Starred Review: The Misdirection of Fault Lines by Anna Gracia

Jan 112024
 

Kirkus: For three teen competitors at the exclusive Bastille Invitational tennis tournament in Florida, there’s more at stake than the winner’s trophy.

Taiwanese American Alice Wu arrives still reeling from the loss of her father, who was also her coach. Mixed with her grief is the betrayal she feels toward the rest of her family, who hid Baba’s illness so she could have a “normal” life as long as possible. Alice receives another shock when she discovers that she’s rooming with rising tennis star Violetta Masuda, a white-passing social media influencer of Japanese and European descent. Violetta is bubbly, glamorous, and well connected, but there are cracks beneath the surface. Relentless pressure from her mother, a former professional tennis player, drives Violetta to increasingly seek relief through vaping. It doesn’t help that the dorm’s third occupant is Leylah Lê, Violetta’s former friend. Leylah holds her partially responsible for the disastrous conclusion to her previous appearance at the Bastille Invitational. Leylah, who has Type 1 diabetes and whose parents are Khmer and Vietnamese, is determined to prove that she belongs in the tennis world without compromising who she is, from her appearance to her brusque demeanor. Gracia engages readers from the start with well-developed characters whose motivations and secrets are carefully revealed over the course of the tournament. Chapters alternate between Alice’s, Violetta’s, and Leylah’s perspectives and examine trauma, addiction, class, and representation through the passion—and desperation—of elite athletes.
Compelling and memorable. (Fiction. 13-18)

Review: The Olympian Affair by Jim Butcher

Jan 032024
 

Shelf Awareness: A secret superweapon capable of wiping out entire populations tips a world into full warfare in the action-packed The Olympian Affair, second in the steampunk Cinder Spires series from Jim Butcher (The Aeronaut’s Windlass).

Humanity has long lived in the Spires, high above the dangers of the planet’s surface. Fleets of airships sail among them, powered by ether and carrying out trade–and, of course, war. The Spire of Aurora’s armada has unleashed a new weapon that has completely destroyed some smaller outposts, and it won’t be long before they take on more ambitious targets. Spire Albion will need all its diplomatic force at the upcoming trade summit at Spire Olympia in order to gather allies to stand against them, but there may be dissent growing in the Auroran ranks. Not everyone is comfortable with wielding Spire-destroying weapons.

The result is a thrilling tale of high-stakes duels, monstrous creatures, and diplomatic negotiations featuring a wide cast of appealing characters, including some talkative cats. Although this is the second in the series, new readers and those who haven’t read The Aeronaut’s Windlass since its release in 2015 will quickly be able to orient themselves. The multiple plot threads, including battles between airships and opponents facing each other down with crossed blades, sometimes move around so much that a chapter’s cliffhanger may dangle for some time, but any frustration is purely due to the successful creation of suspense. Readers will be eager to see where the series goes next.

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.

Review: System Collapse by Martha Wells

Dec 222023
 

Wall Street Journal: The world in this current timeline has been a bit bleak lately. Fortunately for readers of alternate futures, the writer Martha Wells has delivered to us a hyperblast of joy: another wonderfully delightful offbeat adventure of the artificial consciousness readers have come to know as Murderbot.

The Murderbot Diaries started in 2017 with “All Systems Red” and reach their seventh installment with “System Collapse.” These compact, delightful stories are set in a downbeat future in which corporations control humankind’s interstellar colonies and keep many in lives of servitude. An even worse fate is life as a SecUnit, a Security Unit cyborg usually tasked with killing troublesome people and controlled by a module that eliminates free will. Our first-person narrator has been crafty enough to hack itself free—but instead of taking revenge on its creators and destroying every terrible human it encounters, this SecUnit (which decides to call itself Murderbot) would rather watch TV.

If you’re expecting a fast-moving android-becomes-human emotional arc, you’re going to be disappointed. Murderbot learns a little more about humans in each book but mostly remains grumpy, bored and uncomfortable when forced to spend time with its all-flesh counterparts.

In “System Collapse,” the Barish-Estranza corporation is offering to help the colonists of a planet whose machines have been contaminated by alien tech. But the company’s proposal to relocate the colonists sounds almost too good to be true. (It is.) Working with a cognitively powerful (and equally testy) spaceship called ART and a few human friends, our cyborg hero must fight off berserk robots, keep the good humans safe from the bad ones, and figure out how to convince the colonists that the corporation is not on their side. Murderbot also suffers frozen moments of human-style post-traumatic stress—all the more mysterious because the episodes seem to have been caused by an incident that never happened.

The SecUnit remains every bit as snarky and funny as it has been in the last six books, the perfectly conceived action as nearly nonstop as ever. (And we finally get to see the benefits of Murderbot’s TV addiction.) If there is anything negative to say about “System Collapse,” it’s that there doesn’t seem to be an actual system collapse. And sometimes the bits with humans emoting over things go on a little long (but that might be the Murderbot in me talking).

Outside of this series, Ms. Wells has written many other excellent books, including “Witch King,” which was reviewed here earlier this year. If you need something light, a little violent and laugh-out-loud hilarious, dive into this series: You may find that you have more in common with Murderbot than you think.

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.

Review: Cursed Cruise by Faith McClaren

Dec 192023
 

Kirkus: A supernatural mystery unfolds aboard a boat with a haunted history.

Chrissy, Chase, Kiki, and Emma, all 18, are recent high school graduates known as the Ghost Gang. Their YouTube channel has over a million subscribers, and after their last ordeal, in which a deranged serial killer fan terrorized them while they were filming an episode at the Hearst Hotel, the pressure’s now on them to deliver another heart-pounding show. The Ghost Gang also hopes to leverage their fame into a TV deal. With that goal in mind, they board the famously haunted cruise ship the RMS Queen Anne, sister ship of the Titanic, which will be sailing from New York City to Southampton for its inaugural voyage after major refurbishment. On board, they meet the Paranormal Patrol, a rival ghost-chasing crew. Told in alternating first-person viewpoints, this creepy and atmospheric story follows the main foursome as they have a series of chilling ghostly experiences while trying to unlock the truth of the ship’s past. Each Ghost Gang member faces a different challenge, putting their skills, confidence, and sometimes their safety to the test. Kiki is brown-skinned; the other major characters read white, and Kiki and Emma are queer. This follow-up to Horror Hotel (2022) will please returning fans, and the adventure holds water as a stand-alone adventure.

A fast-paced and fun Scooby-Doo–esque paranormal page-turner. (Horror. 13-18)

Review: Exordia by Seth Dickinson

Dec 132023
 

Publishers Weekly: Survival is the measure of success for people overwhelmed by alien forces in this adroit alternate history of first contact from fantasist Dickinson (the Baru Cormorant trilogy). Anna Sinjari, a Kurd living in 2013 New York City, finds an eight-headed extraterrestrial casually snacking on turtles in Central Park. Bound soul to soul by a mysterious alien force, Anna and Ssrin, who turns out to be a rebel from the Exordia galactic empire, attempt to recover a crashed spaceship and avoid the enforcers coming to nab Ssrin. The trail leads them back to Kurdistan, where Anna must confront her mother, Khaje, and fellow villagers, who are all still wary of Anna after she made a devil’s bargain to help them survive an Iraqi-led genocide. The rest of the world notices their struggle, bringing in a swarm of special forces units and nuclear-armed aircraft to an otherwise peaceful countryside. Layering in a bromance, an odd-couple pair of female physicists, an Iranian fighter pilot with a Top Gun obsession, and mother-daughter conflict, Dickinson skillfully puts the cosmic scale of the Exordian rebellion into manageably personal terms. With cool alien technology, admirably hopeful heroes, and SFF pop culture references littered throughout, this will have readers hooked. 

Review: The Someday Daughter by Ellen O’Clover

Nov 292023
 

Kirkus: The daughter of a famous self-help author struggles when she must join a tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of her mother’s bestselling book, Letters to My Someday Daughter.

Logical, driven, precise Audrey is everything Camilla St. Vrain, her yoga-practicing, emotionally distant, image-conscious mother, is not, but she still winds up accompanying her on a nationwide press tour. This means that Johns Hopkins–bound Audrey must give up a place in a prestigious summer program for pre-med students at UPenn that her similarly ambitious boyfriend is attending. Along for the tour is Sadie, the accomplished young doctor Camilla hired to introduce Audrey to medical professionals around the country. They’re also accompanied by three spontaneous interns, Cleo, Mick, and Silas. Audrey’s evolving relationships with each of them, but particularly with Silas, to whom she is quickly drawn, turn out to be the catalyst she needs to re-examine many of her thoughts about herself and her place in the world. Audrey’s transformation from non-emotive and somewhat flat to multidimensional is portrayed with convincing complexity and appealing measures of both humor and earnestness. Some readers may anticipate the twist toward the end, but it still adds an interesting layer to this contemporary drama. Most characters read white; Chloe is Japanese American. Sadie is married to a woman. There’s a brief, entertaining encounter with a character from O’Clover’s Seven Percent of Ro Devereux (2023).

Starred Review: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

Nov 282023
 

Library Journal:  It’s Dinios Kol’s first murder case as the junior assistant to the brilliant, irascible, and much senior investigator Ana Dolabra. Din has been magically engineered to retain every single detail of everything he sees and hears, which should be a boon in his work. But not when the victim is dead as the result of a tree growing out of his lungs. Ana uses Din’s observations to determine not just whodunnit but how this uniquely gruesome murder was accomplished. Her investigation, however, discomfits the rich and powerful even as the monstrous climate impedes the search and destroys the evidence. Bennett’s (Locklands) series opener introduces readers to a conspiracy of murder and skullduggery as seen through the eyes of a naive junior investigator who is forced to grow up fast and hard as his boss and mentor, the rather Sherlockian Ana, threads her way through a complex conspiracy of murders.

Review: The School for Invisible Boys by Shaun David Hutchinson

Nov 212023
 

Publishers Weekly: An 11-year-old navigating friendship troubles, mercurial blended family dynamics, and questions surrounding his sexual identity wishes to disappear—and abruptly does—in this heartwarming adventure by Hutchinson (Howl). Hector Griggs, who attends St. Lawrence Catholic School for Boys, isn’t a sports star like his older stepbrother. Instead, Hector prefers solitary activities such as reading, playing piano, and hanging out with his only friend, Blake. But Blake’s new pals constantly bully Hector, and when a major fight puts Blake and Hector’s friendship on the outs, Hector discovers that he can turn himself invisible at will. Now undetectable, he encounters invisible classmate Orson, who everyone believes has been missing for three years. As rumors of ghosts and rampaging monsters start swirling around school, Hector must save Orson and win back Blake from his unsavory new crew, all while evading frightening creatures. A subplot involving an undercover agent from a supernatural organization is somewhat thinly developed. Hutchinson nevertheless populates this optimistic novel with an organically diverse cast that helps to ferry insightful lessons about empathetic listening and problem-solving, broadening one’s horizons, and dealing with bullies, delivered via an entertaining series opener. 

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