for me, and this one just didn't.

My Goodreads Review

The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler

This book drives some folks nuts, but I understood that it was a first novel and read it as such. Ray Nayler has digested quite a lot of material on his subject (the octopus, of course) and a lot about everything else. His choice to have the quotes at the beginning of chapters be from books he made up is a tip for the experienced reader--you're going to get a novel that is pretty up front about being an exposition of the author's philosophy on whatever is covered. Nothing wrong with that, some really good authors (Octavia Butler, Isaac Asimov) have done it. I think it's even better when an author can make other non-fiction authors speak for them (I should have examples but I don't), but the quotes worked so I have no objections.

The characters in the story are not meant to be either sympathetic or not--they just are who they are. A recurring theme is that of people who are trapped by the larger forces at work on their issues. Eiko, a trafficked slave on an automated fishing boat, is the most obvious one. Some think this subplot is a digression, but I disagree--his story is meant to illustrate the depraved cruelty of the times and get you to anticipate the captivity of all of the other major characters. It's pretty easy to imagine instantiating something like this now. If we're lucky we'll read about it in a few years. If we're not lucky the story will be suppressed and we'll never know.

So the evolution of octopus intelligence is the macguffin in the story, but it really reads more like a backdrop for the author's philosophical vision of the future. Pretty dark but that's where we are now. I think it is worth the read if you go in understanding the limitations.

My Goodreads Review

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, by Becky Chambers

The Monk & Robot series is set in the world we would like to live in after the world we live in now collapses and recovers. We have gotten a few references to the dystopian past but the focus is on the Here and Now, with Dex on his journey to find himself and Mosscap trying to find out what humans need.

Funny question to ask, since it appears that robots took themselves out of the picture when things got very bad and they decided they were part of the problem. Humans winnowed themselves and muddled through, and have now achieved the Beloved Community (it is not referenced as such, but see Josiah Royce or Martin Luther King and substitute a future kind-of-pagan religion and we're there). So what Mosscap encounters when he asks this question is that no one is in particular need.

The writing and characters are engaging, but these get harder to read as the distance between where we are and where these books are set gets wider. I think it's just plain hard to please people in a time when anything pleasing is a reminder of what can be taken away. Cheers to Becky Chambers for bringing the warmth and light--sad for us if we can't appreciate it.

My Goodreads Review