2022/127: Ogres — Adrian Tchaikovsky

Already you’re starting to see the world in a certain way, with that overlay people paint where desperation and necessity get gilded over into stories. [loc.75]

A compact, powerful novella about the haves and the have-nots, here depicted as the ogres (ten feet tall, feudal landlords, 'God's chosen' according to the pastor, able to eat meat, and gifted with magical devices) and the humans over whom they rule. Humans have an allergic reaction to meat, praise their landlords fulsomely (while remaining terrified of the ogres and their whims), and live more-or-less medievally. Torquell, already much taller than his father the headman, and with more of a temper than anyone in the village, may be an exception. One day the landlord's son hits Torquell, and Torquell hits back.

The consequences are fairytale-horrific. Torquell flees to the forest and joins a band of outlaws led by one Roben. But the ogres are determined that he must be held accountable for his crimes, and he's hunted and captured. And then he is purchased by Isadora, a wealthy ogress who remains resolutely unmarried, and pursues magic, which she calls science ...

So far, so unexceptional. It gradually becomes clear, though, that this is not a medieval fantasy but a possible future, one in which humans have become 'Economics', genetically tweaked towards a vegetarian diet and a more peaceful psyche. Whence the ogres? Whence indeed...

Ogres is told in the second person: one must always remember that if there's a second-person protagonist, there is a first-person narrator somewhere in the background. I was very pleasantly surprised by the revelation of that first-person narrator's identity here. Ogres is a quick read (just over a hundred pages in the print edition) and well-paced: I like it a lot, though perhaps more in hindsight than while reading and waiting for the story to reveal itself.

2022/126: The Golden Enclaves — Naomi Novik

[She] didn’t even believe the stupid unbelievable lie that the school had swallowed, the mad ambition written too effectively into its steel and brass… to protect all the wise-gifted children of the world. She wasn’t going to try to do that. She perfectly understood that some children had to die. [loc. 2696]

The words ‘triumphant conclusion to the trilogy’ are worn out by overuse, but here they are accurate: El, fresh out of the Scholomance, discovers the unspeakable foundations that underpin the magical world, and ... refuses. She confronts evils (not all of which are what they appear to be) and discovers that it's not enough to compromise, to look away, to be ignorant of the injustices on which your world relies. Instead, something has to change, and someone has to make that change happen.

Which is not to say it’s simple, straightforward, or predictable. And certainly El's often-abrasive personality is not abruptly transformed into sweetness and light. (Phew!)

This review will inevitably contain some spoilers for the previous instalments, A Deadly Education> and especially The Last Graduate. Stop here if you wish to avoid them.

Hurled out of the doors of the Scholomance by Orion Lake, the powerful young man who claimed to love her, El is the eponymous Last Graduate, magically flung back to the commune in Wales and the yurt where her mother lives. It takes her a while to come to terms with her grief and rage, but the London enclave is under attack, and El is (according to a trio of her erstwhile classmates, who show up in muddy Wales in improbable finery) the only person with strong enough power to help them. Dragged off to London by the fearsomely efficient Liesel, El defeats a monstrous mal (it's scared of her) and learns more about how enclaves are created. This knowledge will prove useful, and it also means that the 'golden sutra' spellbook she brought back from the Scholomance, a book which holds the key to creating small, self-sufficient ‘golden enclaves’, is more vitally important than ever.

From London to New York, Beijing to Dubai, Maharashtra to Portugal, El's journey encompasses her great-grandmother's apocalyptic prophecies, the secret of Orion's unique gifts (or were those gifts a curse?), and the nature of a tertiary-order entity. There is love as well as revulsion and fear, and there are maw-mouths aplenty, and -- astonishingly, hearteningly, jubilantly -- a happy ending.

I was reminded of 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', and of N K Jemisin's response 'The Ones Who Stay and Fight'. Yes, at the heart of this novel is the trolley problem: but there is also the truism about power and responsibility, and the age-old problem with the double-edged vagueness of prophecy. Novik handles these profound themes confidently and clearly, and doesn't neglect character arcs or worldbuilding. I was slightly disppointed not to see more of Gwen, and Precious seemed all but forgotten at times: but El's journeys (moral, emotional, geographical), and her understanding of the magical world's rotten foundations, were utterly compelling and more cheering than I'd anticipated.

2022/125: The Locked Room — Elly Griffiths

Ruth imagines that [she] simply left her past behind her. Something that Ruth, as an archaeologist, could have told her is almost impossible to achieve. [loc. 2968]

Set in the first few months of the Covid pandemic: that spring of glorious weather and enforced lockdown, of home-schooling and clapping for carers. I'd almost managed to forget the strangeness of those months ...

Ruth Galloway is sorting her late mother's belongings when she discovers a photo of her own house, with the inscription 'Dawn, 1963' -- thirty years before she moved there. She resolves to find out why her mother would have kept such a picture: but then Covid descends, and Ruth has her hands full with Zoom teaching and home-schooling for her daughter Kate. She has a new next-door neighbour, too, a nice lady named Zoe, with whom she shares the occasional socially-distanced glass of wine. Nelson, meanwhile, is investigating a suspicious suicide. (The dead woman's bedroom door was locked from the outside.) He discovers a series of other suicides which may have been murders. And he's alone in the family house, with his wife Michelle off in Blackpool and his daughters in their own homes. Of course he's going to check on Ruth and Kate...

Some interesting themes here -- plague, diet culture, mothers and daughters -- though I'm not sure I wholly believe in the murder mystery. As is typical of later books in long-running series, The Locked Room is as much (if not more) about developments in the lives of the characters as it's about the crime at the heart of the novel. Some of the developments here are quite alarming (that circle of protection is not going to be enough) and there's a minor cliffhanger at the end which makes me keen to read the next in the series (The Last Remains, due February 2023).

2022/124: Austral — Paul McAuley

...two hundred years ago it would have been hard to imagine the peninsula with cities and settlements, forested valleys and fjords where glaciers had once flowed, and wolves and mammoths and elf stones. [loc. 1468]

Austral is a husky, a gene-edited human designed to thrive in the harsh climate of Antarctica. Not as harsh a climate as in the 21st century: climate change has warmed and flooded the world, and the ecopoets have been hard at work in the far south, helping the natural world adjust and create an ecosystem which can support human life.

Austral, daughter of ecopoets, has been a small-time crook and something of a drifter, but by the beginning of the novel she's a corrections officer at a work camp, overseeing convicts who are building a transcontinental railway. Her lover, a hardened criminal, is determined to escape the camp, using the imminent visit of a local dignitary as cover. He expects Austral to help, but instead she ends up fleeing the camp with the dignitary's teenage daughter, Kamilah -- who's Austral's cousin.

As the two traverse the wild and dangerous hinterlands of Antarctica, they share their stories, Austral trying to convince Kamilah that she's been lulled into believing a pack of lies, Kamilah more interested in her choose-your-own-adventure storybook, which has echoes of Tristan and Isolde, Theseus, and other legends. Both learn more about their world, their family, and one another.

The worldbuilding is splendid, as one expects from McAuley, and though I didn't always like Austral I found her a complex, intriguing character. She's competent, too, which is a good thing considering the dangers they're up against. And her account of her family history and the work of the ecopoets is fascinating. I'm intrigued by ecopoesis, a kind of professional rewilding, and want to learn more about it: McAuley's afterword includes some useful references. Austral is not always a cheerful read, but it is hopeful: it imagines a world in which humanity adapts and survives, and it makes that world beautiful.

2022/123: Middlegame — Seanan McGuire

...if they wanted to control the elemental forces of creation, they shouldn't have turned us into people. People have their own agendas.[loc. 6181]

Roger and Dodger (yes, rhyming names suck) live on opposite sides of the USA. As children, they discover that they can communicate telepathically, or possibly by quantum entanglement. Roger is good with words: Dodger (who's a girl) is a maths prodigy. They want to meet up, but Roger's parents in particular don't seem at all keen on the idea. Only when they're in their late teens do they end up at Berkeley as post-grads -- and there they begin to realise that they are part of a vast alchemical experiment, an attempt to manifest the Doctrine of Ethos.

Of course there's more to it than that. Dodger's housemate Erin was also one of a pair, but her twin was killed by the project's director, James Reed. Reed himself is a kind of Frankenstein's monster, created by talented alchemist Asphodel Baker more than a century before Roger and Dodger were born. Baker was also the author of a beloved series of children's books, encoding her alchemical teachings in a fable reminiscent of Oz or Narnia. Of course her teachings were suppressed. Of course she was killed before her experiments could come to fruition. Of course Reed has twisted Baker's ideals for his own purposes. And of course he has a malevolent sidekick.

I enjoyed this novel immensely whilst I was reading, though I found myself skimming the chapters that didn't focus on Roger, Dodger or Erin. I began to have a suspicion about the structure of the narrative quite early on: Middlegame opens with what seems to be the end of Roger and Dodger's story, and we revisit variations of that scene throughout the novel. It's important to pay attention to the dates at the beginning of each chapter, as the story moves backward and forward through time.

Middlegame is oddly insular. I don't think there's much, if any, mention of the world beyond the USA, and there's little reference to the major real-world' events of the 20th / 21st century (9/11, for example). I wasn't wholly convinced by the villains' goals or motivations; I found myself caring more about the fate of Bill the cat than about some of the human characters; and I found some of Roger's behaviour towards Dodger deeply unpleasant. He keeps walking away, breaking faith, prioritising his own belief that they're too dangerous to be together over Dodger's emotional attachment to him. There's a scene near the end in which Roger abuses his power over Dodger in a way that I found extremely unsettling.

All those criticisms aside, I found Middlegame fascinating, engaging and very moving. I'm planning to read the second in the series, Seasonal Fears, quite soon. (Also, Bill is fine.)

Fulfils the ‘Has the word “game” in the title’ rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge.

2022/122: Just Like Home — Sarah Gailey

Why should she make herself remain in this house, with a mother who seemed to be a different person every day and a man who wanted so badly to be frightening, and a thing that came in the night to whisper into her ear? [p. 290]

Called home by her dying mother, Vera Crowder finds herself seeking traces of her beloved, much-missed father in the house that he built for his family. There were journals that she hid, and perhaps something left in the basement where he worked But the house has become an attraction for the worst kind of tourist. There's plexiglass covering every surface, and a 'spiritual rendering artist' named James Duvall has taken up residence in the guest house out back. Duvall is keen to talk to Vera about her father: his own father made his name with a book about Francis Crowder and the infamous murders he committed down in the basement. There are secrets that Vera won't share with Duvall, and secrets that her own mother Daphne, even on her deathbed, won't share with anyone at all.

Just Like Home reminds me of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House: the house itself as a character ('this was a house that knew how to stay quiet'), a constant and claustrophobic presence. There are many oddities about the Crowder House, such as the darkness that seems to gather in the room where Daphne lies in bed, and the way that Vera has always been able to block out the sound of arguments (or worse) by snapping her fingers four times. As Vera revisits her childhood memories, the tone and focus of the story shifts until there's no solid ground.

This is a novel about how some monsters are easier to spot than others. Daphne is horrific (and doesn't get a pass just because she's dying), and Gailey's portrayal of an emotionally abusive mother is chillingly intense. Francis is a murderer, but also a protective parent and an attentive husband; he protects Vera from Daphne's worst excesses, though his feelings towards his daughter are not necessarily healthy. ("Dad loves us," Vera remembers saying to Daphne, who responds crisply: "He loves me. Your relationship with him is your own business." [p. 136] and in his journal "Wonder if she loves me the way I love her?")

I had to read this in a single evening: so much suspense, so many questions, so little desire to turn out the light and lie there wondering what was under the bed* ...Marvellous, horrible, twisty and (by the very satisfying final chapter) peculiarly sweet.

*the cat. Probably.

2022/121: Hamnet — Maggie O'Farrell

'You are caught by that place, like a hooked fish.’
‘What place? You mean London?'
‘No, the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child.' [p. 240]

A novel about the death (and life) of a boy named Hamnet, and about the life of his mother Agnes, who is married to a man she met when he was tutoring her brothers in Latin. This man is never named: Agnes and her children are at the heart of the novel.

The narrative switches between eleven year old Hamnet's increasingly frantic attempts to find someone to help his twin sister Judith, who has been taken ill, and the story of the courtship and marriage of their parents. Agnes has agency and power in this novel. She's a girl who's grown up at the edge of the forest, rumoured to be a witch, certainly possessed of herblore and perhaps also of some uncanny power that enables her to see into the minds and hearts of others. When the Latin tutor first sees her, he mistakes her for a boy.

Hamnet features a number of Shakespearian tropes -- the tyrannical patriarch (here played by John Shakespeare, Hamnet's grandfather), the twins too easily mistaken for one another, the blurring of gender -- though they're not the focus of the story. It's about the little intricacies of lives, the coincidences and unhappy accidents, the chain of events that leads from a homesick cabin boy and a Venetian glassworker to a child falling ill one hot summer's afternoon in Stratford. Shakespeare apparently never mentions the Black Death, though it must have affected his life. Hamnet's cause of death wasn't recorded (herein, it's bubonic plague) but London theatres were regularly closed due to outbreaks of pestilence. (Unpleasant contemporary relevance.)

O'Farrell's writing is clear, evocative, crammed with detail (a mother counting the menstrual rags in the week's laundry, and knowing which daughter is pregnant) yet never weighed down by it. There are elements that may be supernatural, but they are handled as part and parcel of everyday life. O'Farrell imagines Agnes being shown a playbill for her husband's latest play, and going to London to witness for herself what he has made of the memory of their son: this was the part that seemed most deliberately invented, and it works surprisingly well. Agnes is an extraordinarily vivid and complex character, far from the dull, ageing country wife I've encountered in other fiction about Shakespeare: I found her story engaging and compelling. And there is a very good reason for her husband bequeathing her his second-best bed.

Fulfils the ‘based on a real person’ rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge.

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry. [p.9]

2022/120: Mister Impossible — Maggie Stiefvater

This time, when he got up for that glass of water, the real glass, the waking glass, he was sure to marvel his fingertips over everything he passed, reminding himself of how specific waking reality was. [loc. 216]

Second in the trilogy that began with Call Down the Hawk. This review will inevitably contain spoilers for the previous book, but not for Mister Impossible itself.

Stiefvater writes a large cast of viewpoint characters, each with a distinctive voice and an arc of their own: Ronan and Hennessy, the dreamers, travelling with Bryde on a roadtrip to nowhere and trying to save dreamers as they go; Jordan and Declan, bonding over art and its functions; Carmen Farooq-Lane working with Liliana the Visionary; Adam Parrish at Harvard, scrying for something terrible; Matthew trying to come to terms with what he's learnt about himself. There is so much going on in this novel, so many threats and so many unanswered questions: it's a wonder it coheres, but it's hard (for me, at least) to focus on any one plot thread. I was intrigued by the ways in which art, and creativity, interact with dreams and dreamt beings. Stiefvater is very good at writing about the process of art, as well as the intricacies and currencies of the art world. (In part, this novel is a love letter to John Singer Sargent and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.) I'm saddened by Ronan's increasing isolation, and the ways in which he is very much not all right. I'm pleasantly surprised by two separate love stories, one heterosexual and one queer: and I'm actually starting to like Declan...

It's tempting to see elements of the novel as metaphors: the decline of the leylines mirroring the climate emergency, the isolation of dreamers and visionaries as a particular kind of disability or chronic illness. I think that does the novel, and the author, a disservice. Everything here is here for its own sake. The stakes here are higher than before, and the cliffhanger ending -- which I'm still making sense of -- will, I profoundly hope, be resolved in Greywaren, due 18th October ...

Fulfils the ‘set in the art world’ rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge.

2022/119: Dinner on Mars: The Technologies That Will Feed the Red Planet and Transform Agriculture on Earth — Lenore Newman and Evan D.G. Fraser

As the two of us have gone on this imaginary mission, we've come to believe a Martian community can and will feed itself successfully, and that in doing so, develop technologies that will revolutionise agriculture on Earth. [loc. 86]

I greatly enjoyed Lenore Newman's Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food, so I leapt at the chance to review her new book, co-written with fellow food scientist Evan D. G. Fraser. Dinner on Mars was conceived during the early months of the Covid pandemic, when the authors were unable to travel or meet in person. It's a thought experiment that begins with the fate of Sir John Franklin's Arctic expedition, and examines the unique environmental challenges that must be met by a self-sustaining Martian colony. There's a lot about soil, radiation, insolation and so on: but there's also an emphasis on the human side of the equation, the spiritual/emotional need for greenery and plant life, the role of shared meals in a society, the importance of food as a pleasure and not merely as fuel.

Newman and Fraser examine the failings and inefficiences of modern agriculture -- which relies on the suffering of animals, the availability of cheap labour, and the profligate (ab)use of non-renewable resources: they describe and decry the ecological impact of dairy farming, and the environmental and health problems caused by agricultural industry. As much as 30% of all food produced is wasted.

Food production on Mars, where every input and output must be carefully balanced, would likely tend towards a vegetarian diet, perhaps with 'meat' grown by farming animal cells, rather than the animals themselves. Digital tools and monitoring systems would enable the system to be fine-tuned; new technologies would be developed as solutions to problems that don't even exist on Earth.

"But you do realise that it will be much easier and cheaper just to save Earth than go to Mars to figure these things out?" asks one scientist. Quite accurate, but the lure of Mars is an attractive one -- there are frequent references to Musk, Bezos and Branson in Dinner on Mars -- and if 'space science' can revolutionise life on Earth, that's another benefit of the space programme.

I found this an inspiring read, despite occasional pronoun weirdness: the oddity of a co-authored book that refers to the authors individually in the third person and collectively in the first person plural. ("Lenore thinks that Evan may be onto something here. In one of our conversations, she noted ..."). Dinner on Mars appeals to me as an SF reader, as well as a reader of social anthropology and the history of food. I was especially cheered to find a mention of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy as 'a classic everyone should read': indeed, I'm oddly tempted to reread at least Red Mars, to see how ideas about feeding a Mars colony have moved on since the 1990s.

Highly recommended, fascinating, and extremely relevant to life on Earth, Dinner on Mars is a book I'll be recommending to many of my friends.

Fulfils the ‘food’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading challenge.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review. UK publication date is 11 October 2022.

2022/118: The Book of the Dead — edited by Jared Shurin

The candy itself is vat-mixed, poured onto cold slabs, and then into molds, hot squares solidifying, soft but slightly resistant, texturally similar to a shoulderblade kissed through a chiffon dress. [p.271: 'Bit-U-Men', Maria Dahvana Headley]

An anthology of stories about mummies, featuring a mix of well-known and new contributors, and with an introduction by John J. Johnston of the Egypt Exploration Society ('the UK's oldest independent funder of archaeological fieldwork and research in Egypt, dedicated to the promotion and understanding of ancient Egyptian history and culture'). The settings range from ice-caves, to an American roadtrip, to a flat in Greenwich whose owner has some drugs to dispose of; the themes vary, from cute (and distinctly non-cute) mummified kitties, to nanotech gone wrong, to unrequited love. Several of the stories address orientalism, central to the whole 'curse of the mummy' tradition; I was especially taken with Adam Roberts' 'Tollund', in which Egyptian archaeologists travel to darkest Jutland to examine a bog-body.

There are several tales about the many ways in which mummies -- human, feline, other -- have been used as medicine, fertiliser, ink: really, it's hardly surprising that the spirits of the dead are angry. ('ONCE YOU WORSHIPPED US, ONCE YOU LOVED US, NOW YOU SCATTER US ON YOUR FIELDS AND YOU GROUND US FOR YOUR MEDICINE'.) I think my favourite story here was Maria Dahvana Headley's 'Bit-U-Men', in which a mellified mummy (one preserved in honey) has some say in what becomes of it, and wishes to become ... confectionary. It's a luscious, sensual story, and one that examines the consequences of its premise very well.

I did find the plethora of typos and homophones ('keeping clear of from the abrasive sand'; 'thrills to wile away winter evenings'; 'with most of his photos are in them'...) vexing. But overall, a wide-ranging and intriguing selection.

Purchased in 2015 ...Fulfils the ‘anthology’ rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge.

2022/117: The Owl Service — Alan Garner [reread]

“She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.” [p. 102]

In which elements of the Mabinogion are repeated, or are still happening, in a Welsh valley: three teenagers reenact the old story without realising, and the abrupt ending keeps the reader guessing as to how this iteration of the story might conclude.

Reread, after reaching Treacle Walker: I last read this more than twenty years ago, and as usual I'm surprised by what I remembered (Gwyn stealing cigarettes for his mother, and carrying suitcases in the rain; the pattern disappearing from the plates) and what I'd forgotten (the motorbike; the dogs; the shadowy presence of Alison's mother). I had not registered all the sexual tension, either, and I wonder if I'm noticing it now because the world's changed and we're all more alert to signs of abuse and harassment: or because I have changed, and am more attuned to such things. (Clive, I think now, is a creep and possibly a predator.)

This is a claustrophobic novel about social class, about heritage and secrets, and about how younger generations repeat the trageies of their parents. And yes, it is also about myth, and about a woman brought into being solely to please a man, and her rebellion against that man. It's a deeply unsettling novel that I don't think I understood much of when I first read it in my early teens, and which I note Amazon thinks is for 9-11 year olds. I hope that some of the young readers encountering now will be able to look back on it (as I am) over a distance of decades, and find more in it than they had seen before.

2022/116: Treacle Walker — Alan Garner

'Why live in a bog?’
‘And if I didn’t,’ said Thin Amren, ‘should I not rot?’
‘And all that dreaming stuff.’
‘What else should a body do when he sleeps?’
‘How long have you been there?’ said Joe. ‘In the bog.’
‘A honeycomb of ages.’
‘How long’s that?’
‘From then till now.' [loc. 461]

This is very short, 131 pages in the print edition, and very dense: I'm not sure that I understand it yet. It's the story of Joe, who likes comics and marbles (so may be a child) but seems to live alone (so may be an adult) and at one point wonders if he is dead (so ..."I will not say that you are dead.") Regularly, just after noon, a rag-and-bone man calling himself Treacle Walker shows up outside the house. On his first appearance, he trades with Joe: a donkey-stone (used for whitening doorsteps) and a chipped Victorian medicine-jar in exchange for Joe's old unwashed pyjamas and a lamb's shoulderblade from his 'museum' of natural findings. This trade seems to set something in motion. Joe has a lazy eye (there's an odd episode with, presumably, an optician) and wears an eyepatch over his 'good' eye: but his good eye enables him to see what he would otherwise be blind to, for instance the edges of the bog, and a man named Thin Amren sitting up out of the water, copper-skinned, naked except for a hood over his head, and disinclined to dry out.

There's a deeply mythic feel to this novel, from Treacle Walker's 'this Middle-Yard' (= Midgard?) to the region of the summer stars, from the unseen cuckoo in the wood to the whitening of a doorstep to keep out malign influences. But there are also comics -- Knockabout, featuring Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit, turns out to be a real comic from Garner's own boyhood -- and mirrors that can be portals (but so can the pages of knockabout). There's a round meadow with three sides and a mound in the middle: a tomb? There are forgotten words (slutch, mools). Joe meets himself returning from a dream: but who's the dreamer? There's circularity, on several scales, and a sense of recursion: perhaps there's nobody here but Joe, and maybe the cuckoo he unwittingly summons. When you (I), the reader, start counting the cuckoo's cries, it's time to stop and draw back from this perplexing, beautiful, unsettling novella. For now.

I'll close with a quotation from an interview with Alan Garner, published in 2012 when Boneland came out: I think he might have been talking about the genesis of Treacle Walker.

"something's going on, and the shape it's taking is interesting in that it's complete at whatever stage I finish it. In other words, provided I get a few paragraphs down and then I just drop dead, it's still complete. It's intriguing me. It's making me think here we go again, perhaps, but in a quite different way," says Garner.
Source: Alan Garner: a life in books. Interview by Alison Flood. Guardian, 17AUG2012 (retrieved 11SEP2022).

2022/115: Jack of Thorns — A K Faulkner

He addled Laurence’s gaydar and Laurence wasn’t sure it was because the guy was British or straight. [loc. 1289]

Laurence is a former heroin addict, now a florist living above his mother's shop. He's still trying to get rid of Dan, a troublesome ex, and he's painfully aware of the urge to relapse into his addiction. Laurence has inherited, from his mother, a supernatural gift for horticulture, but he also sees visions of the future, and when he encounters a familiar-looking young Englishman in the park, he's keen to advance the friendship.

Quentin d'Arcy, who happens to be the Earl of Banbury, has led an extremely sheltered life, is unaccustomed to commoners, and refuses to accept that there's anything unusual about him -- even though freak weather events seem to occur when he's scared or angry. He's fled England following conflict with his father, and is leading a nomadic existence, moving from city to city across America with only his mother's piano and his own vast wealth to insulate him from, well, people.

This might be a straightforward slow-burn opposites-attract romance if not for the presence of the eponymous Jack, who shows up during one of Laurence's prayer/meditation sessions, apparently in response to Laurence's cry for help. Jack might be a god (he certainly presents as one) and he's keen for Laurence to 'feed' him. Jack's influence grows, and Laurence and Quentin must work together to defeat him -- while negotiating their budding relationship, Quentin's horror of his own body, and Laurence's ever-present craving for something stronger than the cannabis he grows in the greenhouse.

This was free on Kindle, and a pleasant enough read. There are intriguing hints of Quentin's backstory, and Laurence has a lot to learn about himself as well as his new friend. But I don't feel inclined to follow the series: the prose style didn't grab me, and Quentin's exaggerated, comic-book Englishness ('really, old boy ... one doesn't recall ...') was overdone. Yes, it was amusing the first few times that Laurence misunderstood Quentin's (stereo)typically British understatement, but one would have hoped that Quentin would loosen up just a little by the end of the novel.

2022/114: The Forgotten Dead — Jordan L Hawk

“…don’t you agree that your personal involvement could lead to stronger manifestations?” Patricia Montague had asked. And he had agreed, but he’d never expected it to be like this. [loc. 783]

Nigel Taylor is a parapsychologist at Duke University: his role is in danger of funding cuts, but a wealthy socialite offers to fund his research ... if he'll agree to work with a professional ghost-hunting team, and investigate rumours of a haunting at a particular property. The ghost-hunters in question are the team behind a show called 'OutFoxing the Paranormal', and their lead, the charismatic Oscar Fox, is immediately attracted to Nigel. It's mutual, but it would be unprofessional to do anything about it while they're staying in the haunted house. Wouldn't it? Even though (a) Nigel has first-hand knowledge of the events in that house, and (b) whatever's there is really very scary?

This is a sweet M/M romance (one of the protagonists is trans) and the sweetness is especially strong in juxtaposition with the truly horrific paranormal element. The cast is diverse (Oscar's team comprises a woman and a non-binary person; Nigel is supported by his former advisor, a woman who has undisclosed history with sponsor Mrs Montague) and Nigel and Oscar's pasts, gradually revealed, explain why Nigel feels driven to investigate this particular haunting, and why Oscar is in denial about his gifts as a medium. Some nice details, including the use of an ESD (electro-static discharge) strap, as used by IT techs, to 'ground' someone who's under attack by a spirit; and some nice interpersonal elements, such as the care Nigel and Oscar both take to accommodate and accept one another's quirks, habits and weaknesses. I'll likely read more in this series.

Fulfils the ‘Recommended by a favorite author’ rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge. (KJ Charles: "SODDING TERRIFYING".)

2022/113: Kill the Boy Band — Goldy Moldavsky

I did love The Ruperts a lot. I loved them more than vanilla ice cream in summer, more than seeing a new review of one of my fanfics, more than discovering a good ’80s movie I’d never seen before. Just because I was a Ruperts fangirl does not mean I was crazy. [p. 5]

The nameless narrator (who uses a number of aliases from her favourite 80s movies) is staying, with her three best friends, at the Rondack, an upmarket New York hotel. The Rondack also happens to be hosting the Ruperts, a boy band comprising four young Brits (all named Rupert) who met, and were made into a group, on a UK talent show. The girls (Erin, Apple, Isabel and our narrator) are all 15, and are determined to meet their idols. But we can tell from the novel's opening -- they have one of the Ruperts tied to a chair in their room -- that it's all going to go horribly wrong. Over the course of one sleepless night, friendships unravel, manifestos are stated, secrets are revealed, hosiery is used for nefarious purposes, and several people are arrested.

Kill the Buy Band is claustrophobic, giddy, and has the frantic feeling of a group of friends inciting one another to extreme behaviour. It features a lot of familiar fandom elements: crowds of screaming teenagers, rumours of band-members' homosexuality, hooking up with band members, writing real person fanfic, queuing for days just to catch a glimpse, speculating about the hidden meanings of songs, analysing every second of every TV appearance... There's definitely a dark side to all four of the girls. One thinks she's going crazy. One's had an unpleasant encounter with a Rupert. One has severe self-image issues. One has a criminal past, or possibly present. And they all conspire to cover up a major crime.

How much can we blame the author for the problematic elements of a first-person narrative? Sometimes the narrator is just an unpleasant person, woth unpleasant views: and sometimes the narrator is fifteen years old, with self-confessed mental health issues and a distinct lack of maturity. (I forgive her for juxtaposing fanfiction and 'real' creativity, even though I think she is wrong.) Yet I did find the fatphobic language uncomfortable, especially as the narrator otherwise seems to accept her friend as she is. And then uses the word 'blubbery'... There are some other issues with the novel, though I think the narrator's reactions to them are more honest. She's uneasy about the consent issues involved in accidentally kidnapping, and deliberately kissing / touching / groping, their captive; she's the voice of reason, urging the others to do the right thing, when disaster strikes; she's determined to tell the truth, even though she won't be believed.

Kill the Boy Band is a fast-paced and darkly humorous novel about friendship as much as fandom, about truth and lies, about appearances and personas and the stories people tell about themselves and the people around them. I liked it, though felt it faltered at the end: no real sense of closure, or justice, or even credible consequences. But I look forward to more of Moldavsky's fiction.

'... we even have an endorsement deal with cat food ... Do you want your cat to eat like a normal cat, or do you want him to eat like a Rupert?’ I couldn’t help but snort at his funny, infomercial-guy voice while simultaneously thinking very seriously of getting a cat. [p. 170]

2022/112: Angelika Frankenstein Makes her Match — Sally Thorne

"Are you ever afraid that they cannot survive the things we have done to them in the name of science, and love?" [loc. 2494]

Angelika Frankenstein is quite as brilliant as her more famous brother Victor, but he's engaged to be married, while Angelika's suitors are generally discouraged by her intelligence, or perhaps by her habit of quizzing them from a prepared list of questions. At 24, she's almost given up on the notion of meeting a man she can love, so she takes matters into her own hands. Literally. Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match opens -- after a prologue from the viewpoint of the neglected family seat, Blackthorne Manor -- in the local morgue, where Victor and Angelika are selecting body parts for the men they wish to make. Victor's aim is scientific one-upmanship, but he jokes (rather creepily) with his sister about penis sizes, and demands for his own creation the hands of the handsome cadaver she's selected. Back to the laboratory they go; it is a dark and stormy night; their experiments are successful; Victor's resurrectee takes one look at Angelika and flees screaming into the night; and Angelika's creation ... well, at least one part of him is attracted to her, as evidenced by his instant erection.

Angelika tends her new companion, and attempts to unravel the secrets of his past: he has no recollection of anything before waking in the laboratory to see Angelika leaning over him. He seems, at heart, a gentleman, but he insists that he doesn't and can't love her. Angelika names him Will, because of his strength of character and stoicism in the face of constant pain. She is guiltily aware that the hands once belonging to this body are attached to her brother's nameless creation, who's terrorising the neighbourhood. Angelika's investigations into Will’s past lead her to the local Military Academy, site of a recent tragedy: there she meets handsome and charming Commander Keatings, who makes no secret of his romantic interest in her. Yet it's Will who stars in her fantasies ...

If I'd read this novel with rose-tinted glasses, I'd have liked it a lot more. It's written in a light-hearted and humorous style, and the characters are, at heart, kind, pleasant and well-meaning -- though Angelika in particular is oblivious to the oppression that surrounds and supports her privileged life. But, but, this is a novel about issues of consent: about a man being resurrected to suffer agonising pain, unwanted desire (Angelika's chosen 'second-largest' penis being incompatible with Will's brain and having a will, haha, of its own), dismissal of his religious faith, and the expectation that sooner or later he will succumb to the charms of the woman who's forced all this on him, and who continues to lie to him in the name of 'love'. This to me is a scenario of horror, not of humour.

With my rose-tinted spectacles on, there’s plenty to admire here. Angelika is an intriguing heroine, intelligent and self-aware and in charge of her own sexuality, and confident enough not to care what the villagers think of her wearing trousers: she's sheltered and privileged, but does strive to be better when she realises the extent of the deprivation in the local community. Her friendship with Lizzie is charmingly intimate, and Lizzie herself -- a playwright, of Russian and Spanish heritage -- is a fascinating character. (I'd love to read the story of how she and Victor met and fell in love.) Victor, while not as arrogant as his literary inspiration, is somewhat misogynistic, and he's only too ready to 'promote' Lizzie to Angelika's role of lab assistant without any consultation. His creation, eventually named Adam, turns out to be quite a nice fellow, and there is an amiable pig named Belladonna.

But I'm still disturbed by Will's torment, and by Angelika's overweening selfishness in playing Pygmalion and assembling a sentient being, to her own specification and for her own use, from assorted spare parts.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date (15 SEP 2022). Thanks, too, to the anon reviewer who used the term 'dick'n'mix'.

2022/111: Stone Blind — Natalie Haynes

Medusa is dead, I am dead. But I'm still the best narrator for this part of the story, because I was there for all of it, and because I am not a lying deceitful hateful vicious murderer. [loc. 2567]

This novel is subtitled 'Medusa's Story', but at first it seems like a complex interweaving of the stories of wronged women from Greek mythology: Zeus' first wife Metis; Andromeda, staked out as a sacrifice to Poseidon; Danaë imprisoned in the dark; Hera and Amphitrite, wronged wives. (Hera, 'a goddess with an almost limitless supply of spite, could barely keep up with the number of women, goddesses, nymphs and mewling infants she needed to persecute'. [loc. 77]) Yet it all circles back to Medusa's story, and the implacable hatred of Athene -- 'vengeful and cruel, always blaming women for what men do to them' [loc. 1209] -- whose curse transforms Medusa after Poseidon rapes her in Athene's temple. Does Athene make Medusa into a monster, though? Is Medusa truly the hideous, unlovable horror sought by Perseus? The great hero is an unlikeable and incompetent teenager in this account, constantly whining to Athene and Hermes about the appalling hardships of his quest for a Gorgon's head. Athene does not have much time for him, and in this one thing I am wholly in agreement with her.

It's not all grim. The love between mortal Medusa and her immortal Gorgon sisters, Euryale and Sthenno, is deep and heartfelt: it's the opposite of monstrosity, the epithet levelled at the Gorgons by both Poseidon and Perseus. Hermes, one of the few male characters who behaves decently in the pages of Stone Blind, asks of Perseus 'who are you to decide who is a monster?'. And Medusa tells Poseidon that beauty is more than skin-deep: she sees it in the loving care of her sisters, and she submits to Poseidon to save a (more) mortal girl.

Haynes plays with voices here: it's not only Medusa's story, but a multitude of voices making a mosaic of misogyny, abuse, privilege and trickery. There are chapters told from choruses of entities: a bickering slither of snakes, an olive grove, the Hespereides. There are so many wronged women, their voices distinct but their experiences alike. I'd love to hear this read aloud, as a dramatic performance... One voice is absent: Medusa's mother Ceto, who dwells in the depths of the ocean. But Haynes weaves her into the story, in a way that is both tragic and elegant.

So many connections I hadn't recognised: so many commonalities of experience. Stone Blind isn't always an easy read, but it is a rewarding one: I am reminded that I have several of Haynes' other mythology-based novels, and am encouraged to read them sooner rather than later.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy. UK publication date is 15 SEP 2022, and there's a virtual launch at the British Library.