What feels like a long time ago, I read a book called The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. Now she’s back with a standalone sequel of sorts, The Witness for the Dead. You don’t need to have read The Goblin Emperor to read this book: the protagonist, Thara Celehar, was a character in the first book, but otherwise there is no real connection between the two. This is an entirely different story—or rather, stories, since it is a meandering conglomeration of a few different mysteries that will either entice you or drive you mad.

Thara Celehar has been assigned as Witness for the Dead to the city of Amalo. This appointment gets him out of the capital but is not technically an exile—a common enough situation for public servants who are a little too good at their job, if you know what I mean. Celehar spends his mornings listening to petitions from the common people—most he can’t help with, some he can, even if the petitioner isn’t always happy with the result he turns up by communing with their dead uncle or whatever. His afternoons are spent in various pursuits, including investigating the final days of dead people and solving murders. Fun!

There are a few connected stories playing out. Foremost is the murder of Arvenean Shelsin, a viper of an opera singer. In the background is the question of the will of a dead rich guy—this sends Celehar on a brief detour to a village two days away to deal with a ghoul, as well as on a trial by ordeal to a haunted hill within the city. At some point there is an airship explosion too. Oh, and there’s a guy going around poisoning his wives.

It’s kind of a lot, and kind of messy, and to be honest I didn’t like this amount of complexity in a book this short. Now, I have to give Addison credit here: at no point did it feel overwhelming, and she somehow manages to wrap up all these mysteries in just over two hundred pages. Nevertheless, every time I was settling in to “ah yes, it’s a murder mystery but in a secondary world; this is exactly for me” the story wanted to switch gears on me and I felt like I was catapulted out of my comfy chair and into a different, but still comfy, chair. It’s just disorienting!

So if you can ride those rapids, you are in for a treat. Like, let’s put it this way: I would read a series of Witness for the Dead mysteries. There’s plenty of fuel for that here, from Celehar himself to the relationships we see in this book to the city of Amalo. All the praise I heaped on Addison for worldbuilding in The Goblin Emperor remains valid for this book as well. I’m settling on three stars mostly because of the disorienting nature of the storytelling, as I observed, and also because, in the end, I’m not Celehar himself undergoes much growth, which is something I really want to see in a main character. For these reasons, The Witness for the Dead was satisfying but sometimes not quite what I wanted it to be.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Talk about a compelling narrative! Melissa Bashardoust isn’t fooling around. From page 1, Girl, Serpent, Thorn is a wild ride. Soraya is the twin sister to the new shah. She is also poison: her touch is deadly to all living things save plants. Her mother raised her to believe this was a curse from a div (a demon), and as a result, Soraya has been raised apart from the court. Different and distant, she discovers one day that her brother has captured a div and imprisoned it in their dungeon. Soraya believes this div might hold the key to curing her of her curse. But divs are sneaky and treacherous, and listening to it might prove the worst decision of all. Fortunately, she has the smouldering and smitten Azad by her side, a brave man undeterred by her poison. Perhaps with his help she can rid herself of her curse and finally enter the world.

But Soraya is going to learn that the truest treachery comes from stories themselves.

Bashardoust’s adaptation of stories, mythology, and ideas from Persian lore is captivating. It all hinges on Soraya herself, who is a lovely example of an unlikable protagonist—she really just keeps fucking up, and it’s wonderful. She lies, steals, imperils the rest of her family and indeed her entire country, all for a rather selfish reason. Lest you think I’m being too hard on her, let me just say that I understand where she is coming from—she is unlikable but not unsympathetic, and that’s the key. She does learn (slowly) throughout the story as she works through betrayals and setbacks.

I appreciate that Bashardoust isn’t afraid to take big swings in her narrative either. I was surprised by how quickly things escalate, with the Shahmar’s return inevitable from the moment he was mentioned yet much sooner than I might have predicted. In a way this is a kind of nested story, with the first part serving as the prelude to the second, which itself turns into a third story by the end. There are so many layers to enjoy here.

Soraya’s relationships with Azad and Parvaneh are probably the most important ones. In the former case, I like how she acknowledges early on the danger of his idea that he can rescue her. This nod to damsels in distress rescued by charming princes is a good one. Azad’s eventual fate, of course, fits very well with the fairy-tale-esque story that Bashardoust is telling here, where the people closest to you often turn out to be the ones you need to watch the most carefully.

Soraya’s budding attraction to Parvaneh is a joy to read as well. I love how subtle it is, how the attraction is somewhat romantic but also seems to be something else. I love that ambiguity, the idea that they don’t have to figure it out all at once, that they can take it slow. The same goes for Soraya’s monstrousness. I don’t want to go into spoilers, but all I’ll say is her acceptance of who she is by the end of the book is truly special. I love books that preach self-love and self-acceptance!

What didn’t I like? There’s a lot in the style of this narrative that I attribute to it being like a fairy tale, and in that respect I’m willing to forgive certain convenient storytelling shortcuts I might otherwise critique harder. To give you an example, Soraya just seems to be very good at a lot of things despite her sheltered upbringing. She sneaks out of the palace easily to visit the dakhmeh. There also isn’t a lot of time spent on secondary characters. We have a total of like two scenes each with Ramin and Laleh, and their feelings towards Soraya are telegraphed in quite obvious, two-dimensional ways. Again, in a less stylized narrative I would be much less forgiving. In this case, I’m happy to accept that Bashardoust is streamlining the story to allow us to focus on Soraya’s journey and the learning she has to do.

Girl, Serpent, Thorn, then, is far from perfect but it is a vibe, if I may be so bold as to use such a term. The atmosphere and themes of the book stick with you after you put it down. Soraya’s journey has echoes within all of us, even if our touch is not poison—we all make mistakes that hurt those we love, and we all struggle, at one point or another in our lives, accepting the things about ourselves that we can’t change. This is a book about how power isn’t strength, and vice versa, and how you are only truly toxic if you choose to be—but you can still do harm even when you don’t intend it. This is a book about how demons mostly live within, even when they are real without. Finally, this is a book about the power of stories—and why when we use stories to obfuscate the truth instead of tell it, we might do the most harm of all.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

This is the year I finish the Murderbot Diaries! Well, sort of. This is the year I finish the original novellas, but I know I have a whole novel to dive into at some point in the future. Exit Strategy has left me more excited for that prospect than I might have been previously—with each new novella, Martha Wells has improved my opinion of this series.

Shortly after the events of Rogue Protocol, Murderbot resolves to track down its original companions, the ones it was with when it hacked its governor module, including Dr. Mensah. It has mixed feelings about the prospect of seeing Dr. Mensah and the others again: on the one hand, it left them abruptly because it didn’t agree with their plans for Murderbot; on the other hand, it feels responsible for their current predicament given its involvement in finding possibly evidence of GrayCris’s illegal activity.

Murderbot’s feelings are exactly at the crux of this novella. At one point it says something along the lines of how it is experiencing an emotion about real life, which is so much worse than emotions it experiences as a result of the media it consumes. I feel you, Murderbot! I appreciate Wells’s commentary on how we process our emotions.

Along the same lines, Murderbot makes it very clear in this book that its goal is not to become human and lampshades this trope’s existence in media. This, too, is a refreshing portrayal of artificial life. It’s also something I can relate to as a trans woman. I think some cis people have the idea that trans women are “men who want to be women” and that the various medical and social aspects of our transition are attempts to reify such a desire. That’s not the case. I am a woman who wants to be a woman; it’s cissexist society that’s standing in the way, not my body. Sure, I will take advantage of what technologies we have on offer to alter my body—but that’s a personal decision, not one about conforming to society’s ideals of womanhood. So I identify a lot with Murderbot’s explicit goal not to become human, for the idea that artificial life is only a pale approximation of humanity is comparable to the idea that trans women are only a pale approximation of cis women. What I need is for cis people to treat me as a woman; my transness is occasional a relevant attribute but mostly not. Likewise, Murderbot wants to be treated as the person it is, and its artificial origins are occasionally relevant.

The action scenes in Exit Strategy were also a lot better than in Rogue Protocol, I think because of the setting but also because of Murderbot’s desperation. Towards the end, when it thinks it might have to sacrifice itself, the emotional weight of that action intensifies the actual combat. After three novellas in which Murderbot’s enemies have been threatening but seldom to a mortal degree, Wells has earned, through a gradual raising of the stakes, that payoff.

Payoff also comes in the form of the plot and relationships—this novella wraps up the story arc of Murderbot on the run and the GrayCris mystery. While there is plenty left to explore (which is why I am happy there is a novel next!), I am really happy that Wells brought this story arc to a conclusion. It’s very satisfying. The only thing that could have improved it would have been meeting ART again—please do spoil me if ART returns in a future book!!

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Audre Lorde is one of those people whom we white people find so quotable yet seldom do we stop to listen to her words (we have done this to Martin Luther King, Jr. as well). Every time I see a quotation from Lorde or another prominent Black activist on a T-shirt, I cringe. One of the insidious aspects of whiteness is how it appropriates the radical language of oppressed people (just look at the evolution of the word woke) and distorts it. So after thirty-two years of existence on this plane, I decided I should probably get around to reading something by Audre Lorde, you know? Then I can put a quote of hers on a T-shirt (just kidding).

To be fair, I see why she is so quotable—though I’m not sure the quotations I will share in this review are the ones a white girl would wear on a T-shirt. Sister Outsider lives up very much to its title. In these essays from the late seventies and early eighties, Lorde recounts the tension of being a Black lesbian feminist mother academic—how belonging to these various communities put her at odds with people who insist on reducing her down to a single identity. At times for me as a female reader, she feels like my sister, as we talk about shared struggles of womanhood. At other times for me as a white reader, I feel like the outsider, as Lorde teaches me about experiences I don’t have because I’m not Black. But Lorde’s message is emphatically not “you can’t understand my struggle because you’re not Black”—she repeatedly says she is tired of non-Black people using this as an excuse to beg off, for example, from teaching Black writers and artists in English classes. Rather, Lorde wants us to stop being reductive—this is a call for intersectionality before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined that term, a call for us to understand that multiple axes of oppression affect people’s lives in different ways, yet we are stronger when we come together in our diversity to fight for our liberation.

Lorde’s words here give me a valuable glimpse into the state of feminism and queer activism just prior to my birth in 1989. At one point, Lorde laments the generational amnesia that seems to affect activists—and certainly I’ve observed that happen in feminism during my lifetime. I really don’t have much of a conception of what the struggle was like in the eighties, and while this book provides only one, narrow window on it, I appreciate everything she has to say nonetheless. Indeed, for some reason, Sister Outsider made me think about Samuel R. Delany, whose novels often have appendices that variously reflect, in or out of character, on the struggles of gay men during the AIDS epidemic. I wonder if Delany and Lorde ever crossed paths in an activist setting.

Lorde provides me with valuable perspectives on the intersections of her Blackness, femaleness, and queerness. She discusses the homophobia within Black communities, the way lesbian is used as a slur even by Black feminists, as well as how, in her youth in particular, her feminist activism earned her opprobrium because she should “stand behind her men”—the implication being that Black women should be Black first and women second. (This is a very understandable situation once you learn how mainstream feminism has been heavily white supremacist since day one.) As a teacher, I appreciated when she talked about her own experiences teaching at colleges and universities in New York, her struggles both within the classroom and with her colleagues. This is part of the “outsider” of the collection’s title—Lorde’s skin colour marks her as different no matter how many qualifications, publications, conferences, etc., she has to her name.

Now, yes, there were many moments where I could relate to some of what she was saying on a personal level as a trans woman. Although trans people don’t come up directly in these essays, Lorde’s politics are aggressively inclusive and make me feel seen. She is not here to advocate for strict definitions of anything, whether it’s womanhood, lesbianism, Blackness, motherhood, etc.

That being said, I am still white, and I recently wrote a blog post about how my whiteness makes me less marginalized even though I’m trans. These are fundamentally different identities, and much as Lorde cannot be reduced to any one of her identities, I cannot be reduced simply to woman, to trans woman, to white woman. I am all of those things at once.

In several of these essays, Lorde directly takes on the white woman feminist. In “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” Lorde says:

 

Oooohhhhh burn, Mary. Lorde is calling you out on exactly the kind of bullshit I mentioned in my introduction. And this is precisely why I don’t want to draw too many connections between Lorde’s experiences of oppression and my own, because we don’t really have much overlap at all, and I don’t want to appropriate and distort her work for my benefit.

 In the same essay, Lorde goes on to explain why white women’s insistence that their feminism is feminism for everyone is problematic:

 

Now this I can relate to as a trans women, because cis feminists do this to us too—that is, make assumptions that the white, cis experience of womanhood is somehow the normative one. This doesn’t account for race, for queerness, for being trans or non-binary, or for being disabled (something that Lorde does mention a couple of times as well).

There’s also a great conversation between Lorde and Adrienne Rich (with whom I am unfamiliar), a white woman, and Rich basically acknowledges the fragility of many white women feminists like herself and says, “I know we need to do better.”

All of this leads me to one realization: the overbearing and supercilious erasure of Black feminists is nothing new. White feminism has long known about this problem, longer than I’ve been alive, and here we are in the year 2021 and it’s still a problem. Sadly I think that if Lorde were still alive she would be writing very similar things, maybe as a Twitter thread.

So yes, Sister Outsider can feel dated in certain ways but remains screamingly relevant to this era of feminism and queer activism. It is a reminder that we are stronger in our diversity and difference, but that we must also recognize the privileges we have and when those might mean we are failing to listen, tone policing, or outright erasing other voices just because they are criticizing our actions in the struggle.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Oops, I am only now realizing as I sit down to write this review that I read Empire Games, the first book in this trilogy, but not Dark State, the second. When Invisible Sun came out earlier this year, I was just so excited to get back to this story that I forgot to check if I was caught up! Turns out I was not. So, if you are wondering if you can read this book without reading the one prior … the answer is yes.

Charles Stross brings this trilogy to a conclusion with a bang—several hundred nuclear bangs, I should say. In one timeline very similar to ours, NSA spooks hunt a refugee from another timeline. She’s a princess, or at least could be, and politically valuable to all the players in this game. Meanwhile, in her home timeline, Miriam Burgeson (née Beckstein) and her daughter, Rita Douglas, do a delicate dance during the mourning period for the First Man. If either steps awry, it might possibly spell the end of this experiment in democracy. Finally, in a timeline where humanity is extinct but a mysterious Dome encloses a gate to yet another parallel timeline, the invasion of a swarm of machine intelligences threatens to spill out across all the timelines we might care about.

My experience with Stross has rather mirrored the trajectory of his own writing career. I used to be very much into far-future, posthuman science fiction that posited nigh-omnipotent artificial intelligences and such. After I had my fill of such stories, however, I started to get bored. I dip my toe back into that subgenre here and there, but I have also appreciated Stross’s urban fantasy and near-future science fiction, including this series and its prequel series. I was a little hard on Empire Games, and honestly, Invisible Sun didn’t offer up anything else new in comparison.

But it got the job done, if you know what I mean.

There’s just something very enchanting about how Stross writes, something that makes me want to keep reading and devour the book as quickly as possible. Yes, the book lacks the focus of a clear protagonist—who should I be rooting for, everyone? Yes, the book is about 78% exposition—but really, what do you expect from Stross at this point? I’m not here for an engrossing story so much as for this incredible thought experiment: what if some people could travel to parallel universes, and what if in the deep past some of their ancestors came into conflict with an unfathomable intelligence that then also acquired that ability? It’s heady stuff.

Something I did enjoy a lot more about Invisible Sun, though, was the commentary on the fragility of democracy. The republic for which Miriam fights is about a decade old and it is already experiencing its first succession crisis. Thanks to the omniscient narrator, we get to see things from all sides—including the Commonwealth Guard leaders who plot the coup and install a junta. I appreciate how Stross draws parallels with events in the twentieth century for which I wasn’t alive, and how he demonstrates that even when one has the best of intentions, sometimes coincidences or missed connections mean that everything goes pear shaped.

This is why I’m not quite willing to stop reading Stross’s books despite the fact that sometimes the plots themselves are a little thin on the ground: he still makes me think. Invisible Sun offers up commentary on democracy, surveillance states, statecraft, spycraft, and of course, the importance of family. It has plenty of weaknesses yet also quite a few strengths, and I can’t deny that I devoured the book, so I can’t complain too heavily about it!

In the end, this won’t win you over if you are new to this series. The original trilogy really holds up better in my mind. I appreciate how Stross has indicated that this story is done, but that he might revisit this multiverse one day. I think that’s a good call. For now, if you are curious about these books, go pick up The Bloodline Feud and prepare to be very entertained.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

This book had me at its opening scene, set in a tea store, where Darius talks to us for the first of many times about his love for properly steeped looseleaf teas. But then it had to go and introduce frequent, detailed allusions to Star Trek: The Next Generation, complete with Darius declaring that Captain Picard is the best captain, and … reader, at that point, I would have hid a dead body for this book. That’s how much we vibed. Darius is half-Persian and male and a teenager and fat; I’m a 32-year-old thin, white woman, yet Adib Khorram bridged that gap through incorrigibly nerdy narration and I am here for it.

Darius is, as the title suggests, very much not OK. He is bullied at school (and outside of school), and even though he and his dad watch Star Trek every night together and are both taking medication for depression, there seems to be an emotional gulf between them. Meanwhile, Darius feels awkwardly out of touch with his mom’s Persian heritage: he doesn’t speak Farsi, unlike his kid sister, Laleh. So when his family announces their first trip to Iran in Darius’s lifetime, he’s filled with trepidation. But in Iran he meets Sohrab, a boy his age, and everything changes.

As I said in my introduction, Darius and I are worlds apart (I also don’t struggle with depression). Yet Darius the Great Is Not Okay perfectly belies the idea that you need to be like a protagonist in order to sympathize with them. Khorram is just so good at bringing Darius’s thoughts to life through the page. I knew very little about life in Iran before reading this book—and, in spite of Khorram’s excellent exposition, I won’t pretend to know much more now—yet I had such a good time watching Darius navigate the differences between his two cultures. The “caught between two worlds” trope is an old one and often clichéd, but Khorram avoids that here and creates something quite special and particular.

This is particularly true in the case of how Darius gets to know his grandparents. He bonds almost immediately with his grandmother, about whom Darius observes, “For Fariba Bahrami, love was an opportunity, not a burden.” Oh. My. God. Favourite line of the whole book right there, because this resonated so much with me and how I approach my love for my closest people. Love without condition truly is an opportunity, a wonderful gift, and that line is a perfect example of the philosophical eloquence in Khorram’s writing.

Darius struggles more with his grandfather, who seems to mirror the disapproval he experiences from his father. Indeed, the lack of significant support from any other male characters in the book is one of the reasons Sohrab’s presence is so important. Sohrab provides a kind of unconditional sensitive masculine presence that, up until now, Darius has never had.

So let’s talk about that.

Darius and Sohrab’s relationship is definitely queer-coded, and Khorram makes a smart decision in never putting an explicit label on it. If one wants to interpret either character as gay, I understand, and I’m not here to tell you that you’re wrong. Nevertheless, as an aromantic asexual reader, I am here to tell you that I am getting serious ace vibes from their relationship. Darius and Sohrab’s relationship was, for me, the most recognizable part of this book. So much of it felt similar to my relationship with my ride-or-die. We complete one another even though we do not feel any romantic or sexual attraction to the other, and our friendship goes deeper than any relationship I have ever experienced. Regardless of either character’s sexuality here, I assert that reading their relationship as platonic or even queerplatonic is a more fruitful interpretation for its healthy approach to masculinity. Men and boys of every sexual orientation should feel comfortable—even seek out—a Sohrab in their life, because everyone deserves a friend like this.

This is not a comfortable book. Sure, Khorram lulls you into a false sense of security with his wonderful prose. Yet at its core, Darius the Great Is Not Okay is about discomfort. It’s Darius’s dying grandfather getting lost and consequently not being able to drive ever again. It’s Darius’s uncharitable thoughts towards his eight-year-old sister as she snuggles up with her dad to watch Star Trek, “replacing” him. It’s the brief but heartbreaking, sympathetic conversation between Darius and his mom where she admits she regrets not teaching him Farsi as a kid. It’s the explosive, climactic scene between Darius and Sohrab that tips Darius’s depression over the edge—but it is also all the little scenes that nudge his depression in various ways. This is a book steeped in the bitter green leaves of discomfort for the express purpose of showing us the life of a teenager teetering on the brink simply because, as the title discloses, not only is he not OK but no one really seems to know what to do about it.

I love the ending, the way it is hopeful but not sanguine, the way it allows Darius to breathe without promising us a magical reprieve for his mental illness. The detente between him and his dad. The careful, perfect acknowledgement that change can be gradual as well as cataclysmic, yet both types can be equally soothing or stormy. Finally, I love how Khorram navigates his novel into a liminal space between realism and allegory to serve us up a cross-cultural experience that is, at its core, irrepressibly human.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Back in the summer, I participated in a book club for educators where we read White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color. Ruby Hamad cited this book once or twice, and I was intrigued. Hamad wanted to make the point that white women benefit from both patriarchy and white supremacy, that in colonial situations like this they will uphold the existing racist structure rather than work against racism because it benefits them to do so. (Ijeoma Oluo touches on this in the context of women's suffrage in Mediocre.) Stephanie Jones-Rogers’ book here delivers a more thorough treatment of this subject in the specific period of nineteenth-century America.

Jones-Rogers specifically wants to challenge some prevailing views among previous historians that constructed white women's relationship to slavery through sociological assumptions about women's suitability for the business of owning people. These historians, Jones-Rogers contends, often interpreted absences from the historical record—for example, when it comes to the transactions of selling and buying people—as evidence of the absence of women as independent slave owners. She uses oral testimony from former enslaved people to reconstruct a fuller picture of domestic goings-on that contradicts this view of white slave-owning women: not only were they keenly aware of the economic aspect of slavery, but they fought fiercely, in the courts and at home, to protect their interests.

On the legal front, Jones-Rogers challenges the notion that white slave-owning women just gave up all their interest in their slaves the moment they married. On the contrary, numerous legal records demonstrate the lengths to which these women would go to ensure that their slaves remained under their control as opposed to their husband’s. Similarly, although these women would often delegate the buying and selling of their slaves to their husbands, they also took care of that themselves or directly hired third-party agents. Jones-Rogers also points out that the written historical record often misses the informal arrangements that white slave-owning women would make to hire out enslaved people to other women, either for routine domestic labour or as a trial before purchase.

In all of these ways, Jones-Rogers contends that these women were complicit in enslavement, active participants as opposed to merely disinterested witnesses to a male-dominated phenomenon. White women in the American South often owned slaves, either ones they inherited from family or were given at marriage time, or ones that they bought, sometimes themselves. As Jones-Rogers traces all of these paths, she also reconstructs a very full picture of enslavement in the American South, from the nature of labour on a plantation to slave markets. I think I’m not alone in confessing that my understanding of slavery is so removed from this time period that I don’t really know what life was like during this period. The idea that enslavement was just a given, and part of how society functioned, is as alien to me as our reliance on wireless technology and electricity would be to these women. Most popular media focuses on the overt horror of enslavement, on using slavery as a form of shock entertainment—and while there are lessons to be derived from that, I appreciate that Jones-Rogers takes a tack that, while drier, is also incredibly eye-opening.

The book closes with the end of the American Civil War and reconstruction. I learned a lot about this period from The Impeachers, including the delightful tidbit that a lot of slave owners actively concealed emancipation from their slaves. So when Jones-Rogers discusses how many white slave-owning women did everything they could to hold on to enslaved people on their land, either through deceit or simply trying to hire them back as labourers, I was not surprised. But as with the rest of the book, she provides detailed and specific accounts that really drive home the attitudes and possible motivations of these people.

Last summer I read The History of White People. It is a macroscopic view of the origins of whiteness, and from there racism and white supremacy. They Where Her Property is a much more focused book, taking a small slice of whiteness and putting it under a microscope for us to examine very closely. In both cases, however, the conclusion can’t be any clearer: anti-Black racism (with enslavement as a particularly acute example) is correlated with the economic engine of capitalism. White women in the American South backed slavery and owned slaves because it was economically beneficial to do so. Yes, you had a minority who truly viewed Black people as mentally inferior. But many of these white women understood that Black people were just as human and capable as they were, yet they willingly erased that humanity for the sake of economic gain.

Why did I, a Canadian in the twenty-first century, both reading a book about white American slave-owning women in the nineteenth? Jones-Rogers ends the book by labelling white women as “co-conspirators” in slavery. Well, we might not have slavery in a legal sense here in Canada in 2021, but, as Hamad demonstrates in White Tears/Brown Scars, white women are still co-conspirators when it comes to upholding whiteness and white supremacy. I wanted to understand this in an historical context and see the line from white slave-owning women then to white feminists now. For it is common for white feminists to move to innocence by falling back on a manufactured universal sorority: “all women” struggle against patriarchy. This is an amnesiacal reading of history, a white supremacist reading of history, that deliberately erases the harm white women have done in service to patriarchy because they were promised a form of power (in this case, ownership and control over enslaved people for labour and profit) in return. Not only do I want to challenge my fellow white women when they exhibit white fragility or privilege, but I also want to challenge these kinds of assertions and do so in a knowledgeable way.

As a more academic volume, They Were Her Property won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, so I can’t give a blanket recommendation. But if, like me, you enjoy deep dives into these pockets of history, then I suggest you check out this book!

My next goal is to learn more about the history of anti-Blackness in Canada, including slavery while it was legal in British North America, along with Canada’s complicity in upholding enslavement in the United States following that! Book recommendations to this end are welcome.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Have I ever remarked how much I appreciate books that have simple titles? Book titles can sometimes be so lengthy or convoluted. I appreciate the simplicity of each of the titles of C.L. Polk’s Kingston Cycle. Also, how did I not know Polk is Canadian until now?? Get a grip, Kara! I am pleased I procured Soulstar from my library not too long since I read Stormsong because I actually remember the ongoing story!

Spoilers for the first two books but not this one.

Our viewpoint protagonist this time is Robin Thorpe, who was a character in the first two books. We recently discovered that she is a Deathsinger, which is a necromantic type of witch in this world. The book picks up where Stormsong ended: King Severin has acceded to his mother’s throne, and he seems like he will be more progressive. Grace is still his Chancellor and is determined to make that true. His first act is to make witches legal again. Robin wants more though: she demands that all witches imprisoned in asylums be freed. This reunites her with Zelind (who uses khe/kher pronouns), whom Robin had secretly married long ago. Soon, Robin finds herself at the centre of a pronounced political push for more progress than Severin (and maybe even Grace) might be comfortable with.

Polk continues the theme they established in Stormsong of the battle of incrementalism versus revolution. Grace, our protagonist from the previous book, represented the well-meaning but privileged white woman feminist who just didn’t have a clue about what really needed to change. At the start of this book, Robin has to push her to go further, and much of this book is Robin’s journey of navigating the practicality of inciting revolutionary change. Somehow, Polk manages to make the details interesting. Robin attends meetings, plans elections, deals with police … aside from the setting and existence of magic, so much of this book feels relevant right now. As I look at the world around me and the need for change in our society, I see the Graces as well as the Robins. And I hope I’m more of a Robin than a Grace, but I am also a white woman and sooooooo….

The revolutionary push for democracy in Soulstar is also very interesting from a fantasy genre perspective. There was a time when I was writing a fantasy novel that also wanted to subvert the unquestioned monarchy that suffuses so many of our fantasy societies—my main character was going to be involved in a plot to overthrow the monarchy and install a democracy, but of course there were some additional complications (darn that magic). I might go back to it one day. But for now it’s just nice to see Polk taking that up—I always love fantasy settings that belie the stereotypical use of monarchies and semi-feudal societies modelled after a Europe that never was. Polk’s interpretation, with its echoes of Edwardian England, is a kind of extreme alternative history. It’s not at all subtle yet incredibly deft in its depiction of shifting political paradigms.

Polk approaches their characters with similar skill. As I remarked in my review of Stormsong, I totally ship Grace/Avia despite not generally appreciating romance in my books. The same goes for Robin/Zelind in this book. Polk depicts their devotion to each other while simultaneously showing the trauma of Zelind’s imprisonment and how it affects kher ability to have close relationships. While I can’t speak from personal experience regarding the verisimilitude of Zelind and Robin’s conflicts, it’s just nice to see conflict that doesn’t feel contrived for the sake of plot. I enjoyed watching them work through their issues even as they each work on projects that are of great social import.

I think the one part of the story that disappointed me was the disposition of the Amaranthines. After figuring so much in the previous book, they seemed more like shadows here. I had thought we would learn more about the Solace and what the Amaranthines wanted—maybe my reading was wrong, and their only concern was the souls that the Aelanders hadn’t allowed to enter the Solace. Even so, I would have liked to see more of these characters.

Overall, though, I have to say: this was a very satisfying experience, this book and the trilogy as a whole. This is some premium grade original fantasy, full of political themes, romance, and an excellent use of magic. I was just so satisfied devouring this book over the course of two days. Moreover, Soulstar is a satisfying end to this trilogy, leaving the story in a place where there is clearly more that needs to happen (there always is) but our main characters from the trilogy are on a new trajectory, and that’s wonderful. This is some of the best fantasy I have read in years.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Although I dearly love science fiction, I haven’t been as enthusiastic to pick it up lately. I’ve been craving happier books as this pandemic stretches on, and most of the science fiction on my to-read list tends to be of the more depressing kind. Children of Time is no exception, although at the risk of a minor spoiler let me say it does have an uplifting ending, so that’s something. This is my first real novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky despite wanting to read his science fiction for years! I admire his storytelling talent even if maybe I am coming to him a bit too late for my tastes. More on that later.

Children of Time comprises two parallel narratives spanning thousands of years. On a terraformed planet that some would call Kern’s World, a species of spiders finds its evolution bootstrapped by a human-designed nanovirus. In orbit of the planet is a small station, a sentry, in which the terraforming project’s megalomaniacal director, Dr. Avrana Kern, sleeps and slowly melds with the sentry’s rudimentary artificial intelligence system. Meanwhile, the sleeper ship Gilgamesh enters the system—and after a rude, hostile reception from Kern and her AI counterpart, departs again—on a mission to find a home for what might be the last humans. The Gilgamesh’s eventual return, thousands of years later (thanks to relativistic travel), becomes a threat for the exalted spiders of Kern’s World. Humanity is coming to meet its children.

This is an intriguing premise, to be sure. Other authors have explored uplift in various ways. Tchaikovsky’s leveraging of stasis technology, relativistic travel, and a nanovirus to accelerate evolution creates a wonderful intersection of narrative possibilities. Despite the epic timeframe over which this story takes place, the human protagonists remain the same. The spider protagonists descend through generations, always named Portia and Bianca and Fabian for the reader’s convenience. Tchaikovsky allows us to witness the evolution of a new sentient species over a mere 600 pages.

The strongest aspect of this book is indubitably Tchaikovsky’s facility for imagining how spider society, technology, and culture would develop. Everything is biological, even the ant colonies that eventually become computers. It’s a wonderful reminder against technological determinism: not every sentient species need develop electronic computers from silicon and other minerals like we have. There are many tech trees, and one of my favourite aspects of science fiction is how authors with sufficient imagination can describe them for me!

Similarly, Holsten’s intermittent periods of wakefulness when he isn’t in stasis aboard the Gilgamesh provide us with snapshots, vignettes of humanity’s own evolution. As with the spiders, this story makes use of its own tropes, from delusions of apotheosis to the ways in which a generation ship would experience cultural drift and mythologizing of its original crew. Very little in this story is really new, yet Tchaikovsky weaves it together in a compelling way.

That being said, I didn’t like this story as much as the spiders’, mostly for its dismal tone. For almost all of the novel, humanity is on the brink of extinction and it is bleak. I don’t want to be too harsh on Tchaikovsky for this, because it’s entirely within his prerogative—it’s just not a tone I’m interested in at this moment in history as the vise grip of the pandemic and climate emergencies tighten around our contemporary society. A story about how humanity fucked up Earth so bad that only a small band of squabbling survivors using technology they barely understand is left is … not what I want to think about right now. So consider this a preference warning rather than a criticism.

Finally, Children of Time is a wonderful novel for its scope, though I don’t really care much for its character development. We don’t see the development of individuals among the spiders, given that theirs is a story told over generations. The societal development is good though. On the part of the humans, our narrator is Holsten Mason, and the nature of his presence (kept asleep, woken intermittently) means he has comparatively little time to learn and change and grow as a person. I wish we had seen Holsten with more agency and more chances to affect the narrative and learn from his mistakes.

This is the type of science fiction I would have adored ten years ago. My tastes have since moved on—I still want big ideas and epic scope, mind you, but I also want novels that explore characters themselves at a deeper level. Tchaikovsky comes close to this with Avrana Kern, but she begins as such a one-dimensional character and ends that way too—just not quite the same one dimension. So in this respect, I see Children of Time as a novel that misses several opportunities to be even better than it is. I will likely read the sequel for completeness’ sake, but I’m not rushing out to do so.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Every so often one encounters a book that should be required reading for all Canadians. Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance is one such book. The moment I cracked open the first chapter, I knew I had to use this in my English class of adult learners (all of whom, at the moment, are Anishinaabeg from Treaty 9 nations). Jesse Wente appears in a documentary, Reel Injun, that I often use in my English course, and I’ve always seen him as a strong voice regarding the representation of Indigenous people in media. By the way, if you want to read the first chapter of Unreconciled, it’s excerpted here in The Walrus. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

The subtitle explains exactly what to expect from this book. Each chapter is a self-contained essay, yet the book as a whole is a unified narrative of Wente’s childhood and professional career and his experience navigating Indigeneity in Canada. Much of what Wente discusses involves the idea of not being “Indian enough.” The concept of Indigeneity, of who is Indigenous, is incredibly complex and fraught here in Canada. I’m not going to summarize it in any way that does it justice here, but Wente does an excellent job explaining how colonialism—implemented through official government policies like the Indian Act—quite literally created official definitions of Indigenous people. And it’s fucked up that we use these colonial definitions. At the same time, movements towards self-identification as the standard have created situations where settlers can exploit opportunities created for Indigenous people, such as access to scholarships or specific academic positions.

These issues are complicated not because Indigenous people have made them so but because the federal, provincial, and territorial governments have done their best to make it difficult to be Indigenous in this country. Maybe people who wouldn’t take a free history course to learn this will listen to Wente’s stories here. His essays tackle so many interconnected ideas, from tokenism to scapegoating to representation. All of these intersect along axes of liberation and power, as he examines the points in his life where he has been free/not free to choose, points where he has had the power to determine something or when that power has been an illusion. It’s telling that Wente’s experience is not linear: one moment he’s enjoying a great deal of success and good times as a part of TIFF, and the next he’s resigning because of how the festival handled the selection of films about Indigenous people. This is an important mirror of Indigenous issues here in Canada. By one measure it’s possible to say Indigenous people have made progress wresting back rights. Yet by other measures, colonial Canada is still alive and kicking and oppressing nations left and right.

This is the thesis around which Wente constructs the aptly titled Unreconciled. But he does it from a different angle than many others might take: this is a political book that doesn’t focus overly much on politics or history (though it is there, if you look for it). Wente focuses on pop culture, on Canadian institutions like the CBC and TIFF, and on his own family history. At one point he says that the solutions to the damage of colonization are well known and documented in reports from various bodies (RCAP and the TRC being but two among many). Much like the issue of climate change, it’s not so much what should we do but when will we have the will to do it? Wente does not mince words when he says that the government refuses to undertake the work of real reconciliation, co-opting the word instead, because it refuses to acknowledge truth.

If you have been learning about and following Indigenous issues and history here in Canada at all, then very little that Wente says here will be new to you … but he says it so very well. His writing is incisive, vulnerable, powerful, to the point where I really do just want to give this book to everyone. Wente didn’t have to do this for us, didn’t have to mine his life and share these stories with everybody. The fact that he has done so is a gift, and the best way we can honour it is to do exactly what he says at the end of the first chapter: listen to him and other Indigenous people, stop centreing ourselves as settlers, and use our position as the majority population of the country to pressure our leaders into listening in turn.

Unreconciled pairs perfectly with Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out on the Ground. Both are powerful and personal memoirs that enlighten and educate us about Indigenous issues in Canada. Complete the trifecta with Seven Fallen Feathers and you’ll be well on your way to a better understanding of what’s going on in this country.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.