Dream with Our Eyes Open

Selena arrives at the tiny train station in the town of Quartz Creek with a backpack, a rolling suitcase, her dog Copper, and a postcard from her aunt, suggesting a visit. When Selena had finally decided she could not deal with her emotionally abusive fiancé any longer, that postcard gave her a destination. But when she reaches the town, after two and a half days of travel, she discovers that Aunt Amelia is dead, and has been for a year.

Selena has hardly any money, and it would be so easy to return to her poisonous partner and let him run her life, but she hesitates. And as she's hesitating, she meets a variety of kind but eccentric townspeople who suggest that there is no reason why she can't simply take over her aunt's house, known as Jackrabbit Hole House. Even in a town where it's far more common for a house to have a name than not, this one is puzzling. Jackrabbits, one of the residents informs her, don't live in holes.

Despite all the minor issues that one might expect in a house that's been all but abandoned in the U.S southwestern desert for a year, Selena finds the place surprisingly comfortable. Her next-door neighbor Grandma Billy keeps her supplied with eggs and other miscellaneous food, and the local church has a potluck supper multiple times a week. She also discovers, when she goes to buy Copper some dog food, that Aunt Amelia left several hundred dollars of credit at the local store, which the store owner insists is Selena's now. With Grandma Billy's help, Selena even starts to recover her aunt's vegetable garden.

Everything is fine until she starts hearing voices. Then there's that creepy statuette in the main room. And one morning, she finds she's not alone in her bed.

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This is the Southwest of Kingfisher's collection Jackalope Wives and Other Stories, where spirits, gods, and shapeshifters co-exist with vintage pickup tricks and ecotourists. Kingfisher seems at her best in this setting, and Selena's predicament is genuinely frightening at times.

The book is also, however, rather familiar. The outline of the story is very similar to Kingfisher's The Twisted Ones (2019), in which a young woman named Mouse travels with her beloved dog Bongo to inventory her late grandmother's house and finds all manner of creepiness. She deals with these manifestations with the help of eccentric locals. The Twisted Ones is actually a more complicated story, probably because it's a pastiche of a 1904 horror short story called “The White People," by Arthur Machen. Snake-Eater is also shorter: 267 pages to 399 for The Twisted Ones.

To me, Snake-Eater is the more engaging story. In the acknowledgments, Kingfisher reminisces about growing up in the Southwest. I knew she had moved there recently, but I didn't realize that she was a returnee when she did so. That may be why this story feels more full of life than the earlier work.

I think I'll be re-reading this one. I've never bothered with that for The Twisted Ones.

I'm a little past halfway, and golly, it's so great to be back with witch king Kaiisteron and his found family of extremely powerful misfits as they try to figure out whether Something Bad is happening at the edges of the map.

The family vibe is ramping up, in fact. At one point their little street urchin, Sanja, wants reassurance that if she goes off to play with some children in the household of an ally that they are visiting, the grownup members of the group won't leave her there (where she'd be safe) while she's distracted. Kai tells her with affable sarcasm that it would be very bad manners to abandon his children to their hosts.

 Given that Edrehasiver VII became known as the Winter Emperor, I’m not shocked that we don’t have much info about how Midsummer is celebrated in the Ethuveraz (Elflands) in the first book.

But after some searching, I’m saddened to report that there’s nothing in the entire Cemeteries of Amalo on the subject either.  In fact, The Grief of Stones has not a single mention of the word “summer,” and the other two only mention it in reference to things like the summer homes of the nobility.

I’m trying to come up with something for a project, and so far I’ve only come up with fireworks and summer fruits like strawberries and plums.   I imagine that there are various agriculture-related  activities in rural areas among commoners (for example, bonfires rather than fireworks), but does anyone else have any inspirations for Summernight activities among the nobility?

A being called Kai wakes up to find himself in a glass box, feeling terrible. His mental powers confirm that a dear friend is somewhere near, but she's feeling equally out of it. Then a gang of unsavory characters show up, dragging with them a dead body and a struggling prisoner. With an ease that shows he's done this many times before, Kai transfers himself into the dead body.

Wait, what?

In less than five minutes, the little band of evildoers discover that they are facing not the helpless ensorcelled person that they had expected, but a fully functioning and extremely pissed off major demon:

"Now," Kai said, grinning, as he shoved the veil aside. "Which one of you wants to go first?"

This is not the Wells of Murderbot, with relatively straightforward plots and a narrator with a limited interest in the worldbuilding around it, but instead the Wells of the Fall of Ile-Rien and Books of the Raksura, with rich, multi-layered histories and landscapes. Some readers may be disappointed; I was enthralled.

After a series of brief action-filled set pieces in which Kai, his friend Ziede, and the former prisoner (who turns out to be a street urchin named Sanja) escape the islet tomb/tower in which the two adults were imprisoned, the book starts to alternate the current timeline plot, in which Kai and Ziede start to unravel the mystery of who imprisoned them and why, with sections set in Kai's past, where we find out more about what he is and what he cares about.

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I really liked this book, but then, I trust Wells to tell a story that I will enjoy, and she seems to be as addicted to the Family of Choice trope as I am.

Witch King has drawn an extremely mixed bag of reviews. Part of it is likely due to the fact that readers are thrown into the deep end and expected to figure out this swimming thing themselves. Not everyone likes this approach. What info dumps we do get are brief, basic, and simply told because they are most often directed in-story at young Sanja, who seems to be nine or ten years old.

Another complaint is that except for Kai, we don't get inside anyone's head. This is actually a common Wells characteristic: the sole narrator of Books of the Raksura is Moon, and the sole narrator of the Murderbot Diaries is, of course, Murderbot/SecUnit. (The Fall of Ile-Rien is a little different: we definitely get sections from both Tremaine and Ilias' viewpoints, and I think we get some from Florian in the second and third books.) Again, this isn't something that bothers me.

On the positive side, people have noted with pleasure the fact that much of the story is agendered. Kai's only concerns about the bodies he has inhabited are how useful they are: some bodies require more rest, some need more food to function well, and so on. Gender isn't an issue. Ziede and her wife Tahren are both women, and various members of the supporting cast use they pronouns.

The ending is fairly open: some of the mysteries are solved, but there is plenty of "Yes, but what about …?" to feed into a sequel or sequels. And when I went to move the ebook from my actual Kindle device to the app on my iPad for another re-read (this will be re-read number 3) , I noticed that the current title info says Witch King (The Rising World Book 1). 😃

The novel begins: “Today he would become a god. His mother had told him so.” But after the smashing opening chapter, the book settles down into an outline I seem to have read or heard about a number of times recently: characters from different backgrounds experience adventures and growth as their journeys bring them together for a magical crisis.

In this case, the characters are in general older than such protagonists usually are, and their background cultures are more expertly fleshed out and varied, as one might expect from Rebecca Roanhorse.

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At the end of February, I had told my management I was going to retire at the end of March, and. I realized that Hugo nominations were due mid-March. So I rather frantically obtained a bunch of novels that were on the Locus and other lists

I hadn't finished them when time came to put in my nominations, but nothing could stop me now! I was a reading machine! So I finished everything I'd downloaded, and then realized that I had books I had downloaded earlier but never read. So I read those. And then I realized that sequels had dropped for a couple of series I was following. So I obtained and read those.

When the dust settled, and I switched to a re-read of something for a writing exchange, I had 11 unreviewed books. If I did one per week (which would be a vast improvement over what I've managed recently), that would still take me into the summer.

Help me prioritize. Which books do people actually want to read about? You can vote for more than one.

Thanks!!

I've been reading a lot, but a fair amount of it was re-reads for Yuletide and for comfort reading.

The Mr. and I are hooked on two new (to us) manga. I like Witch Hat Atelier better than Delicious in Dungeon (although I may cover that one later). Both are seinen fantasy series.

The setting of Witch Hat Atelier is a medieval Euro-type land where magic works but was turned to evil ends not that long ago. As a result, magicians who wish to operate openly have to follow strict rules of behavior and limits on what thei magic can do. For example, performing magic on living bodies is forbidden - even for healing! Coco, a young girl living alone with her mother, glimpses a magician's spell one day (virtually all the spellcasting shown so far depends on written sigils). She innocently tries her had at it herself ...(SPOILER) ...and inadvertently turns her mother into a statue.

The magician, Quifrey, realizing that the child has great raw magical talent and takes her with him to his "atelier," a business specializing in magic works of all kinds for pay. There he already has three young female apprentices, as well as a gruff overseer, Olruggio, who is supposed to ensure that everything in the atelier is done legally.

If you're getting a little skeeved out at the idea of four young girls under the supervision of two young-ish men, all I can do is note that this is actually not that odd a set-up for seinen manga of the "moe" (innocent and cute) type. The girls' Kendo team series Bamboo Blade was another example. Although I can't prove that things will remain innocent, I'm guessing that they will. We did have the girls in "bath wraps" (basically draped and tied bathing dresses) in vol. 6, everything was more modest than a typical U.S. beach of the 21st century.

Quifrey's other students - Agott, Richeh, and Tetia - have varying reactions to the newcomer, who has none of the educational background that they do. Intense, ambitious Agott, in particular, is pretty hostile to her. As one might expect, friendly, naive Coco eventually wins them over, but her acceptance by Agott is definitely well-earned. Along the way are all sorts of wonders and some fairly serious philosophical discussions about the history, use, and misuse of magic in this world.

The art? The art is frickin' gorgeous -

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My understand is that the mangaka was inspired by childrens' book illustrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It shows, but I am familiar with some of those (the art for E. Nesbit's fantasy classics, for example), and this is even better.

Vol. 7 is due out in paperback in just a few weeks. I can hardly wait!

Some SFF/pop/media website had a yearly tournament bracket feature where they pitted characters against each other and had someone (sometimes someone pretty good) narrate how it would have played out, at least for like the final four. Readers vote to advance their preferred opponent to the next round. The tournament featured all kinds of characters: I know Ged from Earthsea showed up one year, for example.

I cannot for the life of me recall where it was, and it's making me nuts. I *think* I saw Gideon Nav in it last year, and I'm re-reading Gideon the Ninth, which I had not read at the time. I have a vision of the little stylized image of her with her cropped red hair, shades, and big honkin' sword, from the site. So now I want to see who she was slated to fight and how it worked out.

Anybody recognize what I'm talking about? If so, can you point me to the site? I usually can find this stuff for myself, but I'm getting NOWHERE.

This was part of my Hugo reading; also, people were raving about it.

The Ninth House, charged with guarding an infamous tomb, inhabits a gloomy world barely capable of growing food to support its human inhabitants -- and that's saying something, because there aren't that many mortal beings around the place. The residents are necromancer priests and nuns, and most of the servants are animated skeletons. And then there's Gideon.

Gideon is a smart-mouthed, tough young woman with something of a talent for swordwork and a head full of lusty fantasies about pretty girls. In between martial arts training with the Ninth House's aging swords-master and reluctant bouts of menial work, Gideon reads naughty comic books, lobs dirty and sacrilegious quips at her betters, and plots to escape off-world to become a soldier. The main reason she doesn't get worse punishments for her sins is (at a guess) that she is the only young person left in the Ninth House except for the high priestess in waiting, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, and someone will have to serve Harrow in the years to come, besides the skeletons. Gideon and Harrow have a mutual enmity fest going that dates back to infancy.

As the story opens, Gideon's latest escape attempt is foiled, and a message arrives from the Emperor God. The necromancer heirs of all nine Houses are commanded to come to the first House and prove themselves worthy of becoming his Lyctor. And because the challenges will be of both mind and body, each competitor must also bring their cavalier. And who will be Harrow's cavalier? Take a wild guess!

Once the candidates come together at the First House, the story becomes a crazed ride of a locked-room mystery combined with a haunted house Gothic. In fact, this is the first time since Marta Randall's The Sword of Winter (anyone else remember this?), with its murderer run amok on a storm-isolated island castle, that I have come across anything that scratches this particular itch for me. Gideon is encountering other people (and green vegetables) for the first time in her life, even as the body count mounts, and it's in many ways a wonderful experience for her. But she and Harrow come to realize that surviving will mean depending on each other, and the ultimate result of this growing trust is, as one critic pointed out, deeply dysfunctional (but also beautiful, in a sick sort of way).

Gideon has a wonderful narrative voice, rather as though Sha Gojyo (Saiyuki) had been reincarnated as a buff young gay woman: the story is told pretty much entirely from her tight third-person viewpoint.The world-building is sheer crack, with all the good and the bad that implies: are the Houses on separate planets? In separate dimensions? Who cares! But if you do care about this kind of information, you may find this book both slight and frustrating.

I enjoyed this an awful lot, maybe more than it deserves. The sequel, Harrow the Ninth, is due out this August.

Three years ago, the Saint of Steel had died. The god left behind his paladins, men and women sworn to the righteous fight, terrifying in battle against evil when they would run berserk. Empty of their god's spirit and bereft of purpose, the paladins have died, one by one, leaving hardly more than a handful.

Stephen is one, attempting to bury himself in purpose by serving the White Rat, god of the downtrodden, alongside the healers, lawyers, and diplomats who strove to make life better in their kingdom. Every day he gets up and does whatever he's ordered: mostly serving as a bodyguard to healers working the poor and desperate parts of the city. In his spare time, he knits socks and tries not to wish he were dead.

And then one day, while he's on duty in the slums, a woman fleeing from the grim priests of the Hanged Motherhood throws herself into his arms and whispers "Hide me!"

The woman is Grace, a skilled perfumer with an unhappy past, and she and Stephen each find themselves unable to forget the other after their brief (and hilariously dirty) encounter in the alley. Meanwhile, a maniac is leaving headless corpses around the poorer quarters of the city and foreign envoys seem to be weaving political schemes.

What's up with the corpses? Why does the foreign prince want to see Grace in person? Why is Grace being arrested? Will Stephen and Grace ever stop tripping over themselves in each other's presence, despite their non-youthful years? And will Grace ever figure out why Stephen smells like gingerbread?

Readers of "The Clocktaur War" will recognize the setting, and those who have read Swordheart will also recognize the Rat God and its servant, the lawyer Zale. The romance seems almost recycled from Swordheart as well, but Kingfisher says in her notes (in the Acknowledgments at the end) that although she meant to write a sequel to Swordheart, she got sidetracked by a podcast on perfumery: "I thought, 'Man, that could be a great profession for a heroine ... '." And indeed, a great deal of this book is a couple of mysteries that Grace helps solve with her highly trained sense of smell.

I wasn't super-impressed with the book, but I enjoyed it. It's not on par with Swordheart, in my opinion (it's missing the dramatic tension of Sarkis' history), but it's fun. And those who found Halla, the heroine of Swordheart, too passive (I didn't, but I heard there are those who did) may find Grace more to their taste. I found Stephen more fun than Sarkis too, knitting and all.