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.