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There's a book I would have truly loved in here, but it's buried under enough trying to make every sentence glitter that I almost gave up on reading it more than once.

I think this is a general vibe I get from Valente: my introduction to her work was a short story (or maybe a book chapter?) read aloud by a friend, and I loved it. But I haven't got on well enough with either of the novels I've read by her to want more. Every sentence, every paragraph, is beautiful and funny and quotable, but after a while it gets exhausting. It reminds me of why I never followed comedians on Twitter. In the terms of this book: it can feel like the sort of music in which every bar is someone's solo and they're all trying to outdo each other. It ends up lacking dynamics and coherency.

I'm very charmed by the basic idea of this book: First Contact happens, and the aliens immediately demand that Earth enters Galactic Eurovision to prove its higher life forms are worth admitting to the galactic community and not a threat who should be exterminated. And at its best, it's a fun ride along that premise. Not trying to take itself seriously, in large part a tribute to Douglas Adams. But it just gets tiring to read.

And then there's one detail that really grated on me: a Turkish character named "Omar Calişkan". "Çalışkan" is a common Turkish name, but Turkish has strong linguistic well-formedness rules and "Calişkan" is Just Not Turkish to the point of being irritating to see. I know this is a niche complaint, but it never stopped bugging me that she found the "ş", but not the "Ç" which would always go with it in Turkish, even though that one's in Latin-1. "Omar" doesn't feel like a Turkish name to me either (the equivalent would be "Ömer"), though I'm less confident in this one: maybe it's just unusual enough that I haven't run into any Turkish Omars. But anyway, this felt extra-jarring when the characters (father and son) are so well-observed that I felt very personally skewered by the "Englishblokeman" thing, and had a specific individual in mind when reading about the son. Couldn't author or editor have found a Turk to run the name by?

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I'm finding it hard to say anything pithy about this book because it wraps so many different things together. I read it uncharacteristically slowly just because it was a busy time, and that maybe contributed to my sense that it's several different books woven together - but also to my enjoyment of the writing itself. It's beautifully done, and you should just go and read it yourself.

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Possible future #SFFBookClub book? (largely on the strength of bookwyrm.social/user/sohkamyung/review/10090007 )

When I heard of this book--a generation ship novel entirely in verse--I was excited and felt some trepidation, because it can be easy for a technical feat like that to overshadow the story. Once I had it in hand and flicked through, I felt both of those things more intensely, because parts of the book employ the sort of creative layouts I associate more with zines than novels.

It turns out that all of that drives the story and characterisation with a singular focus. Even the wackiest-looking page layouts are a guide for pacing and mood, and work fantastically well. I am unusually tempted to just go back to the beginning and read the whole thing through again.

It is also an interesting story, and the three main characters are compelling. It made sense to mostly focus on them at the expense of the ship's crew, but at the end I was left a little frustrated that one question was never addressed: what would have motivated rank-and-file members of the first generation crew to sign up?

It is also a deeply Christian story, enough so that I feel like that needs to be a potential CW. But this is handled in a very interesting way that worked for me as a non-Christian reader.

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About half a chapter in, and I can already tell this is going to be gloriously batshit. I think I mean that as unqualified praise, ask me again after a couple of chapters. #SFFBookClub

How to review this without spoilers for things that it is definitely worth encountering at the speed they're written?

I found this a hard book to read, because so much of the plot is driven by the protagonist making decisions that are clearly bad in the moment they are made. I felt a bit like the stereotypical moviegoer wanting to shout "no, don't do it" at the screen. But I ultimately came to see it as a classic tragedy: a whole series of painful events driven by the hero's fatal flaw. And it is all aspects of the same flaw, and the flaw is one that's very recognisable looking around at society.

It's also a story of the right size for the novella format. Sometimes I get frustrated that novellas feel incomplete, rushing to an ending and/or leaving too few characters fleshed out. This one just felt tightly focussed.

And it has one of the best closing sentences of anything I've read, up there with The Dispossessed for how perfectly it recapitulates the whole story, and how little it will mean prior to having read the story.

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I found this a very satisfying continuation and conclusion of the story started in Moon of the Crusted Snow. It has a very different mood and focus, so much so that in this review I'm trying to avoid spoilers for the previous book more than for this one. Where Crusted Snow gets a lot of its tension from us as readers learning things as the protagonists do, this one is mostly not a suspenseful story. The broad outline of how things have to go is apparent from early on, and most of what makes it interesting is atmosphere and character development. Even the cover art of the two books does a pretty good job of communicating their relative moods.

I'm pretty sure this book would stand alone far better than most sequels do, because it largely follows a character too young to remember the events of or background to the first book. This neatly gives Rice a way to work in some rehashing naturally as people answering her questions, but also this book fills in a lot of information that none of the characters knew during the first one. That said, I'd still recommend reading Crusted Snow first because the most emotional parts of this story are bound to have more impact if you've had longer to get invested in the older characters.

CWs: racist violence, and this one's a real tear jerker.

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There's an excellent book in here. An engaging story about individual and collective self-delusion and amnesia, with some very clear political messages and a grim humour to it. But at times, especially in the second quarter or so of the book, the author seems unclear whether he's writing a novel or a NY Review Of Books essay about individual dementia, collective amnesia, and the selective remembering of nostalgia. It's clear that he could write a fine essay and I'd enjoy reading that too, but the hybrid is clunky. From the POV of a novel reader the essay portions make the plot drag slowly enough that I started to lose interest. From the POV of a creative nonfiction reader, the actually fiction parts are jarring and confusing.

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I loved this book for several things:

• How real and solid the historical-London setting felt. I'm used to that sort of thing feeling very flimsy, but this is an author who clearly does deep research and lets it suffuse the writing without getting all 'splainy.
• The very palpable tension between the protagonist's precarious position and her need to have some freedom.
• The delightful-if-implausable retconning of Sir Christopher Wren's secret motive for shaping London the way he did.

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About halfway through and I have mixed feelings about this book. I find the plot such as there is one quite interesting and a very good vehicle for dissecting/mocking the 2010s-2020s turn to fascism. And I like the writing itself a lot. But Gospodinov seems perpetually unsure whether he's writing a novel or an essay.

The thing that's keeping me going is that he's a good enough writer and observer for it to be an enjoyable essay, but I am increasingly finding myself wanting the essayish digressions to get shorter so the plot can move more.

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This book is off the #SFFBookClub backlog, and I saw it mentioned on Imperfect Speculation (a blog about disability in speculative fiction).

The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic near future world where most people have lost the ability to dream, and the only "cure" is through the exploitation of bone marrow from indigenous people who still can. The book follows Frenchie, a Métis boy who has lost everybody he cares about and travels with a found family trying to find safety and community. The metaphor here resonates directly with the horrors of Canada past, as armed "recruiters" capture anybody who looks indigenous to send them off to "schools" to extract their bone marrow.

I know this is a YA novel, but I wish some of the characters and the protagonist Frenchie had more depth. Maybe this would land better for somebody else, but I also don't have any room in my heart for jealousy subplots, and the one here did not create any extra characterization that could have made it interesting.

Even if some of the plot points felt a bit weak and unearned, the book still ended in a very emotionally resonant way that worked for me.

I enjoyed this recontextualization of the Count of Monte Cristo into a science fiction story of revenge against empire and colonialism. It riffs on many elements from the original, but ultimately takes them in a different direction. Here, Virika is still framed by one of her peers due to his career jealousy, but it's also because of rebuffed sexual advances. Instead of "wait and hope" from the original, this book has the much more modern "success or perish" mantra.

As both a personal and thematic moment, the final scenes of negotiation come satisfyingly full circle, but sadly there's not that much room for worldbuilding in this short novella. It makes the larger diplomatic picture feel shallow, and the end of the book feel abrupt.

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These Fragile Graces is a fun trans noir murder mystery novella. It's a story that focuses much more on interpersonal and community relations than it does on a well-plotted mystery or detailed worldbuilding. That focus also sums up my feelings about what I felt worked and didn't in the story.

Mostly, I wish the mystery plot was a little bit more cohesive, and that there was more detail about the state of the world itself rather than being in a vague near-future urban decay. I loved the small detail of having memory implants to deal with trauma-based dissociation from childhood, but I wish the ideas around implants/augments and a rejection syndrome connected more to the plot.

It is nice to see an anarchist commune in fiction (I feel like maybe I've only read this in Margaret Killjoy's work previously) and how the protagonist Dora wrestles with her relationship with the people in it, wishing she could keep them safe in ways that they don't want to be. And, the heart of this novel is a very trans story about how Dora deals with a (non-estrogenated) clone of herself who comes to murder her but she ultimately ends up protecting. From the moment her clone showed up and yelled traitor, I knew exactly where this story was going, but it was still satisfying to get there all the same.

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