I really enjoyed this book; Howard remains an excellent writer with a real talent for writing the exact kind of urban fantasy I like (no noir in sight!)
I think I preferred her first book, but that’s only because I’m such a sucker for a good Tam Lin story.

Yay, Ann Leckie is back.
Though a much smaller scale than the Imperial Ranch trilogy, Leckie's take on science fiction remains a joy to read and her ability to talk about big problems in small ways remains top-notch.
This book is about a lot of things; it's definitely a space adventure and a story of sci-fi tech and aliens. And it's also a story about how we create history and imbue meaning into objects and how things shape identity.
Leckie's books are preoccupied with questions of identity--who are we and how are we who we are?--and Provenance does not disappoint. The book itself is fun and ridiculously difficult to put down and the ending is so satisfying while the questions the book raises all about who we are get to percolate long after the cover is closed.

This review begins with a question: How many stars do you award to an unconvincing book? The Book of Joan makes an interesting case, one that is argued fairly compellingly and laid out through a narrative that is both sweeping and attentive to detail (almost graphically so), but a case that entirely fails to convince me. Some of it is personal prejudice--I admit--but some is also a failure inherent in the genre. Yuknavitch's book relies on the performance of her ideological argument and, in doing so, she lays bare the results of that argument and they are deeply uncomfortable in a way that the intellectualized conversation, rather than the visceral narrative, would hide.
Clear as mud, right?
The Book of Joan makes the case against kyriarchy. It is a book that seeks to tear the image of modern man in all his incarnations and supplant the ideas of woman over man, brown over white, nature over industry, matter over mind, low over high, earth over human. The resurgence of the visceral, the embodied, and the erotic after modern man's grasp towards disembodiment...but Yuknavitch complicates that trajectory and, ultimately, fails when she can't figure out what to do with women. Are women the opposite of men or are women human and as such stand against Earth and fail? (Eve is just really confusing you guys). Yuknavitch isn't sure and she uses women both ways: Christine and Joan are, arguably, woman as failed human and woman against mankind respectively, but such distinctions fall away against the written lived reality of people being people. As signifiers, they always exceed what they signify (but who doesn't, really?) which makes them inconvenient for an ideological argument if interesting as narrative figures. Yuknavitch can't decide where to put women in this grand tale of reification as they are both hu-man and not-man and it makes everything very muddy and complex. As the real world ought to be, but the real world never lent itself to a good polemic.
And therein is the problem with this book. It fails as an argument because the characters are too strong and it fails as a narrative because the plot and story is too bound up in trying to make a point.
The book's dichotomies and Yuknavitch's clear partiality for the biological, the visceral, and the real allow her to craft a compelling post-apocalyptic story that engages in interesting ways with the question of humanity and how it is we completely mess everything up in our quest for heroics and legacy and life. This is where the contentious space of women becomes obvious: do we engender or do we destroy? And, again, I don't object to complexity, but it feels out of place in a story that otherwise revolves so strongly around a simple taking of sides.

This is most obvious in the most problematic aspect of the book, when a character's biological sex is used as a "gotcha!" moment. I think Yuknavitch is trying to talk about how toxic masculinity shapes the expectations on women, but I also think that the absolute last thing any book needs is "omigod, that man has breasts!" to provide shock value. And this is the real cost of using characters as figures in a morality play and trying to write an argument on the bodies of others.

It is a symptom of the book's own precarious position: Yuknavitch is making an argument against the very work she is doing. Narrative creation lands inevitable on the side of the hero and the mind rather than that of the collective and matter. Do I get to quote Lorde? Definitely. "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
Which is why I don't precisely buy her dichotomies in the first place: the complexity that lurks beneath the surface of her thesis/antithesis overwhelms the setup and while that is precisely the point--the return of the biological reality over the intellectualization--its return undermines the very narrative she sets in place. For the point of the book to be successful, the argument has to destroy the narrative. It doesn't--the narrative wins by a small margin--but neither the argument nor the narrative is better for it.

I had started this book as a bathtub book - ie a book I read in short bursts on my kindle while my daughter is trying to eat the bubbles in a bubble bath - but it turns out that it's the kind of book that needs to be read in one long go. It's a great travel book and so I finally finished it over winter vacation.
The thing about novellas is that they are amazing for world building. Because no one expects 45 pages of info dump, you can just charge straight in and haul the reader along for the ride. Some of the most fascinating worlds I've visited this year have been in novellas and I'm convinced that part of why they are so compelling is the constraint of the genre - you can't explain everything and so the text takes on a certain verisimilitude because you can't know everything and have everything explained IRL either (though God knows some of us do try).
Yang's characters are snapshots of an identity moving through the Tensorate, but it is the Tensorate itself with its revolutions and magic and rising technological prowess that is the star of the show.
Having said that, I thought Akeha was an excellent main character and I cared deeply about his choices and path through life. The care with which Yang constructs the Tensorate depends on having a main character worth following through it.

Today on "why did this book take forever to finish?"
(Okay, because I haven't had a real weekend in like four weeks and that's the only time I get reading done. I'm beginning to reconsider my commitment to hosting Shabbat meals more often; they really cut into my book time.)
This is not exactly an indictment of the book--though it would be a testament to the book's quality if I had charged right through it on one of those busy weekends--since the story is interesting and Older's ongoing use of fiction to model micro-democracy continues to intrigue. Null States is the second book in a trilogy, so it does suffer from some of the ailments traditional to the middle child: it lacks the luster of the first book that introduces the series premises and the resolution of the final book that ties everything up. It spends a lot of time either examining the aftermath of the previous book or setting up the mysteries of the third book, which leaves little space for it to be its own thing. The stories in the book are interesting, but they are almost more interesting as a series of linked short stories between this book and the next. It is the characters that tie them together and--my own biases are obvious here--I am notoriously AWFUL at remembering characters from one book to the next. So the "who are you and why do I care about your love life?" is a never-ending problem for me as a reader. (I could probably put together my top ten list for the year out of books whose main characters I remember without having to look them up.)
This sounds damning and its not. Once I finally had time this Friday night to finish the book, I did enjoy the discrete narratives and Older's investigation into how micro democracy works when it's actually supposed to be working. And the story she's setting up for book three is already interesting so I will keep reading if only for that.
Like The Two Towers, Null States is the kind of middle book that works best when you read the whole narrative in one go.

This is a reread, which I don't usually count towards read counts...except when I do. "Though this be madness, yet there is method in it."
There's this interesting trend among the sff books of the 80s and 90s (lets say the 90s runs a bit into the 00s for the purposes of this conversation) that were written by women of taking on big questions under the guise of formulaic genre. Not all formulaic books do this--although perhaps more than anticipated--but I have found that books written by men are either high- concept OR conventional genre, while books by women tend to incorporate the concepts into the genre. The exceptions to this rule, the women who write high concept like Le Guin, Russ, Tiptree (whose male pseudonym complicates matters) are also the ones who have become canonical. And then there is Butler, who is so much a class by herself that I don't even know where she goes.
Shinn has written a science fiction police procedural romance and hews quite strictly to the genre conventions of each--which already makes this book an interesting mash-up--while also trying to have a conversation about the portrayal of religion in sff. This isn't her first book about religion in genre fiction; the interested reader is directed towards the Samaria series in particular, but she is less interested here in the crafting of religion and more in its impact. A different book would probe at questions of devotion, of ritual performance, of the aesthete versus the ascetic. Shinn's story leaves little space for that and even less space for forming any conclusions about them. This is wise on Shinn's part - the genre conventions of the romance do rather stack the deck against a celibate order, after all, and Shinn is more interested in validating religious experiences of multiple varieties...provided they are grounded in love and not violence.
This approach of using the formulae of the genre to break it carries over into the current generation of writers, although they are far more deliberate in upending familiar tropes and are less willing to bow to convention, preferring a messiness that captures the kernel of the genre and jettisons the trappings that can limit it. The problem with Shinn's work is that you can get through the whole thing without having to actually chew on the question of religious devotion and the role of God. Although whether that is the book's problem or the reader's is, well, an exercise left to the latter.

I swore up and down I was not going to stay up and finish a 500 page book because that would just be silly.
In my defense, the print was quite large.
And I did get to bed by 12:30am.
This book is brain candy for me - it's just a litany of things I really enjoy reading about: Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...
Okay, the fencing and the giants are a lie, but otherwise, Peter Falk has it covered. It's fun, it's somehow not at all what I was expecting, I LOVE Felicity as a character and I genuinely enjoyed yelling at the boys for being nitwits. But I'm really looking forward to the sequel about Felicity.
If you really hate characters mucking up romances by misreading situations, you probably won't enjoy this book (or, you know, romance as a genre), but I thought it was completely believable under the circumstances and so I have no complaints.

This is very clearly an Emma Newman book in the style of her Split Worlds series. If you liked those, this will work for you as well. Charlotte and Cathy are certainly different characters, but you can feel the women chafing at the patriarchal bonds of society interwoven with protagonist chafing at the larger bonds of magical society in both.
My biggest annoyance is that this feels like the first third of a novel rather than a self-contained narrative. I want to know more!

Let’s start the year off right by finishing a book!
Especially since I needed to know what happened to Mokoya and Akeha after the end of The Black Tides of Heaven.
And basically everything I liked about that book I liked about this one as well. They are two parts of the same larger story, but the narrative arcs and lengths are so different that I think Yang's decision to tell them in companion novellas was perfect.

So what does it say about a book when the first thing you do after finishing it is hand it to your husband and demand he read the acknowledgments section?
Ursula’s just that good. This is very much a niche genre—D&D sendup meets the macabre—but if it is your thing, no one does it with more panache than Ursula.