Good Prose – Marked for Plot

The Girl With a Thousand Faces – Hong Kong Never Felt so Haunted

Sunyi Dean’s debut novel The Book Eaters is the type of story that I have spent three years thinking about. Needless to say, there was no question about whether or not I’d pick up her sophomore work. Craft remain Dean’s strength, as do characters that don’t quite line up with easy moral labels. However, I didn’t enjoy this nearly as much as The Book Eaters. As has been the case (and probably will continue for at least another week or two), lingering concussion effects are partly to blame. Not entirely though, I think.

The Premise:
At the end of World War II, Mercy found herself on an island outside Hong Kong with no memories. Thirty years later she is a ghost talker in the haunted Kowloon district, working for the leader of the Snakeskin Triad. She been seeing visions of a drowned woman, and they’re getting worse. It turns out that an evil spirit has very special plans for Mercy, and she’s not going to enjoy them one bit.

Read if You Like: haunting visuals, competent women in their 50s, casual queer representation, ghost cat sidekicks

Avoid if You Dislike: unconventional narrative structures, shifting POV (including 2nd person), depictions of drowning

Novella Readathon #27: The River Has Roots

I adored This is How You Lose the Time War, and I’d been meaning to get around to more work by Amal El-Mohtar. After reading three other Hugo nominees, this seemed like a logical next step. It is the third fairy tale novella nominated for the Hugos this year. I didn’t dislike this book, but I also didn’t fall in love with it like so many others have. Certainly I’d put it lowest in my Hugo rankings.

The Premise:
Esther and Ysabel are sisters who grow magical willow trees on the banks of a river flowing from the fae realms. Their devotion to each other and the songs of their work keep them as close as sisters can get. However, Esther has suitors; a neighbor looking to expand his financial empire, and a fae whose customs are alluring and frustrating. The story’s focus places relatively equal weight on the sibling and romantic relationships, with Esther getting a heavier focus than Ysabel.

Read If Looking For: the power of sisterhood, conjugation-as-magic, unknowable fae, lush prose, high quality audiobook production

Avoid If Looking For: tense plotting, twists and surprises, rigorous thematic work

Novella Readathon #21: The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain

Sofia Samatar has been on my reading list for a long time. I always figured I’d start with The Winged Histories, but this novella kept getting rave reviews, and I love a school/academia setting. I knew this story dealt with class displacement from the chatter, but I wasn’t prepared for how sharply Samatar wields the pen … or perhaps keyboard. This is yet another author that I have now committed to reading more of; I wanted this project to lessen my TBR, but it has in fact done the exact opposite.

The Premise
The Fleet travels from mining site to mining site, remaining for generations before making a long journey to a new source of resources. The boy is one of the Chained, laboring in the darkness beneath, and the professor is one of the ankleted, a sort of middle working class. Some of her friends don’t bear any fetters at all. The professor brings the boy out of the darkness, ‘liberating’ him to her class and installing him as a student at her university. It does not go as smoothly as she’d like. As the two grapple with the chains they bear, they both realize they have much more to learn.

Read If Looking For: thematically dense stories, nuanced yet archetypical characters, the pointlessness of meetings and committees

Avoid If Looking For: plot heavy books, tidy endings, school settings featuring classroom scenes, happy vibes

Novella Readathon #20: Lanny

This is the third, and probably final, Literary leaning novella I’m reading for this project. If we’re nitpicking labels, Lanny is probably closest to Magical Realism, but I think it generally defies easy categorization. It took me a while to settle into Porter’s rhythm, but portions of this book had me in a stranglehold. I think it’s a more approachable entry point into Literary writing, only one step beyond The Spear Cuts Through Water. It’s a personal and intimate window into the souls orbiting around a very special young boy named Lanny and the village where he lives.

The Premise:
Lanny is a very special child. In his life are parents Jolie and Rob, an older artist named Pete who bonds with Lanny during art lessons, and the mythical creature Dead Papa Toothwort. Lanny is in tune with the supernatural, able to defy logic and physics. When Lanny disappears, the town blames Pete, who gets cast as a pedophilic gay man. You’ll enter the mind of townsfolk, visitors, and our core cast of humans. Part three sees them seeking out Lanny in the domain of Dead Papa Toothwort, and mostly reverts to the original prose style. Throughout the book, we never experience Lanny’s POV.

Read If Looking For: experimental storytelling techniques, nature and humanity elementally joined, gritty human relationships, joyful human relationships

Avoid If Looking For: good dads, the magic to make sense, pain-free books, standard narration and dialogue

Novella Readathon #16: Brimstone Slipstream

I underestimated Brimstone Slipstream, and for that I think I owe Matt Weber an apology. I looked at the cover of this novella and assumed it would be a high-octane dragon racing story; Nascar meets Fantasy. I would have enjoyed this of course, otherwise I wouldn’t have bought the book. Instead I got a delightful epistolary novel masquerading as a long-form news story, one whose political undertones are far more interesting and serious than my expectations. In fact, it looks like book 2 in the series, a full-length novel, is going to be more traditionally structured and plotted. Goodness knows I’ll find out before too long, because this kind of knocked my socks off. Finished the whole thing after driving for 5 hours, when I should have been asleep and bone tired. At ~50 pages, this is probably more a novelette than novella proper, and it is well worth the time. Plus, it works well as a standalone, not requiring sequels for the story here to feel like a complete product. Plus it only has five ratings on goodreads. Be a trendsetter! Dragon lovers unite!

The Premise:
Zaya and Kiriki are the rising stars of Brimstone Slipstream. Notably, their success hinges on a whip-smart ground crew and their mastery of psionics. Anyone can become empaths, but the skill comes more naturally to their ethnic group, who form the majority of the working class but almost never the financially stable. This report chronicles moments from their rise to fame and success, their support team which is akin to family, and the history of both the city and dragon racing.

Read If Looking For: narrative reporting, the brutal exhaustion of a culture without maternity leave, evocative infodumps, transparent portrayals of well-meaning people with biases

Avoid If Looking For: flashy dragon racing sequences, fully explained worldbuilding, books that follow the laws of physics

Novella Readathon #15: The Salt Grows Heavy

As I slowly grow into reading horror, I’ve had a complicated relationship with the more grotesque side of the genre. I thought I disliked it, and certainly I need to avert my eyes in any medical show I watch. Body horror authors like Andrew Joseph White capture that visceral repulsion that forces me to skip pages. I thought that The Salt Grows Heavy might be similarly challenging for me. This book features the plucking of eyeballs and the cradling of intestines in one’s hands, yet it was palatable even for me. Khaw married this body horror to a dark fairy tale atmosphere; the result so enchanting that I couldn’t look away.

The Premise:
The mermaid has given birth to her children, and they have feasted upon the land. The country which stole her from the water lays in ruins, a corpse to rot in the sun. Now she travels with the plague doctor, seeking a new country and a new home. They come upon a commune of children and their saints, the strange trio who pursue surgical immortality. The mermaid and the plague doctor’s shifting relationship is confronted by the plague doctor’s past, and the mermaid must decide what is important to her, versus what is simply meat to be consumed.

Read If Looking For: bespoke body horror, the tentative love of monsters, uncommon word choices, inhabiting the mind of a creature of the deeps

Avoid If Looking For: windowpane prose, genre romance, Disney mermaids, fast pacing

Novella Readathon #11: The Lathe of Heaven

As one of the Greats of the genre, I don’t know that I’ll have anything to say about The Lathe of Heaven that hasn’t been said before. I haven’t read a ton of her longform writing, and that’s a crying shame. Honestly, I don’t even think I would have picked this up had 1970s not been on the bingo card this year; it’s been a good kick in the pants that I really need to continue reading older works.

The Premise:
George Orr lives in a world with many problems. War in the Middle East, relentless climate change, and his fear of dreaming. You see, Orr’s dreams have the potential to change reality, rewriting history in radical and extreme ways. He gets caught stealing medications to prevent himself from dreaming, only to find himself in a Sleep Therapist’s office. Dr. William Haber begins to use Orr’s abilities to reshape the world, to improve it and ‘fix’ society’s problems. Orr just wants to find a way to never dream like that again.

Read If You Like: philosophical science fiction, the ethics of omnipotence, classics in the genre

Avoid If You Dislike: extended explanations of fictional science, abusive therapists, the feeling of hopelessness and lack of control in your life

Novella Readathon #7: Autobiography of Red

Two weeks ago, if you asked me the novella I was most excited to read, I’d have responded Autobiography of Red. It’s got several ardent supporters whose taste I trust, it tackles an obscure figure from Greek mythology, a creature whom exists only for Herakles to kill, and it deals in thorny and tragic gay relationships. Unfortunately, what should have been catnip for me ended up as a frustrating reminder of why I tend to avoid Literature. While I’ve enjoyed several novellas with a more Literary bent (most recently On the Calculation of Volume), this one ended up feeling more like work than enjoyment. I do plan to eventually reread it, and I’m hopeful that I’ll get more out of it on a second look, because the bits I liked were really quite phenomenal.

The Premise:
While there are some introductory materials and extra bits, most of this story is the autobiography of Geryon: a boy and man in the mid-1900s who is red and has wings. This goes largely unremarked in the story. It traces his troubled childhood and teenage affair with Herakles, his listlessness in adult life, and a chance reunion with Herakles that is perhaps not everything Geryon wanted it to be. This is … a poor description, I will admit. I’m not sure how to give a better one though. Mostly it asks you to crawl inside Geyron’s head as he floats through different portions of his childhood and young adult life.

Read If Looking For: Literature with a capital L, tortured souls, photography motifs, blank verse, books that feel like Indie Films

Avoid If Looking For: straightforward narratives, clear happy endings, adventure and thrills, Romance beats

Novella Readathon #4: A Taste of Honey

There’s a special kind of magic when stories commit to telling the story of a person, following them throughout their lives. It was one of the reasons I enjoyed Sign of the Dragon so much last year! A Taste of Honey is a story that asks you to step back from your own life and settle into the skin of another. It asks you to reflect on your life, on your choices, and whether you can stand by the paths you chose not to take. It is a piece of unvarnished reality, even though it occurs in a setting somewhere between the Sparticus and The Expanse. It eschews grand epics in favor of the life of a man, and not a man who had a particularly large impact on his world. It also has cheetahs, and who doesn’t love a big cat?

Note: this is technically part 2 of a duology. My understanding is that both books share a world, but otherwise do not overlap terribly much. I’ve read the first book (several years ago), and didn’t see any connections; certainly my fuzzy memory about Sorcerer of the Wilddeeps was not a hindrance to enjoying this novella.

The Premise
Aqib is the son of The Master of Beasts, and has an affinity for working with animals. He has a chance encounter with a visiting soldier, whose nation’s gods are negotiating with Aqib’s nation’s gods. The two have an immediate spark, despite Aqib’s culture forbidding men from laying with other men. This story interweaves their ten day affair with the days, years, and decades that follow Aqib’s separation from Lucrio. Is the life Aqib gained, a wife and child and comfortable life amongst the high nobility, worth the loss of the love of his life?

Read If Looking For: the joy of young (and forbidden) love, the pride a parent feels in their child, second guessing the choices which form the fulcrum of your life

Avoid If Looking For: clear and conventional worldbuilding, invisible prose, Genre Romance

Comparable Media: Sign of the Dragon, Call me By Your Name, The Empress of Salt and Fortune

Novella Readathon #2: On the Calculation of Volume

I’m not a connoisseur of time travel stories, but On the Calculation of Volume is certainly unlike any other I’ve read, and I was impressed with how this story managed to be intense and restrained at the same time. The book isn’t going to be for everyone – a lot of genre fiction fans will bounce off this, I think – but for people who are interested in something more reflective, this is excellent.

The Premise:
Tara does not know why she has repeated the 18th of November a hundred times. There seems to be nothing remarkable about that day – the first one of course – or even the 17th of November. However, she finds herself in an endlessly looping day, with a husband who thinks she is on a trip to France for work. This is her journal, and Tara is not okay.

Read If You Like: psychologically intense stories, existential slice of life, clear and simple prose, literary science fiction

Avoid If You Dislike: books where ‘nothing happens’, inconsistent time travel mechanics, repetitive plot beats

Comparable Media: The Other Valley, Virginia Woolf’s writing, The Bone Harp