thebooksmugglers

X Marks The Story: January 2021

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 20:13:30 GMT

Finding excellent short SFF can often feel like hunting for buried treasure. Sometimes it takes a guide to help fill in the map, connecting readers with fantastic fiction and showing where X Marks The Story–a monthly column from Charles Payseur.

(And yes, this is no longer January–but the stories are still great and worth it!)

Hi there! Ready to X-plore the X-citing world of short speculative fiction once again? To go to X-tremes to find great stories with me, your X-pert guide? Ready for me to stop using more X-tra Xs than a 90s X-Men crossover? Tough! Err, I mean, tough for the last one, because I’m not stopping. For everything else, you’re in luck! Because today I want to introduce you to a number of recently published stories. From science fiction to fantasy to horror, there’s hopefully something for everything to enjoy, so grab a snack and stay hydrated as we embark on this X-quisite literary adventure!

“Deadbeat” by Jacob Budenz (Baffling Magazine #2)

What It Is: If you haven’t gotten around yet to checking out Baffling Magazine, this story, which drops in the January issue (the publication’s second release) will hopefully make you reconsider. The narrator is the lover of a warlock, a demon with something of an insecurity problem and a nocturnal habit of participating in hot dog eating competitions via astral projection. It’s exactly the kind of quirky that I appreciate, and yet the story is much more serious and emotional than the premise might imply, revealing a careful and wonderfully complicated relationship and characters who are far from perfect but who might just manage to be good for each other.

Why I Love It: I love the relationship that is revealed here in all its layers and strangeness and dramas great and small. The narrator is so interesting, a demon who struggles with his sense of self-worth, who is making strides in what he does but who is also ashamed about it in many ways, aware that he’s viewed by his boyfriend’s family as a failure, as the titular deadbeat. And that boyfriend, a warlock, who seems both supportive and not, rounds out their dynamic so nicely. The story follows their messy situation in a great, slice of life style, where the characters feel real and fleshed and complex, all done with a stunning economy of space and through some striking and surprising elements. I laughed at the hotdogs, but there’s something tender and raw and aching under the trappings of magic and horror, and for me it’s a resonating and wonderful read.

“Root Rot” by Fargo Tbakhi (Apex Magazine #121)

What It Is: The narrator of this story went to Mars following a dream of new growth, a fresh start, and they severed their ties with their family to do it. But suppression, imprisonment, mind alterations, and alcoholism have turned them into a shadow of who they were. Depressed. Broken. And now they learn their brother is on the planet, looking for them, and it brings to the surface all the things, the hurts and the hopes and hell they’ve spent the last years trying to drink away. Bleak and messy, the story comes out of the return issue of Apex Magazine, and carries with it the signature grim realities and fragile people one step away from shattering.

Why I Love It: This story hurts, and while for some that might not be a reason to love it, sometimes I crave the kind of emotional annihilation that this story offers. The narrator is an absolute wreck and the story pulls no punches in revealing their pain and the layered wrongs that have been done to them. The hope with which they reached for Mars, the dreams of growing things, and the ways that crushed, their dreams excised from them like their very language, leaving only a shell that once held something lush and alive. The piece plays with hope and despair, with the idea of help and of family, all things that the narrator almost has access to, but for the trauma and the wounds they carry that cannot now be healed. And while it’s bleak and obliterating, it’s also a stunning and beautiful read!

“All in a Day’s Work” by Jade Stewart (Fiyah Litarary Magazine #17)

What It Is: Walker is a non-binary demon hunter who doesn’t want membership into an “elite” coven to get in the way of doing what they think is right and going where their feet take them. The story, coming in the latest (unthemed) issue of Fiyah Literary Magazine, follows a day in their life–a day full of demons! From those brought on by self-doubt and despair to those who can pose a threat to a whole city and mop the floor with a team of coven hunters, the story builds a world where demons are as varied as the people dedicated to banishing them.

Why I Love It: There is such an energy to this story, an irrepressible joy that Walker brings to their work. It’s what they want to be doing, how they want to be doing it, and they’ve paid their way in time and skill and perfection. They’ve had to, because they don’t come from much, and they’ve made it through school with everyone wanting there to be a reason to deny them, to fail them, to send them packing or else co-op them into a coven and its “safe” corporate mandates. Instead, Walker wanders, always circling back to the people they love, the family roots that still run deep, but otherwise enjoying the freedom that the life of a hunter affords them. The ability to move, to act uncensored by the whims of a coven. It might mean less fame, less money, but it also means doing things their own way, and it’s really hard to argue with results. The piece is tightly paced, action-packed, and a delightful and charming rollercoaster from beginning to end. I want the book series! I want the television show! It’s so good!

“Returning the Lyre” by Mary E. Lowd (Kaleidotrope Winter 2021)

What It Is: It’s not like I’ve never read a retelling of the Orpheus/Eurydice myth, but I’m not sure I’ve ever read one quite like this. Serving up an alternative trajectory, the story imagines what would happen if it was Orpheus to die, and Eurydice who travels into the underworld not to bring him back, but to make sure he has an instrument to play even then. The mechanic of needing to leave Hades without looking back is still there, but the story updates and twists the idea nicely, delivering a take that is very different from the original, though in some ways just as tragic.

Why I Love It: The way this story complicates and twists expectations is just :chef’s kiss:. Aside from the shift in perspective, the way this story deals not with devotion but with doubt is so great. It’s an aspect of the original, Orpheus’ doubt that Eurydice is behind him, but here the story presumably ends happily, only for that to sour and rot. I love the long-game trick that the gods might be engaged in here, the tragedy that Eurydice steps in basically from the moment she leaves her home and resolves to find her dead husband. The piece manages to maintain the path of the story while keeping an entirely different set of themes, and revealing the way that doubt is double-edged, cutting not only into the past of what might have been, but into the future of what might be. It’s a powerful and careful take on a myth that has seen its share of attention in the past few decades, and it manages to do something fresh and interesting with the source material.

“Deep Music” by Elly Bangs (Clarkesworld #172)

What It Is: I’m not sure if this story is “properly” science fiction or fantasy (given the publication I’d lean the former, while the overall feel of the piece hit me a bit more the later, so you’re on your own on that front). What I know is that it follows Quinn, a recently dumped woman who specializes in “Aquid Care and Rehabilitation.” She’s definitely not an exterminator, but she does help people who have problems with the water-like creatures who mysteriously appeared on the shore and have been taken in by people as pets or cheap labor ever since. Only recently one of Quinn’s aquid friends seems to be trying to communicate, and might have something rather momentous to say. Too bad a local rival has just showed up to maybe ruin everything.

Why I Love It: I love the way the story finds in Quinn this bundle of grumpy hurt who can’t really bring herself to show weakness. She’s tough and she’s passionate about what she does, about making sure that aquid’s aren’t being abused, about always being presentable and dapper. But that’s part of the thing, that she always has a mask ready, that she never really feels comfortable letting other people in. Which sort of torpedoed her last relationship despite her still carrying a torch for her ex-girlfriend. And I love how the sudden appearance of a complete jerk of a competitor pushes her to confront a lot of her fears and her hesitations, her regrets and mistakes. While still telling this raucous adventure of bruised egos (and bodies) and the importance of treating all living things (but especially mysterious and very intelligent sea creatures who might have a secret agenda) with care and respect. Just a fabulous read!

FURTHER X-PLORATIONS

I would be utterly remiss in my duties as X enthusiast if I didn’t mention the pair of X-Men formal poems out at Strange Horizons by Stephanie Burt, “Hank McCoy’s Complaint Against the Danger Room” and “Frostina” (a sestina about Emma Frost!).

“10 Steps to a Whole New You” by Tonya Liburd in Fantasy Magazine #63 is also wonderful and deals with monsters and bargains, loneliness and secrets.

GigaNotoSaurus’ January novelette, “A Remembered Kind of Dream” by Rei Rosenquist, is a strange, punk-flavored post-apocalyptic adventure swirling around a group of people with some holes in their memories, and it makes for a trippy and captivating read.

Nightmare’s specially issue #100 has a lot of strong stories, but I think my favorite is Sam J. Miller’s “Darkness Metastatic,” which imagines a kind of viral online toxicity and the chilling implications one journalist uncovers about it.

The post X Marks The Story: January 2021 appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

Book Review: KINGDOM OF SOULS by Rena Barron

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 01:42:24 GMT

The daughter of two powerful magic-users in a long legacy of witchdoctors strugglers with her lack of power–especially when the fate of the world is at stake.

Kingdom of Souls by Rena Barron (HC)

Title: Kingdom of Souls
Author: Rena Barron
Genre: Fantasy, YA
Publisher: Harper Teen
Publication Date: September 3, 2019
Hardcover: 496 pages

A girl with no gifts must bargain for the power to fight her own mother’s dark schemes—even if the price is her life.
Crackling with dark magic, unspeakable betrayal, and daring twists you won’t see coming, this explosive YA fantasy debut is a can’t-miss, high-stakes epic perfect for fans of Legendborn, Strange the Dreamer, and Children of Blood and Bone.
“Magnetic and addictive. This book is black girl magic at its finest.”—New York Times bestselling author Dhonielle Clayton
Heir to two lines of powerful witchdoctors, Arrah yearns for magic of her own. Yet she fails at bone magic, fails to call upon her ancestors, and fails to live up to her family’s legacy. Under the disapproving eye of her mother, the Kingdom’s most powerful priestess and seer, she fears she may never be good enough.
But when the Kingdom’s children begin to disappear, Arrah is desperate enough to turn to a forbidden, dangerous ritual. If she has no magic of her own, she’ll have to buy it—by trading away years of her own life.
Arrah’s borrowed power reveals a nightmarish betrayal, and on its heels, a rising tide of darkness that threatens to consume her and all those she loves. She must race to unravel a twisted and deadly scheme… before the fight costs more than she can afford.
Set in a richly imagined world inspired by whispered tales of voodoo and folk magic, Rena Barron’s captivating debut is the beginning of a thrilling saga about a girl caught between gods, monsters, and the gift and the curse of power.

Stand alone or series: Book 1 in a planned series

How did I get this book: Purchased

Format: Hardcover

Trigger Warning: Abuse, Rape

Review

Arrah is the daughter of two worlds. Her father is a kind-hearted and powerful healer descended from a proud line of witchdoctors of the tribal lands. As High Priestess, Arrah’s mother is the third most powerful person in the Almighty Kingdom–and far more invested in her job at the heart of the Kingdom than in her disappointing daughter. Arrah is tempted to listen to charlatans and trade years of her life in exchange for the ability to work a single piece of magic… and yet, she is still holding onto hope. Now sixteen years old, she knows that this Blood Moon Festival is her last chance to receive the gift of magic from Heka, god of the tribal lands.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen. Another Blood Moon Festival, another day without any magical ability whatsoever.

To make matters worse, when her Grandmother tries to understand why Arrah’s powers won’t manifest, she is greeted with a vision of a green-eyed serpent–a demon, the likes of which should all be destroyed, killed in the great war with the vanquishing orisha (gods). Arrah’s father is, justifiably, terrified, but her mother has bigger, more political concerns on her mind. They leave the Tribal Lands and head to the Kingdom, where Arrah soon finds herself in the middle of a power play between her mother and the second most powerful person in the Kingdom, the Vizier. In a ploy for maximum dramatic effect, the Head Priestess makes a shocking revelation–children are disappearing in the Kingdom, and her magic isn’t able to discern the identity of the culprit.

When one of Arrah’s friends is the latest victims in the string of disappearances, she decides to take matters into her own hands–trading years of her life in exchange for magic to uncover the abductor.

And then, things get really complicated.

As it turns out, demons aren’t gone. The fate of the Kingdom–of the world–hangs in the balance, and Arrah is the only one with even a glimmer of a chance to save the world.

Allow me to begin this review in the most professional manner possible: WHY AREN’T PEOPLE RAVING ABOUT THIS BOOK IT IS SO GOOD. PLEASE, EVERYONE, READ IT NOW.

Ahem. Now that’s out of the way, I promise to form more cohesive (and hopefully, persuasive) thoughts. Kingdom of Souls is dark, and desperate, and beautiful. It is the story of a young woman who struggles to live up to her lineage, and who desperately does not want to disappoint her parents. It’s a story about family, both blood and found–one of the key things that Barron nails in this book is that sometimes the family you choose can be closer than the family you are born into. Finally, it’s a story about fate, history, and deception. So much of history is subject to the person who is doing the telling, and this becomes appallingly clear throughout this brilliant novel.

It’s hard to speak to more specifics within this novel without revealing enormous spoilers, but I will do my best:

From a character perspective, my heart ached for Arrah, her family, and her friends. Kingdom of Souls is split into five parts, with some interstitial chapters told from the perspective of the orisha (gods of the Almighty Kingdom, who may or may not have a stake in this game), as well as some others who shall remain nameless. But most of the story is told from Arrah’s perspective, which works pretty beautifully, especially as she discovers more about the child abductions and her world. Through Arrah’s vantage point, we see an unpacking of the legacy of abuse in a respectful, but unflinching way. We also see very clearly how history is written by the victors, and how the truth is often shades of gray instead of some clear black and white solution.

From a worldbuilding perspective, Kingdom of Souls posits an intriguing magic system, where orisha are gods born of the Great Cataclysm but are not all there is. There are gods like Heka, who choose to bestow magic, but who are not orisha; there are demons, whose heritage is a little more complicated. I love the cost-mechanism of magic in this setting, where you either have it and can wield it, or you cannot but you can certainly try at great physical (and, presumably, spiritual) damage to yourself. It’s a cruel and unfair system, but the rules do work.

There are some shaky moments in Kingdom of Souls–but overall, Barron finds her footing and delivers. There are many unexpected twists, leading to some really cool revelations that I am dying to talk about, but won’t for fear of spoilers.

BUT TRUST ME, FELLOW READERS. The twists are good. They are worth it.

And the best part? Book 2, Reaper of Souls, just came out.

Rating: 8 – ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT.

The post Book Review: KINGDOM OF SOULS by Rena Barron appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

Book Review: MEXICAN GOTHIC by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 15:10:59 GMT

In 1950s Mexico, a headstrong socialite embarks on an adventure to save her cousin from a questionable marriage, a potentially haunted gothic mansion, and some twisted family secrets. (And also a lot of mushrooms.)

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Title: Mexican Gothic
Author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Genre: Fantasy, Horror
Publisher: Del Rey
Publication Date: June 30, 2020
Hardcover: 320 pages

An isolated mansion. A chillingly charismatic aristocrat. And a brave socialite drawn to expose their treacherous secrets. . . . From the author of Gods of Jade and Shadow comes “a terrifying twist on classic gothic horror” (Kirkus Reviews) set in glamorous 1950s Mexico.
After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She’s not sure what she will find—her cousin’s husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region.

Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She’s a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she’s also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin’s new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi’s dreams with visions of blood and doom.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family’s youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family’s past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family’s once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.

And Noemí, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.

Stand alone or series: Stand alone

How did I get this book: Purchased

Format: Hardcover

Review

Noemí Taboada knows how to work a crowd. Rich, well-connected, young, and beautiful, Noemí knows how to fluster, flirt, and manipulate others in high society–though, truly, Noemí craves the freedom to follow her passions. Unfortunately for Noemí, earning a master’s degree in anthropology or perfecting her ability to play the piano are not skills that her parents want her to pursue–making a strategic marriage to strengthen the family’s business, name, and prosperity is the Taboada top priority. Family is everything.

So, when Noemí’s father receives a letter from his newlywed niece Catalina, claiming that her new husband and his family and the house itself are trying to poison her, he is quick to act forcefully and discretely. He tasks Noemí with going to El Triunfo to ascertain the situation and make sure Catalina is safe–in return, he will give Noemí his permission to apply for university. Noemí doesn’t need much urging–Catalina is a beloved cousin, and Noemí quickly sets off to help.

What Noemí discovers is a sleepy, forgotten mountain town–after the silver mine dried up, and a string of tragedies, the entire economy of El Triunfo collapsed. And sitting atop a treacherous winding road looking down at town is High Place–a gothic English manor transported to Mexico decades earlier by Howard Doyle, Catalina’s new father-in-law. It is here, in High Place, where Noemí is bound to stay to help her cousin. High Place is large and once proud, but now a slowly rotting relic of a different time–it is a cold, inhospitable kind of home that immediately sets Noemí on edge.

The Doyle family, however, is perhaps even more unnerving than their mansion. There is Catalina’s handsome but coldly reserved husband, Virgil, whom Noemí has met before yet knows nothing about. Florence, Virgil’s aunt, who is stern, gray, and seems to hate Noemí on sight. Florence’s son and Virgil’s cousin, Francis, is the first to meet Noemí and seems to be the only friendly soul in High Place–though Noemí suspects he’s hiding something. And, Howard Doyle himself, patriarch of the Doyle line–a decrepit, ancient man (who espouses arguments for eugenics and remarks on Noemí’s dark coloring and beauty upon their first meeting).

The Doyles insist that Catalina is just suffering from tuberculosis–their private doctor is personally caring for her, and that her hallucinations and psychosis are common side effects to her medication. Noemí, seeing Catalina is a pale version of her former self, is not so sure.

What Noemí knows is this: something is wrong in High Place. And she is determined to understand what is happening to her cousin–even if the same affliction begins to take hold of Noemí herself.

The proverbial cat is out of the bag regarding Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s work; I have long been a fan of her short fiction (The Prime Meridian is absolutely excellent) and novels (Gods of Jade and Shadow, Signal to Noise, etc). Moreno-Garcia is able to fluidly write in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, blending magic with urban legends and folklore, transforming old tropes into something new with her sharp characters’ perspectives. Mexican Gothic is no exception; it is a proper gothic novel, resplendent with sublime imagery, family secrets, and yes, even romance. But add to that traditional framework a 1950s Mexico setting and the tensions and interpretations of race and class–this is what distinguishes Mexican Gothic from every other recent retelling of haunted houses on hills and modernist Brontës.

As with any work of horror, and especially gothic horror, much emphasis is placed on the strength of characters–both heroes and villains. Although it’s hard initially to relate to Noemí’s cynical approach to others, quickly she becomes more tangible and less of a persona, as she tries to navigate the oddness and wrongness of the Doyle household. As we learn more about Noemí and her relationship with Catalina, she becomes even more sympathetic and real–Moreno-Garcia creates a character who is definitely not perfect or passive, and Noemí is forced to confront her own darkness by book’s end. If Noemí is a heroine worth rooting for, there’s also the horrifying specter of Howard Doyle and his son, Virgil, in their calculated cruelty. There are secrets upon secrets, layers of desire, deception, and predatory, terrifying, power in the Doyle line–but for all of that cruelty and darkness, there is also hope that not every cycle needs to be repeated. (Francis is proof of that.)

Arguably the more important element in gothic fiction is the setting itself–and once again, Moreno-Garcia nails it. A town destroyed by a silver mine and greed, now forgotten by the rest of the world, El Triunfo’s remote decrepitude is achingly real. But High Place is the true star of this book, with its molding wallpaper, musty hallways, and almost complete lack of any technological upgrades, like electrical lighting. The house pulsates and squirms, and Moreno-Garcia’s use of mushroom imagery, the overripe sickly sweet rot that pervades High Place and Noemí’s mind, is absolutely fantastic. As you read the book, there are many possible explanations that start to make themselves known–are Catalina and Noemí dealing with some kind of environmental agent shaping their thoughts? Is it something more supernatural and insidious? Is it both, or neither?

Hint: the “reveal” and subsequent climactic final act is absolute bloody perfection, but I won’t spoil that for you.

Don’t just take my word for it; read it yourself and find out.

Rating: 8 – BRILLIANT

The post Book Review: MEXICAN GOTHIC by Silvia Moreno-Garcia appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

Book Review: A DEADLY EDUCATION by Naomi Novik

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 05:01:00 GMT

Naomi Novik is back with a brand new series, and dear readers, I am hooked.

Title: A Deadly Education
Author: Naomi Novik
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Del Rey
Publication Date: September 29, 2020
Hardcover: 336 pages

Lesson One of the Scholomance: Learning has never been this deadly.
A Deadly Education is set at Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted where failure means certain death (for real) — until one girl, El, begins to unlock its many secrets.
There are no teachers, no holidays, and no friendships, save strategic ones. Survival is more important than any letter grade, for the school won’t allow its students to leave until they graduate… or die! The rules are deceptively simple: Don’t walk the halls alone. And beware of the monsters who lurk everywhere.
El is uniquely prepared for the school’s dangers. She may be without allies, but she possesses a dark power strong enough to level mountains and wipe out millions. It would be easy enough for El to defeat the monsters that prowl the school. The problem? Her powerful dark magic might also kill all the other students.

Stand alone or series: Book 1 of the Scholomance Series

How did I get this book: Purchased

Format: Hardcover

Review

Galadriel–El to her friends (not that she has many of those)–is having a real bitch of a junior year. To be fair, she and the other high schoolers within the Scholomance are all having a hard time. It’s not easy being enrolled in a magical school that is actively trying to kill you every second of every day for four years. But that is what the Scholomance does–a teacher-less interdimensional academy into which young magic-workers are whisked away to learn first-hand that magic is a void of eternal darkness filled with monsters that want to eat you alive.

El’s specific problem is that she’s a dark sorceress–the dark sorceress, in fact, as a pretty damning prophecy says she’s basically going to destroy the world. El is unparalleled in her affinity to wield spells of death and cosmic destruction, but she doesn’t actually want to turn to the dark side. So, El works hard to build mana–an energy source for performing spells–the noble way (pushups, situps, performing physical torture like needlework) instead of pulling it out of some unwitting freshman. She has a Plan: keep her head down to stay alive, store up enough mana to show her classmates how powerful she really is (but not too soon or else she might be killed by said classmates), and getting a bid in an enclave so that she and her mother can be protected from the constant threat of sorcerer-consuming monsters.

El’s Plan is solid–until Orion Lake starts to save El’s life. Repeatedly. A New York enclaver with a major savior complex, Orion is confused when El tells him off after he saves her life for the second time. Then he investigates her for thinking she might be behind another student’s death, and is determined not to let her leave his sight. In response, El spins the attention to her benefit and all of a sudden is getting attention from the other enclavers–if she can convince folks to believe she’s dating Orion, she just might be able to get them to believe that he will follow her to a different enclave. (And everyone wants a piece of maleficaria-slayer Orion Lake.) But then things get messy–and El has way bigger problems than making folks believe she’s in a relationship with Orion Lake.

I am a longtime fan of Naomi Novik’s work, starting with her Temeraire books and building to a crescendo of adoration for both Uprooted and Spinning Silver. As such, I had high expectations for this new first book in a series–and I’m thrilled to say that Novik delivers, though I had some initial misgivings. A Deadly Education plays within some very familiar tropes (hello, magical boarding school and I-hate-him-I-like-him, my old friends), but somehow manages to be shockingly inventive, darkly funny, and fun. In other words, dear reader, I absolutely loved this book.

Galadriel Higgins is our antisocial would-be-dark-sorceress narrator, and she is as abrasive (and unreliable) as they come. Snarky to a fault, El is constantly evaluating her environment and those around her to understand their angles and motivations. She’s secretive and defensive to ensure that no one knows she’s an untapped powerhouse of dark magic, choosing to bide her time before she reveals her hand. El is sarcastic but there’s a fair share of vulnerability under all that acid; she’s smart, and she also happens to be pretty loyal to the few allies she makes in the Scholomance. I loved watching El’s layers peel away throughout this first book, as she tries to deny her own feelings and the friendships she starts to make (even though she complains about them the whole way). And while I usually am not a fan of the hero-complex type, the balance that Novik introduces with Orion’s character is perfect–he’s “popular” in that he kills a ton of monsters and tries to save everyone’s life, but no one really cares to get to know the guy. Between El’s caustic acid and Orion’s white knight, there’s a pretty fun dynamic that reveals the actual people beneath their facades.

Truly, though, the reason A Deadly Education is so damn good is because of Novik’s impeccable worldbuilding. I love the idea of an interdimensional magic school that is kind of falling apart at the seams, and intent on killing its students. Dark boarding schools for magic workers have been done (see Skin Hunger by Kathleen Duey, or The Witcher series from Andrzej Sapkowski, or Galen’s training in Assassin’s Apprentice), but Novik’s take is the first time I’ve read a school that no one really remembers how it exists or works, and seems solely to exist in order to kill most of its attendees. There are no kindly headmasters here, no safety from the constant barrage of death–you either learn to protect yourself, or you die. (It’s to the point where even the cafeteria food that appears on schedule may be poisonous, and you never take a shower because bad things happen in the bathroom.)

In the same darkly satisfying vein, the cutthroat rules of magic (energy always comes from somewhere) and scarcity of protection, both within the Scholomance’s walls and beyond with haves (enclavers) and have-nots (everyone else) are wholly believable.

In other words: I absolutely loved this book, and cannot wait for the next instalment.

Reviewer’s Note:

It would be impossible for me to review this book without addressing the reviews and readings that have raised concerns of racism within A Deadly Education. As a bi-racial person of color, I did not personally find this book to be racist in my reading. However, this is my personal reading and I deeply respect those who have been hurt by this novel. It is not my place to speak for BIPOC who felt marginalized by this book, nor is it my intent to dismiss such readings of A Deadly Education. I can only share my personal interpretation, which I hope fellow readers will take into consideration.

I did not find El’s references to other characters of color (of which El is one, herself) or languages to be racist in my reading–she is an antisocial heroine in an environment that is actively trying to kill her. Further, El is half-Welsh and half-Indian but raised entirely by her Welsh mother in Wales; as such, it makes sense to me that she doesn’t identify with her Indian relatives. (As a bi-racial third culture kid, I also struggle with cultural identification and understand El’s actions here.)

These things said, I wholeheartedly agree that Novik’s use of the word “dreadlocks” in one passage of the book (in which El talks about long hair being a very bad idea in the Scholomance, and dreadlocks being a haven for lockleeches to lay their eggs) very clearly evokes a harmful racist stereotype. Taken in the context of the world–in which no one can take a shower or wash their hair without facing near-certain death–I understand that Novik probably did not intend to make this association, but as we all know intent does not always equal reality. While I was glad to see that Novik issued an apology and the actions that she is taking (removing this passage from next printings as well as the electronic versions of the book, and to ensure that sensitivity reads in the future will happen post-last pass edits) come across as both heartfelt and appropriate, this casual misstep shows us again how deeply ingrained such historical racist stereotypes are, especially in publishing.

I recommend reading these posts that explore differing interpretations of racism in A Deadly Education. And if you are still interested in the book (or if you have read the book) and would like to discuss, please leave a comment below.

Rating: 8 – Excellent

The post Book Review: A DEADLY EDUCATION by Naomi Novik appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

"When I Grow Up” by Kate Elliott (A Spiritwalker Short Story)

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 15:01:06 GMT

In 2010, Kate Elliott’s first spiritwalker book, Cold Magic–an alternate, post-fall-of-Rome historical-European, proto-steampunk fantasy with fairies and magic–was published. Suffice it to say, dear readers, that we loved it (and also loved subsequent books Cold Fire and Cold Steel just as passionately). Today, we are honored to share a new short story and accompanying glorious work of art, set in the Spiritwalker universe.

An Introduction from the Author

Ten years ago, in September 2010, COLD MAGIC was published by Orbit Books, to be followed by COLD FIRE in 2011 and COLD STEEL in 2013.

I will always be grateful to the enthusiastic and devoted readers who have championed my Afro-Celtic post-Roman icepunk regency adventure alternate-history fantasy, with magic both cold and fire, revolution, Phoenician spies, well-dressed men and hungry women, female friendship, a spirit world dangerously intertwined with the mortal world, sword fights and battles and ball games, world trees, the talking heads of decapitated poets, legal niceties, and of course lawyer dinosaurs. Where would we be without lawyer dinosaurs, I ask you?

Further short works set in the Spiritwalker Trilogy universe followed. Click on this link for a comprehensive list of the stories and where they can be found.

When I Grow Up might be described as the coda to the coda. This story and its accompanying illustration by Kelsey Liggett was conceived specifically as a thank you to all those aforementioned readers, a year’s end gift from my house to yours. I think we all need something heartwarming right now.

I <3 you all.

Kate Elliott

P.S. A big thank you to the very best Book Smugglers for agreeing to publish this story and illustration on their site. Many thanks to Kelsey Liggett for tackling a truly complicated illustration with panache and skill. Thanks to Sharis Ingram, Nilah Magruder, and Aliette de Bodard for generously answering my requests for feedback.

When I Grow Up

My papa still lets me sit on his lap even though I threw up on his favorite dash jacket.

Now when I sit on his lap he wears an old jacket that is red and gold. I like it because the cloth is so soft and old. Also I like it because I can touch all the tiny stitches where Mama mended it. She says she must have mended it a hundred times which is a lot of times. Mama says each stitch is a thread of love.

I am the best lap-sitter because my brother Daniel is too big now. He says when I am ALMOST THIRTEEN I will not want to sit on laps. That is how he says it, ALMOST THIRTEEN, like he thinks someone has forgotten. He just wants to run off and set fires with our cousins the triplets Hannibal, Tarquin, and Suren. He doesn’t have time for me any more and I don’t want to play with them anyway. I don’t like fire.

I haven’t told anyone yet but I can quench a candle flame even though I am not quite six. I know it doesn’t count if you lick your fingers and pinch the flame dead but I pretend I am a cold mage when I do it.

When I grow up I am going to be a cold mage like Papa.

My big sister Fati says that sitting in laps is for babies but I don’t care. She is mean and she pulls my hair and I hate her because she always tells me to “just go away you big baby why don’t you just throw a tantrum.” Then I go and sit on Papa’s lap. He lets me sit on his lap while he is working at his desk writing letters. He says I am the stillest sitter he has ever known.

I sit so still I get to listen while the grown ups are talking. They don’t notice I am there. Fati can’t ever sit still. She bounces all the time. She is up and down and running after the boys. They don’t mind her even though she is only nine because she can climb better than they can so they send her to get things they can’t reach. Yesterday she climbed onto the roof. All the grownups came out and got very quiet. Papa ran to get a ladder. By the time he came back Mama already climbed up and helped her back down.

Papa told Fati he thought maybe she had invisible wings because she is such a fearless climber. She said maybe she does and maybe she keeps her wings hidden. Then he looked very interested and very concerned. Afterward all the grownups had a talk together around the big table with the door shut. They said things I didn’t understand like wings would suggest a troubling manifestation of the spirit world and perhaps a rip in the veil.

I don’t believe Fati has wings. I think she says so to get attention. But she could never stay still like I did, hiding under Papa’s desk, and not get caught listening. She didn’t hear Mama say, ‘What are we going to do about her?’ and Papa say, ‘Let her be. No harm in it. You have to admire her patience.’

I don’t see why lying about wings is admirable, and Fati isn’t patient. She can’t grow up to be a spy like Mama like I am going to do. But I am also going to be a cold mage like Papa. So I am going to be a cold spy.

Sometimes I have to sit at the big table in Papa’s study because Papa is holding my little baby brother Sumaworo. He is not quite two, and he is very small considering what a big name he has. Everyone calls him Sunny for his sweet little smile. Sunny should be walking by now. Grandmama says he is slow to walk because he rushed early to the world before he was ready. Ready for what I don’t know.

For a long time he slept in a box by Grandmama’s stove. She and Mama and Papa and Aunt Bee and Uncle Rory fed him with a dropper. Now he is bigger, someone is always holding him. Except me. They say I am too small to hold him but Fati says they won’t let me hold him because they are afraid I will throw a tantrum and drop him.

I would never drop him! He doesn’t say Daniel or Fati’s names yet. He only says mine. He can’t say Tara so he calls me Ta-wa. He loves me best because one time when he was very tiny like a wrinkled little raisin bug I sat beside his box singing to him and he turned a funny color. So I ran and fetched Grandmama because she is a doctor. She rubbed him with oil and blew kisses into his mouth until he turned to a normal color. Grandmama says I saved his life and that is why he loves me.

When I grow up I am going to be a doctor. I will be a cold spy doctor.

Because I am very fortunate I have three grandmothers.

One is passed.

One is Nana. She sewed Bunny for me out of scraps of cloth. That was before she went over the seas to stay with Aunt Kayleigh and Uncle Kofi and their children. She said I can come visit when I am bigger.

The other grandmother is Grandmama the doctor.

The morning after The Incident with Fati and the roof, I could not find my bunny. I searched high and low for Bunny in the bedroom nook I share with Fati. I searched under my bed and around my bed and in the wardrobe and behind the chair. Bunny was nowhere to be found.

After breakfast in the big hall, the bell rang for school. All the big children got in their lines and marched away. Aunt Serena came like she does every morning to escort the youngests to the nursery for the day. The little children are noisy and they run around and they push me. I am too old to play with them. So I hid under the table until they were gone. I hide there every morning and no one ever finds me.

Most mornings I go and sit in Grandmama’s office. As long as I am quiet she lets me play with Bunny in a corner while she examines sick people. Maybe I forgot Bunny in the office. But when I got to her office, Bunny wasn’t there.

Grandmama told me I couldn’t stay.

“But I can’t find Bunny!”

Grandmama has a kind voice, but when she says no even Fati cannot wheedle her. “Now, Tara, I have a surgery that I have to do immediately. You’re a big girl. You can find a solution.” She paused, then added with a strong eye, “A solution that doesn’t harm things that belong to other people.”

“I said I was sorry!”

“Yes, you did. Now, go on, little soldier.” She kissed me and sent me on my way.

Grandmama’s office is at the back of the house beside the kitchen. As I walked past the kitchen door I heard Uncle Rory and Aunt Bee arguing like they always do. They were in the pantry packing supplies.

“We shouldn’t bring along this cheese,” Uncle Rory was saying. “It will give away our position to any passing patrol.”

“Only to people who smell like you do,” said Aunt Bee.

I clapped a hand over my mouth, but they heard me giggle.

“Uncle Rory doesn’t smell,” I said when they looked out the door at me.

“I have an exceptional sense of smell.” Uncle Rory held a cheese wheel at arm’s length with his face all squinted up. “Your Aunt Beatrice, on the other hand, is well known to be insensitive to nuance.”

Aunt Bee snatched the cheese wheel out of his hand and stuck it in a travel bag. “You’ll be glad of this humble cheese the third night we’re tramping through the forest.”

She closed the bag to make the cheese safe. Then she knelt and put out a hand toward me in case I wanted her to touch me.

“What is it, Tara? You have such a look on your face. Your mama won’t be gone for more than eight or ten days this time. We are going to rescue some unjustly jailed prisoners, like we always do. There’s nothing to worry about.”

I don’t like it when the grown ups say there is nothing to worry about. I stuck my two fingers in my mouth to suck on. Then I remembered Fati calls it a baby thing to do, so I took them out and pretended it was a mistake.

“I can’t find Bunny. Can you help me?”

“Oh, dear one.” I let her give me a hug because she gives big warm hugs. “I would, but we have to go at midday and your Uncle Rory didn’t pack the travel gear he was supposed to . . . ” She looked at Uncle Rory for a long time and gave a big huff of a breath like a dragon. “ . . . so I don’t have time. Maybe the boys can help you. They have carpentry in the workshop today.”

“You’ll scout out your bunny, my little soldier,” said Uncle Rory. He grabbed me up and twirled me around the way he does like I am a whirligig. That made me laugh and feel better, so they kissed me and sent me on my way.

The house I live in is very big and it has two floors and an attic and many rooms. It has a long front to face the street and two wings like an eru’s wings that fold back. After I left the kitchen I walked down the corridor toward the front. The corridor is wide enough to play piggy-in-the-middle, bowling, and hopscotch when it is winter. I saw Daniel and the triplets ahead of me. They were carrying a pot and holding a lid on it like there was something inside they did not want to get out. I even heard scritching.

I ran to them. “Can you help me find Bunny?”

The triplets looked at Daniel and then at the pot.

Daniel said, “You have to go, Tara. We’re doing something important and you’ll just get in the way.”

“I won’t get in the way!”

“I mean it,” he said. “And if I have to drag you to Aunt Serena, I will.”

Aunt Serena will hug me and fuss over me and make me stay with the little children, so I let Daniel and the triplets go. For a while I stood in the corridor staring at the wood floor that I sweeped yesterday evening. I did not know what to do with myself or where to go without Bunny.

Then I remembered that once a week Papa teaches the youngest students. They are the ones too young to become cold mages yet. He likes to see how everyone is going on and how well they can recite the lessons they will need if they bloom.

Cold mages bloom like flowers. They are closed buds and one day they open. When I grow up I will bloom.

But today I was just missing Bunny so I sneaked into the back of the school room. Sometimes if I sit at the back bench very quietly with the seven year olds no one notices me.

When I tiptoed in Papa saw me sit down but he didn’t say “Tara, you are too young to be here” like the other teachers do, so that meant I could stay.

I like to watch Papa teach. He wears colorful dash jackets even though his friends tease him about his clothes. He only smiles when they tease him. When I grow up I am going to be like Papa and learn to only smile when people tease me instead of screaming and trying to hit them.

Mama says Papa has a persuasive voice. I think that means it is not too high and not too low but just right. He walks along the benches listening to the young students recite from the primer on cold magic. He encourages the soft voices to speak up and the loud voices to leave room for the others. If everyone has done well he lets students recite from the old epics like when the snake comes out of the well.

Because I am not old enough to start school, I speak the words without saying them out loud. When he passed me he gave me a little wink so I sat up straighter and pretended I am a real student. It is so hard to have to wait until I am seven before I can start school.

Papa left, and Maester Godwik arrived to teach geography. He set everyone to a writing exercise with their stylus. While they did that he started to draw a big map on the chalkboard.

I did not have a stylus or a wax tablet for writing so I traced on the desk top with my finger. I know all my letters.

Fati sat at the row of desks right in front of me. She did not turn around but I heard her whisper to her friends on either side just loud enough for me to hear. “Mama finds her so exasperating. Not that she knows what that means.”

“It means you smell,” I whispered to her back.

She snorted under her breath. “I do not smell. That is such a baby thing to say to someone.” Then she nudged her friends, and they all giggled behind their hands.

My ears burned. “You do too smell!”

She bent over her tablet, writing out words so if Maester Godwik looked he would see her working. He did not look around but his tail twitched.

She kept talking in a low voice only those around her could hear. “You used to be fun when you were a real baby like Sunny. Now you’re just annoying. You annoy everyone with your tantrums and your screaming and your hitting.”

My throat felt like a hornet was stuck in it. I blinked because hot tears got in my eyes.

One of her friends whispered, “Didn’t she cut up your birthday jacket?”

Her shoulders heaved with anger. Something fluttered at her back like gauzy wings opening. But maybe that was just the light coming through the windows.

“Yes. Yes, she did. The one Mama sewed for me special from the fabric that matched Papa’s new dash jacket. She was just jealous. What a big baby.”

Her friends turned to look at me like I was a dirty insect. When Maester Godwik made a coughing noise, they all turned back and bent over their tablets.

Fati didn’t stop talking. Her voice was as mean as poison. “Papa made her do my chores for a week. Mama is making her do extra mending to teach her what it means to repair things that get torn. But my birthday jacket was ruined. I’m turning it into doll clothes. And even though Mama is sewing me a new one, a better one, it’s not enough. It will never be enough for that little brat.”

The hornets burst out of me. “I am not a brat!”

She turned to look at me. There was a beast in her eyes and a snarl on her lips. “Do you know why you don’t have any friends? Because no one likes you. Because you are a pest. Just go away and stop pestering me. You will never find your smelly ugly old bunny.”

“Bunny doesn’t smell! You’re the one who smells! You are. You are! YOU ARE!”

I jumped up and crawled over the desk and I hit her on the back with my fist, and I hit her again because she laughed at me and again because her friends shrieked and jumped away and then Maester Godwik appeared with all his teeth showing.

He said in a calm voice, “Tara, the classroom is for children seven and older who can act with discipline and focus. You are not yet among their number. It’s time for you to leave. As for you girls, back to work but understand that I will speak with you all later about your behavior.”

I stumbled out to the corridor and curled up against the wall. Each time I took a breath a big sob came out. There were so many and they were pressing so hard against my chest that I could not stop them. I didn’t have Bunny to help me stop them. I can tell Bunny anything and Bunny listens, never screams or throws tantrums.

Footsteps clip-clopped down the corridor. I was still crying but I peeked up through my hands. Uncle Juba walked past with an important looking visitor. The visitor tried not to stare at me.

In a low voice he said to Uncle Juba, “Should we not ask if the child is well?”

Uncle Juba used his indoor voice. “Let her be. The doctor says she is going through a sticky patch and we should give her space.”

They kept walking because no one cares about me. I sat in the empty corridor and cried and cried and cried.

After a while soft padding steps approached me. Felina settled next to me and started to purr. We don’t really know Felina’s name and maybe she doesn’t know her name or even have a name. She only came to live with us not long ago when a pretty young woman came to the door and yelled at Uncle Rory about how angry she was because she thought she was going to have a baby but she had a big kitten instead. Why would anyone be mad about that? Kittens are much more fun to play with than big sisters.

Everyone says maybe someday Felina will be able to turn into a person and back into a sabertooth cat like Uncle Rory can. I hope so too. Then I would have a friend.

I rested my hand on her back and let her purrs talk through my skin like someone telling me it will be all right. The purrs chased away the hornets. I wiped my cheeks and sucked in a breath and wished I had Bunny to hug.

Then I remembered that maybe I left Bunny behind in Papa’s study yesterday when I was spying on the grown ups when they talked about Fati.

So I gave Felina a pat and jumped up and ran to Papa’s study in the other wing.

The door was locked.

Because my hair is UNRULY like me there is always a hairpin in my braids. A hairpin is like a weapon. It can be a sword for a little soldier. I am a little soldier. I was named after my grandmother Tara and she was a soldier so her spirit resides in me. If a person is very patient, even if she is not quite six, she can jiggle a hairpin in a lock until the lock opens.

Carefully I pushed down the latch. Slowly I pushed open the door a crack because I thought I heard a noise inside and I have very good hearing. Peeking in, I saw Mama was sitting on Papa’s lap and they were kissing!

“Goodness, Andevai,” she said, pulling away. “We will only be gone a few days.”

He smiled like he does when he is with Mama.

She said, “Will you be all right with the girls? They are both in quite the state these days. They were so sweet together for so long and now they fight all the time.”

“It will pass,” he said. “Fati got accustomed to Tara being her loyal little shadow. But now Tara is ready for more independence. We have to let them sort out a new relationship without too much interference from us. Sometimes people have to fight before they can learn to get along, Catherine.”

“Do they?” she asked in her teasing voice which is a nice teasing voice and not a mean teasing voice like Fati’s.

He laughed like he does when he is with Mama. They went back to kissing so I snicked the door closed.

Coming to the study made me think. I thought and thought about when I was in the study squeezed under the desk and listening to the grown ups talk at the table about Fati climbing up to the roof. I did not have Bunny when I was hiding under the desk. I was all alone.

You will never find your smelly ugly old bunny.

How would Fati know I will never find Bunny? Unless she knows where Bunny is. Unless she put Bunny somewhere she thinks I can’t get to and no one will notice.

That’s when I knew what a terrible thing Fati had done just to be mean to me.

I ran outside to the big courtyard behind the front of the house and between the wings. I remembered exactly where Fati climbed the wall where there are window ledges and a drain spout and an overhang. And there was Bunny on the roof, all alone, ears flopping over the side. If it rained, Bunny would get wet. If it snowed, Bunny would get cold. If the wind blew, Bunny would blow into a far country and never find her way home. I had to rescue Bunny.

So I pulled myself up to the window ledge, and I wedged my feet between the drain spout and the wall and I climbed until my hands hurt and I got to the top of the tall window where there was another little ledge because the window has an arch on top with more glass.

I grabbed and held on. I heard people shouting from inside. My fingers were aching and my feet were slipping. It was so far to the ground because the windows were very very high, as high as the ceiling inside the rooms. And it was even higher to the roof, another whole set of tall windows. But Bunny was waiting for me so I had to be brave and strong like my grandmother Tara.

I heard a lot of shouting. People came running into the courtyard. Fati ran in front of all of them.

She was yelling at me like she does in her bossy voice. “Don’t move, Tara. Don’t move. Papa is getting a ladder. Just don’t move or you’ll fall. I’ll get Bunny back for you.”

“I won’t fall! I won’t! You think I’m a baby and can’t do anything but I’m not a baby any more and I can!”

My shout was so loud it made my hands slip and my feet slip. I screamed, and I fell. I grabbed for the drain spout but I couldn’t keep hold of it. My forehead scraped against the metal like it was a knife cutting me open. I fell again and hit the ground on my elbows and knees with the biggest bump. My head was on fire. Blood poured into my eye and it tasted nasty and I screamed, and Fati screamed, and everyone was screaming.

Except Papa and Mama. He set down a ladder, and Mama rolled me onto my back and told me to look at her and tell me my name as if I didn’t know my name!

“I’m not a baby!” I yelled at her. “I don’t want to be a baby any more.”

“She might have a concussion,” said Mama concernedly. “We’d better get her inside.”

Papa picked me up and my head hurt so badly I felt really sick and I threw up on him. He carried me all the way to Grandmama’s office and laid me on a table. Mama closed the window shades so it was dim. That was better but it still hurt. It hurt especially when she brought a cloth and dabbed blood from my face but even that didn’t hurt as much as the thought of Bunny alone on the roof.

“Hush, hush,” said Papa. “You’ll be all right.”

“Hush, hush,” said Mama. “You’ll be all right.”

The door opened and Grandmama came in. Her hands touched my skinned knees, my skinned arms, my skinned shoulder, and my scalp. She stared into my eyes and made me look at her finger when she moved it back and forth. Then her fingers pressed a little circle above my right eye where the spout had cut me. I made a whimper and then I wished I hadn’t because I wanted to be brave.

“I don’t think she has a concussion but I will keep a close eye on her,” Grandmama said to Papa and Mama. “As for the blood, it is just a cut. Scalp wounds bleed copiously but it’s not serious. I will have to stitch it up.”

“No! No! No!” I started to kick.

Mama bent over me. “It’s just mending, Tara. Like I mend your papa’s jackets. I’ll stay here with you.”

Grandmama has a brisk voice she uses when people don’t want to take the medicine she gives them. “Cat, given what we know, you must go because you are the only one who has a chance to rescue them. I have seen many a wound and I can tell you that Tara will be fine and we can handle her for a few days.”

No one argues with Grandmama about medicine. Not even me.

“Let me get my suture kit while you give her a kiss for courage.” Grandmama went out.

Papa said to Mama in his persuasive voice, “It doesn’t hurt to let her sit in on the class. Godwik said she was fine until Fati and her friends started teasing her. I know she is younger than the other children but she can sit so still. If she can learn to cause no trouble, then what harm in it? She’s bored. And she likes the routine of the classroom. Which is more than I can say for some.”

Mama laughed in the low, secret way she does when she is with Papa. I could tell she wanted to kiss him and began to lean toward him but wrinkled up her nose. “I’ll tell Fati to wash your jacket.” She turned back to look at me. “As for you, sweetling, I’ll be back in a few days.”

She kissed me on the head and left. Papa stood by the table, holding my hand and humming a lullaby. I tried not to cry but the cries kept coming because my head hurt and my knees hurt and my arms hurt and my heart hurt.

Grandmama came back. She opened the shades and she was armed with a needle and it had a very sharp point.

“No. No, no,” I said, trying not to cry, and just as I was trying so hard not to cry and kick, the door opened and Fati the mean beast burst in.

“Fati, haven’t you done enough for today?” said Papa, sounding exasperated for once.

His stern voice made her stop right there by the door. She had snot and tears all over her face like she’d been crying and she looked so funny and so stupid that I stopped crying.

“I didn’t mean for Tara to get hurt.” She crept forward trembling and she held out her hands because she was carrying a lump of cloth.

“Bunny!” And it was. It was really Bunny.

Papa smiled just a tiny bit. “Give that poor abused creature to Tara and wait outside.”

“Yes, Papa,” she said in the tiniest voice ever heard. She pressed Bunny onto my chest and ran for the door and then she was gone.

Grandmama held the needle and I held Bunny tight. Even if Bunny smelled like rain and mildew I didn’t care.

Grandmama moved to where I couldn’t quite see her. She dabbed at my forehead with a wet cloth that stung and made me blink lots of tears.

Papa placed his hands on either side of my head and he looked me in the eyes with his big warm eyes. “Now hold very still like I know you can. Close your eyes and press this side of your face into my arm. I’m going to hold you so you don’t move.”

Grandmama said, “You are a brave little soldier, Tara. Your bunny is a brave little soldier too. Can you both be brave for me right now? Then you’ll be mended and good as new.”

I can be brave. When I grow up, I am going to be a cold spy doctor soldier.

The prick of the needle hurt but it wasn’t so bad after all, because each stitch is a thread of love.

Art by Kelsey Liggett

The post “When I Grow Up” by Kate Elliott (A Spiritwalker Short Story) appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

Non-Binary Authors to Read: December 2020

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 11:53:57 GMT

Non-Binary Authors To Read is a regular column from A.C. Wise highlighting non-binary authors of speculative fiction and recommending a starting place for their work.

Welcome to the December 2020 edition of Non-Binary Authors to Read. It’s been quite the year, hasn’t it? Despite everything though, reading has remained a comfort for me, and I hope it has for you as well. To that end, I have four stories to offer up as recommendations. They are stories of longing, bittersweet relationships, but also hope. I wish you all a restful end to the year, and may 2021 bring you many more delightful books and stories to read.

P.H. Lee is an author with multiple short stories to their name, however my recommended starting place is “Distant Stars” published at Clarkesworld in April 2020. Struggling with grad school and finding a job is the final straw that leads Sarah’s marriage to fall apart, with her wife Martha getting custody of their son. Fast forward several years – Sarah is about to receive a Nobel Prize, Martha is remarried, and their son is about graduate high school. A scientist in Taiwan contacts Sarah, intrigued by her theories about Dark Energy, and while Sarah is in Hsinchu working on her theories, her son calls to let her know that Martha has passed away suddenly and unexpectedly.

Dark Energy, particularly, isn’t really dark and isn’t really energy. It’s a way of saying this: we expected, when we looked at distant galaxies, that they’d be moving away from us. But we didn’t expect that they’d be moving away from us faster and faster. Dark Energy means that the entire universe is accelerating away from us. And it means that we have no idea why.

The story is relatively short, but packed with emotional weight. Sarah’s studies in Dark Energy and relativity pair with a story about family, how the trajectory of people through their lives affects those around them, and how distances can grow between you and those you love the most, no matter how hard you try to hold on. And sometimes, there is no rational reason as to why. It’s a melancholy story, but beautifully written, with Sarah’s struggles to understand the nature of the universe reflecting her struggles to understand her own family and herself.

B. Pladek is a literature scholar and author. My recommended starting place for their work is “What the Marsh Remembers” from Lackington’s Issue 22. After the war, Randall is assigned to Clearwater Marsh as a Restoration Officer, trying to bring back the scorched land to condition where it might draw tourists again. Rand’s efforts at restoration are interspersed with his memories of the war, of learning about the marsh and its inhabitants from his fellow soldier, John. Both were injured in the war, and assigned to separate restoration locations, despite their request to be assigned together. The BER is unwilling, however, to see beyond whatever is most expedient to make things tourist-friendly.

As Rand’s shadow lengthened over the new rushes, he tapped into the water table below the bedrock. Refilling the marsh had been his core mandate. Put the water back where it was, the Bureau’s brief had said. Add whatever species you like, whatever looks natural, so long as it’s not extinct or too ugly. Remember, we’ve got brochures to print.

The story is a lovely exploration of memory, as well as a frustrating look at bureaucracy. Those who truly care about the land – Rand and John – are limited in the good they can do by their employer who cares only about what is “good enough” to call the job done. There’s an air of longing and melancholy to the story, and the feeling that Rand and John may be more to each other than friends, but can’t speak their feelings aloud. The story also explores the question of who benefits from restoration efforts, and what sort of idealized state of nature is being honored. The bureau’s efforts are aimed at doing what is pleasing and beneficial to human beings, whereas Rand is one of the few to ask – and ultimately to try to honor – what the marsh remembers, and what state it would be in without human interference.

Iona Datt Sharma is an author and lawyer based in London. My recommended starting place for their work is “Heard, Half-Heard, in the Stillness” published in Anathema Magazine. Ekta dreams of going to space. She has since she was young, and was even selected for Human Spaceflight Programme, however an accident during a routine test causes a terrible fire that destroys half the facility where she works at the IAF, and the program is cancelled.

Ekta’s Dadi could tell the future. She didn’t read the tea leaves, or make horoscope charts, or lay bets on the cricket. But she booked the photographer the week before the news came of Purnima Didi’s engagement. She told the panditji to get his blood pressure checked before he told anyone he was short of breath. The day before the Human Spaceflight Programme was suspended, she called Ekta in Sriharikota and said she should come home.

Ekta is understandably heartbroken. She returns home to celebrate Diwali with her family, but it’s hard to celebrate when everything reminds her of space and the journey she assumes she will now ever get to take. The story perfectly captures the idea of having to reorient and rethink your entire life after the goal you have worked towards for so long suddenly vanishes before your eyes. For all that, however, this is still a story about hope, family, and learning to see things in a different way. By learning to appreciate her mother’s wisdom and her way of seeing the world – a way that often seems very distant from Ekta’s experience of life – she learns to have hope again, and forge a new vision for her future.

Xan van Rooyan is a South African author currently based in Finland. My recommended starting place for their work is “The Order of Stolen Hearts” published in Apparition Lit in May 2020. Zia is part of the order of Solomonari. Once upon a time, they were hunters, risking their lives to transform themselves into winged, horned, and scaled creatures by defeating great beasts, taking their hearts, and gaining their powers. Now, however, the order keeps an array of cloned beasts caged so acolytes can take their power without having to fight. Zia alone seems troubled by the new way of doing things, feeling that magic is too cheaply obtained now. At the same time, their own heart is failing, and their lover Ilie encourages them to take on a cloned beast heart as a replacement.

Two hundred years, ago I went hunting for the monster from which I would steal a heart with nothing but my courage and a dagger. Two hundred years ago, a fresh heart and the magic within it was a reward for tenacity, an honor earned through blood by those few truly worthy of the title Solomonar. My right shoulder throbs with the memory of my battle on the mountain, the pain spreading to the dozen other scars from fangs and claws etched across my skin. I am old. I am bitter.

“The Order of Stolen Hearts” offers up an interesting exploration of the cost of magic, versus scientific progress. Is it fair for the cloned beasts to suffer in place of the beasts in the wild? Is the new system better because fewer lives are lost, or is the whole Solomonari way of life cruel? What is magic worth if it costs the user nothing? The story is full of striking imagery as it explores these questions, and the impact humanity has on the world around it.

The post Non-Binary Authors to Read: December 2020 appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

Women to Read: September 2020

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 19:26:29 GMT

Women To Read is a regular column from A.C. Wise highlighting female authors of speculative fiction and recommending a starting place for their work.

Welcome to another edition of Women to Read! If you’re new to the series, with each column, I recommend four women you should be reading, and point to a specific place to start with their work. This column also has a sibling-series, Non-Binary Authors to Read, packed with even more reading recommendation goodness.

I would say I’m on a horror kick as Autumn slowly approaches, but let’s be honest – I’m always on a horror kick. That being the case, I have two horror novels, and two horror/dark short stories to recommend this time around. As the weather (again, slowly) starts to cool and the leaves start to turn, it’s the perfect excuse to grab your favorite warm beverage, curl up somewhere cozy, and enjoy some chilling reading.

Jennifer McMahon is a Vermont-based author with multiple novels to her name, and my recommended starting place for her work is the New York Times bestseller, The Invited .

The set-up is a familiar one: couple Nate and Helen move to a remote location with the intention of building their dream home and quickly discover the land has a dark past and may be haunted. Back in the 1920s, a woman named Hattie Breckenridge lived on the land, was accused of witchcraft, and was eventually hanged. Her young daughter survived her, leading to a whole line of seemingly-cursed women, each meeting an unpleasant end.

It was a scrabbling, gnawing sound coming from under the bed. Steady and grinding. There was something down there. Something with sharp teeth. Something chewing its way up to them.

While the set-up may be familiar, McMahon quickly flips the traditional haunted house tropes. Helen deliberately sets out to build her house with as many relics related to Hattie Breckenridge and her descendants as possible. As the title implies, this haunting is invited. The novel’s approach to ghosts and the traumas of history is fascinating on several levels. Helen choice to build a haunted house is a wonderful inversion, putting her in control – at least to some degree – of the events happening around her. While distrust and paranoia test her relationship with Nate, and while sinister things are afoot all around, the reader is never left with the question that often plagues haunted house stories – why does the haunted family stay? In this case, curiosity and compassion are the answer. Helen immediately recognizes there is more to Hattie’s story. Instead of a witch seeking revenge and cursing the land as a result of her traumatic death – another familiar trope – Helen believes Hattie was maligned, and seeks to understand her and offer some measure of peace if she can. Women being made monstrous as the result of trauma is another staple of the horror genre, and while I love a good traditional haunted house story, and the enduring curse due to a violent death can be done very well, it’s refreshing to see a different take on both themes. None of the creep factor or the tension is lost as a result, making The Invited is highly satisfying horror read.

Laura Mauro is a fiction writer, a pro wrestling journalist, and the Women’s Wrestling Editor for Steelchair Magazine. My recommended starting place for her work is “When Charlie Sleeps” originally published in Black Static, and republished in Best British Horror 2014 and her collection, Sing Your Sadness Deep.

Like many of the stories collected in Sing Your Sadness Deep, “When Charlie Sleeps” is unsettling, and draws much of its horror from what it leaves unexplained. Hanna lives in a decaying house with Mercy, Stella, and an entity they refer to as Charlie, who occupies the upstairs bathroom. None of them know precisely what Charlie is, only that it is vital that they keep him happy and, as much as possible, keep him asleep. Terrible things happen when Charlie is awake, manifestations that affect the house, and – so Hanna’s roommates tell her – if left unchecked, the whole of London.

It’s hot in the bathroom, thick and tropical like the inside of a vivarium. Hanna closes the door behind her with a click. Across the room is a cast-iron bathtub, the enamel stained yellow like old bones. The tiles are furry with black mildew, the windows obscured by newspaper. She breathes deep, easing her nerves, and heaves the bucket onto the counter.

Hanna resents being drawn into her role as one of Charlie’s caretakers. Charlie is an innocent, but also a creature of want. He cannot be reasoned with, only soothed and kept asleep with lullabies and songs. Charlie may be a parasite, but he’s a symbiotic one, vital to the city.

Charlie can be seen as a version of the buried child, but rather than suffering abuse so the rest of the city can flourish, he’s a monstrous thing that must be placated, even if he’s horrible through no fault of his own. He’s a force of nature, in a way, frightening and misunderstood, lonely but dangerous. There’s something almost childlike about Charlie, and Hanna, Mercy, and Stella can be seen as reluctant and resentful parents, feeding and caring for a child that is all hunger and want, interrupting their sleep, and unable to explain his needs or understand what they are doing for him. Caring for Charlie calls on them to be unselfish, for uncertain rewards, and it seems only a matter of time before the task proves to be too much.

“When Charlie Sleeps” is full of evocative and visceral descriptions. Again, much of the horror here comes from what is left unexplained. Particularly early on in the story, before Charlie’s nature is explored, the story draws tension from and plays with the idea that the scariest thing is indeed a closed door with someone unknown, and perhaps unknowable, on the other side.

Alma Katsu has been nominated for multiple awards, including several for my recommended starting place with her work, The Hunger , a historical horror novel retelling and reimagining the story of the Donner Party.

The story is told from multiple viewpoints, including those of Mary Graves, one of ten children traveling west with her family, Tamsen Donner, the young and beautiful wife of George Donner, believed by many to be a witch, and Charles Stanton, a bachelor traveling on his own, an oddity among a party made up of families. Katsu weaves these perspectives together to tell a rich tale, while giving each perspective its space to breathe and making each character feel alive and fully-realized. A sense of dread pervades the novel, partially from the known history and the fate that must ultimately befall the characters, but also from from the writing itself.

Mary took the paper. It was brittle and fragile from many days in the heat. She unfolded it carefully, afraid it might disintegrate in her hands. The ink was faded, as though it had been written a long time ago, but she didn’t have any problem making out the words. Turn back, it said in a thin, spidery hand. Turn back or you will all die.

As tragedy stalks the party, paranoia builds among its members. There is plenty of finger pointing, and plenty of blame, including self-blame. Each member of the party comes with their own baggage, and their own demons. Katsu does an excellent job of layering the characters and their stories together, steadily increasing the tension and the sense of threat, and suggesting multiple possibilities for the curse that seems to stalk the party before ultimately revealing the truth. The Hunger is satisfying as a character study, as a historical novel, and as a supernatural horror novel, all perfectly balanced into a highly atmospheric and chilling whole.

Kay Chronister is a Tuscon-based short story writer, and my recommended starting place for her work is “The Fifth Gable” which originally appeared in Shimmer Magazine and is reprinted in her collection, Thin Places.

Four women share a gabled house, growing children from the earth, fermenting them, and building them from spare mechanical parts. One day, a young woman named Marigold Hest comes to them, seeking a child, unable to conceive by conventional methods.

The second woman to live in the four-gabled house pulled her children from the ground like stubborn roots. They came out of the soil smelling of pollen, with faces like tulips. They were healthy until she cut their stems, and then they withered. They returned reedy and gray-faced to the earth.

One by one, the women try, and one by one, the children fail to thrive. Marigold suffers with each loss, and the women suffer too. The story tends more toward dark fantasy than outright horror, but there are horrific things within it – the sacrifices required in making a child, by whatever means, and the pain of loss when those sacrifices don’t work out. The story also explores the notion of motherhood being the expected role of a woman, her only purpose to produce a child, no matter what the cost. Marigold desperately wants a child, but she’s afraid to say why, implying it is not solely on her own behalf, but also implying she hasn’t fully questioned her own desires and whether this is truly what she wants, or what she’s be conditioned to want. This concept is explored through the denizens of the house as well, who each come to the house with a certain identity, one that they no longer recognize in themselves now that they’re dedicated to house and making children.

The story has a surreal and dream-like quality to it, and the prose is full of striking and lovely imagery. A sense of sorrow hangs over the story, but a sense of hope as well, and the two are bound together, suggesting that one is not possible without the other. To care for someone else, like a child, is to open yourself up to the possibility of pain, and it’s up to each person to decide for themselves whether that hurt, or potential hurt, is worthwhile.

The post Women to Read: September 2020 appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

A New Book by Zen Cho? Hell yes! Announcing: Black Water Sister – due out May 2021

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 13:17:24 GMT

Hello everybody and we have Most Excellent news to share! Zen Cho – author of SORCERER TO THE CROWN, THE TRUE QUEEN and more recently, THE ORDER OF THE PURE MOON REFLECTED IN WATER – has a new book coming out in May next year and we have the full scoop, with the author herself telling us allll about BLACK WATER SISTER.

Ah Ma may be dead, but she’s not done with life yet . . .

When Jessamyn Teoh starts hearing a voice in her head, she chalks it up to stress. Closeted, broke and jobless, she’s abandoning America with her parents, bound for Malaysia – a country she left as a toddler.

She soon learns the new voice isn’t even hers, it’s the ghost of her estranged grandmother. Ah Ma was a spirit medium, avatar of a mysterious deity called the Black Water Sister. Now Ah Ma’s mission is to deal with a gang boss who offended her goddess, and she’s decided Jess will help her – whether she wants to or not.

Drawn into a world of gods and ghosts, Jess finds that making deals with capricious spirits is a dangerous business. As Jess fights for retribution for Ah Ma, she’ll also need to regain control of her body and destiny – or the Black Water Sister may finish her off for good. And all the while, she has to stop her dead grandmother from spying on her personal life, spilling her secrets to her family and using her body to commit felonies. Suddenly, finding a job seems the least of her worries . . .

One of the standard questions you get when you’ve written is a book is: “What was your inspiration for writing it?”

I always find it hard to answer. A short story or a novella may come to me in a flash of inspiration, birthed by a single image or memory or sensation. But a novel is made up of any number of things, absorbs energy from any form of stimulation you feed your brain while you’re working on it. Here are some answers for BLACK WATER SISTER:

When I was a child and living in the US (it was only for a short time), I drew a picture that made my mother say to herself, “If we stay, the children are going to get a complex.”

So we went home – that is to say, back to Malaysia. Some of this book is about what it might have been like if we had stayed a little longer.

If home is the place where nobody can tell you “go back to where you came from”, though, Malaysia isn’t our home. That’s probably China, where a grandparent and some great-grandparents came from. They, and the other Chinese migrants who came south to settle in Malaya, brought their gods and ghosts with them.

I always figured my family was not religious because we never talked about that stuff when I was growing up, beyond the occasional order “not to shout at the wind or the thunder god will punish you”, or the explanation that we had sweet sticky niangao at Lunar New Year to feed the Kitchen God, so as to gum up his mouth when he went to give his report on the household to the Jade Emperor.

When I got older, I realised that we never talked about that stuff because my family really believed. You don’t simply mouth off about gods and spirits. Someone might hear you.

Some years ago I picked up a book in Malaysia – an academic text, published by a university press. On the cover was a grainy photo of a Datuk Kong altar under a tree, with lit incense laid out as an offering. The book was called The Way That Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and Spirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia, by Jean DeBernardi, an anthropologist. It was about all the things my family hadn’t talked about. Once I read it, I realised I was going to write a story inspired by it.

(Datuk Kong are really cool. Here’s an article about them.)

I’m interested in the things that we don’t talk about because they’re dangerous – to ourselves; to our conception of the people we’re supposed to be; to our ideas of how the world should work.

Black Water Sister is about the things families don’t talk about. Unhappy histories. Buried scandals. What people did that they shouldn’t have done. The push and pull of love and dependency and wanting to be free. Being someone who doesn’t fit what your family wants of you. Queerness. Gods and ghosts.

It’s also about Penang, one of my favourite places in the world, and about hipster cafes, and gentrification, and being a stranger where you should belong.

And – consistent with almost everything I’ve written – it’s about dealing with strong-minded aunties who have forcefully clear ideas about how you should lead your life. Not that I have direct personal experience of that or anything, cough.

It’s the most personal novel I’ve written yet. It may be my best. It’s funny and sad and strange. I really hope readers connect with it. You can pre-order it now at the links below.

Publisher page for Black Water Sister

Publisher page for Black Water Sister

International

Book Depository (free shipping worldwide)

The post A New Book by Zen Cho? Hell yes! Announcing: Black Water Sister – due out May 2021 appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

Book Review: CHOSEN ONES by Veronica Roth

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 04:01:00 GMT

Veronica Roth is back with an adult(ish) SFF offering, taking the Chosen One trope to the next level.

Title: Chosen Ones

Author: Veronica Roth

Genre: Speculative Fiction/Science Fiction

Publisher: John Joseph Adams / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication Date: April 2020
Hardcover: 432 pages

The first novel written for an adult audience by the mega-selling author of the Divergent franchise: five twenty-something heroes famous for saving the world when they were teenagers must face even greater demons—and reconsider what it means to be a hero . . . by destiny or by choice.
A decade ago near Chicago, five teenagers defeated the otherworldly enemy known as the Dark One, whose reign of terror brought widespread destruction and death. The seemingly un-extraordinary teens—Sloane, Matt, Ines, Albie, and Esther—had been brought together by a clandestine government agency because one of them was fated to be the “Chosen One,” prophesized to save the world. With the goal achieved, humankind celebrated the victors and began to mourn their lost loved ones.
Ten years later, though the champions remain celebrities, the world has moved forward and a whole, younger generation doesn’t seem to recall the days of endless fear. But Sloane remembers. It’s impossible for her to forget when the paparazzi haunt her every step just as the Dark One still haunts her dreams. Unlike everyone else, she hasn’t moved on; she’s adrift—no direction, no goals, no purpose. On the eve of the Ten Year Celebration of Peace, a new trauma hits the Chosen: the death of one of their own. And when they gather for the funeral at the enshrined site of their triumph, they discover to their horror that the Dark One’s reign never really ended.

Stand alone or series: Book 1 in The Chosen Ones series

How did I get this book: Bought

Format (e- or p-): Print

Review

Remember 2011? A time when one could leave one’s house without fear of contracting a fatal contagion, sure, but also a time when YA dystopias were in full swing, and Veronica Roth emerged in the YA SFF scene with her addictive debut novel, Divergent, and its faction-based vision of the future.

2011 seems like a long time ago now–Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant and their film counterparts tales from a distant past–but having read and reviewed all of those books (and yes, even the first film), I was excited to learn of Veronica Roth’s foray into adult SFF with a brand new series. (And given lockdown, why not escape to a parallel universe with a group of superheroes struggling with their past choices, and a resurgence of evil threatening their future?)

Chosen Ones begins with a solid hook: the year is 2020, and the world is safe from the threat of the Dark One. That’s thanks to the fact that back in 2010, five then-teenagers (Sloane Andrews, Matthew Weekes, Inez Mejia, Albert Summers, and Esther Park) stopped the Dark One’s increasingly powerful chaotic attacks. Since then, the world has returned to normalcy, safe from the threat of Drains (the Dark One’s preferred method of destruction) though the scars of the past are still very visible–not only in cities like Chicago, where Drain sites remain a terrifying power-void, but also for the five heroes who used their magical gifts to save the day. Sloane Andrews, one of the so-called “chosen ones” hasn’t had the easiest time adjusting to being a public figure and hero after ten years–a large part of that is PTSD from having been abducted by the Dark One prior to their final battle (and the choices that she made, which become gradually unveiled to readers over the course of the novel). But a large part of it is self-denial and self-preservation; take, for example, the fact that Sloane lives with her boyfriend and fellow Chosen One, Matthew Weekes, whom she knows she is supposed to love and confide in, but with whom she has nothing in common other than their traumatic past.

Then, the unthinkable happens: one of the Chosen Ones dies. Albert Summers–Albie, to his friends–commits suicide by way of drug overdose, following the ten year anniversary celebration of the Dark One’s defeat at the Chicago Drain site. The remaining four friends are heartbroken–Sloane especially suffers with the loss. Albie was the only other person in the group who understood her, who was by her side when they were captured and tortured (though, once again, more of Sloane’s memories surface throughout the book especially where the Dark One and Albie are concerned).

At Albie’s funeral–a small affair to spread his ashes at the Chicago Drain site, per his wishes (every Chosen One has an “in case I don’t make it” contingency plan)–another unthinkable thing happens. One moment, Sloane, Matt, and Esther are standing on dry land; in the next, they are sputtering lake water in a parallel universe. The Dark One wasn’t defeated, you see. The battlefield, and the stakes, have just jumped across dimensions.

There’s a lot to love about Chosen Ones, pushing the validity and entirety of the “chosen one” archetype, while asking important questions: what happens when you grow up and you don’t have all the answers? What happens when you are a supposed hero, but don’t have any other battles to fight? Why doesn’t the world ever stay saved? Roth’s strength lies, as it did with the Divergent trilogy, with her protagonist. Sloane grapples with these big questions, while presenting a front for the outside world and even towards her fellow chosen ones, which becomes especially fraught when her relationship with Matt buckles under pressure. Who the world thinks Sloane is, who Matt thinks Sloane is, who Sloane thinks she herself is–these are big, soul searching revelations that drive the novel’s narrative. While Sloane grapples with her own sense of identity and power, there’s a parallel secondary storyline that unfolds through classified documents and news articles. Sloane has been trying to reclaim her past, and as we readers go through these different epistolary interludes, we–like Sloane–gradually understand the larger picture, and the depth of the exploitation of the chosen ones by their authority figures.

While the depth of Sloane’s character and the nature of the revelations she faces are undeniably powerful, other aspects of the story are less well-polished. For example, while I love the surprising shift from Part One to Part Two, Chosen Ones feels like two books that have been fused together–there’s the slower burn of Sloane’s search for meaning and identity, which then becomes an interdimensional portal story, which then becomes a showdown with an archnemesis. All of this is super rad, but the delivery is pretty remarkably uneven.

Also uneven were the other characterizations, beyond Sloane–Matt and Esther have a lot of potential that never really feels realized, as these other two chosen ones fail to rise beyond supporting cast status. (Also, Inez is in the book for like four chapters, and gets a pretty bum deal.) It was also slightly frustrating that–of course!–a predictably dull love interest twist pops up in the book’s second act.

These criticisms voiced, though, Chosen Ones is still a hell of a ride. I loved the imaginative scope of the story and its ultimate resolution–Roth takes the chosen one trope and subverts it again and again to pretty awesome effect. I’m excited to return to this strange new world.

Rating: 7 – Very Good

The post Book Review: CHOSEN ONES by Veronica Roth appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

A scattered journey through Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Mon, 17 Aug 2020 10:56:00 GMT

You thought you were prepared for this book. You were, and I can’t stress this enough, not.

You loved Gideon the Ninth. In fact, you may have uttered words like “best book of 2019”, “genius” and “most fun I ever had reading a book in decades” and also “this book eviscerated me from inside like lyctor soup”.

So coming to Harrow the Ninth with your SOUL eviscerated by the previous book, dehydrated from sobbing your heart out and grieving but with your feelings and your memory somewhat dulled by time and by pretending things would be ok, you realise something very soon into the narrative that…

This is not Gideon the Ninth. Because there is NO GIDEON.

At least, not in a certain way.

You thought you may have been prepared for that given the end of the first book. The joke is on you, silly knuckle.

This new rollercoaster is a feverish dream of an unreliable second person narrative that does the UNPARDONABLE sin of rewriting memory and erasing a certain personage from most of the narrative. You do however, love unreliable narratives and narrators and this one is so cleverly done.

It is unpardonable though because it hurts so bad. But also because it brings back OTHER DEAD PEOPLE. The hurt is bad but also good, you think to yourself late at night staring into nothing.

In a book about necromancy, you would think this is par for the course, but the author is ready to stab you in the back like certain betraying immortals.

But then you find that your feelings of grief and loss are mimicked by the narrative – in Harrow. And you see her actions and struggle with her mental health and a trauma that is both historical and freshly new.

And beyond the personhood of the shared narrative arc of Harrow and Gideon, there is a larger story being told, a story that started in the last book, or, rather, ten thousand years ago.

And being a historian, you notice that what’s happening in this series is that history is being checked mated. A history written by the victors and by a God named John (how utterly silly, you think, until God has a threesome and you like Harrow want to avert your eyes) who created an Official Narrative but there is a different side to it, a different narrative and that narrative is trying its absolute best to come to the surface. You realise you don’t know who the villains are. There is a story told about people and God, and faith and historical action and belief.

Lies, you are certain.

Then you go back to the Dramatis Personae on literally page 1 and realise all is foreshadowed.

GENIUS, you whisper to yourself.

But also confusing and vague and there is a certain amount of earned trust in the author but is that trust perhaps squandered a bit, you wonder. Maybe, because so, so much of it is very disorienting. You did find yourself rollercoasting through this feverish hellscape of a narrative, lost and often confused, and does it all coalesce into a beautifully built necromantic skeleton or does it fall apart without muscles and tendons and blood and heart?

You are not so certain, your eyes far too dry when the last page rolls in.

The post A scattered journey through Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

HAUNTED HEROINE: SARAH KUHN ON INSPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 10:57:00 GMT

Hello everybody! We have Sarah Kuhn back to the blog today to talk about the fourth HEROINE novel, the inspirations and influences behind it and what it means to go back to the start and write again from the perspective of the first heroine in the series plus… how it all connects to The Baby-Sitters Club and a carpet ball.

Four years ago, I visited you here at the home of the illustrious Book Smugglers to talk about my debut novel Heroine Complex. Today I’m visiting you to talk about the fourth book in the series—and the start of a brand-new trilogy—Haunted Heroine.

No matter how many times I type those words, they do not seem real. My Asian American superheroine book that became a trilogy has now become a full-on series! There’s continuity and timelines and stuff! People have favorite characters and ’ships! I actually have to remember what I wrote in the first book, because it matters for something that’s happening now!

I’d always wanted to write a series, but I have to admit that once it became a reality…I realized there were things I absolutely did not think about when I was creating the world of put-upon superhero personal assistant Evie Tanaka way back when. I had a lot of questions for/fights with Past Me while writing this book and launching the series into its next stages, and I thought I’d share how I worked through all that and prevented my head from exploding. (Although to be honest, it did explode a few times.)

Theme? What’s a Theme?

The first Heroine Complex trilogy has a different protagonist for each book: fire-wielding wallflower Evie Tanaka, diva celebrity superheroine Aveda Jupiter (aka Annie Chang), and upstart chaos princess little sister Bea Tanaka. All three get a chance to narrate us through their adventures, and all three go through the second coming of age many of us experience in our early 20s.

That “second coming of age in your 20s” thing is what I considered to be the unifying theme of these books, alongside the usual theme for all of my work, Asian Girls Having Fun.

To be honest, I never thought I would climb back into Evie’s head again. I’d left her happy, in love, and in control of her superpower. Her relationships were finally sorted out, and she had decided to embark on a superheroing partnership with her best friend, Aveda. She had also been through a lot. The thought of taking her back to a place where she wasn’t happy or was struggling with any of this felt cruel, and I desperately did not want to do what certain sequels to my favorite movies have done (looking at you, Ms. Congeniality 2!): I didn’t want to rip away all the progress she’d made or undo any of the realizations she’d had or tear down her hard-earned happiness and relationships. I wanted her to enjoy the beautiful life she’d built.

When the first book came out, I relived a lot of it with readers. I felt, very deeply, how close I had been to Evie, and how much I cared about her. And in talking about her, in hearing what she meant to others…I was suddenly dying to hang out in her head again. But I had to do it in a way that didn’t strip away all that she’d gone through or reset all the progress she’d made.

In short, I had to come up with a new theme!

Not the Asian Girls Having Fun part—that obviously had to stay and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But if the theme of the first trilogy was “the second coming of age we experience in our early 20s”…then what would Evie be dealing with now? She’s [spoiler alert!] married, pregnant, in her 30s, and still fighting evil and saving the city with Aveda.

That is a lot of good stuff. It’s also…a lot to be dealing with at once. Just thinking about everything she had to contend with in this new stage of her life…it made me happy, but it also made me very tired.

And that’s what gave me my theme—the Having It All Myth. This idea that in order to be fully functioning humans worthy of love and empathy, we need to Succeed at Absolutely Everything and Look Great While Doing So. I think this is something a lot of us deal with. Especially women. And most especially women of color. I knew all three of my heroines would deal with this concept differently—Wallflower Evie, Diva Aveda, and Chaos Princess Bea. (Aveda and Bea are both getting a sequel too as part of this new trilogy!)

I knew Evie—like me—would try to show up for all the parts of her life fully and equally, that she would flounder and fail at times, and that she would experience the same feelings of inadequacy and impostor syndrome that I so often do. I knew she would have empathy for everyone around her, but would struggle to conjure it for herself.

I also knew that she would eventually have a lot of fun while on this journey. (And she does. This book is nicknamed Horniest Heroine for a reason.)

Location, Location, Location

We’ve spent three whole books exploring demon-infested San Francisco, and while I love it…I had a yearning to expand the world of Heroine. I wanted my girls to go places! I asked Past Me why she’d confined so much of the demonic action to a single city—couldn’t there be evil in other areas for my heroines to battle?

Well…yes. I realized, as the person who writes these books, I could invent new evil and put it other places. In this case, I had a direct inspiration that was not just my own rage-y thoughts about Ms. Congeniality 2.

I wanted to write the Baby-Sitters Club Super Specials of my series!

If you are not familiar, the Baby-Sitters Club books are a very important series for many women of my generation, tracking a delightful group of tweens who are obsessed with providing quality childcare. It was recently made into what is possibly the best TV show ever, and you can watch it on Netflix. Anyway, in the Super Specials, the BSC usually goes to some exciting new location, like the Bahamas or Paris or…Vermont. And sometimes the Super Specials are also tied to a fun holiday!

With this new trilogy, I decided we’d explore some new places—in this first book, I took Evie and Aveda over to the East Bay to investigate a series of hauntings at a local women’s college during Halloween. Crafting a creepy, ghostly, pumpkin spice-enhanced atmosphere for the heroines made the series feel fresh again to me—it gave them a whole new series of “sets” and characters to play with, and it made me feel like I was decorating a whole new room in my series’ Barbie Dream House. The Halloween bit also enabled me to answer questions like, “What would Evie and Aveda dress up as?! And what are some other, ahem, creative uses for these costumes?” (Back to Horniest Heroine…)

Also, my girls actually do end up kind of babysitting! Their mission requires them to go undercover as grad students, and in doing so, they meet a little gang of college kids that they become very invested in. Which brings me to my final inspiration/influence…

Real Life

The haunted women’s college in Haunted Heroine is called Morgan College, but it’s based a bit on the actual haunted women’s college I attended—Mills College. (Only the good parts, though, I promise.)

Past Me had intended for the resemblance to my own college days to be minimal, but writing about the scent of the eucalyptus trees, the old dorms full of shadowy nooks and crannies, and the late-night runs to Taco Bell transported me fully back to that time period.

And before I knew it, I’d ended up adding a lot of elements based on favorite memories: late-night bonding sessions with new friends over silly things, throwing old dining hall plates off the roof of my dorm as a way of getting my anger out, creeping around some of the older buildings in an attempt to see an actual ghost…

And of course…Carpet Ball. Carpet Ball is a stuffed blob of muddy green that one of my best college friends, Kelly, had in her dorm room. It looks like it is made out of 70s-era shag carpet, hence the name. As time went on, it became part of our daily life. Sometimes you might pet Carpet Ball for comfort. Or toss Carpet Ball out of frustration. Or marvel at the fact that Carpet Ball had probably never been washed, ever, because no one could quite figure out how to accomplish such a task. When I told my college friends I was writing a book inspired by our days at Mills, someone immediately asked: “Can Carpet Ball be in it?!”

Carpet Ball

And so Carpet Ball is, providing Evie with some comfort and humor as she embarks on this next stage of her life. Truly, sometimes inspiration comes from the most unexpected places.

Sarah Kuhn is the author of the popular Heroine Complex novels—a series starring Asian American superheroines. The first book is a Locus bestseller, an RT Reviewers’ Choice Award nominee, and one of the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog’s Best Books of 2016. Her YA debut, the Japan-set romantic comedy I Love You So Mochi, is a Junior Library Guild selection and a nominee for YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. She has also penned a variety of short fiction and comics, including the critically acclaimed graphic novel Shadow of the Batgirl for DC Comics and the Star Wars audiobook original Doctor Aphra. Additionally, she was a finalist for both the CAPE (Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment) New Writers Award and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. A third generation Japanese American, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and an overflowing closet of vintage treasures.

The post HAUNTED HEROINE: SARAH KUHN ON INSPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCES appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

Holy Guacamole: WE WON A HUGO AWARD?!

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 17:48:44 GMT

We are speechless. After multiple nominations and losses, starting back in 2014–we were like, the Leo Dicaprios of the Hugo Awards–THE BOOK SMUGGLERS WON A HUGO AWARD FOR BEST FANZINE LAST NIGHT!

WHAT AN ACHIEVEMENT! WHAT A DELIGHT! (Yes, we know that rhymes.)

We are overwhelmed, incredibly touched, and hugely thankful to everybody who voted for us. This means a lot to the both of us.

However we must say it has also been a bittersweet win in many aspects. We are far away from each other, our celebratory hugs and high fives were granted virtually–which is awesome, and necessary, given the global pandemic. Above all, in spite of our personal happiness and being thrilled for all the amazing winners, we are deeply unsettled with many aspects of the awards ceremony. (We do appreciate all of the effort that went into making a completely virtual awards show happen, which is a thankless and doomed-at-the-outset endeavor.) Technology issues aside, many parts of the show were uncomfortable, and downright enraging, to watch.

George R.R. Martin was the host this year and in between his pre-recorded messages and his live performance, he sadly managed to somehow be simultaneously boring, infuriatingly oblivious (we are going with this perhaps too-gracious reading), yet often offensive. Even if we were to overlook the mispronunciations of several nominee names (all finalists were required to provide a phonetic pronunciation guide that got lost, we guess?), our major source of frustration was Martin’s blithe praise of several known fascist, racist, and sexist authors in what can only be described as this overlong, bloated, egotistical white-dude fest that glorified a past that should no longer be glorified when we have right here, RIGHT NOW such an amazing, forward-thinking, diverse SFF community who should be the ones being glorified and celebrated. (We mean, just listen to the winners’ speeches, especially the powerful words from R.F. Kuang, Chimedum Ohaegbu, Jeannette Ng, and S.L. Huang–but seriously, virtually every winner had something important and, yes, political to say.)

…. and breathe!

Back to our celebration! The full list of winners can be found here and if you want to check out the ceremony and hear the amazing speeches given by the winners, Chelsea of TheReadingOutlaw did the amazing work of editing the ceremony to remove the toastmaster’s bits and you can watch it all here. Our bit starts at 17 minutes and you can watch Thea delivering our speech.

But for easy and accessible reference, here is our written speech:

We are being wholly, utterly honest when we say HOLY GUACAMOLE, we did not see this coming. Thank you, fellow fans, readers, writers, and creators so much.
We know that it can be frowned upon to be Political at the Hugos, but we also know that everything is political, so f that. We have been running The Book Smugglers for over ten years, as two loud, opinionated women on the internet–one of us Filipino-American and the other Brazilian. We have been giving space for diverse voices to be heard, read, and seen, and we know now that is even more important now than it has ever been, in the fight for social justice in the face of fascism, systemic oppression, and racism around the world. Black lives matter.
So thank you so much for this award–our very first Hugo. Thank you for seeing us, for hearing us, for believing that our work matters.
Thank you to all of our fellow nominees, and to our regular contributors–especially Charles Payseur and A.C. Wise.
Thank you to all of the readers and friends who have supported us throughout the years. To everyone who keeps coming back to read The Book Smugglers–we are nothing without you. Special shoutout to Sparkle Rocket and to the Filipino contingent at the Hugos.
It’s also worth mentioning that Ana is now the first Brazilian to ever win a Hugo. (Valeu Brasil!)
Finally, a huge thank you to the television show Lost–without which The Book Smugglers would never have happened.
Thank you again, from the bottom of our SFF-loving hearts, and remember to stay safe, wash your hands, and wear a mask.
Thank you.

The post Holy Guacamole: WE WON A HUGO AWARD?! appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

Hugo Award Packet 2020

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 20:50:47 GMT

Hello, friends! We are pleased to announce that The Book Smugglers are finalists for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine!

Every year, the Hugo Awards are administered and voted on by members of the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). The Hugos are typically presented at the end of Worldcon weekend in late August–though this year, of course, things are a little different. The 2020 Worldcon, CoNZealand, scheduled for 29 July – 2 August 2020 in Wellington, New Zealand, has announced that they will be a “virtual online convention” without a physical convention this year due to the global COVID-19 pandemic (and we Smugglers respect and understand the decision from the CoNZealand committee–stay home, stay safe, wash your hands, and wear a mask, people!)

Art by Reiko Murakami

We are thrilled to be included in the roundup for this year’s finalists for Semiprozine–which includes Galactic Journey, Journey Planet, Quick Sip Reviews, the Rec Center, and Nerds of a Feather Flock Together. It’s tradition for Hugo Finalists to provide sample work in the year’s Voter Packet–this year, we’ve selected some of our favorite reviews. Whether or not you’re a voting member of Worldcon, we hope you’ll enjoy the selection of content we’ve put together below.

Download the PDF

Thanks for your consideration–and we hope to see you on the live webcast!

The post Hugo Award Packet 2020 appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

Queering Dr. Watson: Sexual Identity in The Angel of the Crows

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 13:13:46 GMT

Katherine Addison, the author of award-winning The Goblin Emperor, has a new fantasy novel out, a dark Fantasy that is mash-up of Jack the Ripper and the detectives of Baker Street. We have a guest post from the author today, talking about the work, and its queer characters.

SPOILER ALERT: Dr. J. H. Doyle is not what you think.

I am not the first writer to notice that you can use a first-person narrator to play games with sex and gender roles. Emma Bull (Bone Dance) and Sarah Caudwell (The Shortest Way to Hades), to name two off the top of my head, do a great job of using first-person to keep their narrators’ sexual identities in question. I followed suit in The Angel of the Crows.

I did this partly, let’s be honest, because it was fun. It was fun to write Doyle as someone with a secret (well, with several secrets), and it was fun to write the people around Doyle reacting to the projected image and to know that they were wrong. You’ll notice that Crow never uses a pronoun when talking about Doyle, because Crow knows from the beginning that Doyle’s biological sex and performed gender do not match, and understands human society enough to know that it has to be a secret.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are very much a product of their time. As such, they are sexist, classist, and racist, with white (English) professional-class men representing the pinnacle of human evolution. They are also profoundly homosocial, since the relationship between Holmes and Watson is the (generally unspoken, except for that once in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs”) foundation on which all the stories are built. Men’s relationships are paramount, and I can’t think of a story that even has a scene where you could try to apply the Bechdel Test. One reason Irene Adler in “A Scandal in Bohemia” is such a brilliant creation is that she is the protagonist; she is the one who beats Holmes at his own game (and cross-dresses successfully to tweak him). But Irene is an exception, recognized explicitly as such (“To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman.”); she exists in a category of one.

It is possible to recognize these things about the stories and still love them.

But the temptation to subvert is very strong.

In The Angel of the Crows, I made Holmes into an angel, which, as we learn later in the novel, means that he is both asexual and technically female and puts him solidly in the professional class of the novel’s London (insofar as angels fit into any human class system at all), looking for someone to go halves on the rent of a flat in Baker Street.

Which brings us to Dr. Watson and Dr. Doyle. Watson in the original stories is the perfect professional-class representative homosocial heteronormative (Scots-)Englishman, the perfect foil for Holmes’s brilliant intellect and sharp wit. (I don’t know if the text really supports the reading that Watson is deliberately down-playing his own intelligence to make Holmes look even better, but I hope it does because otherwise you start wondering about how he made it through medical school.) And what I wanted to do in The Angel of the Crows was to present that façade but have something quite different going on beneath it.

The question of Doyle’s sexual identity is a vexed one. You can read Doyle as a trans man, although that term is completely unavailable to the characters, or you can read Doyle as a transvestite lesbian. Or you can read Doyle as profoundly genderqueer (also a term not available to the characters). You notice I’m trying hard not to use pronouns, and that’s because I don’t want to invalidate any of those readings. It’s important, because names in this book are so thematically significant, that Doyle considers Joanna his/her/their real name—that Doyle has in fact consistently refused to choose a different name, going only by initials. Doyle and I can get away with this because in the closed homosocial world of Victorian professional-class men, no one ever refers to anyone except by his surname anyway. Never once does Holmes call Watson “John” and the only person who calls Holmes “Sherlock” is his brother Mycroft. (We never learn Lestrade’s given name, either.) But beyond the choice to hold onto the given name, I can’t go. I truthfully do not know how Doyle gender-identifies. Which is no impediment to a first-person narrative, but does make it hard to talk about.

Both Doyle and Crow are performing Victorian normative masculinity, but neither one of them fits it. In a way, they’re playing dress-up as Holmes and Watson, but in so doing, they make a friendship that is genuine. I’m suggesting, I think—I hope—that the roles of Holmes and Watson, Detective and Sidekick, are available to anyone who wants to play, that the archetype is strong enough to withstand as many re-imaginings as we can come up with.

The friendship has to be real. That’s the part that matters.

KATHERINE ADDISON’s short fiction has been selected by The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. She is the author of the Locus Award-winning novel The Goblin Emperor. As Sarah Monette, she is the author of the Doctrine of Labyrinths series and co-author, with Elizabeth Bear, of the Iskryne series. She lives near Madison, Wisconsin.

The Angel of the Crows is out now.

The post Queering Dr. Watson: Sexual Identity in The Angel of the Crows appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

The Best of British Fantasy 2019: An Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 12:17:00 GMT

The Best of British Fantasy 2019 contains two dozen tales of the weird and wonderful: featuring pensive houses, angry gods, ghosts, monsters, living statues, were-creatures, sorcerers, swordsmen, spells, skeletons, and, of course, the end of the world. Stories by Lavie Tidhar, Eliza Chan, Kirsty Logan, Chikodili Emelumadu, Maura McHugh, Heather Parry, Gareth Rees, Sara Saab, Natalia Theodoridou, and many more.

We are pleased to welcome its editor, Jared Shurin, to talk a bit more about it today.

“Someone will be along to dig you out.”: The Best of British Fantasy 2019

The best metaphor for a ‘year’s best’ anthology is the parable of the blind men and the elephant. As you may remember, each of the blind men touches a different part of the elephant and immediately, if justifiably, believes they know the entire nature of the beast. The man holding the tail thinks an elephant is like a rope, the one touching the leg thinks it is a tree, the one holding the trunk assumes it is serpentine.

All, according to their experience, are correct. Yet every one is also, objectively, wrong.

It is only by collecting enough blind men that we can begin to understand the true nature of the elephant. A novel, however brilliantly written, is, at best, one blind man with exceptionally sensitive fingers. An anthology, while not having that singular depth, gives us more hands: the collection of impressions required to feel out the edges of a vast and multi-faceted beast.

In the introduction to the previous volume, I wrote about the role of The Best of British Fantasy could play in capturing the past for the sake of the future. An anthology, I argued, can provide a snapshot of a particular point in time, capturing the feel of a moment for far distant readers. Many legendary anthologies – say, Dangerous Visions or Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters – accomplish this: ambitious collections that use fiction to help the 21st century reader glimpse some of the themes, concerns, and cultures of mid-20th century life.

In thinking about an anthology’s duty to the future, I completely neglected what it means to those of us in the present.

As I write this, we have entered the second month of mandated social distancing. My two countries – where I was born and where I live – are both facing economic and cultural ruin. Tens of thousands have died, a growing statistic that becomes more gruesome every day. I, like many of you, have friends and family risking their lives every day in hospitals, at care homes, in supermarkets and warehouses. We live in communal, collective anxiety.

Perversely, there are fewer opportunities for distraction. The cultural sector is near-universally furloughed. Sports have come grinding to a halt. Amazon, for the second time in as many months, has removed the ‘buy’ button from books as ‘inessential’. Reality is inescapable.

Given the state of our present, fantasy stories may seem trivial or ‘inessential’. But they have two, slightly contradictory, but very important, roles to play.

First, fantasy helps us escape reality.

Escapism can often be a dubious virtue, but given our current imprisonment, there’s unquestionable value right now. We cannot step out to dinner, but we can still cross into Narnia. It is easier to walk into Mordor than to the office. Reality is inexorable and inescapable. What is happening is so unquestionably important, that our minds do nothing else but whir frantically, trying to make sense of it.

As a result, and unsurprisingly, a recent ONS survey reveals that almost half of Britons currently report high levels of anxiety. The simple act of escape – of turning off, of giving yourself a break – has become essential. Escapism need not be Disneyfied, cheery, or overly simplistic: it is a matter of moving from here to there; a good story that allows the reader to ponder someone else’s problems for a change. In this volume you’ll find many ways of escape. Some are literal escapes, such as a flying carpet or a persuasive spirit. Others take place in captivating worlds, far from our own: ancient sailing ships, forgotten kingdoms, deep under the ground or high atop impossible sculptures. They draw us in – or, more critically, out – with seductive atmosphere, high-flying adventure, good humour, haunting horror, and impossible feats of magic. Enjoy them, as they are meant to be enjoyed: without guilt. You – we – all deserve some time away. As Gareth E. Rees’ story in this collection says, we all deserve a ‘fragile, momentary sanctuary’.

Second, fantasy helps us understand reality.

Some realities are simply too big to be understood except through stories. Stories, narratives, help us comprehend the incomprehensible. Stories are our hands on the elephant; they allow us to find the edges of the things, to capture abstractions into shapes.

Our current situation is too much for a single narrative. There’s no special spell or magic cloak; there’s no sword to wield or dragon to slay with it. There is no ring of power, no wizard, no prophecy or Crack of Doom. We’re trapped in the worst of stories: there’s too much going on, no resolution, a billion conflicts without a villain.

And that’s why we need fantasy: it allows us to simplify the incomprehensible; as Douglas Adams put it, to ‘eff’ the ineffable. A good narrative helps us reduce the inexplicable into a form that we can understand, resolve, and even act upon. Although the stories contained within were all first published before the Covid-19 outbreak, they are good stories (the best, in fact), and address themes that are still very relevant. We have a child learning to accept loss, a man learning to love, a family learning to survive. There are stories about sacrifice, and commitment, and bravery.

There’s a tale in here about how scary change can be, and another about how coming to grips with the past. There are several about loneliness, some about isolation, several about loss, and many more about friendship, and all the strange and wonderful forms it may take. Perhaps most importantly, there are stories here about survival, acceptance, and love. These are fantasy stories that understand tragedy, loss and fear, but also remind us that there is much, much more in life: redemption, companionship, and hope.

Perhaps the most eerily prophetic story in this book is the first, by Helen McClory. It captures, disturbingly, a world fearing [redacted]: seemingly wracked by a generic, all-encompassing, apocalyptic event. McClory manages to give voice to formless dread, but also, and far more importantly, reminds us that this is a shared experience, and, somewhere over the horizon, this too shall pass. When reality is cruel and abstract, fantasy can provide reassurance and perspective. As McClory elegantly reminds us: the world around you is kinder than you imagine now.

I look forward to sharing a kinder future with you.

The Best of British Fantasy 2019 is out on June 30 and you can get your copy here.

The post The Best of British Fantasy 2019: An Introduction appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

Non-Binary Authors to Read – May 2020

Thu, 28 May 2020 14:03:13 GMT

Non-Binary Authors To Read is a regular column from A.C. Wise highlighting non-binary authors of speculative fiction and recommending a starting place for their work.

Welcome to another edition of Non-Binary Authors to Read! While we’re all stuck inside, we need excellent things to read, no? Here are four wonderful stories that speak to themes of family and home for your social distancing reading pleasure!

Sam Kyung Yoo is a queer non-binary writer of speculative and literary fiction. My recommended starting place for their work is “Even Robots Can Cry” published in Fireside Magazine, which straddles the line between both of those genres.

Simon faces incredible pressure from his parents to be the perfect student. He applies that same pressure to himself, studying at all hours of the day and night to the point where his roommate, Gene, accuses him of being a robot. In truth, Simon is beginning to feel a bit like a robot, programmed to become a doctor, every minute of his life scheduled with some input that will help him achieve that goal, with little thought to what he actually wants in life.

Simon thinks being a robot would make everything so much easier. Streamlined data retrieval, able to recharge whilst remaining operational. Not needing sleep would be a wonderful reallocation of time.

Simon’s sister, Sun-Hee, refused the med school path their parents tried to set her on, following her dream to become a musician, which essentially led to her being cut off from the family. Simon feels even more isolated with the loss of his sister, the one person who might understand him. The problem is, unlike Sun-Hee, he doesn’t know what he would want to do with his life instead. He’s been programmed for one thing for so long, he isn’t even certain of his own dreams.

The story does a wonderful job of exploring the cultural and parental pressure put on Simon as a Korean child, now considered by his parents to be their only hope. Simon’s breakdown over the course of the story is paralleled with the breakdown of his laptop, showing how even machines can be pushed to a limit where they can’t physically function anymore. Simon’s thinking is even mechanical. He constantly does calculations of how much time he’s spent on certain tasks, or how many days left until this test, or that essay deadline. He views his parents’ love as a conditional relationship – if he doesn’t provide the appropriate input in the form of good grades, he won’t get the desired result. When the situation finally reaches a breaking point, it is both cathartic and heartbreaking for the journey Simon takes to get there.

It’s a beautifully-written story, which uses the science fictional trope of artificial life to great effect. There are no actual robots in the story – it is fully grounded in the real world – but as the best science fiction does, this story gives us a lens through which to explore the main character’s emotional life and their humanity.

Setsu Uzumé is a speculative fiction writer, and an Assistant Editor and Host at PodCastle. My recommended starting place for their work is “The Lawman’s Boy” published in Bourbon Penn.

Where Yoo’s story skirts the line between speculative and literary fiction, Uzumé is firmly in speculative territory with a weird western where the sins of the father literally become the sins of the son. Palla is a lawman and her husband Kitche just happens to be a criminal. She’s tasked with tracking him down, which she does, shooting him in the process, and then she must do everything she can to keep him alive in order that his spirit doesn’t pass into their son and turn him just as bad as his father.

“I chose, you chose. It’s done,” she said. Same thing she said when he’d walked out on her and the baby, sixteen years ago. It had made it easy to sell him out, along with all the other thieves she knew how to find. “We’re gonna do this lawful. Go to trial, they’ll execute you proper, and get your soul sealed away. Tie up all the loose ends of your frayed, sorry life.”

Of course, Kitche has other ideas about securing his legacy and continuing with his criminal career. He’s just too good at thieving to give it up, even if it means sacrificing his body, and taking over the life of his son.

Uzumé gives the story a distinctive voice that captures the Western feel, and does an excellent job with worldbuilding to inject it with a sense of the weird. The story is stylish with an emotional core that makes it pair well with Yoo’s story. Despite the authors’ very different approaches, both stories explore parents living vicariously through their children. While one does it more literally, both instances leave scars, and reading the stories together makes for an interesting study of the way parents and children perceive themselves in relation to each other, and where their responsibility to each other lies. One story is told from the child’s perspective and the other from the parent’s, but in the end, many of the questions they ask are the same – how much am I allowed to be my own person, how much do I owe to those who came before me, or who come after me, and what impact do my choices have on others?

Matthias Klein is an author and collector of dead things and my recommended starting place for nir work is “The Art of Quilting”, which first appeared in the anthology Survivor edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and JJ Pionke and reprinted in Transcendent 4: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction edited by Bogi Takács.

Vin is far from home, living on Venus, but that doesn’t stop nir parents from tracking nem down. It seems no matter where ne goes, nir parents find nem, following nem to Mars, Venus, Pluto, the Moon, and beyond. They claim only to want what’s best for nem, expressing concern and the desire to bring nem home, which ultimately drives Vin farther away.

Ne didn’t want to leave. Not yet. Not ever. Ne was just building a life, a real existence here. No rules, no frames, no requirements. The world was not what Vin was raised to believe it was, and ne didn’t want to live in that other place, that unquestioning, dutiful place where ne had no power, no agency, no self.

As Vin continues to flee from place to place, ne quilts, rescuing scraps of fabric and beads and stones that speak to each place ne settles, no matter how temporarily. Deep black-blue for Venus, cool blue-grey for the moon, and crystals for Pluto, stitching them together into a gorgeous work of art they carry with them from place to place. Nir parents remain relentless, insisting they love nem, even as they refuse to acknowledge nir identity and call nem by the wrong name, trying to fit nem into a box of their own perception, rather than seeing nem for who ne are.

Like Yoo and Uzumé’s stories, Klein also explores the fraught relationships between parents and children, and the damage parents can do – wittingly or unwittingly – by refusing to see their children as people of their own, and not merely extensions of themselves. “The Art of Quilting” is a heartbreaking story, but one that also offers hope. On top of the exploration of family, the story also explores the concept of home. Tired of fleeing from place to place, Vin finally finds nemself on a ship traveling between the stars. Rather than treating the ship as yet another means to get to a place ne will eventually have to leave, ne realizes the ship itself can be a home. Home does not need to be the place you come from, or the place you’re going – it can be the place you create and carry with you, as Vin creates nir quilt from pieces of the places ne has been. The ship, like the quilt, is a home that can travel with nem, and the crew a family built from seemingly disparate and overlooked pieces into a beautiful whole.

Juliet Kemp is a queer non-binary author based in London. My recommended starting place for their work is “Growing Resistance” published in Translunar Travelers Lounge.

Oak and his husband live on the margins of society, among the have-nots, invisible to the haves on the other side of the wall. Those beyond the wall are the ones who could afford the vaccine during the plague, while Oak and those like him, had to come up with their own vaccine, but not before many lives were lost. Oak is a chemist, providing much needed drugs and medicine for his community, putting him on precarious legal footing with those on the other side of the wall.

Mathias, Oak’s husband, comes up with a plan to blockade the rail line, forcing those on the other side of the wall to finally acknowledge the less affluent community that they left to their own devices during the plague. The action is successful, and Mathias escapes with only a broken arm, but Oak’s assistant, Vera, a trans teenager, is caught up in the aftermath and arrested, even though she wasn’t involved. Since Vera and her brother have no parents, some other adult must collect them, or she will be assigned a guardian – one who may or may not respect her identity and allow her access to the hormones she needs. No one else in the community has a valid government ID, except for Oak.

What my ID says—what I hate most about it—is that I could walk right through that gate right now if I chose to. I don’t, and I won’t, because it’s all fucking bullshit. The only reason I’m allowed inside is because my family bought me the vaccine. I let them do it because I hadn’t realised then what it was going to mean.

In addition to misgendering him, Oak’s ID is a reminder of where he came from, and the people he’s ashamed of now for their callousness during the plague. For Vera’s sake though, Oak must face his past, and take the risk that he will be lumped in with the agitators and be arrested.

While Oak’s parents are not a physical presence in the story, the echoes of their lifestyles and choices speaks to the some of the same themes seen in Yoo, Uzumé, and Klein’s stories. Oak is set apart from his family and his roots, building a new family of choice on the other side of the wall. A different facet of caring and guardianship is explored as Oak is forced to take responsibility for Vera on paper at least, though their relationship remains one of teacher and apprentice. Contrasted with the parent-child relationships explored in other stories, Kemp offers a relationship built on respect and freedom of choice. The themes of economic disparity and the invisibility of those living on the margins of society are also powerful ones. Each of the stories discussed here stands perfectly on its own, but they are all also given extra layers of meaning when read together for the variety of ways they understand family, home, community, and the relationships between the people that make up each of those concepts.

The post Non-Binary Authors to Read – May 2020 appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

Social Distancing Reads #5: The Last Emperox by John Scalzi

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 11:20:27 GMT

Hello everybody – hope you are all keeping safe. I am lucky enough to be exclusively working from home and as I do so, I am trying to create a mental health routine of comfort reading, writing, going for (safe) walks and TV watching. Since I have read over 30 books so far this year, I will start posting about my recommended Social Distancing Reads more frequently as a way to catch up and keep up.

Times being what they are, The Last Emperox was a salve for my ailments, the perfect ending to this fantastic trilogy by John Scalzi. Also, thank the fucking gods for Kiva fucking Lagos. What a delight, what a pleasure, what a tremendous privilege to follow this character and see where she got to go. And how.

The how is of course part of the storyline of The Last Emperox, the series ender to end all series, concluding a story that took us through multiple twists around the Interdependency as we followed a new Emperox – Garland II – take her mantle at the wrong fucking time, or rather perhaps, at the precisely right time. Because only a good person could effectively handle the problem that was presented to her right at the beginning: what makes all these colonies interconnected was coming to an end, with the imminent collapse of the Flow system and the ensuing potential collapse of civilization and death of billions.

Things being what they are, now and in the book, it feels eerily prescient for Scalzi to be writing about the collapse of what can be felt as “normal” with the rich nefariously getting together to become richer and not giving a damn fuck about the lives of regular, “expendable” people.

So here we follow our heroes and heroines doing their absolute best to save others, while the Machiavellian villains do their absolute worst to fuck everybody. And not in a good way, as Kiva fucking Lagos would say.

The plot twists are many (and GASPABLE) but really the character development here is what makes the book – and my heart – sing. These are admittedly fewer words than what the book, the characters and the series deserve, but things being what they are, it is the best I can do right now.

I just urge you to go and read this whole series.

The post Social Distancing Reads #5: The Last Emperox by John Scalzi appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

Social Distancing Reads #4: The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 13:04:10 GMT

Well, this was WONDERFUL in every possible way: heartwarming, lovely, romantic, funny and full of unbridled optimism and the belief that humans are actually good and will eventually do the right thing. It is incredible how the good old cynical me, instead of feeling like this is an impossible naïve scenario, was instead left with a sense that everything is possible and good will always win. It was an welcome respite from Our Trying Times and the first book I managed to read in one sitting for a long time.

Linus is a by-the-book caseworker employee of a ministry of magic – he is responsible for visiting orphanages for magical children and make sure they are alright. When is called by a the Extremely Upper Management to go on a secret mission to investigate an orphanage far away from everything on a island by the sea (he has never seen the ocean!), he is taken aback but orders are orders and he will follow them. He is given case files for six children and their carer – a man named Arthur. When he first opens the first file he cannot believe his eyes and literally passes out. The children, they are impossible, rare magical beings that could potentially be dangerous.

When he arrives on the island, it is with a mixture of fear and anxiety but with the belief that he is there doing the right thing.

Linus is a forty-year-old gay man who thinks he is past his prime, who doesn’t believe he has anything of note to contribute to the world and who is perfectly fine thank you very much just spending time in his little house, with his little fussy cat, listening to old albums on his little Victrola and whose only spot of colour is the little sunflower he has planted. It is of course, IMMEDIATELY obvious to everyone he meets when he arrives on the island that Linus is a caring, nurturing, fiercely protective man who will do everything to right perceived wrongs, to help the children and to support Arthur.

The book proceeds to then melt my heart as it builds up this mismatched family. This being the book that it is, Linus is immediately smitten with the children and Arthur. What follows next is a slow build up of a found family, of a group of misfits finding each other and fighting the System and a romance between Linus and Arthur that is a mix of wonderful pining and almost-conversations and slow dances and long-held looks. It is a book of quiet revelations, of deep transformation and of the world-wide effect of doing the right thing.

And I loved it so damn much, I want the whole world to read it.

The post Social Distancing Reads #4: The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

So you want to read about the end of the world? (A Book List)

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 20:40:57 GMT

The world is a little scary right now. (As a New Yorker who lives in Queens, I feel this fear acutely at this particular point in time.) If you are a reader of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, or a lover of horror, you might be familiar with that inexplicable desire to explore that discomfort and fear through films or literature–I certainly do. Maybe it’s because you want to feel like the world we’re living in is a little less scary than the one you’re reading about. Or, maybe it’s because you want to sort out your own feelings about the current state of things. Perhaps its a form of schadenfreude.

Regardless of your motivation, if you want to read more about apocalyptic scenarios–this list is for you.

THE STATION by Emily St. John Mandel

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
A National Book Award Finalist
A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.
Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.

“Survival is inefficient.” Emily St. John Mandel’s novel depicts the end of the world, succumb to a flu pandemic that strikes quickly and kills efficiently. Alternating between before and after, Station Eleven hits pretty close to home right now.

Read the review here.

THE PASSAGE by Justin Cronin

“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”
An epic and gripping tale of catastrophe and survival, The Passage is the story of Amy—abandoned by her mother at the age of six, pursued and then imprisoned by the shadowy figures behind a government experiment of apocalyptic proportions. But Special Agent Brad Wolgast, the lawman sent to track her down, is disarmed by the curiously quiet girl and risks everything to save her. As the experiment goes nightmarishly wrong, Wolgast secures her escape—but he can’t stop society’s collapse. And as Amy walks alone, across miles and decades, into a future dark with violence and despair, she is filled with the mysterious and terrifying knowledge that only she has the power to save the ruined world.

Justin Cronin’s take on the apocalypse is by way of an infection–but one markedly different from the St. John Mandel’s flu. By that I mean: it’s a vampire virus. A very different take on vampires, but still vampiric, nonetheless. Featuring a narrative that is split between before and after the end of life as we know it, The Passage is devastating and hopeful apocalyptic fiction at its best. (Unfortunately the rest of the series doesn’t quite hold up–but don’t let that deter you from Book 1.)

Read the review here.

THE BOOK OF M by Peng Shepherd

WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE UP TO REMEMBER?
Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.
One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.
Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.
Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.
As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.
Like The Passage and Station Eleven, this haunting, thought-provoking, and beautiful novel explores fundamental questions of memory, connection, and what it means to be human in a world turned upside down.

Peng Shepherd’s debut novel is heartbreaking and profound, illustrating the end of the world due to a mysterious pandemic that causes its victims to forget. At first, it’s small things, like the color of a small household item–but soon the forgetting consumes its victims, who forget where they came from, or how to read, or eventually who they are. What’s more, these infected also start to reimagine the world–their forgetting results in them shaping the world in their own new strange ways. The result is beautiful, and very, very sad.

Read our reviews here and here.

THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH by Carrie Ryan

In Mary’s world there are simple truths.
The Sisterhood always knows best.
The Guardians will protect and serve.
The Unconsecrated will never relent.
And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village; the fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth.
But, slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power. And, when the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness.
Now, she must choose between her village and her future, between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded in so much death?

There are quite a few zombie apocalypse novels that could have been included on this list–This is Not A Test by the exceptional Courtney Summers, The Walking Dead series by Robert Kirkman, Max Brooks’s World War Z, or Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies, for example–but I decided to only include only two. As far as the end of the world by the undead goes, The Forest of Hands and Teeth is one of my favorites. Imagine a world decades after the apocalypse–the only survivors live in the woods in a religious enclave, protected by the safety of fences that surround their perimeter. Mary dreams of the ocean, and tales of the world before, passed down by her long-dead mother–when calamity strikes her village, she finally has the chance to leave, though it will cost her everything.

Read the review here.

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS by M.R. Carey

In the ruins of civilization, a young girl’s kindness and capacity for love will either save humanity — or wipe it out in this USA Today bestselling thriller Joss Whedon calls “heartfelt, remorseless, and painfully human.”
Melanie is a very special girl. Dr Caldwell calls her “our little genius.”
Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant keeps his gun pointed at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite, but they don’t laugh.
The Girl With All the Gifts is a genre-defying, emotionally charged thriller that will shatter your expectations of the classic zombie novel.

The Girl With All the Gifts started as a short story–the novel’s exceptional first chapter. A heartbreaking, horrifying story about medical research and the children who might hold the key to saving humanity, M.R. Carey’s take on the zombie apocalypse plays heavily on the relationship that forms between a teacher and the titular girl with all the gifts, named Melanie.

Read the review here.

AGNES AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Kelly MacWilliams

The Handmaid’s Tale meets Wilder Girls in this genre-defying novel about a girl who escapes a terrifying cult only to discover that the world Outside has succumbed to a viral apocalypse.
Agnes loves her home of Red Creek — its quiet, sunny mornings, its dusty roads, and its God. There, she cares tirelessly for her younger siblings and follows the town’s strict laws. What she doesn’t know is that Red Creek is a cult, controlled by a madman who calls himself a prophet.
Then Agnes meets Danny, an Outsider boy, and begins to question what is and isn’t a sin. Her younger brother, Ezekiel, will die without the insulin she barters for once a month, even though medicine is considered outlawed. Is she a sinner for saving him? Is her sister, Beth, a sinner for dreaming of the world beyond Red Creek?
As the Prophet grows more dangerous, Agnes realizes she must escape with Ezekiel and leave everyone else, including Beth, behind. But it isn’t safe Outside, either: A viral pandemic is burning through the population at a terrifying rate. As Agnes ventures forth, a mysterious connection grows between her and the Virus. But in a world where faith, miracles, and cruelty have long been indistinguishable, will Agnes be able to choose between saving her family and saving the world?

This novel from Kelly McWilliams isn’t out until May, but I urge you to preorder the book because it is ever so relevant today. Agnes and her family are members of a secretive cult, who believe in the supreme, divine power of its leader. But Agnes starts to question her world when her brother falls ill–and then, the rapture hits. Agnes is a bold, refreshing take on religion and faith, patriarchy and the abuse of power, all set against an apocalyptic background. I loved this book, and I think you will too.

[Full disclosure: I worked with the author on this book and its marketing campaign.]

SALVATION DAY by Kali Wallace

A lethal virus is awoken on an abandoned spaceship in this incredibly fast-paced, claustrophobic thriller.
They thought the ship would be their salvation.
Zahra knew every detail of the plan. House of Wisdom, a massive exploration vessel, had been abandoned by the government of Earth a decade earlier, when a deadly virus broke out and killed everyone on board in a matter of hours. But now it could belong to her people if they were bold enough to take it. All they needed to do was kidnap Jaswinder Bhattacharya—the sole survivor of the tragedy, and the last person whose genetic signature would allow entry to the spaceship.
But what Zahra and her crew could not know was what waited for them on the ship—a terrifying secret buried by the government. A threat to all of humanity that lay sleeping alongside the orbiting dead.
And then they woke it up.

In the category of near-apocalyptic SFF thriller, Salvation Day is one of the best new entries that I’ve read in a long time. (I thought about including Michael Crichton and Daniel H. Lewis’s The Andromeda Evolution on this list for this particular close-call subgenre of the apocalyptic canon, but Kali Wallace’s novel is just better. Examining themes of humanity and systemic inequality, Salvation Day is science fiction at its best.

SWEET TOOTH by Jeff Lemire

Kids like Gus have a price on their heads.
Seven years ago, the Affliction raged like a forest fire, killing billions. The only children born since are part of a new breed of human-animal hybrids. Gus is one of these children, a boy with a sweet soul, a sweeter tooth-and the features of a deer.
When vicious hunters descend on his isolated forest home, a mysterious and violent man called Jepperd rescues Gus. The hulking drifter promises to lead Gus to The Preserve, a fabled safe haven for hybrid children.
As the two cross this dangerous new American frontier, will Jepperd corrupt the boy he’s nicknamed Sweet Tooth, or will Gus’s heart change Jepperd?
Written and illustrated by spectacular talent Jeff Lemire, SWEET TOOTH is a haunting tale of survival in post-apocalyptic America of friendships formed in tragedy, and the good and bad in humankind. Collects SWEET TOOTH #1-12, as well as never-before-seen sketches and an introduction by celebrated actor Michael Sheen (Masters of Sex, Frost/Nixon).

The cat’s out of the bag with writer/artist Jeff Lemire, but my favorite of his works remains this limited series. Sweet Tooth is the story of a young boy who is born after the world has ended–a virus killed billions, sparing few humans in its wake. One of the virus’s parting gifts to humanity is its effect on the next generation–any new children born have human-animal hybrid features, like tails and snouts, or horns and deer-like legs. More importantly: only these hybrid children are truly immune to the virus.

Read the review here.

EXTINCTION POINT by Paul Antony Jones

First comes the red rain: a strange, scarlet downpour from a cloudless sky that spreads across cities, nations, and the entire globe. In a matter of panicked hours, every living thing on earth succumbs to swift, bloody death. Yet Emily Baxter, a young newspaper reporter, is mysteriously spared—and now she’s all alone.
But watching the happy life she built for herself in New York City slip away in the wake of a monstrous, inexplicable plague is just the beginning of Emily’s waking nightmare. The world isn’t ending; it’s only changing. And the race that once ruled the earth has now become raw material for use by a new form of life never before seen…on this planet.
With only wits, weapons, and a bicycle, Emily must undertake a grueling journey across a country that’s turning increasingly alien. For though she fears she’s been left to inherit the earth, the truth is far more terrifying than a lifetime of solitude.

Apocalypse via alien invasion is an old staple in the end-of-the world canon–and there are plenty of fantastic books and films that tackle this particular theme. Paul Antony Jones’s Extinction Point appeals to me on a personal level as a New Yorker; as heroine Emily discovers an empty city, devoid of any other survivors of the red rain, you feel her terror and desperation. This isn’t the most polished book on the list, but the series delivers a timely kick and feels especially relevant to this NYCer.

Read the review here.

THE END OF OCTOBER by Lawrence Wright

In this riveting medical thriller–from the Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author–Dr. Henry Parsons, an unlikely but appealing hero, races to find the origins and cure of a mysterious new killer virus as it brings the world to its knees.
At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When Henry Parsons–microbiologist, epidemiologist–travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will soon have staggering repercussions across the globe: an infected man is on his way to join the millions of worshippers in the annual Hajj to Mecca. Now, Henry joins forces with a Saudi prince and doctor in an attempt to quarantine the entire host of pilgrims in the holy city . . . A Russian émigré, a woman who has risen to deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security, scrambles to mount a response to what may be an act of biowarfare . . . Already-fraying global relations begin to snap, one by one, in the face of a pandemic . . . Henry’s wife, Jill, and their children face diminishing odds of survival in Atlanta . . . And the disease slashes across the United States, dismantling institutions–scientific, religious, governmental–and decimating the population. As packed with suspense as it is with the fascinating history of viral diseases, Lawrence Wright has given us a full-tilt, electrifying, one-of-a-kind thriller.

An eerily timed forthcoming title, The End of October is Lawrence Wright’s exercise in examining how a modern day pandemic could bring the world to its knees. Read more about the author’s essay on the current pandemic and the intersection with his work here.

LIFE AS WE KNEW IT by Susan Beth Pfeffer

I guess I always felt even if the world came to an end, McDonald’s still would be open.
High school sophomore Miranda’s disbelief turns to fear in a split second when an asteroid knocks the moon closer to Earth, like “one marble hits another.” The result is catastrophic. How can her family prepare for the future when worldwide tsunamis are wiping out the coasts, earthquakes are rocking the continents, and volcanic ash is blocking out the sun? As August turns dark and wintery in northeastern Pennsylvania, Miranda, her two brothers, and their mother retreat to the unexpected safe haven of their sunroom, where they subsist on stockpiled food and limited water in the warmth of a wood-burning stove.
Told in a year’s worth of journal entries, this heart-pounding story chronicles Miranda’s struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all—hope—in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar world. An extraordinary series debut!
Susan Beth Pfeffer has written several companion novels to Life As We Knew It, including The Dead and the Gone, This World We Live In, and The Shade of the Moon.

Last but certainly not least is another personal favorite. Susan Beth Pfeffer takes a simple premise in this first novel: what would happen if the moon’s orbit was skewed closer to the Earth? This epistolary novel is told through the first person diary entries of a teenage girl who documents the end of life as she knows it in the fallout of a lunar asteroid strike–volcanic eruptions, unpredictable extreme weather patterns, plague, famine, and the collapse of society. Through it all, though, there is hope.

Read the review here.

And that’s it from me–any other end-of-the-world readers out there?

The post So you want to read about the end of the world? (A Book List) appeared first on The Book Smugglers.

On the Smuggler’s Radar

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 16:40:37 GMT

“On The Smugglers’ Radar” is a feature for books that have caught our eye: books we have heard of via other bloggers, directly from publishers, and/or from our regular incursions into the Amazon jungle. Thus, the Smugglers’ Radar was born. Because we want far more books than we can possibly buy or review (what else is new?), we thought we would make the Smugglers’ Radar into a weekly feature – so YOU can tell us which books you have on your radar as well!

On Ana’s Radar:

You know, if there is a moment for a “shocking psychological thriller” to get our minds out of THINGS, this is IT:

Lola doesn’t particularly want a new stepmother. Especially not one who has come out of nowhere and only been with her dad for three weeks. And – she’s not racist or anything – but since when did her dad like black women anyway?
Darling didn’t particularly want a new stepdaughter. Especially not one as spiteful and spoilt as Lola. She does want Lola’s dad though. And he wants her, so that’s that: Darling and Lola will just have to get used to each other.
Unless Lola can find a way to get rid of Darling.

This upcoming SF debut sounds cool:

An outsider who can travel between worlds discovers a secret that threatens her new home and her fragile place in it in a stunning sci-fi debut that’s both a cross-dimensional adventure and a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging.

Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there’s just one catch: no one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying—from diseases, from turf wars, from vendettas they couldn’t outrun. Cara’s life has been cut short on three hundred seventy-two worlds in total.

On this earth, however, Cara has survived. Identified as an outlier and, therefore, a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the dirt of the wastelands. Now she has a nice apartment in the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. She works—and shamelessly flirts—with her enticing yet aloof handler, Dell, as the two women collect offworld data for the Eldridge Institute. She even occasionally leaves the city to visit her family in the Wastes, though she struggles to feel at home in either place now. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, Cara is on a sure path to citizenship and security.

But trouble finds Cara when one of her eight remaining doppelgangers dies under mysterious circumstances, plunging her into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined—and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world, but the entire multiverse.

I am also super into the description for this own voices dark fantasy:

A young woman living in a rigid, puritanical society discovers dark powers within herself, with terrifying and far-reaching consequences, in this stunning, feminist fantasy debut.

In the lands of Bethel, where the Prophet’s word is law, Immanuelle Moore’s very existence is blasphemy. Her mother’s union with an outsider of a different race cast her once-proud family into disgrace, so Immanuelle does her best to worship the Father, follow Holy Protocol, and lead a life of submission, devotion, and absolute conformity, like all the other women in the settlement.

But a mishap lures her into the forbidden Darkwood surrounding Bethel, where the first prophet once chased and killed four powerful witches. Their spirits are still lurking there, and they bestow a gift on Immanuelle: the journal of her dead mother, who Immanuelle is shocked to learn once sought sanctuary in the wood.

Fascinated by the secrets in the diary, Immanuelle finds herself struggling to understand how her mother could have consorted with the witches. But when she begins to learn grim truths about the Church and its history, she realizes the true threat to Bethel is its own darkness. And she starts to understand that if Bethel is to change, it must begin with her.

Oh LOOK a new Horror novel by T Kingfisher. I LOVED The Twisted Ones so I am really keen to read this new one:

Pray they are hungry.

Kara finds the words in the mysterious bunker that she’s discovered behind a hole in the wall of her uncle’s house. Freshly divorced and living back at home, Kara now becomes obsessed with these cryptic words and starts exploring this peculiar area—only to discover that it holds portals to countless alternate realities. But these places are haunted by creatures that seem to hear thoughts…and the more one fears them, the stronger they become.

With her distinctive “delightfully fresh and subversive” (SF Bluestocking) prose and the strange, sinister wonder found in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, The Hollow Places is another compelling and white-knuckled horror novel that you won’t be able to put down.

The First Sister sounds super cool and I love the cover:

Combining the social commentary of The Handmaid’s Tale with the white-knuckled thrills of Red Rising, this epic space opera follows a comfort woman as she claims her agency, a soldier questioning his allegiances, and a non-binary hero out to save the solar system.

First Sister has no name and no voice. As a priestess of the Sisterhood, she travels the stars alongside the soldiers of Earth and Mars—the same ones who own the rights to her body and soul. When her former captain abandons her, First Sister’s hopes for freedom are dashed when she is forced to stay on her ship with no friends, no power, and a new captain—Saito Ren—whom she knows nothing about. She is commanded to spy on Captain Ren by the Sisterhood, but soon discovers that working for the war effort is so much harder to do when you’re falling in love.

Lito val Lucius climbed his way out of the slums to become an elite soldier of Venus, but was defeated in combat by none other than Saito Ren, resulting in the disappearance of his partner, Hiro. When Lito learns that Hiro is both alive and a traitor to the cause, he now has a shot at redemption: track down and kill his former partner. But when he discovers recordings that Hiro secretly made, Lito’s own allegiances are put to the test. Ultimately, he must decide between following orders and following his heart.

A stunning and sweeping debut novel that explores the power of technology, colonization, race, and gender, The First Sister is perfect for fans of James S.A. Corey, Chuck Wendig, and Margaret Atwood.

On Thea’s Radar:

For my radar this week, loads of books I’ve just purchased and/or received in the mail. Starting with this forthcoming fantasy novel from the excellent Django Wexler:

Long ago, a magical war destroyed an empire, and a new one was built in its ashes. But still the old grudges simmer, and two siblings will fight on opposite sides to save their world, in the start of Django Wexler’s new epic fantasy trilogy
Gyre hasn’t seen his beloved sister since their parents sold her to the mysterious Twilight Order. Now, twelve years after her disappearance, Gyre’s sole focus is revenge, and he’s willing to risk anything and anyone to claim enough power to destroy the Order.
Chasing rumors of a fabled city protecting a powerful artifact, Gyre comes face-to-face with his lost sister. But she isn’t who she once was. Trained to be a warrior, Maya wields magic for the Twilight Order’s cause. Standing on opposite sides of a looming civil war, the two siblings will learn that not even the ties of blood will keep them from splitting the world in two.

Next up, another forthcoming Orbit title from a repeat favorite author, Melissa Caruso (set in the same universe as her excellent Tethered Mage/Sword and Fire trilogy):

The mage-marked granddaughter of a ruler of Vaskandar, Ryx was destined for power and prestige at the top of Vaskandran society. But her magic is broken; all she can do is uncontrollably drain the life from everything she touches, and Vaskandar has no place for a mage with unusable powers.
Then, one night, two terrible accidents befall her: Ryx accidentally kills a visiting dignitary in self-defense, activating a mysterious magical artifact sealed in an ancient tower in the heart of her family’s castle.
Ryx flees, seeking a solution to her deadly magic. She falls in with a group of unlikely magical experts investigating the disturbance in Vaskandar—and Ryx realizes that her family is in danger and her domain is at stake. She and her new colleagues must return to the family stronghold to take control of the artifact that everyone wants to claim—before it destroys the world.

Next up, a YA novel slated for release in May of this year–dragons!

Five royal houses will hear the call to compete in the Trial for the dragon throne. A liar, a soldier, a servant, a thief, and a murderer will answer it. Who will win?
When the Emperor dies, the five royal houses of Etrusia attend the Call, where one of their own will be selected to compete for the throne. It is always the oldest child, the one who has been preparing for years to compete in the Trial. But this year is different. This year, these five outcasts will answer the call….
THE LIAR: Emilia must hide her dark magic or be put to death.
THE SOLDIER: Lucian is a warrior who has sworn to never lift a sword again.
THE SERVANT: Vespir is a dragon trainer whose skills alone will keep her in the game.
THE THIEF: Ajax knows that nothing is free–he must take what he wants.
THE MURDERER: Hyperia was born to rule and will stop at nothing to take her throne.

Next up, a horror novel (you know I’m a sucker for those):

Inspired by a true story, this supernatural thriller for fans of horror and true crime follows a tale as it evolves every twenty years—with terrifying results.
Ella Louise has lived in the woods surrounding Pilot’s Creek, Virginia, for nearly a decade. Publicly, she and her daughter Jessica are shunned by their upper-crust family and the Pilot’s Creek residents. Privately, desperate townspeople visit her apothecary for a cure to what ails them—until Ella Louise is blamed for the death of a prominent customer. Accused of witchcraft, both mother and daughter are burned at the stake in the middle of the night. Ella Louise’s burial site is never found, but the little girl has the most famous grave in the South: a steel-reinforced coffin surrounded by a fence of interconnected white crosses.
Their story will take the shape of an urban legend as it’s told around a campfire by a man forever marked by his boyhood encounters with Jessica. Decades later, a boy at that campfire will cast Amber Pendleton as Jessica in a ’70s horror movie inspired by the Witch Girl of Pilot’s Creek. Amber’s experiences on that set and its meta-remake in the ’90s will ripple through pop culture, ruining her life and career after she becomes the target of a witch hunt. Amber’s best chance to break the cycle of horror comes when a true-crime investigator tracks her down to interview her for his popular podcast. But will this final act of storytelling redeem her—or will it bring the story full circle, ready to be told once again? And again. And again…

And then last but not least, a new YA lgbt SFF effort that sounds fantastic:

A young pilot risks everything to save his best friend–the man he trusts most and might even love–only to learn that he’s secretly the heir to a brutal galactic empire.
Ettian Nassun’s life was shattered when the merciless Umber Empire invaded. He’s spent seven years putting himself back together under its rule, joining an Umber military academy and becoming the best pilot in his class. Even better, he’s met Gal Veres–his exasperating and infuriatingly enticing roommate who’s made the Academy feel like a new home.
But when dozens of classmates spring an assassination plot on Gal, a devastating secret comes to light: Gal is the heir to the Umber Empire. Ettian barely manages to save his best friend and flee the compromised Academy unscathed, rattled both that Gal stands to inherit the empire that broke him and that there are still people willing to fight back against Umber rule. As they piece together a way to deliver Gal safely to his throne, Ettian finds himself torn in half by an impossible choice. Does he save the man who’s won his heart and trust that Gal’s goodness could transform the empire? Or does he throw his lot in with the brewing rebellion and fight to take back what’s rightfully theirs?

And that’s it from us! What books do you have on your radar?

The post On the Smuggler’s Radar appeared first on The Book Smugglers.