booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

Soul Jar is a wide-ranging collection of sci-fi and fantasy stories by disabled authors. Most  of the stories feature openly disabled and/or neurodivergent characters and some deal with ableism, but mainly they feature many kinds of people in the kind of SFF stories I love to read. They vary widely in tone and topic, meaning that there's something for everyone, probably several stories to catch your fancy. 

I love stories which completely immerse the reader and leave me to figure out the setting with either little or very sly guidance, something that "Which Doctor" by Lane Chasek does materfully, flipping the assumptions of "traditional" and "alternative" therapies in a way which highlights the absurdities of real-world ableism and institutional issues. "Spore, Bud, Bloody Orchid" by Jaye Viner is an excellent tale which wouldn't be out of place in a horror anthology but which fits perfectly here. "Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese" by Nicola Griffith is about stubbornness, grief, and what it takes to come to terms with a new reality. I'm a singlet, but I like the way "The Things I Miss the Most" by Nisi Shawl engages with a kind of plurality and the aftermath of loss. "A Broke Young Martian Atop His Busted Scooter" by K.G. Delmare is a Mars-based story of classism with a very cool setting and immersive worldbuiding. I also like two completely different stories thinking about clothing, presentation, and rules with "The Definition of Professional Attire" by Evergreen Lee and "Wardrobe of the Worlds" by Jennifer Lee Rossman. "Cranberry Nightmare" by Kit Harding uses a maze of unspoken social rules in a great way with an ending that made me wish it was the start of a book rather than just a short story.

If you like sci-fi and fantasy, don't miss this excellent collection!

The setting was detailed and complex in a way that was hard to follow, a lot of lore very densely.

The description said they're the coast guard for space, but in the narrative they self-identified as cops, so I'm not finishing this. My patience for copaganda and cops as protagonists is almost nonexistent.

 

UNDER THE SMOKESTREWN SKY brings Avery, Zib, and their companions to the Land of Ash and Embers. As fire is the most obviously transformational of the four elements in this series, I appreciate how this book focuses on transformations and the endpoints after major decisions.

As the final book in the quartet, UNDER THE SMOKESTREWN SKY wraps up many dangling narratives, including but not limited to the fate of the missing queen, whether Avery and Zib make it out of the Up-and-Under, and whether any of them reach the Impossible City. There’s a mostly new storyline which didn’t appear in the other three books, as the general goal of finding the missing queen becomes their specific task at hand. To this end they begin searching the Land of Ash and Embers on their way to the Impossible City. There’s a crisis related to Zib which is introduced and resolved in this book. As the story nears its end, Baker's narration is at times concerned as much with the emotional state of the reader as she is with the decisions made by any of the characters. A foundational assumption in Seanan McGuire's writing is that knowing something changes the person who finds it out. This is said quite explicitly in the narration as Baker discussing how you can only read the story for the first time once, after that you'll never view it the same way again.

One of the things I appreciate specifically in Seanan McGuire's writing is the way that she treats identity and memory. I recently wrote an essay about how this is handled in the most recent October Daye books, but a smaller version of this happens here as well with Soleil and I’d be remiss if I elided over it. Soleil is figuring out who she is and how her friendships with the other characters do or don’t overlap with who the Crow Girl was to them. As much as the Crow Girl was her own person, that person is not the same as Soleil, nor who Soleil should be as she remembers more of what she gave up to become the Crow Girl in the first place. Soleil can't have the same relationships that the Crow Girl had, even less so once she reclaims the other memories which she lost. 

Because of the way the Up-and-Under series exists juxtaposed with the longer Alchemical Journeys books, it's doing double duty as itself and as a fable-style meta-commentary that is used by some characters in that series to understand their own lives. Now that this journey is complete I can say confidently that this quartet tells a complete story which would be interesting, even to those who have never heard of MIDDLEGAME, but certain aspects of it will likely end up more meaningful when they appear quoted those other books. Even though this phase of the series is distinct from the others and it tells a particular narrative from beginning to end, this is best read after the other three books as you would otherwise be witness to several transformations without seeing where they began. 

I’m very pleased with how this wraps up, and I’m excited for when it’s eventually quoted in the Alchemical Journeys series. 

*I listened to this as read by the author on the CZM Book Club Sunday episodes of the podcast It Could Happen Here posted between October 8th and October 29th, 2023.

I liked most of THE LAMB WILL SLAUGHTER THE LION. It has some interesting ideas about punk and anarchism as import elements of the setting and plot, but some of that was conveyed more by the CZM book club commentary than the actual text. Since there isn't an audiobook, that was a great way to listen to the story. It feels like a cross between a modern fable and an anti-police procedural, as Danielle is trying to figure out what's happening in the punk settlement and how to stop people from dying. As the first book in a series (current of two books but there might eventually be more), this functions almost completely as a stand-alone story, then at the very end it specifically sets up the idea of more stories to come. The ending felt a bit too neat, as all of a sudden everything was solved and the problems are fixed, which definitely contributed to it feeling like a fable where the lesson is more important than any realism. 

I enjoyed Wren as a queer protagonist who never has her queerness be questioned or even be an issue within the text. She's in love with her superior officer and best friend, someone who cares about her but doesn't put anyone above her own work as a soldier. Wren's interest in anatomy and the more scientific aspects of medicine are used but not really appreciated by those around her, because they don't understand the value of this learning and the additional lives that can be saved by combining scientific knowledge with magic. This lack of emotional support from those around her also leads Wren to be more vulnerable when it seems like her knowledge is finally being appreciated by someone who is in a position to help her. She receives a letter from a lord from a neutral nation who promises her political help if she'll come save his servant from a mysterious illness.

When she arrives, the lord is eccentric and the patient she was summoned to save is Hal, a war criminal and former child soldier. He's an assassin who can kill with his magic gaze, and the lord seems to have no idea, demanding that Wren do all she can for his "servant". Gradually, it becomes clear that Hal's illness is more complicated (as are her growing feelings for him), and Wren will have to choose between turning him in and stopping the war.

I saw a review which characterized Wren's dilemma as a choice between supporting a current war criminal or a former war criminal. That is definitely literally a choice that gets made at several points in the text, and somewhat dampened some of my enjoyment of the story. However, I did appreciate it as a narrative about two people who didn’t have much choice about whether to join their respective nations' militaries, but now are trying to find other paths for themselves and stop those who want a war to continue. When the options are to root for the character who was a child soldier but now is trying to stop the violence, or to support the character actively kidnapping and torturing people for his own personal and political gains... that's not nearly as tricky of a problem for me as this other reviewer found it. 

One of my favorite worldbuilding details is the way that the small cluster of three countries (two of which are shown) have very different levels of technology, largely driven by whether or not their citizens have access to magic. Next is the way that this feels like a Beauty and the Beast retelling. It's probably not meant to be one, however, so many of the larger story beats fit neatly into the mold of that narrative, that, at the very least, someone who loves Beauty and the Beast (depending on the reasons) would likely be very interested in this book. It has a snow-covered castle lorded over by a strange man with strict rules about where the heroine may or may not go, an arbitrary timeline to solve a strange problem, a ball, and lots of wound care. The cadence of the plot follows that other one in some interesting ways, but getting into those details would be too many spoilers. 

 

REBEL SISTERS is an engaging and thought-provoking sequel to WAR GIRLS, one which feels like it swerves at the very last minute to create a sense of resignation and helplessness even though solutions were sought and found for many of the problems which drove the characters to action. As a story about the futility and cyclical nature of war, this makes sense in certain respects, but the way the final moments undercuts previous events. I'm left feeling that things are pointless, conflict is intractable, and any solutions are only a stop-gap at best. I’m left not quite sure whether I understood completely what it was going, whether I misunderstood, or whether the actual story refrained from saying anything clearly. The worldbuilding is very good. There are a couple of distinct moments where something is finally explained, but it had been treated as true in the narrative all along it’s just that no attention had been called to it until that point.

I’m having a lot of complicated thoughts about the story as a whole and it is difficult to discuss them without spoilers, but I will do my best. I recently wrote an essay discussing two books in the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire and their connection to a concepts from a TV show called Babylon 5. There I discuss at length the particular approach that those books took to someone forcibly giving the entire populace fake memories, and then a small group of people trying to get them back. I’m struck by how the positions of villain and hero are reversed in REBEL SISTERS than from the October Daye books. In REBEL SISTERS, the Nigerian government is the one erasing memories. In the text it's treated as better that it’s at least the Nigerian government changing the memories of the Nigerian people (and their remaining Biafran neighbors in a unified Nigeria). Here, the villain is an outsider trying to give people back their memories of war and destruction. More than that, she’s also trying to give the memories of the dead to the living, memories that the survivors would not have had even if the government hadn’t interfered by taking away the memories of the war. The villain is arguing that this is the correct thing to do, because they are the real memories. Ify is arguing that it is wrong to do this, because giving people back these memories makes many of them unable to live with their neighbors, or with themselves. Additionally, there is a character who has memories of a deceased person, and who consequently is driven to find someone she never actually met. Something that isn’t stated by any of the characters, but which seems obvious is that having or not having these memories completely changes how people think and behave because this knowledge demands some sort of response, and most reactions in this case are destructive. 

The ending thematically backpedals in a weird way, with one of the characters expressing the thought that it doesn’t really feel that what they did even matters in the context of a different solution having happened elsewhere for more people. So the final scene implies heavily that a particular thing happened without actually confirming it. Given this series is about cycles of war and trauma, and the difficulty of actually having any kind of solution that works for everyone, or even whatever value of "everyone" matters to the people in power, I could easily believe that the ending is meant to be  implied and feel a bit weird. But still, narratively it’s like the middle third builds just something completely different than what the very beginning and the very end are trying to accomplish. Actually, the more I think about this, the very ending seems to imply that a particular solution is better because it makes it clear that memory is what allows this violence to continue, but now in a new place.