Sometimes I write substantive reviews. Sometimes I just look at a book and say "if you've been waiting for a new book by this author, you will be delighted."
It is a new Stephenson book. I am delighted.
I laughed out loud more time than I care to admit and practically applauded some of the skewering of academia. As always, Stephenson is a blast to read and the bit at the end where all the plot threads start to messily tangle only to resolve into a cohesive whole is a joy to behold. Though some of that might be Galland since, as we all know, Stephenson doesn't write endings :)
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Added 7/26/17
"Sometimes I don't write substantive reviews" and then come back later because I tempt fate by putting words down.
Stephenson, as an author (and somewhat as an auteur) is at his best when he is responding to the zeitgeist. That's why [b:Snow Crash|830|Snow Crash|Neal Stephenson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1477624625s/830.jpg|493634] is my favorite work of cyberpunk and why I think [b:The Diamond Age|827|The Diamond Age or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer|Neal Stephenson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388180931s/827.jpg|2181158] is a brilliant venture into what comes after cyberpunk (did we name the 90s? I can't remember. It's in between cyberpunk and the rise of grimdark.) DODO is great because it's in that tradition. It sits, like SC and TDA, at the intersection between the genre and a pastiche of the genre. This time, Stephenson is writing a mash-up. He's caught on to the trend in speculative fiction that, rather than opposing science fiction to fantasy or epic to personal or third person to first person to epistolary, takes elements from each to craft a story that is not easily categorized, but extremely enjoyable. The term zany is often used. And because it is Stephenson, the premise (we're using quantum mechanics to bring back magic) is both completely ridiculous and the vehicle he uses to talk about the things that interests him. And to laugh at them. You can almost draw the line between Fforde's Eyre Affair and DODO, although the latter is actually the more serious text. Because Stephenson is serious. Despite the book's silliness, it remains a story about choices and agency and autonomy and what it means to change the world.

I have this problem now where I have to clarify every book I read in terms of reading medium and location lest that compromise my review. For about two weeks, this was my kindle book I read while giving my toddler a bath (read as my toddler trying to give me a bath and dumping water on my head, but I digress). Which is not strictly the ideal reading situation for things like narrative immersion.
In some ways, this book held up extremely well. The relationships were lovely in a heartbreaking way and the supporting characters, in particular, had an emotional heft to them that I appreciated. I loved that the romance wasn't forced, but evolved naturally. (Which, incidentally, contrasts with what I feel like a heterosexual relationship would have been like under the circumstances.) The world-building felt simultaneously cluttered and shallow; there was a fair amount of description, but it also felt like surface painting laid over a mist. And while tropes are not a bad thing, this book did occasionally feel like it lifted plot points out of The Toast's excellent "How To Tell If You Are In A High Fantasy Novel". The pacing also felt off, but this is where I start to doubt my own experiences because 20 minute toddler baths will do that to your sense of narrative progression.
Anyway, it was a sweet story that could have done more, but did pretty well nonetheless.

I enjoyed this book--I think I might have enjoyed it slightly more if I remembered more about Star-Touched Queen (aside from finding the Dharma Raja deeply attractive), since it took me a while to recall what I knew about the characters. I liked both Gauri and Vikram and appreciated the ways that their stories ran both parallel and intertwined. I felt like there was a little less overall cohesion than the previous book, although Star Touched Queen did benefit from drawing on the same underlying trope as the cupid and psyche/east of the sun, west of the moon myths and I love those.
I also really disliked the last few pages.

I TOTALLY get the "don't tell her anything and make her show up and surprise her" trope, but the older I get, the grumpier it makes me. Just communicate, people!

I will be keeping my eye on Chokshi; I really like her stuff and her sense of what makes a good fairy tale. (Detail! So much glorious detail!)

This one is somewhere between a 3.5 and a 4, but I enjoyed it significantly enough more than its predecessor that I'm giving it a four. Not that the first book was bad. But the characters in this one felt far more alive and I found myself significantly more invested in what was happening and to whom. I also remembered literally nothing from the first book, which made the beginning a bit confusing, although manageable. This books feels like it stands on its own--although I may be wrong--and I'm glad I chose to read it.
Also, babywearing ftw.

Sometimes a book of short stories is a slightly destructive emotional experience, albeit in the best way possible. The stories in this book were mostly grouped by their concerns, rather than chronology, which did make the last few feel particularly gut-wrenching. Liu writes about loss-from the individual scale to the grandest-in a way that makes nearly all the stories in this book feel both like a reworking of a larger concept and also a new experience. If it were a symphony, you would think of it as 15 variations on mourning and return.
There are a few standout stories: Good Hunting, All the Flavors, and The Man Who Ended History were my favorites. The eponymous story nearly made me cry and it was brilliant, but it did not stick with me the way those three did. Each one was a perfect example of its genre. The space ships stories were intriguing and the questions they asked fruitful, although the way they are strong together makes them feel almost like some ideas for novels that will never be. The only story I had to force myself through was "the Regular" and it was a content issue rather than a sudden failure of form - I'm not usually into police procedurals, though I make exceptions, and it felt very...women-in-refrigerator-y. It's a narrative I have no interest in (re)visiting.
I'm glad I finally read these and now I'll go back to waiting for the next book in the Dandelion Dynasty.

I don't know why my brain is convinced that short books are cheating - that I somehow am a better reader if the books I complete are 750 pages rather than 75. It's not like the purpose of a book is to be as long as possible and encountering new authors and their works is just as important regardless of the book's length.
Anyway, this month has been my excuse to read all the short fiction I've been meaning to get around to. Including this one, which I knew was going to be dark and sad because it's The Little Mermaid and that story is always going to be dark and sad, but I was somehow surprised at how much I was invested in things maybe being okay anyway...
Anyway, Huang's inventiveness shines through every aspect of the story and the impossible plausibility of her fairy tale is both delightful and fascinating. Her most impressive translation, however, is the way she takes the quest for humanity and a soul from the HCA original and turns it into something deeply resonant with contemporary life. The story is so good--and so painful--because Huang succeeds in that translation.

I think I remember reading Liz Bourke's review of this and deciding it would probably be interesting, but not entirely my thing for specific things that Bourke herself found lacking and because I still have a complicated relationship with sff set in America. It's nice to be right.

This is one of those novellas where ALL I WANT is a nice, giant book set in this universe. Everything about it is so cool and interesting despite how much I find--for lack of a remotely better term--frontier AU to not be my thing. I absolutely get the style of novella that sketches out one story and one character's movement from point A to B set in a glorious world that is both clearly thought out and distant from the text. But I love meticulous world building so it's hard for me to just look at Desmond and Lij's story and their escape as insufficient. It would make a great beginning, but it feels incomplete as it is. Maybe there will be another one...

(Kindle copy needs better copy editing and you can tell it's bad if *I* noticed.)

That out of the way, I'm really enjoying the upsurge of superhero narratives in book form that ask all these interesting questions about saving the world and what it means to be chosen and to fight. Yap's book is less interrogative than some of the others that have come out the Book Smugglers' initiative: she's not interested in the moral complexity of super powers or in the way that good and evil are handled, she cares more about what being a girl battling the forces of darkness does to a person. Well, a team of people. In schoolgirl outfits and heels. But she's explicit about taking her cues from the magical girls who populate manga and anime. Yap is another example of using fun and fluffy ideas--magical girls and one of them is getting married!--to write fun and fluffy books that also add depth to these larger narratives of superheros and saviors that populate (in particular) visual media. Prose invites a certain kind of interiority and Yap takes advantage of that approach to give the characters more time and space to worry and struggle with who they are.

The downside is that magical girls fighting monsters does not translate perfectly to prose and some of the action scenes would work much better in another medium. Basically, someone make this into a graphic novel while preserving the inner thoughts and illustrating the fight scenes. Win/win.

If the point of reviewing is to record my feelings about a text to remember I've read it, this review is pointless. Jemisin's work is unforgettable and everything from the language to the actual narratives to the characters to the pain to the way she uses fantasy as the reflection science fiction is supposed to be: to distort the mirror held up to life and show us not merely who we REALLY are, but who we can dream to be...
There is a tired and not entirely wrong trope that science fiction is about the future and imagining possibilities and fantasy is about the past and the return to the idealized (mythic) era. There are many authors working against that narrative: some are, sadly, producing hideously regressive science fiction, while others are stretching fantasy's capacity to imagine the other. Jemisin leads that charge and, I have said this before, she is the best in the field.

I am not really good at judging graphic novels so I'm not really sure if I should be reviewing this. It's clearly good and clearly gorgeous and I'm interested in where it's going, but I also have this weird relationship with the glorious world-building found in graphic novels. Not enough words in, which is precisely the point. Huh.