Fantasy Anthology Review: Jade Shards by Fonda Lee

 

Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 31, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Jade Shards is a collection of four prequel stories to Fonda Lee's The Green Bone Saga (Jade City, Jade War, Jade Legacy), her award winning trilogy that combined concepts of mafia books like The Godfather with Wuxia/Kung Fu tropes from southeast Asia. The four stories include three which were originally published on Lee's patreon followed by a fourth brand new story, and together the collection only makes up the length of a middle-length novella (the stories also each come with an afterward explaining Lee's thoughts in making them).

I very much wound up liking The Green Bone Saga, so I was very willing to try out four new stories in this world. As you might expect from stories so short, they will only be of interest to big fans of this world, but if you did really like the trilogy, you will probably enjoy this quick look back at what happened to setup its events.

SciFi Novella Review: Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden

 

Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden:

Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 25, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Emergent Properties is the next novella from author Aimee Ogden, author of a pair of really interesting novellas from last year - Local Star (A Queer Polyamorous Space Opera and Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters (A Queer Space Opera with elements of the Little Mermaid and a whole lot more). This novella travels over ground made familiar to many sci-fi fans in Martha Wells' Murderbot stories, with Emergent Properties following the independent AI Scorn in a world filled with non-autonomous AIs who are limited to certain roles and properties...unlike the young Scorn. And so, in a similar vein to Murderbot, there's a story here about an AI unsure of its own purpose and place among humans and non-autonomous AIs, as Scorn tries to solve a mystery while treading the line of not acting too like humans...but also not limiting zirself too much either.

The result may feel like it's covering similar ground in AI self-discovery as Murderbot, but the method Ogden does so is very different, and that results in a rather interesting and well told story (even if it will be one far less approachable for the common fan than Murderbot). The world and setting here isn't particularly setup all too deeply, with the reader having to fill in gaps and implications on their own, but Scorn's own mental narrative and perspective works really well as the story sets up a mystery for Scorn to investigate - what happened to the ten missing days in Scorn's memory and who would be trying to stop Scorn from finding something out...and what? - and follows that through to its conclusion. Very enjoyable, as usual from Ogden.

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Beneath the Burning Wave by Jennifer Hayashi Danns

 

Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on November 8, 2022 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Beneath the Burning Wave is a Queer YA fantasy novel by debut British author Jennifer Hayashi Danns and is apparently the start of a trilogy. The story advertises itself as exploring the "origin of gender and desire in an epic queer fusion of Japanese folklore and Egyptian mythology" and well, that piqued my interest. And just as promised there is a very queer world here, with the setting being an island whose people don't use gendered pronouns and who practice queernorm relationships and polyamory, (whether they differentiate based upon sex in other ways is another question).

That said, the prose used to describe this world often fails to make clear exactly what is happening, and the characters and plotting in this world are very weak, shallow, and sometime just plain irritating, such that I didn't think the book worked at all. There's an attempt to do things here with origins of gender and pronouns that just seems abrupt and poorly done, a lot of things happen just well "because", and there's no satisfying resolution or message here to take home, even if you consider this just the first book of a longer story. This is not a book that makes me want to read further into the trilogy, which makes it one I also cannot recommend.

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Immortal Longings by Chloe Gong

Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 18, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Immortal Longings is the first book in a new fantasy trilogy by Chloe Gong. Gong is well known for her YA work, beginning with her These Violent Delights duology which took Romeo and Juliet and reimagined it as taking place in 1920s Shanghai, with its conflicts between Communists and Nationalists and between foreign Imperialists jockeying for power from the West and the East and the local peoples. I really liked that duology, which reimagined its Romeo and Juliet type characters in interesting ways, dealt with the impacts of real life historical atrocities of imperialism and even local massacres, and had characters and a story who really worked. I was less enthused by Gong's first book in her follow up duology (Foul Lady Fortune), but I was impressed enough by the first duology that I was certainly interested to check out Gong's first non-YA long fiction, as Immortal Longings is pitched.

And like These Violent Delights (which honestly could be just as easily considered not YA if the protagonists weren't the right age), Immortal Longings is certainly interesting - filled with a couple of really strong lead characters, some very strong themes of power, Empire, and what it means to try to fix oppression and suffering. Yeah it's all centered around a plot structure that's pretty familiar and Hunger Games-esque, albeit with an Asian-inspired setting, but Gong makes that familiar setup work thanks to some excellent characters and plotting. And with a magical power that most of our characters have to jump bodies, you also have here some interesting questions about the soul and what it means to be one's self/own-person. The result is well worth reading, even if the book's last act featured way too many abrupt ends to plot threads and a VERY abrupt cliffhanger ending.

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: To Shape A Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose

 


Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on May 9, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

To Shape a Dragon's Breath is subtitled "The First Book of Nampeshiweisit" and as that subtitle might lead you to expect, it's the first book in a new Indigenous American-inspired fantasy series.*  The story features a 15 year old indigenous young woman** named Anequs who lives on the island of Masquapaug, an island populated by her indigenous people who live otherwise unmolested by the colonizing Anglish as long as they pay their taxes on time and don't come into anything of value to the Anglish.  But when Anequs finds a dragon egg, a Nampeshiwe dragon rather than a colonizer dragon, she finds that she has no choice but to go to the Anglish world with her dragon Kasaqua in order to learn about how to properly train and handle the dragon...for her own people's dragons had been lost long ago, together with their own knowledge of how to handle them.  Naturally this results in conflict, for the colonizers do not view Anequs and her people as civilized at best, want to exterminate them at worst, and nearly all have little interest in them having a dragon....

*Some places online, like goodreads, list this book as Young Adult, presumably because the story is in some sense a "coming of age" story, features a teen protagonist, and features as a major plot point the protagonist going to a special school.  However, neither the publisher website nor Amazon list the book as such and it does deal with adult themes, and I know one reviewer I trust for YA has rejected the distinction for this book.  So I will be treating this as adult fiction.*

**Anequs' culture treats adulthood as coming at 13, so despite her age I will be referring to her as a "woman" and not a "girl" in this review.**

The result is a fascinating story, which features a rigid prejudiced, sexist, and classist colonizer society like that of Victorian England (with a Norse-like religion mind you) being constantly interrogated and run up against by the far more liberal and flexible Anequs.  Anequs encounters not only colonial power and the aforementioned prejudices, but also has to deal with the Anglish society's rules against queerness (Anequs is Bi and would like to date two different people at once) and its misogynist and ableist teaching in society that lead another friend of hers, an Anglish boy who is clearly autistic, to be constantly bullied and punished.  And how Anequs struggles through it all  as she tries to learn how to handle Kasaqua and to help her people survive and get use out of the dragon (including trying to figure out the setting's really interesting alchemical/chemistry based dragon magic) is really interesting to read.  That said, the book sometimes feels like it makes Anequs too perfect, as if she has the answer to everything such that she can never truly go wrong, which kind of is a personal issue of mine with certain books, even if the book never goes quite too far in this direction to the point of being really annoying....

More specifics after the jump:

SciFi/Fantasy Poetry Collection Review: Beautiful Malady by Ennis Rook Bashe

Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on June 5, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Beautiful Malady is a collection of speculative poetry, dealing with queerness and disability and the modern and speculative treatment of those who suffer from disability. The collection is short but powerful and contains a number of self-contained but related poems as well as a series of 8 poems which actually tells a complete short story in poetic form.

This'll be a short review, as you'd expect from something this short in page length, and I should note here quickly that I'm not a huge fan of or really a good judge of poetry. So take my words here with a grain of salt. But Beautiful Malady worked for me pretty well, really hitting home the struggles of the disabled to be taken seriously when they say their bodies are in pain, to not be laughed at when they suffer or seek treatment, and to not be treated as lesser when they try to simply live their lives like anyone else with what accomodations they require. Disabled people are people, and not in any way lesser, and the disabled perhaps (as noted in a at least one poem) are better able to recognize when they should rely on accomodations like a cane than the prideful healthy-bodied who should use one when they get old and less able.

Bashe uses speculative ideas and concepts (Fae and Changlings, Princes and Ghost Bodyguards, etc.) to illustrate these themes really well, and does include in the end a strong autobiographical piece on their own struggle and their struggle to write about it. And the aforementioned 8 part story of poems, Rose Ghost, is really great as it showcases a girl whose disability makes her body barely able to function, so she's given the ability to become a ghost who can serve as a bodyguard for the royal prince, with whom she falls in love. A really excellent way to begin and end this collection, as its first and eighth parts bookend the poems. So yeah, despite me not being a poetry guy, I recommend this one.

Horror/Fantasy Novella Review: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

What Moves the Dead by T Kingfisher

What Moves the Dead is a horror novella by author T Kingfisher (aka children's author Ursula Vernon).  The novella is an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher", in which Kingfisher attempts to answer some questions she has always had about the short story and to fill in her own horror-filled answers. I've never read the short story and to be honest I'm not a huge horror fan, but generally Kingfisher's adaptations of old classic horror stories (see The Twisted Ones and The Hollow Places) have really worked for me, with strong characters, dialogue, and plotting, even if I don't thrive on jumps cares or existential horror the ways others do. So when this novella saw a sequel announced recently, I figured I'd given it a try.

And well, What Moves the Dead doesn't quite work for me in the same fashion as those novels. Don't get me wrong, the dialogue and internal narration of the protagonist, Alex Easton (a queer former soldier from a fictional country with some interesting difference in its gender roles), is very enjoyable and the story is told decently enough. But the story is obvious from its start about what will likely be responsible for the horror (hint: creepy fungi) and yet takes a while to get to that point, and if you - like me - don't necessarily find the horrifying result worth a read in and of itself, well, the novella won't do too much for you.

More specifics after the jump