Starred Review: SHEINE LINDE by Darcie Little Badger

Jan 252024
 
Kirkus: Two generations before the events of Elatsoe (2020), Shane, a 17-year-old Lipan Apache girl, helps her mother, Lorenza, perform volunteer search-and-rescue operations.

Familiar both with tracking to survive in the wilderness and counting change to survive under capitalism, Shane possesses the resourcefulness of an irresistible protagonist. Her practicality also provides the perfect foil for her extraordinary ability—inherited from her four-great-grandmother—to summon dead creatures, adding texture to her supernatural world. What starts out as Lorenza’s quest to locate two missing children becomes Shane’s journey through Texas, Arkansas, Colorado, and the ghostly land Below to find her mother after she disappears. While faeries and vampires inhabit Shane’s surroundings, the heart of her story is her family’s endurance despite various tragedies, including climate devastation and rich settlers’ betrayal and theft. Frequent flashbacks and late-breaking perspective changes add narrative complexity, alongside rich depictions of cultural identity, generational trauma, and community care. A secondary character’s revelatory discovery offers an empowering narrative of reclaiming one’s stolen ancestry. Shane’s protectiveness toward her younger brother, complex love for her inconstant grandfather, and sturdy bond with her mathematically minded best friend add further relationship depth. Bug enthusiasts will also find kindred spirits in Shane and new acquaintance Dr. Richards, an older Black scholar of biology, magic, and comics.

A classic fantasy adventure and a balm for any soul weary of oppression. (note on the title) (Speculative fiction. 12-18)

Review: The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

Jan 022024
 
Library Journal: Veris Thorn once rescued a child from the rapacious Elmever Forest and knows better than to ever enter it again. But she’s forced to relive her nightmare when the equally rapacious Tyrant forces her back to the forest to rescue his adventurous children. Veris has one day to get them out before the Tyrant burns her village and the Elmever takes all their souls. But the Elmever wants the only thing from Veris that she can’t give, and the price is as monstrously high as it was the first time she escaped. In Veris’s soul-searching and redemptive rescue quest, there’s a constant struggle between her desire to save these children as she could not save her own and her fear that they will become just like their father the Tyrant, who is responsible for the deaths of her family. She’ll have to face the past as well as the monsters of the forest.
VERDICT The latest from Mohamed (No One Will Come Back for Us) is recommended for readers of magical-bargain and forest-journey novels, such as Emily Tesh’s “Greenhollow” duology and Peter S. Beagle’s The Way Home.

December Translation Deals

Dec 312023
 

Italian rights to Jo Walton’s AMONG OTHERS, to Marco Rana at Edizione E/O, by Stefania Fietta at Donzelli Fietta, on behalf of Katie Shea Boutillier for Cameron McClure.

Italian rights to C.L. Polk’s THE MIDNIGHT BARGAIN, to Marco Rana at Edizione E/O, by Stefania Fietta at Donzelli Fietta, on behalf of Katie Shea Boutillier for Caitlin McDonald.

Turkish rights to Melissa K. Roehrich’s LADY OF DARKNESS and LADY OF SHADOWS, to Ren Kitap, in a two-book deal, by Merve Öngen at AnatoliaLit Agency, on behalf of Katie Shea Boutillier.

French rights to Melissa K. Roehrich’s LADY OF DARKNESS series and LEGACY series, to Guy Tredaniel, at auction, in a very nice deal, in a nine-book deal, by Sarah Dray at Anna Jarota Agency, on behalf of Katie Shea Boutillier.

Hungarian rights to New York Times bestselling author Tamsyn Muir’s PRINCESS FLORALINDA AND THE FORTY-FLIGHT TOWER, to Fumax, by Milena Kaplarević at Prava i prevodi in association with Michael Curry for Jennifer Jackson.

Italian rights to Jeanette Ng’s UNDER THE PENDULUM SUN, to Marco Rana at Edizione E/O, by Stefania Fietta at Donzelli Fietta, on behalf of Katie Shea Boutillier for Jennie Goloboy.

Spanish audio rights to New York Times bestselling author Martha Wells’ WITCH KING, to Recorded Books, by Amaiur Fernández at International Editors Co. in association with Michael Curry for Jennifer Jackson.

Review: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Dec 212023
 
New York Times: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera is the best book I’ve read all year. Protean, singular, original, it forces me to come up with the most baffling comparisons, like: What if “Disco Elysium” were written by Sofia Samatar? At the same time, all you need to know about it is contained in its opening:
“The moment Fetter is born, Mother-of-Glory pins his shadow to the earth with a large brass nail and tears it from him. This is his first memory, the seed of many hours of therapy to come.”
Fetter is one of several almost-chosen-ones (they have a support group) who are raised in the expectation of a spectacular and violent destiny, but shirk or sidestep it in favor of a haunted and marginal life in the city of Luriat. All is mundane in Luriat except its “bright doors,” which “give the city its historic identity without intruding on its daily life.” These doors seem to open onto nothing, but from their keyholes emerge whispers, a cold breeze and a sense of the otherworldly. Fetter’s fascination with these doors draws him into a web of Luriati intrigue that involves his estranged and godlike father, The Perfect and Kind — whom Fetter has been trained since childhood to kill.
I can’t remember the last time a book made me so excited about its existence, its casual challenge to what a fantasy novel could be. In its slipperiness, its combination of antique registers (“megrims” for migraines, “haecceity strings” for bar codes) with contemporary digital life, it manages to pinpoint the peculiar insanity of our modernity. Atrocity is both all-obliterating and seasonal here, able to be mapped onto a calendar; childhood is a site of trauma and self-fashioning, to be both escaped and fulfilled. This novel is so intelligent and compassionate, so furious and so calm.
As a critic I often attempt to turn myself into a book’s ideal reader in order to do it justice. It’s bewildering to encounter a book for which I am, in fact, already the ideal reader, a book that gives me everything I didn’t know I needed, that makes me feel both the pinwheeling fall from climbing a step that isn’t there, and the relief of being caught before I hit the ground.

New York Times Best SFF Books for 2023!

Dec 202023
 

The New York Times released their Best SFF Books of 2023 list, and huge congratulations to Vajra Chandrasekera and Martha Wells for making the list!

  • The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
  • Witch King by Martha Wells

 

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2023

Dec 042023
 

The New York Times has released it’s 100 Notable Books of 2023 list, and it includes two DMLA titles!!!

  • The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
  • The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

Congrats to Vajra Chandrasekera and Tananarive Due!

Review: No One Will Come Back for Us by Premee Mohamed

Nov 012023
 

Interzone:Premee Mohamed’s debut collection…eschews genre fidelity with gleeful abandon – No One Will Come Back for Us (Undertow Publications, 2023) is a melting pot of horror, dark fantasy, sci-fi and the gloriously weird – but retains nonetheless a subtle but definite thematic thread. Mohamed’s microcosms are meticulously crafted little snowglobes populated by believable, interesting characters, and more often than not, utterly and cosmically indifferent gods. This theme runs the gamut from explicitly Lovecraftian (‘The Adventurer’s Wife’, which is nothing that you expect it to be) to the more folk horror flavourings of ‘Below the Kirk, Below the Hill’.

Another favourite story, ‘Four Hours of a Revolution’, spotlights the absolutely magnetic Whittaker, a punk-soul rebel fighting a civil war of some kind. Our POV character is Death – though, in a brilliantly imaginative twist, Death is merely one of a great many Deaths, a faintly corporate conglomerate of reapers whose job is the dispassionate dispatch of those whose time is due. It’s pacey, exciting and the worldbuilding strikes a beautiful balance between giving just enough information, and leaving you to intuit the rest. Mohamed says this story makes every mistake in the book; if that’s the case, perhaps more people ought to make mistakes more often.

Her craft and ability are without question, as is her ability to meld genres; title tale ‘No One Will Come Back For Us’ straddles horror, sf, the weird and even a little thriller for good measure. An oddly optimistic tale despite its near-apocalyptic cosmic horror setting, Mohamed seems to be asking whether sometimes, it is simply enough to survive. There’s also something wonderfully wry in the little digs at imperialist attitudes given cosmic horror’s tendency towards xenophobia; a truly twenty-first century take on the genre which I think is well warranted.

Premee Mohamed has staked her claim as one of the most versatile writers I’ve encountered in recent years. Her ability to evoke vividly a wide range of settings and write a wide range of characters whilst maintaining an integral authenticity and believability is remarkable. The bottom line is: Mohamed tells a cracking story, and this collection is as enjoyable a read as you are likely to find in any given bookshop, especially if you like your tales painted across a broad spectrum. The gods may be indifferent, but by the end of this book, I was anything but.

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