Chelsea @ Spotlight on Stories posted: " I'm slaying my goodreads challenge, but not managing to write about many of the books I've read, so here are some mini reviews as I catch up! Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse (rounded down on goodreads) With Black Sun, the first book in her fa" Spotlight on Stories
I'm slaying my goodreads challenge, but not managing to write about many of the books I've read, so here are some mini reviews as I catch up!
Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse (rounded down on goodreads)
With Black Sun, the first book in her fantasy trilogy set in a Pre-Columbian Americas inspired world, Roanhorse won me over with her complicated characters and strong worldbuilding. Fevered Star is the second book in the series but it suffers from a bad case of middle book syndrome. So much of this book feels like set up for the concluding volume; there's a lot of moving characters from point A to point B, both physically and metaphorically and the result is a book with intricate, arguably overly, complicated political moves but stagnant character development.
In a book with multiple POVs there will often be perspectives that grab you more than others and that's at work here. Serapio, the blind avatar of the crow god, is one of the more compelling perspectives, but Xiala, who I absolutely loved in Black Sun, is reduced to pining over Serapio for most of the book. I continue to love the casual queerness of this series (expressed through characters like Xiala, who has relationships with both men and women, and Iktan, a non-binary Priest of Knives who uses xe/xir pronouns) though, and I did enjoy the dynamic between Xiala and Iktan.
Fevered Star appears to be building to big things so fingers crossed Roanhorse can nail the conclusion next year!
Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
More melancholic than its quirky premise might indicate, Light From Uncommon Stars is about self-discovery, human nature, and queer found family.
I absolutely loved the originality of concept here. As anyone who's been following this blog for a while knows, I give points (or stars maybe?) for uniqueness and this one is up there! It features an alien who runs a donut shop with her family/crew and who falls in love with Shizuka Satomi, a shark of a teacher who sells her students' souls to the devil in order to earn her own back. Meanwhile, Satomi is developing a bond with her seventh and final student sacrifice, transgender runaway Katrina.
Before picking this up I expected it to be one of my favourites of the year, and while I did enjoy this book, something was missing for me. Maybe it's the too frequent shifts in perspective (often from paragraph to paragraph), maybe it's that everything seemed to be wrapped up a little too conveniently at the end, or maybe it's the tonal dissonance of telling a dark story in a whimsical way (a personal pet peeve of mine), but this book didn't quite click for me.
I've seen Light From Uncommon Stars being recommended to fans of Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series, so I want to caution that this is a much darker book. Chambers' books are often set in worlds of casual queerness, where differences are often accepted and celebrated. While there are also aliens and there is, eventually, acceptance, Light From Uncommon Stars is set firmly in a world like our own with all of the prejudices that entails. Katrina is a transgender runaway who has experienced domestic violence both at home and in her relationships, who engages in sex work to get by, and who experiences transphobic language and misgendering. As someone who went in expecting more of a feel good, cozy sci-fi vibe, this did take some getting used to. Still, it's wonderful to see an Asian-American trans voice in science-fiction and I'm interested in seeing what Aoki will do next!
The Magician by Colm Tóibín
It's telling that not a single member of my book club could figure out why The Magician was written. Spanning more than 400 hardcover pages, The Magician is a fictionalized biography of acclaimed German author Thomas Mann and the contradictions of his public and personal lives. I'll admit that having read this after reading one of Mann's own books (Death in Venice), which I found underwhelming, and, unfortunately, the Wikipedia article that mentions Mann's diary entries where he writes about being attracted to his adolescent son, my mind may have been clouded, but I at least expected Mann to be an intriguing figure, if not a particularly likeable one. I can't find fault with Toibin's solid prose, but Thomas Mann is the least interesting character in this book. He's passive, reactive, and interior, none of which make for a person or character who you want to spend time with. Members of the book club I read this for agreed that we'd rather have read about multiple other Manns, including pragmatic spouse Katia, strong-willed daughter Erika, screw-up of a son Klaus, or daughter Monika (who survives a German submarine sinking the ship she's travelling on!) before Thomas. Yet it's Thomas' story that Toibin inexplicably chooses to tell. Of more interest is the early-mid-twentieth century Germany setting, which is deftly described.
The Magician is only my second Toibin novel, after Brooklyn, which I also remember as an emotionally hollow read. I like Toibin's writing style enough that I'm willing to try once more and see if three times really is the charm, but I'm starting to wonder if character development is not his strong suit.
Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker (rounded down on goodreads)
Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City was recommended to me by a bookseller at my local SFF indie as part of a long and enthusiastic conversation about our shared love of Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, Katherine Addison's exquisite worldbuilding, and the joys of Martha Wells' Murderbot, so perhaps my expectations were just too high going into this one.
I think I expected a narrative that focused more on character and the daily lives of the ordinary people impacted by the siege, but K.J. Parker's novel is more about engineering wizardry and the ingenuity of one man who tries to save his adopted home. I did, however, enjoy it. Sixteen Ways is an entertaining read and I was compelled to keep going and see how Orhan, a colonel of engineers more experienced in bridge-building than battles, would get himself out of each new scrape. Orhan's unreliable first-person narration effectively guides us through the intricacies and politics of a Rome-like city and though I am emphatically not an engineer, I found the Roman-era technology interesting.
Ultimately I wish Parker had focused more on the characters, most of whom (besides Orhan) are shallowly developed. The women in particular exist almost entirely as love interests or relations to the male characters, which felt like lazy and regressive writing for a book that's only a few years old.
(rounded down on goodreads)
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