Zach

Tantra wavered between a 3 and 4 star book for me, and I have to admit that I'm disappointed that the author doesn't seem to have written a sequel.

I'm not a fan of the Laurel K. Hamilton-style hard-bitten vampire hunter, and this book was pretty trope-y from the get-go (mid-twenties, attractive female hunter in leather!), but it never got too overwhelmingly rote for me. It's definitely both a debut novel and a self-published novel, and I had my expectations adjusted accordingly. The pacing was off at times; for example the death of her boss and destruction of their hide out is dealt with in a weirdly perfunctory manner, and the love interest gets sadly little development.

Where the book departed from the common urban fantasy tropes it got interesting– the interpersonal relationships of the author with her aunt and cousin, implied relationship with her mother and arranged marriage subplots were fresh, as was the incorporation of a variety of Indian magic and holidays. I read it in a day, and there were only a handful of moments where I rolled my eyes.

DNF
Where the book focuses on the house and its history it does fine. I was invested enough in the concept that I made it over a third of the way through. But he needs to work harder on character conception— none of these characters are well-developed enough or given the respect they're due.

The racist treatment of Kate (and in particular Moore's interactions with her were deeply uncomfortable), the ableist treatment of Rebecca Finch (we get it, people with disabilities are scary), the fatphobia inherent in the treatment of Slaughter (and the weirdly aggressive anti-religion aspect to that treatment) combined with a clunky concept, a horrifically dichotomous idea of horror (none of the author's seem to be able to think of horror as anything besides “what loving god would do this?”) drove me batty.

Not to mention the fact that none of the horror authors— or human beings— I know or have interacted with act anything like these.

All in all it just made me want to finish the Mabel podcast and go read Jeff Vandermeer or Victor Lavalle again. Meh.

“A better future is like a poppered-up body's bumhole: open.”

I'm just going to quote from the book and let the rest of you figure out why the book left me with a bad taste in my mouth:

“nuJuism is the religion practiced by the Demi-Monde's Sectorless nuJu community. nuJuism is an unrelentingly pessimistic religion which teaches that suffering and hardship is life-affirming and necessary to prepare nuJus for the rigors to be experienced during the Time of Tribulation (a.k.a. the End of Days). It is a central tenet of nuJuism that there will arise a Messiah who will lead the nuJu people safely through Tribulation and to the Promised Land. As with everything to do with the nuJus this is, of course, pernicious nonsense.”

Well-written, well-researched, concise, thoughtful and extremely readable.

Smith and Mac do not flinch and they pull no punches. Whether or not you agree with their thesis, their analysis of the current regimes is cogent and solidly backed up, and their analytical framing on labor rights and labor law's affect on sex workers is one that is both highly necessary and sorely neglected elsewhere.

This is the sort of book my partner would appreciate more than me, honestly. I enjoyed it and I know logically that it is well-written, well-put together, paced well with engaging characters and is, in every way technically perfect. Ken Liu's translation keeps the flavor of the original while making the book understandable to a Western audience.

That said, I'm terrible at physics and there was more than one moment where my eyes glazed over because what even are they talking about? Me and science just don't mesh well.

On the other hand, I enjoyed it enough that I plan to buy a physical copy and look forward to the sequels. Even someone without a strong science focus can find many things to enjoy in Cixin;s work.

Let me heal your rape with my magic elf dick, okay.

Basically, the world-building was interesting and a bunch of the characters were interesting but no one got nearly enough development (especially not Tenzin or Matthew or Nestor or Sinistrus, all of whom had the possibility of being wildly more fascinating than our pretty boy protagonists). The more interesting plot points were glossed over. I wanted this to be an urban fantasy with queer characters instead of pretty elf boning while the world nearly dies in the background.

Three stars, for much mourned potential.

This is a solid book. Given the size of my to-read pile, I almost never immediately read advanced review copies the moment I download them but Liar hooked me from the first paragraph. Sadie is a compelling protagonist, the villains are interesting, if not particularly complex, and the side characters all deserve their own spin-off novels. While the climax fell a little flat compared to the tightly-controlled tension of the rest of the book, upon finishing I still found myself hungering for a sequel. 

Liar of the Red Valley reminded me of the way I felt upon reading Jim Butcher's first Harry Dresden novel, or Seanan McGuire's October Daye series (or Diane Duane's So You Want To Be A Wizard– the easter egg of naming the ambiguously gay couple Thomas and Charles was cute). Goodwater has built a strong world with a fun and effective protagonist.

I was with you up until the last chapter. I would have preferred an in-universe denouement. Millions of Shakespeares just felt like a cop out.

You know the old “don't judge a book by its cover”? Well, with the Chris McGrath-ish cover I really was expecting going in to have a gritty urban fantasy experience. But while the book offered up a certain amount of urban fantasy grit, it's hard to be seriously hard-bodied about your protagonists when they run an antique shop in the middle of Charleston, SC. There was a lot more mucking about in history and antiques than I would have expected, albeit in a fairly enjoyable sort of way. Despite the mismatch between expectations and reality, I enjoyed the book– it reminded me a bit of the small town amateur detective genre, if those books also involved killer demons and 600 year old vampires. Pleasantly enough, although the main character is a woman, there was not a whiff of a love interest to be found (also her store manager/magic-fighting partner is gay and in a relationship with a very helpful lawyer, so there's that.) It would have been nice if the helpful Vodoun mambo had been more than a magical negro, but oh well, can't win everything.

I tend to prefer short story anthologies with multiple authors, but those can sometimes be a crapshoot, with great stories and terrible ones side by side. Reading an anthology entirely by one person gives you a glimpse into their mind and their preoccupations in a way little else can, but run the risk of becoming extremely samey.

In the case of Johnson, I was startled to see the ease with which he switched settings and cultures– jumping from Pacific Islanders to faux Germanic, to modern America, to a future where refugees from the Roman era appear. The sheer diversity of stories and concepts (Superman is dying, A jewish doctor searches for a way for his people to survive, a Chinese chef tries to figure out how to make his father's ghost move on, a Pacific Islander whose islands are now underwater creates VR memories) is dazzling.

On the whole it's a solid piece, Johnson's themes (memory, cultural continuity, passage of time and people) are clear, tying the stories together into something that leaves a strong impact, while his skill at creating memorable settings gives him room to create a body of work that is grand in scope.

DNF

Let me quote:

Knight Ryan Foxheart. Soon to be Knight Commander Ryan Foxheart. The dreamiest dream to have ever been dreamed. The current holder of all my masturbatory fantasies. (“Oh, who's a bad knight? You're a bad knight. You've been so bad that I'm going to joust with your butthole.”)

A bog-standard gritty “fairytale retelling” that has very little to do with the actual fairytale, and relies heavily on the ableist Alice In Wonderland mental institution which is SEALING YOUR MAGIC WITH BRAIN DRUGS. Also every male character introduced has the hots for Snow and ugh.

Have you ever read Transmetropolitan and thought to yourself “this is cool and all, but it needs to be WAY more trans”?

DO I HAVE A BOOK FOR YOU.

After the alien colonization of earth, 50-something artist and doctor Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka is faced with the reality that the world isn't what she remembered. Her partner is leaving her to become a baby with a new family in the south of France, and the grief is crushing.

A moving story about being human in the era of transhumanism.

I'm torn about this. It's well-written, it's interesting, but I can't help but feel that I've read it all before. A middle-aged middle-class family man suddenly feels like nothing around him is real, and there are women trying to seduce him, and men cross-dressing, and they all appear to be a handful of people taking on different roles. It's not bad– it's a competent story that raises salient questions about reality. On the other hand, it's been written before and it's been written better.

I can't pan it across the board, but I also can't think of anyone I'd recommend it to.

Definitely an enjoyable read and, despite the slightly intimidating name, a fairly smooth read. I have to give props to the editor for the diversity in topics– it's not often that books on race in sci-fi consider more than Black and Latin@ US concerns (although some non-American continental writing would not have been out of place).

The essays were, almost across the board, insightful and fascinating. Specifically, Grace Dillon, M. Elizabeth Ginway and Matthew Goodwin's pieces explored topics that I haven't seen much of, and did it in an accessible way.

The only flaws in the book were Isiah Lavender's own essay– which neglected intersectional and historical concerns in favor of a straight-forward racial reading of “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” (I would have appreciated consideration of the treatment of disabled Black men and women, especially given that the story was written just after the height of the AIDs epidemic), and Robin Anne Reid's “The Wild Unicorn Herd Check-In”. Reid's piece was interesting, but suffered from being quantitative analysis taken from a large thesis, and so fell a little flat.

All in all, a satisfying collection.

I'm not a self-help or therapeutic book reader. Theory? Politics? History? Sex? Sure. How to unf*ck yourself... less so. But I backed the Kickstarter because zines are cool, and the book was so small and friendly-looking.

I don't think I have fallen for a book so deeply and so quickly before. I was recommending it to my doctor and buying it for my library by the time I was done.

It is written in easy to read, up-beat prose, but don't let that fool you. Harper is asking for us to do some serious work. Some of it is easy, a lot of it is difficult, but but I had a surprising number of “a-ha” moments for a book that clicks in at under 200 pages.

It's worth multiple reads.

A weird satire of science fiction and religious thought, set during the 1950s, with obligatory headnods towards McCarthy and Buck Rogers. A science fiction writer for a Buck Rogers-type show learns that logical positivist lobster aliens really really like his show, and then has to conspire to pull the wool over their eyes when they decide to vaporize the two million viewers of a religious drama on the same channel. The dialogue feels a little too snappy at times– it's very hyper-stylized. But once I started reading it I didn't really want to stop even when I rolled my eyes at some of the author's phrasing. Also, this book read to me as very Jewish at times, despite the fact that the plot revolves around a Christian soap drama.

I love this book and I knew I would going in. Gay's writing is both enthusiastic and nuanced. Delights are contextual, and Ross Gay enumerates and contextualizes each pleasure. Some are heartwarming, some funny, and some delights are bittersweet— Still Processing gives me shivers every time.

The best part, though, is finding your own delights reflected in the essayettes. (Rothko Backboard made my partner cackle because he HAS burst into tears over a Rothko— and learning that was a delight itself.)

Although not quite as strong as similar books on the topic, Silent Witnesses was a thorough, decently engaging pop history. Because it's an overview of all the forensic techniques, there isn't really enough time for any particular biography or topic to take center stage and while that was a flaw, in that it meant the story lacked an over-arching narrative, it also gave the author a chance to take a broad scope and put all the pieces together. I would have liked the book to have gone into more depth–it gave one chapter each to different forensic topics, such as ballistics, fingerprinting, blood, and DNA, with illustrative case examples, but every chapter left me wanting to know more. Still, if all you know about forensic science is from CSI, Silent Witnesses is not a bad introduction to the history of the topic, if a little overtly focused on British criminal history at times (which, I suppose can be forgiven, as the author is a British forensic scientist.)

I wanted to like it– Queer women of color, Jews everywhere and dragons? But it just felt a little thin. No one really got much character development or world building. I'll probably try the sequel because the idea is cool enough, but the book wasn't very strong all things considered.

I'm not sure how to describe this book. I am tempted to compare it to Margaret Atwood's short stories and prose fiction, in its focus on the grotesqueries, metaphors and realities of a type of female life made manifest. But Mellas breaks open even the metaphors' metaphors. Her women are boxes within boxes with cocoons within berries and fruits and bugs. She doesn't shy from making manifest emotional pain as physical pain (in the first story of the volume, ice skaters screw the blades directly to their feet). Rape, fear, anger, love, are all broken into component parts and digested in ways that are both surreal and viscerally real. I don't know if I liked the book, but I'm glad I read it.

All this book really did was making me want to read Seanan McGuire's Toby Daye books again. That or play Changeling:The Dreaming. Both of those at least tell me what the setting is and why I should care.

So our main character is bratty high school student who acts like every 20-30 year old urban fantasy protagonist with a snotty attitude, only with the occasional pause to wail about how he's not going to graduate HIGH SCHOOL, I'M A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT DID YOU GET THAT, HUH. Turns out he's half fairy/trickster/demigod/something or other that's never explained. He finds out because his dad's apparently dead (and his mom goes into fugue states about which our main character can angst, but which does nothing to help the reader give a fuck about her.) His 50-some odd “uncle”, who is NOT blood related, but WAS daddy since dad took a powder, shows up to tell him all about how, hey, magic exists, and I'm magic and your magic EVERYBODY GETS A NEW MAGIC, oh and yeah, you need to go speak at your divorced and absentee father's funeral.

Blah blah blah AND THEN 50 YEAR OLD UNCLE FIGURE WANTS TO BONE 18 YEAR OLD HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT. WHO HE HELPED RAISE. This raises no eyebrows. Even to mom who, out of her fugue state walks in on our main character and his APPARENTLY HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD “UNCLE” FUCKING IN THE TUB.

There are a handful of characters in the book who are actually interesting in any way (the more important of whom ended up the brunt of pretty egregious transmisogyny on the writer's part). Those characters do not include the protagonist or his boyfriend. And they definitely don't include the bad guy, who is literally the most boring thing in the book. We know so much about her, and all of it should have added character and world building but I was left more confused about the world and caring less about her every time. The half-dead, relationship-devouring vampire-sorceress who is obsessed with resurrecting her Sorcerer King child SHOULD NOT BE BORING.

The pacing was totally effed the hell up. The plot that was in the last third of the book should have been earlier than halfway through the book. But instead we get extraneous sex scenes that prove the main character and HIS UNCLE FIGURE are, like, sex-bonded to each other forever. Ffffffff.

And lets not get into how shoddy the world building is. Like, there's an entire fairy court, not just phoukas? Wear are they? Are satyrs members? Coyote's a god, and apparently so's Bacchus, are all the magical creatures descended from a god? And what's this bullshit with the fates existing. So there are gods of the gods, or... Seriously, every time I think I'm going to get to learn something, the chance is yanked from my fingers.

And then there's the culturally appropriative racist stuff. Kitsune? Nipponese? They're perfectionists! They can do magic! There's a really pretty boy who passes for a girl? This is neckbeard-level exoticizing, and also if I never see another gay romance fantasy that uses Japanese shit as background decoration, it with be TOO SOON. And COYOTE. I WOULD CHEW MY ARM OFF FOR AN URBAN FANTASY ABOUT COYOTE TO BE ABOUT ACTUAL NATIVE PEOPLE. And don't give me that “well maybe the coyotes other than the main character are native”. Yeah, maybe! But see about re: shoddy worldbuilding. Are there other native magic types? What the actual fuck even if going on. You don't get to have Coyote say a few native words and magically it's a decent depiction of native religons.

Also, that bullshit with Shiko at the end! No, you DON'T get to pull the “surprise, this character you thought was female the entire book has A DICK!” and then not even let her answer the main characters question about which pronouns SHE wants him to use. “What pronouns do you want? Nevermind, I'll just use she.” is NOT cool.

UGHHHHHHHH. Two stars, for Shiko and your mourned potential's sake.

It's. A Seanan story. If you like horror and her brand of horror nerdery, it's a nice little bit of genre. If you're not a fan of her writing, it won't convince you.

I was keenly aware of not being the audience for this book– Deloria's intent was clearly to convince a native audience of an ancient cosmic connection and set of abilities that have been lost. As an outsider, my inherent lack of connection with his thesis made it a difficult read.

On an anthropological level the book is fascinating and impeccable sourced. But the credulous tone Deloria takes towards the anecdotes he recounts (using someone's “impeachable character” as reason to take stories at completely face value, for instance) rubbed me the wrong way. There were times when glaring holes in his arguments got on my nerves– for example, stories where the storyteller had every reason to lie or fabricate are completely glossed over– but, again, I wasn't someone he was trying to convince in the first place.