2021/158: Picasso, I Want My Face Back -- Grace Nichols

O England
Hedge-bound as Larkin
Omnivorous as Shakespeare.
[from 'Outward from Hull']

I'd previously encountered the 'Weeping Woman' poem for which the collection is named, though couldn't recall where: it may have been when it was Poem of the Week in the Guardian, in December 2009. The poem-sequence is effectively a monologue by Dora Maar, Picasso's lover and the model for Weeping Woman: I do remember being struck by the line 'He might be a genius but he's also a prick'.

I find it challenging to review a collection of poetry, especially one as wide-ranging as this: Nichols interweaves art, landscape, memory and the female experience -- the latter especially in the 'Laughing Woman' series of poems -- and gives voices to subjects and objects as diverse as Ophelia, the Empire State Building and Tracy Emin's Bed. Her snapshots of life are vivid (for instance, a poem about how to cross a road in Delhi) and her evocation of a trip into the interior of Guyana, where she was born, makes me crave an experience I've never had. I think my favourite in this collection, though, is the title track, the shifting tone and perspective of Dora Maar celebrating and bemoaning her fame, and reclaiming her self.

Fulfils the 'Poetry Collection by a Black Woman' prompt for the Reading Women Challenge 2021.

2021/157: Sorcerer to the Crown -- Zen Cho

In truth magic had always had a slightly un-English character, being unpredictable, heedless of tradition and profligate with its gifts to high and low. [p. 22]

I'd started this novel several times and hadn't engaged: it must have been a case of 'right book, wrong time' because when I settled down with it, I was delighted. Yes, the premise (Regency England, with magicians) is reminiscent of other works, most notably Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but the execution is very different. Cho's protagonists -- Zacharias Wythe, a freed slave who has become Sorcerer Royal, and Prunella Gentleman, a young woman whose English father and Indian mother are both dead, leaving her to assist at a school for 'gentlewitches' -- have to maintain good manners in the face of constant microaggressions. Their guardians (Sir Stephen, who purchased Zacharias -- though not his parents -- as a boy; Mrs Daubeney, who tells Prunella to eat with the servants) have given them some degree of social standing, but have also made it extremely clear that this kind benevolence is contingent on good behaviour. And both have secrets: Prunella's concerns the stones she has, more or less, inherited from her parents, while Zacharias has made a terrible bargain with his late master's familiar, the dragon Leofric.

British magic is draining away, a crisis that most members of the Society for Unnatural Philosophers blame on 'woolly Afric' Zacharias. Zacharias, having identified the proximate cause for the decline in magic if not the rationale behind it, is saved from a magical assassination attempt by Prunella. In turn, he agrees to bring her to London and help her learn magic -- an option not usually available to young women, since magic is very much a man's world in the British Empire. Indeed, the most-practiced spell at Mrs Daubeney's school is the 'seven shackles', which 'If practised regularly, the exercise will extinguish seven of the most common types of magic of which the mortal frame is capable'.

Enter Mak Genggang, a powerful witch who has come from Malaysia by way of Fairyland to confront the Sultan of Janda Baik about his attempts to enlist the Society's help against a group of female magicians. She provides Prunella and Zacharias with a great deal of food for thought. Not least among her pronouncements is that 'all the greatest magic comes down to blood,... and who knows blood better than a woman?': an axiom which enables Prunella to unlock the secrets of her heritage, and incidentally be one of the few Regency heroines to allude to menstruation.

The women in this novel are seldom helpless, and are determined to get what they want. Prunella, in particular, is ruthless and (according to Zacharias) amoral: there's one incident which made me queasy, where she's faced with a deadly choice and chooses the lesser (but in some ways less forgiveable) sacrifice.

Sorcerer to the Crown depicts a magical crisis and features a romantic sub-plot, but it also addresses colonialism, sexism and racism, There are some horribly credible period-typical attitudes here, and the measured cadences of Cho's prose don't make it any more palatable: but there is also an ending that is both traditionally happy and narratively satisfying. I'm now looking forward to reading The True Queen.

2021/156: Elder Race -- Adrian Tchaikovsky

I am only now ... beginning to realise just how broken my own superior culture actually was. They set us here to make exhaustive anthropological notes on the fall of every sparrow. But not to catch a single one of them. To know, but very emphatically not to care. [p. 148]

Lynesse Fourth Daughter, accompanied by her laconic companion Esha Free Mark, is on a quest: a demon is threatening the land, and she seeks the help of the fabled sorcerer, Nyrgoth Elder, who aided her family centuries ago against the evil Ulmoth. The sorcerer, when they find him in his forbidding tower, is seven feet tall, horned, and wears 'slate robes that glittered with golden sigils'.

Nyr Illim Tevitch, anthropologist second class of Earth's Explorer Corps, is woken from his long, artificial sleep by the outpost's caretaker routines. At first he thinks this might mean the return of the Explorer Corps, but there's been no communication from offworld in nearly three centuries. He's been abandoned, and the locals -- whose culture, and language, has evolved in leaps and bounds since he last mingled with them -- want his help. Lyn speaks of magic and demons, but Nyr is a scientist and a scholar, as he tries to explain.

Unfortunately both those words translate as something like 'wizard'.

On one level this is a straightforward, and very entertaining, exploration of the old axiom that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. (There's a bravura chapter where Nyr's explanation of colonisation is shown next to what Lyn hears. A great deal is lost in translation, as it were, though Nyr is speaking the local language as best he can: he doesn't understand the nuances or allusions in what he's saying.) On another level, it's a story about different ways of looking at the world; and on yet another, it's about Nyr's appalling loneliness and depression, and how he decides to deal with it. He has an enviable device, a Dissociative Cognitive System, which is supposed to cut him off from his feelings so he can make rational decisions: he is, perhaps, overreliant on it. (He tries to explain depression to Lyn, but what she hears is a tale about a beast that ceaselessly pursues and torments him.) The DCS can't be used constantly, though, and sometimes it is better -- healthier and more useful -- to experience the emotion than to block it out. (I say this as someone who has experienced mental health issues for much of my life.)

There are two narrative voices: Lynesse in third-person past tense, and Nyr in first-person present. I wonder how differently the story would read if these were switched: if we had Lyn's stream-of-consciousness rather than her framing of the story, and Nyr's mostly-dispassionate reflections on his actions.

This is a short novel, barely more than a novella, and it could easily have been a long one: I'd have loved to read more about Sophos 4, with its vestiges of high technology and its complex matriarchal society, the echoes of Earth culture (what is the red face that now appears on funerary urns?) and the various genetic modifications that have been made to the planet's inhabitants. But the story of Nyr and Lyn is contained and complete, and though it doesn't wrap everything up it does resolve in a very satisfactory way.

2021/155: Old Baggage -- Lissa Evans

‘You’re a very disputatious woman,’ he said, as if that were a slur. [loc. 2189]

This is, chronologically, the first in the loose trilogy that continues with Crooked Heart and V for Victory, both of which I read in 2021 during pandemic lockdown. Old Baggage is at once more and less cheerful: it's set before WW2, and focusses on women's rights, especially the multiple campaigns for female enfranchisement.

The setting is Hampstead in 1928, and the protagonist is Mattie Simpkin, a single woman in her late fifties who is somewhat adrift, nostalgic for the glory days of the suffragettes. She lives with her friend and lodger, Florrie Lee (known as 'the Flea'), whose support goes largely unacknowledged. When Mattie encounters a fellow campaigner from the old days and realises that the young women of 1928 lack direction and drive, she sets up a girls' club called the Amazons. The first recruit is a young woman named Ida: later come others (including Winnie and Avril who also appear in V for Victory). Mattie's Amazons gain healthy exercise and life skills: they also attract the attention of the Empire Youth League, a militaristic youth club run by a former comrade of Mattie's. All might yet be well, except for the insidious presence of Inez, the daughter of yet another suffragette -- and of a man who was very dear to Mattie.

There is much to like about this novel: the centring of female experience; the middle-aged protagonist looking back on the days of bread and roses; the small tragedies (the old baggage of love, loss, injustice, imprisonment) that Mattie and the Flea carry with them; the gaps between Mattie's self-image and her tactless, sometimes cruel behaviour. When catastrophe strikes, it's a small, domestic sort of catastrophe, an error of judgement rather than a deliberate betrayal -- though none the less painful for that. There's a good London ambience, too, though less so than in V for Victory: Mattie lives a more rarified life than Vee.

Once I'd finished this, I went back to check a couple of references in the other books and ended up rereading most of V for Victory, which is certainly my favourite of the three: really good, though, to see some of the characters from Old Baggage showing up as grown adults, in a world changed in ways they could barely have imagined.

2021/154: Weave a Circle Round -- Kari Maaren

"She time travels constantly. She does it because she can’t. Every so often, the insanity spills over into my life, and I find myself doing something I can’t be doing either.” [p. 121]

Freddy Duchamp is 14, Canadian, and lives with her little sister Mel ('treacherous genius') and her detested step-brother Roland ('shambling mess'). Their parents are ... extremely hands-off, and certainly don't notice or care when some peculiar people move into the house round the corner. Josiah seems more or less normal: Cuerva Lachance (Freddy finds it impossible not to use her full name) is charismatic, eccentric and chaotic. Freddy finds them intriguing and likeable, until Josiah starts trying to be her friend at school, which interferes with Freddy's strategy of remaining below the radar of her classmates. One concussion later, Freddy wakes up a very long way from home, and discovers that Josiah and Cuerva Lachance have different names -- names that are familiar from films and books ...

(I suspect I originally wishlisted this charming YA novel because of those names, but I had forgotten my rationale by the time the price dropped: so the big reveal was a big reveal, and I would rather not spoil it for anyone else.)

This was a delight, anyway: time loops, the power of story, the tensions between chaos and order, and some excellent historical vignettes. I was reminded of some of Diana Wynne Jones' novels, and slightly of Neil Gaiman's work too. Freddy is a likeable and effective narrator, who realises over the course of the book that she needs to change, and who is instrumental in rebuilding relationships within her family as well as, y'know, making a cosmic difference. I also liked Roland's evolution from shambling mess to sharp-witted gamesmaster -- a role that becomes highly significant -- and the glimpses of Mel's problematic role in the family.

My only major criticism would be the continued absence of Freddy's mother and stepfather. In a Diana Wynne Jones novel I'd probably interpret their uninvolvement as the result of a spell (though, hmm, Time of the Ghost), but that doesn't seem to be the case here. And why have the authorities not noticed or acted?

Highly recommended, regardless of that issue: I hope to read more by Kari Maaren.

2021/153: The Christmas Murder Game -- Alexandra Benedict

She would have liked to be a snowflake in the drifts that lined the road. An individual lost among many. She’d like to not be seen ever again in a whiteout of her own life. If she always felt cold, then she wouldn’t know when the sun wasn’t shining. [loc. 1267]

Lily Armitage is, despite her inclinations, spending Christmas at Endgame House, her late aunt's mansion in the snowbound Yorkshire Dales. It might be better if her aunt Liliana was still alive, or if Lily herself didn't associate the house with her mother's Boxing Day suicide in the maze twenty-one years ago. And it would certainly be better if Lily's cousins -- mean girl Sara, withdrawn Gray, brothers Tom and Ronnie, Rachel who's brought her wife Holly -- were less toxic.

Aunt Liliana hosted an annual Christmas mystery game, with twelve clues and twelve keys. Even dead, she is domineering, and this year's game goes ahead despite her recent death. The stakes are higher now, though: not only will the winner inherit Endgame House, but Lily believes that the mystery of her own mother's death will be explained.

And then the mysterious deaths begin ...

I certainly missed a lot of the allusions and playful references here: Benedict has woven in anagrams and titles of Christmas murder mysteries throughout. I'm not sure, either, that the clues can be decoded by the reader: for me, the interest was in watching the characters react to and interpret each of the sonnet-clues. Marvellously atmospheric, very wintry (Christmas cheer is unsurprisingly thin on the ground), and with some unexpected relationships revealed as the novel draws towards a close.

Many of the characters (especially Sara) are pretty unpleasant, and those who aren't actively nasty don't have a great deal to contribute to the plot. I'm not sure I liked Lily, but she's an interesting character: a designer of baroque dresses, bisexual, introverted, trapped in her memories.

I love Alexandra Benedict's writing, but didn't enjoy this as much as The Beauty of Murder or Jonathan Dark, or the Evidence of Ghosts: those novels had supernatural aspects and an unsettled ambience, while the horrors in The Christmas Murder Game are all human.

2021/152: Lavondyss -- Robert Holdstock

'Each of you was born with memory of the same ancient event, and the abundance of later myths and legends that had developed from it...Lavondyss for you – for all of us – is what we are able to remember of ancient times ...’ [p. 398]

Having reread Mythago Wood, I found myself craving the Ice Age and the multiple circling-backs of Tallis' story in Lavondyss. Tallis is the sister of Harry Keaton, Stephen Huxley's companion in the earlier novel. Guided by a letter written by her grandfather in the margins of a book of myth and legend, she develops a rich and strange personal mythology, donning hand-made masks to channel different voices, and discovering the secret names of the fields and streams around the village where she lives. She encounters, and impresses, an aged Ralph Vaughan Williams: she misses her brother, and wants to find him again: she catches a glimpse of a dying warrior, and falls in love with him. And she tells stories that she doesn't understand ...

Lavondyss revisits and reshapes the themes of Mythago Wood: here, the siblings are bound by love instead of envy; the female protagonist is more powerful than anyone else; there is more sense of the 'present' (the 20th century) informing events, and of 20th-century thoughts being available in the deep past at the heart of the forest. And Lavondyss, that deep cold heart, is an atavistic memory of the never-ending winter of the last glacial maximum, a place of horror and honour, a place where the cruel origins of stories about princes and castles can be revealed.

Here's my review from my last reread, back in 2010. I have a clear memory of Rob telling me that it wasn't a time loop, which I found immensely comforting: but apparently I did not have that memory then, and Rob died in 2009 ... Have I created a comforting memory, or did I simply forget that conversaion back then, and remember it again more recently? .. .I also note that this time around I recalled slightly different aspects of the novel, but it was distorted out of shape: I'd thought the majority of the story took place within the wood, but Tallis doesn't enter the wood until nearly two-thirds of the way through.

2021/151: Mythago Wood -- Robert Holdstock

She was not violent, perhaps because the old man himself could not think of a woman being violent. He imposed a structure on her, disarming her, leaving her quite helpless in the forest. [p. 57]

This is a novel I return to again and again, each time finding something new. This time around I found the toxic masculinity almost overpowering: but this is, after all, a novel about tensions between father and son and between brothers. It's not an accident that the only female characters are either dead (Stephen and Christian's mother) or mythic (Guiwenneth).

In brief: the setting is the English countryside just after World War II. Ryhope Wood, apparently a small patch of ancient woodland, harbours ancient landscapes and mythic archetypes -- 'mythagos' -- who are created from the wood itself and from the collective unconscious of humans who venture into the wood. Stephen Huxley, returning from war, finds his father dead and his brother Christian mourning the death of his wife, Guiwenneth, who Stephen never met. Christian reveals that Guiwenneth was not truly human ('she had no life, no real life. She’s lived a thousand times, and she’s never lived at all') and that 'she was father's girl'. When Christian disappears into the wood, returning older and angrier to abduct another version of Guiwenneth, the stage is set for a mythic quest-narrative, with Stephen and his new friend Harry Keaton in pursuit of a myth and its origins.

There are some pseudo-scientific elements -- George Huxley experimented with electricity and hallucinogens, and he and his various correspondents eagerly discuss the prehistoric roots of the societies and stories he discovers in the wood -- but the focus is on the formation of myths and mythagos, and the ways in which stories play out again and again.

I reread this after reading Scenes from Prehistoric Life, which reminded me of the strangeness, and the resonance of Holdstock's myth-making. I hadn't revisited Mythago Wood for many years, and was surprised by how much I remembered of it. But quite quickly I realised that this wasn't the book I was craving: I wanted winter, and a female protagonist, and old memory in snow ... Onward to Lavondyss!

2021/150: Scenes from Prehistoric Life: From the Ice Age to the Coming of the Romans -- Francis Pryor

We tend to think that people in the past judged everything from a practical perspective: were certain changes going to benefit the occurrence of wild game, or the growth of cereal crops? But in reality, they would also have had an emotional response to any changes that were happening around them. [loc. 638]

Fifteen 'scenes', beginning half a million years ago (Boxgrove, Happisburgh) and concluding with snapshots of life in Roman Britain: they're not so much scenes from prehistoric life -- though there's quite a bit of informed speculation -- as scenes from an archaeologist's life, rich with anecdote and simile. I enjoy Pryor's writing (for instance, in Britain BC) and found the subjective, discursive flavour of these essays rather engaging. Pryor is at pains to point out that the inhabitants of prehistoric Britain were anatomically and neurologically the same as modern humans: that their lives were as complex and varied as our own, and that they were swayed by emotional as well as practical considerations.

I especially enjoyed the chapter on Seahenge, which contextualised the creation of the monument: at least 51 people worked on the timbers, judging by the distinct marks left by different axes. Pryor likens the cost of an axe around 2000 BC to the cost of a car around 2000 AD (a comparison I found compelling) and speculates that the larger axes were wielded by younger, stronger men, while smaller axes -- used for more precise work -- belonged to older, more experienced workers. Pulling together evidence from dendrochronology, axe-marks and the archaeological excavations at the site, Pryor depicts a ritual occurring in the spring of 2049 BC, and ties it to theories about wood representing life and stone (or, in north Norfolk, earth) representing death.

This probably isn't the best book to read about archaeological excavations, or the introduction of bronze, or neolithic burial customs: but it is a splendid book if you want to appreciate a lifetime's experience in archaeology, and a humane and compassionate perspective on those who left traces of their lives in the British landscape.

2021/149: Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times -- Katherine May

Some winters are gradual. Some winters creep up on us so slowly that they have infiltrated every part of our lives before we truly feel them. [loc. 1480]

Katherine May's book on surviving winters meteorological and spiritual feels especially apposite in this second winter of the pandemic. Her definition of wintering as 'a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider' rang true for me: in a way, much of this year been a wintering for me, and I appreciated May's exploration of self-care, of regarding the darkness as an opportunity for rest and recuperation, a time to reach out rather than hunker down, a time for craft (which is not the same as creativity) and for realigning with the rhythms of the natural world.

I did find some parts of the book -- May's journeys north in search of the aurora, her trip to Iceland, her solstice at Stonehenge, her cold-sea swimming -- less interesting than others. May is an excellent writer, lucid and lyrical, but I did not empathise with the tightness of her diamond shoes. Her acceptance and endurance of the gloom, waiting for winter to pass and spring to come, was what I found most helpful: I'm trying to reshape this winter, with its attendant melancholia, as a fallow period from which I'll emerge revitalised.

Lots of fascinating material here: the first and second sleeps of 'natural' winter nights before electricity, the winter customs of northern countries, the wildlife of the English countryside, the weird beauty of snowfall. I am reminded to recognise the year's rhythms: we've turned the year, the days are getting longer. That, despite electric light and warm houses, we are still affected by the natural cycles of the world.

Wintering was the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, December 5-9 2021: excerpts read by Melody Grove.

PS: I've just noticed that this book has two different subtitles: 'How I Learned to Flourish When Life Became Frozen' and 'The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times'. I'm not sure which came first, or why the change, but I think the former makes it seem more of a memoir, while the latter is angled towards self-help.

2021/148: The Dark Archive -- Genevieve Cogman

I’m not interested in working for someone who thinks I should be able to achieve the impossible because it makes for a better story. [p. 148]

Irene and Kai are back in the London they've made their home -- the London where great detective Vale lives and works, and pursues a master criminal known as the Professor; the London where Lord Silver holds court; the London, and Europe, in which both Kai and Irene have become targets of assassins and kidnappers. Who could be behind it all? An old enemy resurrected, or a threat that never really went away? Can Irene's irritating apprentice -- Catherine, Lord Silver's niece, whose ambition is to be the first Fae to enter the Library -- become less irritating and more useful? Can Kai's vexing and overbearing brother Shan Yuan, self-proclaimed tech genius, actually live up to his own ego? And when Vale reveals a devastating connection, is he actually telling the truth, or has his trace of Fae heritage incited him to simply create a good story?

Splendid denouement in the spaces under La Sagrada Familia; some surprising reunions; Catherine's desire to be a librarian rather than a Librarian (she loves books, not the whole keeping-the-balance-twixt-order-and-chaos routine); that showstopping revelation ... A fast and pacy read with a great cliffhanger. And yet, and yet ... the next (and currently last) in the series has been out for a fortnight and I haven't grabbed it yet. Perhaps three of this series in a month would be a surfeit: and there is (I hope) time enough.

2021/147: The Secret Chapter -- Genevieve Cogman

‘The United Kingdom?’
‘Very strongly tied to Europe, which is why CENSOR has an English name and acronym. It did attempt to leave the European Union last year, but apparently that was prompted by demonic interference. A lot of politicians were subsequently tried for treason and beheaded at the Tower of London.’ [p. 149]

The latest in Cogman's 'Invisible Library' series, set in a multiverse where each world is somewhere on the axis between order (dragons) and chaos (Fae). I always forget how much I enjoy these, and I also forget who's who and what's what ... In The Secret Chapter, Irene and Kai become involved in an art theft on a high-tech world. During a dinner party hosted by the mysterious Mr Nemo in his Caribbean supervillain lair, a heist is proposed: if Nemo's hand-picked team acquires a very specific version of Géricault's 'The Raft of the Medusa', he'll grant each member of the team (a dragon tech expert, a Fae thief, a gambler, a driver and an enforcer) an item from his personal collection. For Irene this is the only way of acquiring a book which will save the world where she went to school from a rapid descent into chaos, so naturally she accepts the challenge. What could possibly go wrong?

Answers on a postcard of Vienna, please ...

This novel introduces several new characters, some of whom I very much hope to encounter again. It also hints at some intriguing backstory concerning the history of the dragons -- secrets which the dragons would very much prefer remained secret. And there is an intriguing subplot dealing with power, conscience and rebellion. But mostly it is great fun, breathless and fast-paced and full of abrupt reversals, betrayals, alliances, and petty sniping. An entertaining read: I went straight on to the next in the series ...

2021/146: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants -- Robin Wall Kimmerer

The very facts of the world are a poem. Light is turned to sugar. Salamanders find their way to ancestral ponds following magnetic lines radiating from the earth. The saliva of grazing buffalo causes the grass to grow taller. Tobacco seeds germinate when they smell smoke. Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury. Aren’t these stories we should all know? [loc. 5324]

My 'dip-into' book for most of 2021: Kimmerer's essays and stories reward contemplation: I don't think I would have appreciated the book as much if I'd read it cover to cover without breaks.

Kimmerer is a professor of botany and forest ecology, who is also a citizen of the Potawatomi nation. She describes Braiding Sweetgrass as 'a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story' [loc. 320] and combines folk tales and mythology with a profound understanding of ecology, botany and zoology. I was particularly intrigued by the ways in which traditional First Nations practices reflect a balance, almost a symbiosis, between humans and the plants and animals on which they rely. For example, the Nechesne people of Oregon greeted the annual return of salmon to the river, but didn't start fishing them until the fourth day after the first fish had been seen. This ceremony meant that more fish made it upstream into the forests, bringing nitrogen and nutrients as well as spawning the next generation. I was struck by the reciprocity inherent in this approach: a gift for a gift, a responsibility towards, well, food.

Kimmerer writes powerfully of her rediscovery of her own heritage: learning the language of her ancestors and marvelling at the world-view it facilitates. I shared her joy at discovering the word 'Puhpowee... “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.” As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term'. [loc. 996] And I was moved to tears by some of her descriptions of the wounded natural world, of the damage that has been done: some of it irreversible, but not all. Kimmerer's grief for what's been lost is honest, raw and painful, but she has practical suggestions for repair and reparation.

There were points at which it would have been easy to tip into sentimentality, especially when Kimmerer echoes the animism, and the anthropomorphism, of myth and story. But I felt this was balanced by her scientific background and by her knack for interpolating fascinating facts. This book made me want to walk in the woods, to immerse myself in the natural world, to turn my back on the city and marvel at the worlds in a yard of hedgerow, a muddy riverbank, a rotting log. The urge to roam is less practical these days than before the pandemic, but I am determined to reroot myself, however briefly.

Fulfils the 'Memoir by an Indigenous Woman' prompt for the Reading Women Challenge 2021.

2021/145: The Merlin Conspiracy -- Diana Wynne Jones

Blest London was quite a bit different because they’d never had the Great Fire. There were thatched cottages in Mayfair and the parks were all in strange places. [p. 312]

(Re)read immediately after Deep Secret: my memories, as usual with rereads lately, were extremely vague, but I'm not sure I noticed on first reading (nearly 20 years ago) how very different it is to Deep Secret. For one thing, it comprises two first-person narratives, both from teenagers: Arianrhod, known as Roddy, who's part of a peripatetic royal court in the Britain-analogue Isles of Blest; and Nick Mallory, late of Bristol and the Empire of Koryfos, who is still keen to be a Magid but who seems to have completely forgotten his beloved sister Maree ...

Roddy and her friend Grundo (whose mother is up to No Good) discover a dastardly plot against the Merlin, who has, in this world, equal status with the Archbishop of Canterbury. They become separated from the Court and embark on an epic quest-journey around the Isles of Blest, hoping for aid from several of Roddy's powerful relatives. (I had forgotten just how Powerful her grandfather was.) Eventually they invoke a wizard, and get Nick, who is still unable to travel between worlds on his own, but has nevertheless managed to get into plenty of trouble. Notably, he's apparently incurred the enmity of the powerful wizard Romanov, who lives on 'an island made from at least ten different universes in at least seven different centuries' because he is avoiding his (ex-)wife.

It's fair to say that Nick and Roddy do not immediately hit it off. There are plenty of distractions, though: dragons, imbued silverware, city spirits, a prehistoric ghost with a shattered hip (about whom I would happily read whole novels), and several personable animals including an elephant named Mini.

A friend suggests that the difference in tone and ambience is because this was published and marketed for a younger audience than Deep Secret, which was apparently intended for an adult audience. I still think it's odd that Nick has so thoroughly forgotten Maree that she doesn't rate a single mention in The Merlin Conspiracy. I did love the specifically British mythology and folklore, though, and the glimpses of this other not-Britain with its straighter coastlines and huge white church where Nick expects to see St Paul's Cathedral, and the royal Progress which keeps the realm healthy. There is also a subplot concerning magical influence, slavery and consent, which I think is well-pitched for a young adult audience without being grossly simplified.

And hey, it's Diana Wynne Jones: it felt like greeting an old friend after too long an absence.

2021/144: Deep Secret -- Diana Wynne Jones

...here you can turn five corners and still not make a square. [p. 117]

Reread for Lockdown Book Club. I first read this fairly soon after it came out, in 1997: I recall enjoying it a lot, but I hadn't felt the urge to reread, and had (as usual) forgotten a lot of the details of plot and character. I'd also let some period-typical attitudes (most blatantly the fat-shaming) and dated technology (faxes! backup discs!) wash over me. The past is a foreign country...

Rupert Venables, 26, is a Magid, charged with urging Earth (and some other worlds in the multiverse) 'Ayewards', towards magic and good. It's a hefty task even before his mentor Stan dies: and when Rupert is left to find a replacement Magid, assisted only by Stan's disembodied voice -- and taste for Baroque choral music -- he begins to feel out of his depth. Politics and lost heirs in the Koryfonic Empire, also in Rupert's remit, complicate matters: so does his weird neighbour Andrew. And when it turns out that Fate has drawn all five of the possible Magid candidates to an SF convention, for ease of assessment, Rupert finds himself very definitely floundering.

One of the Magid candidates is Maree Mallory, to whom Rupert takes an instant dislike: Maree is adopted, does not get along with her stepmother Janine, and is plagued by dreams of a thornbush goddess -- who may be related to the deity worshipped by the assassinated emperor of the Koryfonic Empire ...

All of which sounds horribly tangled in summary, but -- as is so often the case with Diana Wynne Jones' books -- fits together like the gears of some intricate mechanism. Deep Secret was marketed as a novel for adults, and it's arguably more complex than many of her YA novels: there are multiple viewpoints, unevenly represented, and several of the major events of the novel happen off-page, reported (with variable reliability) by the characters. There are some familiar tropes, such as the wicked stepmother and the ancient, malevolent goddess.

But the joy of this novel, for me, was the depiction of SF fandom in its natural setting. The book club consensus recognises at least one of the characters as someone we know in real life, and we have all stayed in convention hotels which feel non-Euclidian, unmoored from reality, and prone to sudden shifts. Deep Secret is a delight, despite its sometimes unkind depiction of fandom ('vast bosoms', filkers, social ineptitude, general weirdness): I was immediately eager to reread the sequel, The Merlin Conspiracy ...

2021/143: Mexican Gothic -- Silvia Moreno-Garcia

“I suppose now you realize we are not like other people and this house is not like other houses." [loc. 2971]

The setting is Mexico in the 1950s, opening in Mexico City but focussed on an isolated mansion near a decaying mining town. Noemí Taboada is a glamorous young socialite who enjoys parties, boyfriends, driving a convertible and studying anthropology. She's not best pleased to be summoned home from a party by her father, who is concerned about the wellbeing of her cousin Catalina. Catalina was always the imaginative one, beguiled by Gothic literature and fairytales: her recent letters imply that her English husband, Virgil Doyle, is planning to poison her. Noemí is packed off to High Place, the gloomy, sprawling home of Doyle and his family, to determine whether there's any truth in Catalina's fears.

Noemí is an interesting protagonist: somewhat impulsive, prone to rule-breaking, independent in thought and manner, but with a weary understanding of women's roles in patriarchal Mexican (and English) society. She realises the need to ingratiate herself with the Doyles: "women needed to be liked or they’d be in trouble. A woman who is not liked is a bitch, and a bitch can hardly do anything: all avenues are closed to her". [loc. 807] Catalina, by contrast, is two-dimensional. Her illness, and the brevity of Noemí's visits with her, don't give much opportunity for character to be revealed.

There's a distinct sense of menace to High Place, and a very real -- though far from predictable -- threat to Noemí and Catalina: but I found Moreno-Garcia's prose heavy and distancing. This is an atmospheric novel, with a well-paced ramping-up of mystery and dread: the comparisons to du Maurier are well-deserved, and I was also reminded of Shirley Jackson and her gift for revealing the terror of the ordinary. Yet Mexican Gothic didn't engage me as much as I'd hoped.

2021/142: Falling in Love with Hominids -- Nalo Hopkinson

...anywhere there’s water, especially rioting water, it can tattle tales to your mother. [loc. 2545]

Eighteen short stories by Nalo Hopkinson, all with some element of the fantastic, some quite slight, many foregrounding young black women, several featuring queer and poly relationships. There are stories of metamorphosis (I especially liked 'The Smile on the Face', which riffs on the idea that if you swallow a cherry stone a tree starts growing inside you) and transformations of other works ('Shift' is a reimagining of Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' from Caliban's perspective). SF tropes such as time travel, zombies, and genetic engineering are twisted into unexpected shapes, and elements of Caribbean folklore (Mama d'Lo, douen children) are given 'contemporary' settings.

That all sounds like a list: I'm not good at reviewing story collections, especially single-author collections where there is, perhaps, less contrast between stories and styles than in a multi-author anthology. I generally limited my reading to one story per session, but some of the stories have admixed in my memory.

That said, 'The Smile on the Face' -- which is a story about adolescence, about the cruelty of high-school bitchery, and about learning to love yourself the way you are -- left a powerful impression on me: definitely my favourite of the stories in here, though I suspect that others will deepen with rereading. 'The Easthound', a zombie-apocalypse story in which children, immune to a virus that transforms adults, survive in the ruins of a Canadian city, had a particularly effective and poignant twist. And 'Emily Breakfast', in which cats fly and chickens are descended from dragons, was a charming and cheering fantasy story with a queer setting.

Fulfils the 'Short Story Collection by a Caribbean Author' prompt of the Reading Women Challenge 2021.

2021/141: Dark Pattern -- Andrew Mayne

“I can’t find her in a lab,” I explain. “That’s not the way the Dark Pattern works. Sometimes you can see it. Other times you just have to be it.”
“The Dark Pattern? Do you even listen to yourself?” [loc. 3922]

Dr Theo Cray is on the trail of a serial killer who works in hospitals; he's also plagued by the fear that he's running out of time. He's certainly slipping up more than before, making mistakes because he's so convinced by his own theories. It takes a visit to his old mentor to shake him out of his own arrogance -- and even then he's convinced that only he can solve the case.

Theo is definitely falling apart in this novel, but he's still fascinating. I was surprised by the ending, but not wholly convinced. I've enjoyed this series -- even when, as with viruses and now hospitals, it's a little too relevant to Real Life -- and found in the four books a tragic arc of rise and fall, hubris, a good man trying to prevent evil and making moral compromises of his own. The scientific asides are excellent, too. Enjoyable, interesting, informative and well-written: I may return to Mayne's work, but for now I need more cheerful fare.

2021/140: Murder Theory -- Andrew Mayne

No good deed involving pseudo–mass murder and cannibalism goes unpunished. [loc. 2915]

Dr Theo Cray is called in by the FBI to investigate an inexplicable murder, at a site where murdered bodies were buried -- the victims of the villain in Looking Glass, which leads Theo to wonder if there's some connection to his previous case. The apparent perpetrator claims to recall nothing, and all his colleagues insist that the man they knew wasn't a murderer. But there's something weird showing up in his MRI. Theo also realises that there's a mysterious individual visiting murder sites. Could he have a rival -- or a fan?

This novel deals with viruses, which is a little too close to the bone at present. Still, I found Theo's investigations fascinating: and I watched his increasingly extreme, and increasingly macabre, methods with horrified fascination.

Lots of interesting science here, including an explanation of the Viking 'sunstone' (used for navigation in medieval times) and some speculation about the effects of our internal biomes, which made me feel somewhat queasy.

Ends on a fairly major cliffhanger, so I needed to read the fourth and final in the series ...

2021/139: House of Names -- Colm Tóibín

As they fade from the earth, the gods do not hover over with their haunting, whistling sound. I notice it here, the silence around death. They have departed, the ones who oversaw death. They have gone and they will not be back. [loc. 99]

Based on, but not exactly a retelling of, the Oresteia. Tóibín depicts a world without gods or furies, in which 'what you did is all you have'. The novel is in three parts, with three narrators -- Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra -- and tells the story of Iphigenia's sacrifice, the murder of Agamemnon, and the vengeance wreaked by his children. Clytemnestra's first-person narrative was, for me, the most effective: her fear and misery as she's imprisoned under a rock for three days, her sense that the time of the gods have passed and that Agamemnon alone is to blame for the murder of their daughter, her sheer icy rage. Orestes' story, told in the third person, is oddly flat. He is taken from the city for 'protection', imprisoned in a strict house with other boys, and escapes with his friend Leander to live idyllically by the sea. Only when he returns to the palace, and to his mother, does it seem that he has any agency. And Electra, whose story is also told in the third person, seems one-dimensional.

There is some beautiful writing here, and some achingly painful depictions of grief, bitterness and rage. It matters that the time of the gods has passed, and that the characters must take responsibility for their own actions. But the novel feels claustrophobic, unanchored. There is no mention of Troy, and little description of the locations through which the characters move. I was thrown by several seeming anachronisms -- for example, people wear nightclothes, drink from glasses, herd sheep -- and though the absence of gods and furies drove the story, there did not seem to be anything in their place.

2021/138: The White Magic Five and Dime: A Tarot Mystery -- Steve Hockensmith

The cards looked like The Lord of the Rings as illustrated by Salvador Dalí. Most of them packed in enough kooky symbolism for a dozen Lady Gaga videos. [p. 87]

Alanis McLachlan, a telemarketeer, is surprised to learn that her estranged mother has bequeathed her a New Age shop and tarot-reading business -- the White Magic Five and Dime -- in the small town of Berdache, Arizona. Her mother, who went by a variety of names, was an accomplished con artist, and Alanis (not her real name), who grew up playing key roles in her mother's scams, is pretty sure the tarot-reading was just another ruse. But someone murdered her mother, and she's increasingly sure that it wasn't a burglary gone wrong. She persuades charming detective Josh Logan to help her investigate three people with grievances against her mother -- a gullible woman who's paid through the nose for relationship advice, a family whose haunted jewellery has gone missing, and an elderly gentleman who claims he was her mother's fiance. Each has a tale to tell, and there are also plenty of flashbacks to Alanis' childhood: it quickly becomes obvious that Alanis' mother had a plethora of enemies, and deserved them all. Does her teenaged apprentice, Clarice, who's living in the apartment above the store, hold the key to the murder?

I picked this from the Kindle Unlimited list on a whim, and enjoyed it more than I'd expected. Alanis is a smart, cynical and extremely perceptive narrator, which would not endear her to me if that was all she was. There's a vulnerable child in there, though, and a woman who is increasingly drawn to the tarot and its symbolism, despite initially writing it off as 'hogwash'.

I think this is the only novel I've ever read which features a tarot reading at gunpoint. Kudos!

2021/137: No One Is Talking About This -- Patricia Lockwood

“A minute means something to her, more than it means to us. We don’t know how long she has—I can give them to her, I can give her my minutes.” Then, almost angrily, “What was I doing with them before?” [loc. 1981]

This is a dense, concentrated novel, a challenge to review. Part One is about life online, specifically 'the portal' (which may be the whole of the internet, or just social media, or just Twitter which demands compact pithy posts). The nameless narrator has achieved fame via a viral meme, and travels the world talking about the portal and interacting with people, especially those who are exactly the same amount of online. It's a life lived more on-screen than off, artificial and self-referential, magnifying the importance of the portal, divorcing its afficionados from reality and from honest emotion. 'This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?' [loc. 289]

Part Two, which is 'autofiction' (i.e. based on actual events experienced by the author), is equally intense, more harrowing, and utterly real. A child is born with severe genetic defects: she is not expected to survive: the narrator devotes her time and attention to the child. Is it facile to say that the narrator regains a sense of proportion regarding her online life, her portal persona(e)? Is it naive to say reality, with all its messiness and pain and anguish, trumps the glossy superficialities of the internet?

Lockwood's prose is rich, precise, sometimes ringing with self-mockery and sometimes soberingly sincere. I found the first half hilarious and horribly relevant to my interests: the second half was distressing, though often beautiful. Individual sentences captivated me: I'm still pondering whether the novel as a whole did so.

Handy guide to all the memes!

Why had she entered the portal in the first place? Because she wanted to be a creature of pure call and response: she wanted to delight and to be delighted. [loc. 2932]

2021/136: The Night Hawks -- Elly Griffiths

'...the body will turn out to be thousands of years old.’
‘It might not,’ says Judy. ‘Stranger things have happened.’
‘They certainly have,’ says Nelson. ‘And mostly to us.’ [loc. 231]

I'm in that strange reading mood where the familiar is best, and where if I like something I want more of the same thing: hence reading this novel straight after the previous one in the series ...

The eponymous Night Hawks are a group of metal detectorists who prefer to roam the countryside after dark. One night they discover a dead body on the beach, almost on top of a tangle of bones and metal. The skeleton is Bronze Age: the more recent corpse might be an illegal immigrant. Ruth Galloway, who's now back in Norfolk (minus Frank) and Head of Archaeology at the University of North Norfolk, attends the scene with her obnoxious new colleague David Brown, who's full of stories about how the Beaker people almost wiped out the original Neolithic population of Britain by introducing a 'new virus'. (Why, yes, this novel was published during the Covid pandemic.) Ruth does not feel that blaming migrants for disease is wise -- even when an apparently-healthy young man, one of the Night Hawks, dies suddenly of an unknown illness. When the Night Hawks are involved in more suspicious deaths (an apparent murder-suicide at an isolated house) Ruth and Nelson -- with the usual supporting cast -- begin to uncover an unsettling conspiracy and a lot of unexpected connections.

Again, a good and well-paced read: there's much more sense of place in this novel, with its familiar Norfolk saltmarsh setting, than there was in the previous Cambridge-focussed novel. Some high-stakes events here, and some very topical issues. And Michelle gets the spotlight for a change! I'm looking forward to the next in the series, due in 2022.

2021/135: The Lantern Men -- Elly Griffiths

'...I got the idea from the Lantern Men. We were a light in the darkness, guiding women onto the right path. Sometimes the kindest thing is to save the women from the world.’ [p. 335]

Set two years after The Stone Circle: Dr Ruth Galloway is now living in Cambridge with Frank the American, plus Katie and Flint. She's teaching at a Cambridge college and has just finished her latest book at Grey Walls, a writers' retreat, where she found a friend in serene Crissy, who runs the place. Meanwhile, back in Norfolk, DCI Harry Nelson is sulking about Ruth's departure, and vexed by a murderer -- Ivor March -- who has never confessed to his crimes, and who will only disclose the location of more bodies if Ruth is in charge of the excavation ...

This was an enjoyable read, and my vague notions of whodunnit and what they actually did all turned out wrong, which is always refreshing. As usual with this series, the focus is as much on the recurring characters as on the crime and archaeology: Nelson, Ruth, Michelle, Phil, Shona, and Katie have all changed over the years (Katie is turning into an interesting young woman) and there's more, in this novel, of Nelson's daughters, and his domestic life.

The murder mystery is well-plotted and features some intriguing characters and some uncannily accurate intuitions: there is also a strong sub-plot concerning Grey Walls and the artistic commune at its core. I found The Lantern Men very readable, with an ending that had me immediately starting to read the next in the series.

One minor gripe: bisexual erasure. "Why would an older, gay man socialise with a young woman? ... Ailsa married Leonard, even though she must have known that he was gay. ..."

2021/134: A Drop of Ink -- Megan Chance

“Your story isn’t about spells and magic. It’s about sisters. When you focus on them, you are quite brilliant. Curses don’t belong to you, Mr. Calina. You should take them out of the story.”
“And leave them to you,” I said.
A nod. “I understand them better.”
“Why is that?”
“I’m under one,” she said, meeting my gaze. “Can’t you tell?” [p. 256]

Sixty years after the rainy summer holiday by the shores of Lake Geneva -- the venue for the famous ghost-story competition which spawned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and John Polidori's The Vampyre -- another group of five passionate artists gathers at the villa. The famous writer Bayard Sonnier is there with his secretary, Giovanni Calina, who grew up in the slums of Bethnal Green but is hoping for Bayard's help and patronage. Descending on them comes a party of three: American sisters Adelaide and Louisa Wentworth, and Adelaide's lover, the poet Julian Estes.

Personally I would not like to spend a rainy weekend, much less a fortnight, with any of these people. Bayard is smug, self-indulgent and hypocritical; Calina (known as Vanni, one of the two narrative voices) is blind to how little Bayard thinks of him, and to how others view him as a way of getting close to his employer; Louisa is mercurial, selfish and immature; Julian is a laudanum addict, unfaithful to Adelaide (for whom he left his pregnant wife) and arrogant; and Adelaide, the other narrative voice and probably the most likeable of the protagonists, is deeply depressed after a miscarriage. (She was also accused of murdering Julian's wife Emily: I'm not sure we ever discover how Emily did die.) But this volatile gathering does provide a great deal of drama, some of it echoing incidents in the lives of Shelley and Byron's group.

I found this quite a harrowing read, because the dual viewpoints gave an overview of the situation which I don't think was available to any of the individuals caught up in it. I felt immense sympathy for Vanni and Adelaide, and wonder if I would have felt more kindly towards Louisa or Bayard if they'd been given voice. (Pretty sure I would not have liked Julian.) Adelaide, whose own writing has been suppressed by Julian's insistence that she's his muse, finds a friend -- and maybe more -- in Vanni; Vanni, meanwhile, is writing furiously, illicitly, both inspired by and fighting against Bayard.

It's gloriously Gothic, with mistaken identities, treachery, fearsome weather and a laudanum flask that's as much a symbol as an actuality. The codependence of the Wentworth sisters is horribly claustrophobic, and Vanni's resentment of the others' privileges is acutely sour. This really drew me in, and I'll read more by this author -- though I note I didn't have the same reaction to her earlier novel, Bone River, read last year.

2021/133: The Book of Atrix Wolfe -- Patricia McKillip

...the Hunter lifted a fistful of torn pages to his teeth, bit into them. Blood ran down his mouth, as if words bled. Talis swallowed, his throat paper-dry. [loc. 1400]

Twenty years ago, the mage Atrix Wolfe created a monster to stop a war. Peace came at a terrible cost: death, infertility, a mute child scrubbing pots in the castle kitchen. Atrix Wolfe eschewed magic and shapechanging, and turned away from humanity, working as a healer of animals in an isolated mountain village. But then Talis, heir to one of the kingdoms saved and doomed by Atrix Wolfe, discovers an ancient spell book, where the words on the page don't mean what they say.

I am not generally an afficionado of high fantasy, but I've loved McKillip's prose since I discovered the Riddle-Master trilogy at an impressionable age. This is very much in the same style -- lush, rich, allusive, mythic -- and though I didn't especially empathise with any of the characters (except possibly the mute, amnesiac Saro, staring into the cauldron as she washes saucepans) I enjoyed the sensory richness of the world in which the story plays out. The tangle of stories -- Atrix Wolfe, Talis, his brother Burne, Saro, the Hinter -- resolves in a satisfactory way. Justice is achieved; there is a brighter future for the kingdoms of Pelucir and Chaumenard; Saro remembers herself; the Hunter, who is truly terrifying and who echoes many forest-myths, finds mercy.

An intriguing allegory for weapons of mass destruction, and a moral story about the power of words and the need for precision: I don't think it will end up as one of my favourite of McKillip's novels, but in several ways it feels more mature, and more grounded in the 'real' world, than her earlier work.

A note for non-American readers: pronounced with an American accent, 'Saro' and 'sorrow' are homonyms. I was confused by the characters' confusion until I realised this!

2021/132: One Day All This Will Be Yours -- Adrian Tchaikovsky

...it’s horrible out there, in history. It always was, even before we shattered it to bits. It’s full of war and plague, starvation, intolerance and misery. [loc. 529]

A cheerful tale of the postepochalypse, narrated by an unnamed veteran of the Causality War, which destroyed time itself. Our narrator is determined to maintain world peace forever, despite the many visitors he receives -- time travellers like himself, trying to see how far forward they can travel, who reach 'this last perfect day before the rest of time happens'.

Our narrator is not in favour of time travel, despite the many pleasures of messing around with time: Wordsworth writing about trilobites instead of daffodils, 'that peculiarly tangled timeline where William Shakespeare, Helen Mirren and Orson Welles got together to make a Transformers movie', meeting notable figures from history, and acquiring exotic pets. Miffly is an absolute delight, especially when she chases Hitler round a field. (Allosaurs can run faster than Hitlers.)

There is also a delightful enemies-to-lovers / arranged marriage romance, some splendid genre in-jokes ('a mint-in-box set of Ticket to Ride, the rare Hutchinson Games edition from where Europe split into a thousand different states'; a meeting highly reminiscent of 'All You Zombies'; a Wellsian chap with an excellent moustache), and, beneath the snark and cynicism, a profoundly damaged and melancholy character.

I find Tchaikovsky something of a Marmite author: I certainly don't love everything he's written, and have been disappointed in the past. This was the opposite of disappointment, though, a novella that I enjoyed much more than I'd expected, and shall read again when I need an appealing villain and a playful plot.

2021/131: The Haunting Season: Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Nights -- Pulley / Collins / Hurley et al

...his haste had nothing to do with the man’s glinting eyes, or the way the shadows huddled and plotted on the wall behind him. [p. 9: 'A Study in Black and White', Bridget Collins]

A collection of eight ghost stories -- well, are they all ghost stories? They're all wintry, all chilling, and all quite different from one another. The stories are mostly by women (Andrew Michael Hurley being the exceptioon) and are all set in Britain: some are contemporary and, I think, none are set earlier than the nineteenth century.

I bought this for Natasha Pulley's 'The Eel Singers' (featuring characters from The Watchmaker of Filigree Street) and was not disappointed: this was the story that appealed most to me, with ancient lore and desolate Fens and quaint folk customs. I also found 'Monster' by Elizabeth Macneal (Victorian fossil-hunting with a dark twist) very effective, and Andrew Michael Hurley's 'The Hanging of the Greens' (Christmas, a vicar, an alcoholic and a desolate farmhouse), though it felt slight on first reading, has stuck in my head: more about the ritual than the ghost-flavoured wrapping.

This is not to say that the other stories are weak. The Haunting Season is very much the kind of anthology where one dips in between other reading, rather than reading start to finish: I think the stories I remember less about are the ones I did not read 'in isolation'. But I do remember images: a deadly game of chess, an out-of-control wheelchair, a woman crouched over a crib, a reflection in a blinded window ... Some splendid writing and deliciously chilling atmosphere: odd humour, Gothic tropes and several female protagonists. I bought this at full price and feel it was worth it.

For added entertainment, here's Amazon's categorisations for The Haunting Season, one of which is appropriate:
1 in Literary Victorian Criticism
2 in Historical Fiction Short Stories
2 in Religious Fiction Classics.

2021/130: The Heart of the Moon -- Tanith Lee

To lose love was a very terrible thing. To lose affection for one’s own self – this must be worse. For you could, at least in your mind, move far off from others. But from yourself you never could, until death released you. [loc 1161]

A novella ('The Heart of the Moon') coupled with a short story ('The Dry Season'): I hadn't read either of these before, and they contrast one another excellently.

'The Heart of the Moon' is set in a secondary world reminiscent of ancient Greece: Clirando, on discovering that her lover Thestus is having an affair with her best friend, Araitha, bests them both in combat and sends them into exile. Araitha, in return, curses Clirando never to sleep again -- and when the ship she sailed on is wrecked, Clirando has no hope of the curse being lifted. She is sent on a holy mission to Moon Isle, where a mysterious conjunction takes place once every seventeen years. There, Clirando meets a number of disconcerting entities, and falls in love with Zemetrious, who's also tormented by his past. A spiritual journey, an inn-room with only one bed, and a psychological resolution: classic Lee.

'The Dry Season' is also set in a world with echoes of antiquity, in this case Imperial Rome -- the Remusa featured in some of Lee's other work. Seteva is a military commander who falls in love with a young woman who's about to be sacrificed. He does not listen to the excellent advice he is given. No good comes of it.

I have loved Tanith Lee's work since I encountered her writing when I was in primary school. Given the sheer volume of novels, stories, plays and screenplays she produced, it's not surprising that I am still, six years after her death, discovering new fiction by her. I don't regard either of these stories as representing her best work, and I didn't enjoy them as much as I had hoped: but they are strong stories and it's good to see them in print.

2021/129: The Crow Folk -- Mark Stay

‘You’re the one who risked a demonic incursion to win best pumpkin at the village fair.’ [loc. 2647]

The setting is Woodville, a small Kentish village, during the Second World War. The protagonist is Faye Bright, seventeen (a period-typical seventeen, rather young for her age by contemporary standards), who's just discovered that her dead mother was a witch. The antagonist is Pumpkinhead, a former scarecrow who has brought other scarecrows -- the Crow Folk -- to life and is determined to emancipate them. ("We ain't their slaves no more.") Faye is a capable young woman: a keen bellringer, she is also an Air Raid Precaution warden ("Put that light out!") though the Local Defence Volunteers -- later to be renamed the Home Guard -- won't accept her application, what with her being female. Faye also helps her dad run the local pub, where she gets to hear all the gossip, and encounters the village witches.

It's a somewhat soft-focus, nostalgic version of wartime, though full of evocative details such as the ban on bell-ringing, the removal of signposts, and so on. Most of the characters are pleasant enough, and there's plenty of humour: there are also intriguing hints of a larger magical society. It didn't really engage me, though, perhaps because I was expecting a darker story.

2021/128: A Free Man of Color -- Barbara Hambly

It had been a French city then, with the French understanding of who, and what, the free colored actually were: a race of not-quite-acknowledged cousins, neither African nor European, but property holders, artisans, citizens. [loc. 2034]

In 1817, Benjamin January left New Orleans for Paris. In 1833, after the death of his wife, he returns to a city that has changed in his absence -- and not for the better. January is the eponymous 'free man of color': born a slave but freed as a child, he is a dark-skinned Black man, trained as both a surgeon and a musician. In New Orleans, with its complex hierarchy of Blackness (mulatto, quadroon, octoroon) and its institutional plaçage -- a civil, extralegal union between a white man and a mixed-race woman -- January has to readjust to being treated as an inferior. He has to allow a white man to strike him without raising a hand in his own defense. And when a quadroon woman is murdered (with January apparently being the last person to see her alive) he has little chance of justice, unless he finds it for himself.

I think I read a novel in this series a long time ago: I don't remember much about it, and that may be because, like all the best series, there is a strong core cast of characters who become familiar to the reader. Jumping in at the deep end means flailing without context. This time, I started at the beginning (thanks to Lockdown Bookclub) and very much enjoyed this well-written, well-researched novel. Given the times we live in, and the fact that Barbara Hambly is white, I was surprised not to read reviews about cultural appropriation, racism, privilege: but Hambly treats her subject and her characters with respect. She doesn't shy from the more horrific aspects of slavery and racism, but also doesn't dwell exclusively on this side of the story. Bad things happen to good people, true, but good things happen too, and there are moments of beauty and peace even in January's memories of life as a slave.

The murder mystery is suitably twisty, the characters -- especially the marvellous Prussian fencing master, Mayerling -- intriguing, and the descriptions of 19th-century New Orleans (a city I visited just once, years before Katrina) evocative and compelling. I have every intention of reading more in the series.

Oh, and from the Afterword: "All my thanks and humble gratitude go to Octavia Butler for her time and consideration in reading the original of this manuscript and for her invaluable comments."

2021/127: Tam Lin -- Pamela Dean

If you were in the habit of vanishing under a hill into a realm where time stood still, then, supposing you wanted to live in the world again -- and after all, one must do something -- you might very well decide to go to college to catch up on what the world had been doing. Adolescents are awkward; they know nothing; nobody is surprised at any ignorance they display. Mingle with college students and nobody would notice you twice. [loc. 6227]

Reread again: I adored this when I first read it in the second millennium (review from 1998) but was less enthusiastic when I next read it (review from 2015). I think I may have attained some kind of equilibrium this time around: I admired and enjoyed the novel while remaining aware of its flaws. And heavens, the protagonists are all so very young: teenagers, college-age students, all dramatic gestures and a propensity for quoting Great Literature at the drop of a hat.

Though not all the teenagers are teenagers, and not all of the Classics department are wholly human ...

I especially enjoyed the frequent scenes of play-going (Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy et cetera) this time around, what with having been deprived of live theatre by the plague. And I found myself paying much more attention to the Shakespearean trio, with their odd assumptions and beliefs, and their clothes smelling of herbs ("Janet wished they would wash with chemicals like normal people" [loc. 6526]).

Worth noting that Tam Lin, published in 1991, is set in the early 1970s: reading it in 2021, it's effectively historical fiction. I wonder how the story would work in a contemporary setting ...

2021/126: The Lost Sun -- Tessa Gratton

Everyone across the United States of Asgard will be watching the ritual in Philadelphia as his priests spread the ashes from his death pyre into the roots of the giant New World Tree. Cameras will flash, the seethers will sing, and everyone will wait as—slowly, slowly—Baldur the Beautiful climbs hale and whole out of his own ashes: new, golden, and alive. [p. 29]

This novel, highly relevant to my interest in Norse mythology, was published in 2015: how have I been oblivious to its existence until now?!

The Lost Sun is first in the 'United States of Asgard' series, set in an alternate world where North America was colonised by Norse settlers instead of Europeans. Their gods came with them: Odin is involved with the House of Congress, Thor kills mountain trolls when they menace the human population, Loki drives an ice-cream van ... And every Asgardian vows allegiance to a god -- except for those like Soren Bearskin, whose father succumbed to berserker frenzy and killed thirteen people, and who has no choice but is pledged to Odin because of his own berserker nature. Soren (who's Black) is attracted to his schoolmate Astrid, daughter of a renowned prophetess: but he doesn't expect to take a road trip across the United States of Asgard with her, in search of Baldur, whose annual resurrection has not occurred.

The Norse-flavoured USA was splendid: Gratton has tweaked history and culture in both obvious and subtle ways, retaining older names for the states, or rather Kingstates (Laflorida, Mizizibi, Kansa, Nebrasge). There is a LEGO model of the Rainbow Bridge; kids choose a Hallowblot sacrifice from the martyr store; that famous band from England was called the Quarrymen; Biblists worship a god who was resurrected, and tend to pledge to Baldur; there are pygmy mammoths and hill trolls on the Great Plains, and we encounter the wolf Fenrir in a surprising form. The Asgardians have vowed to coexist with non-humans (though the original inhabitants of the North American continent seem to have fared rather less well, at least initially): their international diplomacy is surprisingly pacifist, though young men are still sent off to the desert to die.

I definitely want to read more about this world, but I didn't find Soren and Astrid's romance either credible or engaging. It's the only aspect of the novel that felt 'young adult' to me, and it is very much an instant, soulmate-style bond. I am pleased to report that it does not end predictably. Other plot strands (Fenrir, Idun, lady berserkers et cetera) were more satisfying, and I look forward to discovering how those stories develop.

2021/125: Get a Life, Chloe Brown -- Talia Hibbert

He wanted to find every friend who’d ever ditched her... and force them all to walk barefoot across a room full of Legos for the rest of their lives. [p. 243]

One day, Chloe Brown is almost hit by a car: she chooses to take this as a message from the universe, to the effect of 'get a life so your eulogy won't be boring." Accordingly, she moves out of the family home into a block of flats somewhere in South Nottinghamshire, where she intends to work on her 'Get a Life' list. This includes a motorbike ride, a drunken night out, meaningless sex, and 'do something bad'. She is certain that the gorgeous Redford Morgan, caretaker at the flats, can assist with at least some of these, even though he seems to have an instant aversion to her. Chloe -- who suffers from fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and migraine, amongst other invisible disabilities -- is fascinated by Red's art, and by his tattoos and motorbike. But as she gets to know him, she realises that he has issues of his own.

I liked this a lot: Chloe is smart and determined, far from a victim despite her physical limitations, and if she hadn't already won me over by the time she rescued a cat from a tree, that would have done it. ("Well done, human! miaowed the cat. You’re a total badass!"). I found Red a fascinating romantic hero: he gets lost in the flow of his art, is triggered by memories of past emotional trauma, and is willing to admit that he's wrong. Two damaged (but indefatigable) people, learning how to fit into one another's lives and how to tell each other what hurts, physically or mentally. There are some communication issues, in both directions, but Red and Chloe overcome them.

Get a Life, Chloe Brown is also very funny -- Chloe's narrative in particular is a delight -- and I'm looking forward to reading the other two novels in the 'Brown Sisters' trilogy, each of which deals with one of Chloe's eccentric / charming sisters.

2021/124: Shadow of a Lady -- Jane Aiken Hodge

Miss Tillingdon was always a little shocked by Helen’s interest in the one-time Emmy Hart. She believed that women should be liberated, but not, perhaps, quite so liberated as Lady Hamilton. [p. 41]

Labelled as a Regency romance, but to my mind it's neither: it's set in the 1780s, and the romance is secondary to the historical narrative. Helen Telfair has sworn never to marry. She is due to inherit a great deal of money when she comes of age, and she intends to set up house with her friend Miss Tillingdon. Then her mother falls ill, and she and Helen accompany Helen's father, a naval captain, to the Mediterranean. Captain Telfair assures the ladies that they will be quite safe: in this, he is incorrect. Helen finds herself in a terrible quandary, and marriage to the dilettante (and very probably homosexual) Lord Merritt seems the only solution. Then, of course, she must face the man she could have loved, to whom she cannot explain the reason for her marriage. And, once ashore in Naples, she finds herself in the company of her childhood 'angel', a beautiful woman who once danced on a table for the entertainment of some dissolute aristocrats: Lady Emma Hamilton, wife of the British Ambassador.

Lots of naval action, double-crossing, perfidy, bad behaviour and poor parenting. Helen does seem prone to dropping people when their faults become evident: I don't think she ever writes to Miss Tillingdon to say that her plans have changed; she is immensely grateful for the company of Charlotte in the first days of her marriage, but begins to find her company grating; and though by the end of the novel she has every reason to distrust and fear Lord Merritt, she is never really appreciative of the fact that he's saved her reputation and perhaps her life.

The novel seemed to end very suddenly, in a flurry of action and resolution. An epilogue might have helped...

I found the historical aspects of the novel more compelling than Helen's story, though it's interesting to see the everyday effects of revolution, war and volcanic eruption -- and the efforts of Sir William Hamilton on behalf of the British -- from the perspective of a lonely and desperate Englishwoman. Not one of Aiken Hodge's best, though.

2021/123: Paladin's Hope -- T Kingfisher

...hair the color of… no, don’t start trying to decide what organ at what stage of decomposition is that shade of red. Pick something else. Something that isn't horrible. ... Smoked paprika. [p. 29]

Galen is a paladin of the Saint of Steel, and thus prone to occasional berserking: otherwise upright, moral, courageous and well-armed. Piper is a lich-doctor (think forensic pathologist) who prefers the company of corpses, has a minor wonderworking talent which he prefers not to discuss, and would also rather not discuss or even admit to having emotions. Earstripe is a gnole, working for the city guards.

Together they fight crime. (There's also a cheering romance, not involving Earstripe.)

Third in T Kingfisher's 'Saint of Steel' series (Paladin's Grace, Paladin's Strength) which typically features some fairly horrific plot elements -- in this volume, a number of clerical corpses who have met a variety of gruesome deaths, and the location at which those deaths occurred -- wrapped in and ameliorated by a fluffy romance, plenty of humour and some excellent characters. I especially liked the insights into gnole pronouns and grammar here: Earstripe is very good at expressing himself. Kudos to the author, too, for the line 'Five men stood .. looking at a corpse. Four of the men were human' -- the fifth, of course, being the badgeresque Earstripe. I like the fact that 'man' is not species-specific, but refers to a sentient adult male. I also thoroughly approved of the Temple's solution to the shortage of trained clerks, required due to a shake-up of the city guard: retired prostitutes, aged out of the profession, retrained by the Scarlet Guild in clerical skills and recordkeeping.

Lots of neat worldbuilding, two romantic protagonists with flaws and secrets (and some difficulty in believing they're worthy of the other's regard), and .. possibly slightly too much of a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Character as well as plot plays out in the maze, though, and the wonders of the ancients are, as usual, rather exasperating. Paladin's Hope was an enjoyable read: I am happy to read that the author plans more in the sequence, and am hoping that the books will tie in somehow to the yet-unfinished sequence that began with Swordheart ...

2021/122: Perhaps the Stars -- Ada Palmer

...before I've sweated out my term as oarsman on Apollo's flagship, I must lead Utopia to some new world untouched by Distance, where the very oars and sails we use to battle grim Poseidon are undreamed. [loc. 12074]

The long-awaited (and long) finale of the Terra Ignota series. (Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle.) I will not attempt to summarise the tetralogy here, except to note that it's set in a 25th century that thinks it's small-u utopian but has elements of dystopia. There are gods (some more Present than others) and monsters (oh, Mycroft), a World War and an ideological war conducted simultaneously, a villain in an underground lair (hmm, more than one of those), reversals and twists, blurred identities, mythic resonances, metamorphoses and miracles, space elevators, and -- regrettably -- spreadsheets, which have not yet gone extinct.

The war subtracts two of the key technologies that society relies on: the car system, which had made it possible for individuals to live and work anywhere in the world with at most a two-hour commute, and the tracker system, which connected (and monitored) everybody. Chaos, in the form of riot and prejudice, ensues, and old alignments and alliances shift and change: the calming influences aren't necessarily those one might expect. The twin toxicities of gender and religion are further explored, and some of the limitations of the various approaches to both acknowledged. The existence and treatment of Servicers is also addressed, and by the end of the novel there are credible expectations of a better world. Or worlds.

Not all endings are happy, but happiness is not necessarily the point.

There were some conclusions that weren't wholly satisfying (Madame, reminiscent of Lady Macbeth; Thisbe; Ráðsviðr), and some developments -- those relating to the narrative voices, and the various Readers who interrupt and interrogate the primary narrative -- which felt slightly rushed: but the latter might simply be because I raced through the novel and missed foreshadowing. Conversely, it was cheering to spot a resonance or reference before it was made explicit. There's a lot of the Iliad here, as well as its in-universe sci-fi reimagining by Apollo Mojave (which was read and reimagined, in turn, by an impressionable adolescent). Apollo never, thankfully, got as far as the Odyssey, which is mirrored in Mycroft's tale. I cheered when Helen was revealed, and teared up at Odysseus' dog.

...Perhaps the Stars is a densely-written, complex, philosophical novel which I suspect I'll be assimilating for some time. It doesn't answer all the questions I hoped it would: it doesn't neatly tie off all the threads. But it is profound and provocative, tragic and triumphant and, literally, marvellous.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest and unbiased review which I'm posting out of sequence for publication day!

2021/121: The Heavens -- Sandra Newman

... in waking life, she was dogged by anomalies, discrepancies, attacks of jamais vu. In every street, there were new stores and restaurants, appearing at a pace that seemed impossible even for New York. She didn’t know most of the songs on the radio. She didn’t know half of the movie stars. [loc. 628]

New York City, in the year 2000: a Green woman senator is president, astronauts have landed on Mars, the Jerusalem peace treaty has been signed and carbon emissions have declined rapidly. '...the first year with no war at all, when you opened up the newspaper like opening a gift' [loc. 350]. Ben meets the romantic, impractical Kate at a party, and they fall in love. But Kate has a second life: since childhood, she's been dreaming of what she gradually realises is the past, the sixteenth century, where her name is Emilia and she plays an ivory flute for the queen. Not everything is perfect in Emilia's life. There is plague, and she is pregnant by the Lord Chamberlain, and being asked for help by a feckless playwright named Will -- of whom Kate, in waking life, has never heard. She's certain she has a vital task to perform in the past, something that will save the world and prevent the bleak, lifeless cities which she glimpses in visions: it seems that Will is somehow key to this mission.

The Heavens is a mosaic of shifting timelines, memories that don't fit together, and Ben's increasing impatience with the utopian alternate reality that Kate claims to remember. It seems clear from the narrative that the present is changing, and Kate is sure it's because of her dream-life in the past. But the world doesn't seem to be changing for the better: and Kate is not a reliable narrator.

I found much of this novel very enjoyable, though for me it crumbled apart in the last few chapters when the mechanisms were revealed. There are some splendid, and some appalling, scenes ("There was a war going on in this world, Kate guessed, a war in which airplanes were used as weapons. The skyscraper seemed to be a major development...' [loc. 2105]) and some achingly sad moments -- all the more poignant for their ephemeral nature, because by the next chapter they might never have happened. I kept hoping that there could be a happy ending, even after Kate stops dreaming of 1593. But for the dark Lady Emilia and for Kate herself, for Will and for Ben, for the world in which the novel opens: relentless, implacable change.

I enjoyed the beautiful prose, interesting characters, an ever-changing whirl of history ancient and modern: this was absolutely worth reading even though it didn't go in the direction I wanted it to go.

“Are you still from a parallel universe?”
“Who knows?” Kate said. “It isn’t really a question that comes up.”[loc. 2934]

2021/120: Strong Wine -- A J Demas

"If it would help," said Varazda, deadpan, "I'd be happy to pose as a bizarre girlfriend. I didn't bring any of my gowns with me, but I can always get something ready-made in the market." [loc. 1453]

Third in the series that started with Sword Dance and continued with Saffron Alley: the setting is reminiscent of the classical Mediterranean, though with the names changed, and the protagonists are Damiskos (military veteran) and Varazda (eunuch dancer and spy).

I think I enjoyed Strong Wine even more than the previous two instalments. Damiskos, who has been living with Varazda for a month and rather hoping that he can stay forever (but is it too early to ask?) is summoned 'home' to Pheme to encounter old enemies, his ex-fiancee, and -- worst of all -- his feckless parents. He despairs: but he should have more faith in Varazda, who is not prepared to simply let his beloved be drawn back into a life he no longer wants.

Hilarious, poignant, and triumphant, Strong Wine features a murder mystery, some splendid women (including Aradne and Nione, first encountered in Sword Dance, as well as Ino the silversmith and Dami's mother Myrto, who refuses to misgender Varazda), just deserts for the malfeasant and happy endings for the (mostly) deserving, including Dami's horse Xanthe. I was especially cheered by the ways in which the characters look after one another, and by Varazda's sheer competence: he's not just a pretty face. (I was also, perversely, cheered that neither Varazda nor Dami were prepared to tolerate misgendering, homophobia or generic insults. It's one thing to know that they originate from prejudice and ignorance, quite another to endure the constant grind.)

I received a review copy from the lovely author, in exchange for this honest review, which I'm publishing out of sequence in honour of Publication Day!