Reading Roundup - May and June

Another twofer, covering May and June.

Found Horizons
Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri
Okay; you know the drill. 'Ordinary' girl, secret powers, moody sexy man of mystery. So snowflake, such been there.

Except that we haven't; not really.

Mehr is the daughter of two cultures. He father is a noble and official in the in the all-conquering Ambhan Empire, while her mother is one of the Amrithi, a nomadic culture persecuted by the Empire. She practices her mother's customs at the indulgence of her father's authority, putting her at odds with her stepmother, and ultimately bringing her to the attention of the Mystics, the religious fanatics in the service of the Maha, immortal founder of the Empire. Her Amrithi blood gives her rare powers, but also comes with a burden that she does not understand until it is used against her.

The balance of power and frailty is just one of the ways in which Empire of Sand stands apart from the crowd of lesser efforts with which is shares some rudimentary plot beats (The Hundredth Queen, I'm looking at you here.) Others include a romance which builds out of shared horrors, not some instant attraction to a pair of dreamy eyes (her husband Amun is far more complex than just being a love interest, and has somewhat scary black eyes,) and a willingness to sacrifice both life and love for the good of the world, rather than vice versa. Mehr acknowledges her early naivety and struggles to learn from it, and succeeds by understanding other people, rather than by simply denying their position until the world validates her.

In short, Empire of Sand is notable both for its atypical setting - a secondary fantasy world based on Mughal India, rather than the conventional mediaeval European model - and for taking a whole bunch of tired and/or unhealthy tropes and doing them really well.

New Novels
Provenance, by Ann Leckie
Ingray Aughskold is going to show them all. She has a plan. The only problem is that it's a terrible plan, which involves paying a vast sum of money to have a criminal extracted from not-prison-honestly to embarrass her adoptive mother's political rival on their homeworld, Hwae. It's a plan that will ultimately involve her in a murder mystery, a fake identity scandal, a diplomatic incident and an attempted interstellar insurgency, all revolving around Hwae's obsession with vestiges, the physical artefacts associated with historic events.

Set in the same universe and shortly after Leckie's Ancillary trilogy, Provenance departs the single-gender Imperial Radch for the single-world polity of Hwae, where identity hinges on proof of one's family history, favourite children share their parents' name and personhood, and children become adults when they feel ready to choose a grown-up name and a gender (male, female or non-binary(1).) It's a lot less epic than the previous novels, but likable characters, and interesting setting and a bucket of intrigue make for an engaging read nonetheless.

Whereas the singularity of gender identity in the Ancillary series is an intriguing deconstruction that is kind of adjacent to the main story, this is a book all about identity: the self-determined gender of the Hwaeans, their fixation on - slightly questionable - physical artefacts to define their history, and that history to define both their cultural and personal identity, and the personal struggle of the various characters to discover or define who they really are.

Bloody Rose, by Nicholas Eames
Tam Hashford is the daughter of a mercenary and a bard, and longs to have adventures of her own, but her father has decreed that she spend her life at home, where it is safe. But then Fable, the greatest band in the world, come to the tavern where she waits tables, and Tam has a chance to become their bard, and join them on the road for their last tour, and at the end of it, the greatest gig in history; something that will put even the reputation of Golden Gabe into the shade.

The sequel to Kings of the Wyld follows the band led by the titular Bloody Rose, the daughter of Saga's lead singer Gabriel, and that's just the start of the band's daddy issues. In fact, if there's a glaring flaw with the novel it's the focus on Rose's struggle to rise out of Gabe's shadow when the rest of the band's paternal units are a monstrous tyrant, a violent abuser, and the kind of emotional fuck-up who can't get his own head out of his arse. Still, it actually makes sense that these similarly damaged folks would find each other in an emotionally complex world of touring stadium gladiators.

Like Kings of the Wyld, Bloody Rose is probably a better book than it has any right to be, given that it's basically a one-joke concept - a world right out of fantasy RPGs, in which PC parties are effectively rock stars - as Eames puts in the humour and character work to make the whole far more interesting than the sum of its concepts. It has a few inherited diversity issues - one of the leads is a humanoid rabbit, but none are people of colour, because fantasy Europe - but there is at least some gay and bi representation and plenty of complex female characters. Rose may struggle to measure up to her dad, but that's because his life has almost accidentally made him a legend in the golden age of the mercenaries, not because she's a woman.

Deadly Desert, by Marcus Sedgwick
Elf Girl and Raven Boy are on a quest, but the truth is that they aren't very good at it. They need to find the artefact that will save their forest from ultimate evil, but they're not very qualified for heroism, lacking greatly in the fields of courage and badassery, and being a little too loose-lipped when it comes to the question of wishes. Still, they're all there is to prevent the forest becoming a barren waste like the Deadly Desert.

The third part of the Elf Girl and Raven Boy series - first I've read; the joys of library reading - is a fun, light-hearted little adventure with actual stakes. Sedgwick's usual metier is gothic bleakness, but he manages the shift of tone neatly, and the result is weird and sweet and yet with a bit of weight to its events, despite having a villain who never actually puts in an appearance. It also features one of the more self-aware 'three wishes' scenes I've read; good enough I was willing to give a pass to assigning three wishes to a genie (whose traditional bit is 'your wish is my command', which is a whole different scope than the fairy godmother thing.)

Very simple. Good stuff.

The Questing Knights of the Faerie Queen, by Geraldine McCaughrean
In the land of Faerie a queen rules, Gloriana, mistress of a court of chivalry and virtue, who dispatches her knights on quests to reaffirm the rule and role of virtue in the world: George Redcrosse, seeker after holiness; Sir Gunion, in need of temperance; Sir Campbell, in want of friendship; Britomart, chaste champion of true love; Sir Artegall, champion of justice; and Calidore, the courteous. Their stories overlap, with each other and with the quest of Arthur, king of legend and knight of all virtues, in a mosaic of courage, combat and romance.

Prolific children's author McCaughrean presents a lavishly illustrated retelling of Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene is a witty effort, although it does from time to time struggle with the source material, especially in Sir Artegall's misogyny and transphobia(2). The result is a diverting enough read, although if sharing it with childrne, this is on the 'complicated conversations end of the bedtime reading spectrum (see also Peter Pan, below.)

The illustrations by Jason Cockroft are bright and striking, although a little excess of enthusiasm with the rosy cheeks of Gloriana make the Faerie Queen look like she's gone a little heavy on the booze for the past eternity.

The October Man, by Ben Aaronovitch
A mysterious death, potentially supernatural means, and a problem that seems determined not to go away. This looks like a job for Peter Grant, jobbing copper and apprentice wizard... but it isn't. It isn't, because the death occurred in Trier, which puts it square in the bailiwick of Tobias Winter, sole apprentice magician in the German equivalent of the Folly, and his local liaison Vanessa Sommer.

The two main criticisms of The October Man that I've seen are 1) that it's too short, and 2) that the protagonist is a little too like Peter Grant in his dry, sarcastic first person narrative.

Point one is... fair. Novellae(3) by established authors are a bit of a racket in sales terms, but if they tend to be priced to give less bang for your buck in terms of solid page count, they also provide a welcome uptick in the old release schedule without turning your author into a desperate shell of humanity, plagued by the fear of 'going Jordan' and leaving the TV finale as the only one there is(4).

On point two... I actually don't know. This is one area where it makes a huge difference that I was listening to an audiobook. Once I'd recovered from the fact that a Rivers of London story wasn't being read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith(5) that fact in itself transformed the narrative voice for me. It also seemed to me that, alongside a different set of cultural references and hobbies, Toby was... well, a bit less of a dog than Peter, describing the women he meets in more practical terms. While he always respected them, especially in his early outings, Peter kind of had the hots for every woman he met, whereas Toby and Vanessa come across as colleagues with a natural working rapport. I liked that.

Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions - Mission 1: Salvage Trouble, by JS Morin
I don't make a habit of picking up books based on recommendations on the Facebook, because they usually look terrible (she's cool, she's hot, she hunts demons for the Vatican, but she isn't religious or anything(6).) The Complete Black Ocean - or possibly the Complete Galaxy Outlaws, I'm a little confused as to the title of this collection - has something different. Specifically, it's an omnibus with like, eighty-five hours of listening for a credit.

Carl Ramsey is an ex-Navy pilot running a mostly-legal freight and salvage operation on his ship, the Mobius, with his nails-hard ex-Marine ex-wife, a hard-drinking uplifted chimpanzee mechanic, an alien cat-woman who is more apex predator than fanservice, and a beatnik wizard. In this first story they lose their communications tech rescuing a stranded lifepod, and take on board a priestess and her charge, a young boy with secrets. As a result of this, and Carl's need to showboat, they quickly end up on the wrong end of a lot of heavily-armed attention. Fortunately, the crew of the Mobius know how to look after themselves.

The opening of this series has some interesting ideas - FTL travel is literally magical, an old wizard family called Brown uses the traditional middle name The to add grandeur(7), religion is alive and well, but distinctly altered - and some interesting twists on stock character archetypes, but the stock is very visible, and there aren't a lot of surprises for the veteran reader. Since I've got another eighty hours, I'll probably listen to at least the next story, but I'm certainly not going to do it all in a oner.

Audio Plays

Criss-Cross (Big Finish)
Leading WREN Constance Clarke is the leader of a group of hard-working ladies, crunching numbers at Bletchley Park to help break the German Enigma code, the silent muscle behind the male academics; academics like Doctor Smith, with his particular interest in a German agent named Spark.

The first of four Big Finish plays I worked through this month, Criss-Cross revisits familiar territory (actual Bletchley Park being ironically reminiscent of the Highland ersatz Bletchley from The Curse of Fenric, which the Doctor won't actually visit for another lifetime,) and introduces a new companion in the form of Mrs Constance Clarke, who is exactly the kind of no-nonsense travelling companion who complements the Sixth Doctor's excesses.

The plot manages to both celebrate the work of Bletchley and throw some shade on the moral ambivalence of intelligence work in general, with the eponymous Agent Criss-Cross hailed as a hero by various factions while betraying most of them for his one true loyalty to himself. The specific alien threat is a little mechanical, however, serving primarily to give the Doctor his interest in the earthbound events.

Planet of the Rani (Big Finish)
There is a prison, where the worst of the worst are held, and where the worst of the worst of the worst... has been rehabilitated. When Constance finds an email inviting the Doctor to attend the Rani's parole hearing, they discover that the renegade Time Lord is running the show. But that's not what she's really after; what she wants is to go back to the planet she made her own, and the child she created to be the progenitor of a master race under her command, and she doesn't care who gets hurt in the process.

As often happens, especially with a new companion, this run of three plays follows a close chronological sequence, and focuses on the development of the new character. Constance has joined the Doctor to take care of 'personal business,' and with every intention of returning moments after she left, because she ain't no deserter. We also learn that life in wartime has made her harder than many companions, not afraid of a little rough stuff and willing to encourage a more aggressive course of action than the Doctor might prefer.

Siobhan Redmond brings the requisite overwhelming arrogance to her performance as the Second Rani, and her co-option of a thoughtless childhood experiment of the Doctor's plays up the chilling childishness of her unsympathetic ambition.

Shield of the Jotun (Big Finish)
In the not-too-distant future, the Sixth Doctor and Constance stumble upon an ancient Viking burial mound in the central United States, at the heart of a site intended for development of a climate-saving terraforming engine. But there is something terrible buried with the Vikings, a device at the heart of a plan for the Earth to become a frozen paradise for alien colonists fleeing their own doomed planet.

Classic Who this one: Bit of environmental message, aliens bent on world domination, and an earnest attempt at compromise by a Doctor who is doomed to eternally being not angry, just disappointed. Constance has mostly settled into her companion mode for this one, but I expect to see her through plot reappear in the next set of three.

Shield of the Jotun is probably the weakest of these three, with some gorgeous soundscapes but a fairly simplistic motivation for its antagonists. Still, even weak Big Finish tends to be pretty solid stuff.

You are the Doctor and other stories (Big Finish)
The Doctor is teaching Ace to pilot the TARDIS, and it's going about as well as you might expect. She's looking for sun, sea, sand, and presumably not too many personal revelations. What she finds is a trash ship where she and the Doctor are caught up in a choose your own adventure, a murder mystery weekend in time and space, a hotel where they are caught up in a heist, or a revolution, or both, and a space tourist vessel, where they are caught up in an attempted real estate scam. Pure bad luck, or is there a connection?

Somewhat ironically, given my regular lambasting of the single-episode-story approach of nuWho, I've always rather enjoyed the four-story collections in the Big Finish main range, and this is no exception. You get a good spread of stories, and it helps that this uses my favourite classic pairing of the Seventh Doctor(8) and Ace. A good finish to the month's Who.

Alien III, by William Gibson
Alien3 had a famously troubled production, not least due to its reason for existing being 'Aliens made a tonne of money, this franchise is bank,' rather than 'and this is the next story we want to tell in this universe.(9)' Many fans of the franchise and critics of the eventual film - whichever version of it you want to consider canonical - have long hewed to the touchstone that 'the original script' would have been better. Written by Neuromancer scribe Gibson, this script has since seen the light of day as a comic book, and now as Alien III, an Audible-produced audioplay(10), starring Michael Biehn, Lance Hendricksen and the American residents of producer-director Dirk Maggs' contacts list.

Do you remember when Biehn was a hot young talent, fresh from playing the love interest in The Terminator? When his star was rising and he looked set to be the kind of leading man not even the box office poison of Navy SEALS could stop? Those days are long past, and to be honest between this and Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, I don't think he was ever that great at voice acting. Still, an Alien story only calls on him to be gruff, protective of Ripley, and vaguely paternal towards Newt(11), and he can do that.

The script almost immediately eliminates Ripley(12), which probably saved a major bit of recasting, since Sigourney Weaver still has a movie career, and instead follows Hicks as he recovers, sees Ripley and Newt to safety, and then tries to protect as many members of the crew of a science station as he can after Weyland-Yutani once more try to re-engineer the Alien. Meanwhile, an entirely parallel and as-yet largely unmade movie is taking place on a Communist station, and I kind of wanted to hear more of that one, if I'm honest.

It's very short for a full credit, but it helps calm the franchise completist in me that knows I will never be able to get all of the comics.


Re-reads

Peter Pan
All children grow up, except one.

An established classic to which I came late, I remain impressed by the book's awareness of its titular characters glaring flaws, but it's still a highly problematic work; less for the massive of indescribably gruesome violence obliquely referenced throughout the text than for its depiction of Wendy, a character so utterly indoctrinated into the Edwardian patriarchy that motherhood is for her not merely a goal but a sacred purpose. Also, it has the redskins in, which I had to explain to my six year old daughter are not aliens, but instead a racist caricature of native Americans.

Old stuff. It's got challenges.

(1) I totally stole this idea for the elves in my D&D setting, by the by.
(2) TLDR, Amazons upset the order of his world by making him wear a dress, so he murders them all.
(3) Novellas? I don't know; this isn't a hill I'm prepared to die on or anything.
(4) If that's not too specific.
(5) For the record, I don't think he should play the part in the TV series if and when it gets made. His voice is Peter for me, but on screen they need to cast someone younger.
(6) Paraphrased, but not made up. The synopsis is written in first person and uses the phrase 'put on my big girl pants' with no sign of irony.
(7) The Mobius's wizard is thus legally known as Mordecai The Brown, for example.
(8) Don't @ me.
(9) See also the entire Alien vs. Predator subfranchise, which despite a few successes very much a product of 'wouldn't it be profitable cool' thinking.
(10) Audible are getting really into Alien spin-off material; I suppose they must have secured a deal of some sort.
(11) Honestly, I can forgive a lot for not just writing out Newt for the sake of convenience. 
(12) This is not one of those things.

Reading Roundup - February, March and April 2019

Three months at a pop this time (I missed two and its taken most of the third to get this written up.) I managed two entries for the Found Horizons challenge, three other new novels, seven comics, two audio plays and eight re-reads.

Found Horizons
Throne of the Crescent Moon, by Saladin Ahmed
Picked up on a recommendation from James Holloway, this has also started a bit of a kick on fantasy novels taking their model from something other than mediaeval European history and/or Tolkien. In this case, the setting is influenced by the Thousand and One Nights. The novel is supposedly part one of a trilogy, but is largely complete in itself and the second part hasn't emerged in the seven years since this one came out.

The novel follows the struggles of the ghul hunter, Doctor Adoullah Makhslood, and his friends and assistants against a mysterious and terrible dark sorcerer bent on seizing an ancient and apocalyptic power from the fallen empire on whose ruins the current Kalifate was built. The ageing Doctor battles using costly and exhausting sacred invocations, and fights alongside the holy swordsman Rasheed, lion shapeshifter Zamia, and his old friends the mage Dawoud and the alchemist Litaz. All of them have incredible powers, but the society in which they live has no respect for their abilities or their fight. In addition to the supernatural threat they face, they must struggle with social unrest: A revolution led by the charismatic Falcon Prince, and the violence of the thuggish zealots known as the Young Scholars, whose seeming-piety Rasheed admires, but who are little different from modern fundamentalists, white nationalists, or those who use the phrase 'Brexit means Brexit' without irony.

While the characters and plot aren't bad, the real strength of the book is in its worldbuilding, which is deep and compelling, and a refreshing change from more conventional fantasy.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James
They call him Tracker, and it is said that he has a nose. One eye is that of a man, the other of a wolf. If you want someone found, he will track them into the underworld itself. Twice, he has been called upon to find a child, and now the child is dead. Someone wants to know why. Someone wants to know how. Tracker may be the only one who knows, but he isn't going to be quick to tell.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the first fantasy novel by Jamaican author Marlon James. It follows the deeply personal odyssey of Tracker - the wolf of the title - as he moves through the the great events of his day, across a sprawling secondary world steeped in the folklore of Africa (primarily southern Africa, I believe, but I'd still be writing these reviews in June if I tried to track down everything in this book to its source.) Tracker - a gruff, misanthropic loner by nature, whose motto is 'nobody loves anybody else' - is both our protagonist and our deeply unreliable narrator; called on to give testimony to an inquisitor, he instead tells a series of interlinking stories which lie somewhere nebulously between objective truth and outright lie. In his search for the missing boy and his monstrous captors, he is forced to work with an old partner - the shapeshifting black leopard - and a ragtag band of equally truculent souls, as well as navigating an increasingly complex web of lies surrounding the identity of the child in question.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is an intricate exploration of internal and external truth, as well as a sort of survival-horror-level approach to fantasy, set in a world completely unfamiliar to the European reader. It also features another rarity in that its grumpy, anithero protagonist is gay. It's highly profane in its language, bleak in its outlook, and definitely on the dark side of the genre.

A word of warning: bad things happen to children in this book. A lot.

New Novels

The flamboyantly camp Dr Tachyon, depicted
on this cover, is 100% straight, as is pretty
much everyone in this book.

Wild Cards, edited by George RR Martin
An alien force comes to Earth, bringing with them a virus intended to transform the human genome to generate psychic abilities. Conflict with a defector and the interference of a human criminal result in the 'Wild Card' virus being released over New York, and so the age of superpowers begins. Some of those infected recover, most die horribly, and some are changed, into superpowered 'Aces' (a few with very specific, low-utility powers are called 'Deuces') or disfigured 'Jokers'.

First published in 1987, this first anthology in a shared world series edited by George RR 'Song of Ice and Fire' Martin... is really, really eighties. Almost all of the major characters are men, with women playing supporting and usually romantic roles. The two significant female Aces in the collection are a woman who absorbs the knowledge and personalities of other people, ultimately becoming overwhelmed by the burden of the minds of the great men whose knowledge she now holds, and a young radical whose rape caused her to turn into a vigilante subway car. Minor female characters include several Jokers with exotic deformities, and one who has passive sex powers. There is also a half-Japanese, half-African American Ace who is a pimp with sex-fuelled magical powers; not precisely a negative portrayal, but the book is hard into exoticism. Notably, this edition has three stories not in the original printing, which includes 'Ghost Girl Takes Manhattan', and that has a much more active female character, Wraith (although even she spends a striking amount of time naked.)

With all of this in mind, 'Wild Cards' presents a history of a world with superheroes in an interesting way. The quality of the stories varies, but they are generally well-written, albeit unevenly characterised. It's likely that, if this were written today - and edited by anyone by Martin - I wouldn't give it the time of day, but as a historical artefact I'm kind of interested to see how the series is going to progress and transform through the succeeding books.

Although there are twenty-seven of them, so don't hold your breath.

The Restless Girls, by Jessie Burton
So, here's a book that I saw on a poster at the railway station. Seriously.

In a Mediterranean-type kingdom, an adventurous queen dies, leaving a dozen daughters and an overprotective father who decides that they will be safer without hobbies, dreams or excessive direct sunlight. He locks them in a single dormitory, watched over by a portrait of their late mother. The girls discover a hidden door behind the portrait, and a path which leads to a hidden palace where they dance with a crowd of animals every night, until the King notices how fast they are going through shoes. He exiles the oldest daughter, and determines to marry one of the others to a man who can take up his crown. Only one prospective suitor meets the king's challenge, but is he all that he seems?

Jessie Burton's retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses - which I read to my partner, and let me tell you, I really need to pick books for reading aloud that require fewer than a dozen distinct voices throughout - is a gently subversive delight, which flips the script on the bartered bride mode of fairy tale. The princesses are great, and their mother - although dead for the entirety of the story - is an absolute baller.

It may be a bit of a liberty to call this one a novel, it's more of an illustrated novella, but I won't hold that against it.

The Battles of Ben Kingdom: The Claws of Evil, by Andrew Beasley
In Victorian London, apprentice cooper Ben Kingdom is about to stumble into an ancient conflict between the rooftop-running Watchers and the subterranean Legion: a conflict over nothing less than the fate and soul of the world itself. Subject of apocalyptic prophecy, Ben is fated to choose between good and evil and so bring an end to this war. But which side will he choose, and which is which anyway? (Spoiler warning, the ones who live underground, have violent hazing rituals, cages full of monster birds, and fantasize about world domination are the baddies, while the ones who work with an actual angel aren't.)

As I might have given away with that synopsis, the big problem with this otherwise enjoyable Victorian supernatural adventure is that its central conflict lacks a fundamental element of suspense. The story wants us to question which side Ben will choose - even throwing in a Macguffin to tempt him towards the wrong choice - but since it also wants us to like Ben, it's fairly clear that he's going to end up on the literal side of the angels. In fact, this means that the fate of dissenting miniboss Ruby 'too cute for villainy' Johnson is far more interesting than Ben's, because she genuinely could go either way.

I got this one from the library, so no telling if or when I might get hold of the second and third volumes, but if I see them I will.

New Comics
The Power of the Dark Crystal, by Simon Spurrier, Kelly Matthew and Nicole Matthews
The official continuation of the story of the movie The Dark Crystal - an absolute corker, if you don't know it - was going to be a film, but ended up as a 12-issue comic. Set many years after the film, the comic sees the Gelfling race restored and now ruling Thra from the Castle of the Crystal. Jen and Kira are ancient, and the rule of Thra is mostly undertaken by a corrupt priesthood who demand extortionate 'offerings' in exchange for access to the crystal and to Jen and Kira.

A being called Thurma, a fireling, comes to the castle, asking for a shard of the crystal to save her world, which lies deep beneath the surface of Thra. Denied, she steals a shard, bringing back the Skekses and Mystics, and flees with the aid of a conflicted temple acolyte called Kensho. As the two young fugitives bond, pursued by the agents of the priesthood, the tools of the Skekses now controlled by Jen, and by the whining Chancellor, the ancient Aughra struggles to understand what is happening, and how the world can be on the brink of destruction again.

As a huge fan of The Dark Crystal, and having written a failed pitch for inclusion in an authorised anthology, I was very keen to read this. It's pacing is a little slow, and honestly it probably could have stood to be six-to-eight issues, but I did enjoy the ideas and the sense of impending doom was on point. It is a fairly tragic capper to the story of Jen and Kira, as the hope of Thra - and the subterranean world of Mithra - is passed to Thurma and Kensho.

There's a follow-up being released at the moment, which I'll catch up with once it's in trades.

Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery, by Kurtis J Wiebe
In a world where the rough and tumble of high fantasy is giving way to a more orderly world of trade and culture, the town of Palisade is faced with the question of what to do with the adventurers who once tamed the land and protected the borders, but are now just a drunken, violent threat to civic harmony. Best - or worst - of the crowd are the Rat Queens, a quartet of hard-drinking, bar-brawling women: Hannah, an elf necromancer; Vi, a dwarf fighter; Delilah, a human cultist of a blood-drinking squid god, turned cleric of no particular deity; and Betty, a smidgen(1) with an appetite for drugs, ladies and stabbings. When the merchants guild hires assassins to wipe out the adventurers, the Rat Queens take it personally, which is going to be bad news for someone.

Probably the greatest triumph of this opening volume of the Rat Queens' adventures is not concisely presenting the above information to bring us into their world, but in creating characters who are not only complex and engaging - even likable, for all their rough edges - but convincing both as comic characters and as roleplaying PCs. Wiebe captures the weird banter of the game table with uncanny accuracy, but also creates convincing protagonists.

My only real problem with the book is that it kind of impinges on one of those ideas I probably wouldn't have had time to write anyway - what if a roleplaying world were real, and most of the monsters were dead now - although a) 'The Boys from the Borderlands' would be a lot less fun, and b) it woudl already have been clashing with Kings of the Wyld.

Rat Queens Volume 2: The Far Reaching Tentacles of N'rygoth, by Kurtis J Wiebe
Huh. So it turns out that I picked up volume 2 of Rat Queens in a sale pretty much right after writing the review above, but before publishing this roundup. (Seriously, I need to get on with these reviews a lot faster.)

Picking up directly from the end of volume 1, this one sees a revenge plot against the captain of the watch - a former assassin and Hannah's on/off booty call - expand to exploit Delilah's ex-deity and basically destroy the world, so that everyone can experience one man's pain (albeit only for the few moments it takes for the rest of existence to fold up like a barely-spoiled tablecloth.

While still not a million miles from the style of its roleplaying roots, The Far-Reaching Tentacles of N'rygoth is very much more a conventional narrative than Sass and Sorcery, which is probably a vital step after the establishing chapters. On the other hand, it has the sort of increasingly relevant backstory that is the hallmark of character-heavy RPGs, including an appearance by Delilah's never-before-mentioned husband, and flashbacks to Vi's break with her traditional dwarf family (in regards to which, I loved the fact that the family armoury business was run like a dynastic fashion house.) Betty has a bit of a side role in this, but I'm sure she'll get to break out of her tragicomic sideline in future volumes.

Still on board for this one. Roll on the next sale.

Giant Days: Vol 8, by John Allison
Man; what else can I say about Giant Days? While Vol. 8 brings new stories and new challenges, the series is sufficiently slanted towards character material that recapping the stories feels somewhat redundant. It's all 'Susan, Esther and Daisy do some stuff and shenanigans ensue', and as much as it's all glorious, its strength lies in 'Susan, Esther and Daisy,' rather than in the nature of either stuff or shenanigans. Maybe one of the girls gets into trouble due to romance, politics or a misunderstanding, or perhaps one of them tries to introduce the others to some new activity, but the drama, tension and comedy are in their reactions and interactions.

On the character front, Susan, Esther and Daisy continue to mature, and to grow apart, as Susan and Daisy's love-lives bring tension into the household (Esther's love-life is a train wreck, but a largely self-contained train wreck.) If I have a criticism of Vol. 8, it's that this growing-apartness cuts down that so-important level of interaction between the three central characters. I am also increasingly aware that a university-based series has a natural end point, which must be coming up in the not-too-distant future. This makes me sad, especially given that Allison's webcomic, Bad Machinery, has ended and that I am into the later stories re-reading it on Go Comics, but fortunately my next read was...

By Night: Vol 1, by John Allison
It is so weird to read a John Allison comic that isn't even slightly set in the north of England.

Jane is a chemistry major and aspiring documentarian whose awesome-if-unruly hair seriously suggests a way-back family connection to Giant Days' Daisy Wooton. Interning at a lab in her home town, she crosses paths with former BFF and early-onset silver vixen Heather, and the two of them set out to explore Charleswood, the recently-abandoned estate-cum-designer-community created by the town's founder, Chet Charles, and document its decline into ruin. There they unexpectedly discover a portal to another world, and with the assistance of Jane's work colleague and Heather's recently unemployed father they plan to expand their explorations into terra incognita.

Weird fiction, fantasy, mature exploration of the disconnection of youth and the collapse of the industrial society taken for granted by past generations, By Night is your typical John Allison mix of whimsy and introspection, and I am so here for it, even if I do assume on some primal level that all these small-town Americans are secretly from Yorkshire. I haven't embraced Jane and Heather as much as the Giant Days crew, perhaps because I don't have the 'in' of a familiar character (as Esther crossed from Scary-Go-Round,) but I'm happy to put the effort in to get to know them.

Vox Machina Origins, by Matthew Mercer, Matthew Colville, Olivia Samson and Chris Northrop
Speaking, as I was a couple of books ago, about roleplaying characters, I picked up the first six-issue arc of Vox Machina Origins, a comic recounting of the earliest adventures of the heroes of the Critical Role D&D(2) stream. Before they were a party, let alone heroes of Tal'dorei, the future members of Vox Machina were a scattered bunch of socially inept (either through inability or antisocial tendencies) sellswords doing grunt work in the swamp port of Stilben. What is the link between their various quests? Who is disappearing the poor? And what exactly is the legal, copyright standing of Scanlan Shorthalt's persistent filking?

I'm a bit of a recent convert to Critical Role, having started off at the top of Campaign 2 after failing twice to get into Campaign 1 - partly because of the relatively low video quality, partly because it comes in with the characters already at level 7 from the pre-stream game with the backstory to match, and partly because of the intimidating volume of video to go back through - I'm now working my way back through the Vox Machina streams. Moving up towards episode 100, I feel I know the characters well enough to pick up the backstory comics.

It makes an interesting contrast to Rat Queens, in part because, despite the characters actually being the PCs from a roleplaying game, they're written to be more like conventional narrative characters (probably in part because the CR team are fans of the Queens - that's how I came across that series - and are wary of too much parallel humour.) It's also interesting to get a look into the early days of the characters, before they had access to all the magic and all the powers. Good fun, and I'm looking forward to meeting early Pike and Percy later this year.

Heart of Empire, by Bryan Talbot
In 1999, Bryan Talbot released the sequel to his 1970s psychedelic epic, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. Heart of Empire: The Legacy of Luther Arkwright had the characters of the original aged pretty much in real-time, and Arkwright's daughter, Princess Victoria, as its protagonist. Victoria's mother, Queen Anne, is the monstrous, psychic ruler of a global empire every inch as corrupt and repressive as the Puritan regime that it replaced, and much more powerful. The comic essentially follows Victoria's personal progress as she discovers the truth of the world she has been insulated for, and in doing so confronts the impending destruction of the multiverse and the real fate of her supposedly-assassinated twin brother and long-vanished father.

Heart of Empire is a much more conventional story than Luther Arkwright. It is a linear narrative and concerned with a much less philosophical threat at its core (the Disruptors wanted to guide history to their own, mysterious ends; the Heart of Empire just wants to rip everything apart at the molecular level.) It features the completion of a process shown in the end of the first graphic, where we saw the victorious rebels already beginning to become the new oppressors. This British Empire has a slave- and tribute-based economy, and a massive dose of legally-supported racism, contrasted with a more liberal America.

Ultimately, Heart of Empire lacks the iconic heft of Luther Arkwright. It also lacks the unfortunate 70s tropes, although it does have a few 90s tropes to regret in retrospect; in particular, Victoria lacks agency for much of the story, although less because she's a 90s female character and more because she, like her father, is a pawn of destiny.

It's okay, is what I'm saying. Easier to read than its predecessor, but with less staying power as a consequence.

Audio Plays

Last of the Cybermen
Jamie and Zoe are waiting for the Doctor to return, but when they see him take a fall and run to help him, they find in his place a large and more bombastic man in an outrageous coat. The Sixth Doctor has been transported into his own past, and he needs to make sure he doesn't change anything, doing everything as his second incarnation would do. Unfortunately, it's been a long time since he had to deal with The Last of the Cybermen.

This is the second part of the 'locum Doctor' sequence; a set of three plays in which the Big Finish Doctors are swapped with their past selves to interact with the surviving companions (although unlike Legend of the Cybermen, the director doesn't force poor Wendy Padbury to do an impression of her younger self, which can't be easy to maintain for an entire play.) Threatening the Doctor's mission are a cyber-cult within the elite educational institute that made Zoe the superlogical polymath she is, and the usual greed and corruption of humanity. The Sixth Doctor also lacks the Second's tenacious will to remain free at all costs, and if he succumbs to his own impulse to take the pragmatic course, how will that change the world?

The Secret History
Steven and Vicki are taking a break with the Doctor in Ravenna, capital of the Western Roman Empire, when their Doctor is swapped with his much less vacay-happy Fifth incarnation. Belisarius is struggling to reunite the Empire, against the paranoia of the Emperor Justinian, and someone is keen to get the Doctor involved in events. Quintus, a roman medic with too much knowledge of time and space, and an axe to grind against the Doctor for perceived past - or rather future - wrongs.

The final locum Doctor play sees the Fifth Doctor step into the shoes of the First, and the Fifth Doctor is very different from the First, the coolly pragmatic history tourist who seriously considered bashing a caveman's skull in with a rock that one time. Finally, the plan which has set all these events in motion comes to fruition, and the Doctor is left to struggle not just for his life, but for his very existence.

Re-reads
Doctor Thorne, by Anthony Trollope
After a bit of a break, I've taken another step on the re-visiting of the Barchester Chronicles with Doctor Thorne, which I think may be the last one I've actually read (although that might be Framley Parsonage.)

We take a step out of Barchester itself for this one, and into the genteel countryside of Barsetshire. Here, the eponymous Doctor Thorne has his practice. A modestly well-off, educated physician, Thorne is somewhat looked down on by his fellow doctors for his mercenary nature - he has a set schedule of fees for different visits, instead of just modestly accepting much more money without comment - and tendency to diagnose on the basis of symptoms and other such malarkey, but highly respected by the local worthies. The light of his life is his niece, Mary, who has been educated with the children of the Squire of Greshamsbury. In Mary Thorne we meet another of Trollope's saintly young women, who through the book weathers the condemnation of society after the penurious squire's son and heir, Frank, falls in love with her despite the family's injunction that he 'must marry money.'

Thankfully, she is in a Trollope novel and not a more harshly realistic milieu, so it all ends happily thanks to virtue, and indeed just about everyone ends up well, except for the most pernicious and unrepentant of Mary's nay-sayers, who loses two fiances in the course of the narrative, because that's the worst thing that can happen to a woman.

So, yeah; it's Trollope. It's lovely and fluffy and very old-fashioned, and also introduces Miss Martha Dunstable, a bastion of common sense and awesomeness.

The Sleeper and the Spindle, by Neil Gaiman
When a mystical sleep begins to spread across a kingdom, the young queen of a neighboring country, a woman with experience of magic, sets out with her dwarf companions to investigate. In a tower, in a castle, a maiden sleeps. While she sleeps, those in the castle sleep; all save a crone who watches over her. We know the story, we know the cure, but is this the story that we think it is?

Neil Gaiman is an accomplished reteller of fairy tales, and this Briar Rose/Snow White mashup - illustrated by Chris Riddell, which is something that, if you haven't gathered, I always have time for - has a definite twist in the tail. It also has a princess - or rather, a queen, who has no time to be waiting around for rescue, and indeed walks out on her own 'happy ending' to help others, swapping a wedding dress for armour and a sword - which, again if you haven't gathered, is something I will always have time for, as indeed are fairy tale retellings with a bit of a twist.

This is another story that I read to me partner at bedtime.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard, by JK Rowling
Another bedtime story for my partner, and another book illustrated by Chris Riddell (and not the last of either for these three months.) The Tales of Beedle the Bard is a metatextual DVD extra of a book, combining an in-universe collection of wizards' fairy tales with in-universe commentaries on the stories by Albus Dumbledore, providing the kind of Wizarding World deep cuts which have gained Rowling such derision from those who feel it is the fans job to create that sort of thing(3), and a few extra bits of metacommentary from Rowling herself in her role as... Harry Potter's biographer? It's all very literary agent theory.

The tales themselves are a mixed bag of morality tales, and perhaps most intriguingly quite deliberately feature magic which lies outwith that possible in the Wizarding World, which I suspect is a more interesting commentary on the nature of wizards than Rowling necessarily intended.

This is my second copy of Beedle the Bard, by the way; less because I love the stories than because Chris Riddell.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by JK Rowling
And while we're on the subject, Arya and I finished the main Harry Potter series, wrapping up The Deathly Hallows almost exactly a year after we began The Philosopher's Stone. I re-read this myself not long ago, so I won't do any kind of in-depth analysis of the book itself at this juncture.

Arya did much better than I expected, vis a vis her aversion to emotionally challenging content. She took a bit of a pause after Dobby died, but wasn't as cut up as I thought about Hedwig. Then again, she's never fully accepted that 'cute little mouse' Scabbers was actually, in all conceivable meanings, a rat.

We've been trying since we finished to find another longer form story for me to read with her. We got halfway through the first book in The Land of Stories series before she complained that it was too scary, and dismissed my suggestion that Deathly Hallows was scarier 'apart from chapter 8.' We have, however, found a new jam at last, and indeed we have finished...

It's surprisingly hard to find an image
that isn't from the movie.

The Hundred and One Dalmations, by Dodie Smith
Nice, middle class Dalmatians Pong and Missis are shaken when their puppies are kidnapped by the malevolent, fur-loving Cruella de Vil to be made into coats. With the assistance of the nationwide network of the twilight barking, they set out across country to rescue their puppies from the wilds of Suffolk, only to find that there is much more on the line than just their one litter.

Arya got Cruella and Cadpig on World Book Day, a short story spin-off from a simplified retelling of The Hundred and One Dalmations, which she then asked to buy with her pocket money, so I thought I'd give her a go with the original.

Which is apparently out of print, so what the fuck is that about? I got a second hand set - The Hundred and One Dalmations and the sequel, The Starlight Barking, in which the dogs gain telepathic and telekinetic abilities from an alien god - and have also picked up the kindle versions for night reading.

This remains a damn good story, if a little old-fashioned in places. Missis is a good little wife, stronger in faith, but weaker in wits than Pongo, and the girl puppies are repeatedly noted to be weaker than their brothers, which I'm not sure is a thing. There is also a scene with gypsies which... Well, for starters it includes the word gypsy, and presents them as inveterate dog-thieves, although it also includes mention of the Romany language.

Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
I re-read this one a couple of years ago, but hit it again with the upcoming TV adaptation finally on the definite horizon. I still love it, although I can appreciate some of the flaws in it more each time. In particular, Gaiman and Pratchett have always been a couple of white dudes, and in this and their other early work this is quite apparent, although the development of their female characters in particular marks them as very much white dudes who listened and learned.

Still love it.

The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter
Perhaps the best known work by the prolific British author Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber is an anthology of richly Gothic fairy tales, including two takes on Beauty and the Beast - 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon' and 'The Tiger's Bride' - the titular Bluebeard tale, Puss in Boots as a bawdy sex comedy and of course 'The Company of Wolves', a version of the Red Riding Hood story, and a collection of other werewolf anecdotes which inspired the film The Company of Wolves.

Dark, sumptuous, oddly claustrophobic and by turns sensual and nauseous, The Bloody Chamber is arguably the prototype of the subgenre which Gaiman has made his own in works like The Sleeper and the Spindle. It's a lot of fun.

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
Almost done.

A Short History of Nearly Everything is an accessible potted history of science. It's a lively jaunt through the various developments of the last few centuries of thought, and the last few epochs of geological and evolutionary development. The problem, of course, is that as meticulously research as it was, who knows if the science stands up a decade and a half after publication.

Odd and the Frost Giants, by Neil Gaiman
And the last of our Chris Riddell-illustrated bedtime reads is this little gem, originally written for World Book Day many years ago and now re-released with added Riddell.

Odd is an odd boy, the son of a deceased viking who lives with his mother and step-family in a Scandinavian village. He is lame, having nearly severed his own leg with his father's axe, and considered something of a burden. When winter refuses to leave one year, he sets out into the wilderness, where he meets a fox, a bear and an eagle, and finds his way into an otherworldly adventure which might change the fate of the world.

Very much a novella, rather than a novel, this is a fairly straightforward coming of age tale, featuring a viking hero out of the classic bruiser mould (which is entirely suitable, as any saga would tell you,) learning to be more than a boy through wits instead of might.

(1) An off-brand hobbit.
(2) I think technically at this point they would actually have been Pathfinder characters, but who's counting?
(3) There are valid reasons to pooh-pooh this line of activity from Rowling, relating to the actual content and the decision to relegate it to deuterocanonical sources, but I'm pretty sure there are some nerds who just resent her basically creating her own wikia.

Found Horizons Challenge - The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Reason for Reading: This is another of those books that I really ought to have read an age ago, and in fact it's been on my challenge lists as long as I've been setting myself reading challenges. I've heard abridged versions, but with the adaptation and the state of the world making it such a relevant talking point, this felt like the moment to go the whole hog.

Set in the not too distant future, The Handmaid's Tale is the story of Offred, a handmaid in the theocratic post-America of Gilead, a society in which faith is a cudgel and fertile women are assigned to the households of the childless elite to bear children for them. It's a nightmarish dystopia, yet one not a million miles from where we live today, with the flashbacks to the emergence of Gilead through a series of executive orders and incremental cessation of liberty as salutary a warning as ever they were. Offred's story is explicitly an unreliable narrative, which the epilogue suggests could as easily be some sort of post-Gilead propaganda as a genuine account of the times, but only in the personal sense. The wider narrative never questions the nature of Gilead - the tyranny and corruption, the hypocritical theocracy, the grim subjugation of women's reproductive faculties - only the individual narrative which provides it with a personal, emotional context, which is, in itself, a commentary on the drive to personalise 'history', both in and out of fiction. By focusing on Offred(1), The Handmaid's Tale gives us an individual to connect with, but the epilogue gives us one last caution by reminding the reader that actually the horror of this story is not that it is happening to one specific person, but that it is happening to everyone.

Of course, the real problem with reviewing The Handmaid's Tale is finding something new to say about it. It's not just a classic, but its recent adaptation pushed it back to the forefront of cultural discussion, so basically anything that was going to be said about it - its original relevance, its contemporary resonance, its literary value and influence - has been said more than once. On a more personal level, it would be untrue to say that I enjoyed it - it's hard skating, and portrays a horrible nation in mundane detail - but I certainly appreciated it.

(1) One of the things that an audio adaptation can hide is that the handmaids' names are in the form 'Of X', where X is the name of their Commander, thus further annihilating their individuality; the one on BBC 7 pronounced them all 'off' as if they were a government regulatory and inspecting body

Reading Roundup - December 2017

Nothing else in the challenge this time, so I am officially converting the 2017 Challenge into an ongoing push to explore new (to me) literary territory that I shall call Found Horizons.

I did listen to La Belle Sauvage, the first part of The Book of Dust, Philip Pullman's new trilogy set in the universe of His Dark Materials (and, critically, in Lyra's world, which is probably the most interesting part of that universe.) It tells the story of young Malcolm, an innkeeper's son and aspiring scholar, his relationship with aleithiometrist Hannah Relf and his resulting involvement with an anti-Magisterium secret society known as Oakley Street, and his flight with his teenage frenemy Alice and the infant Lyra Belaqua along a flooded Thames Valley aboard his canoe La Belle Sauvage. At first navigating swiftly through ordinary terrain in flight from the charming, yet malevolent scholar Bonneville and his much-abused hyaena daemon, they gradually find the lines between the mystical and the mundane blurring, and the canoe carrying them along the dangerous borders of Faerie; or something like it.

A lot has been said of Pullman's fixation on pubescent psychosexual awakening, surprisingly little of it along the lines of 'that's what fairy tales are all about,' but take that aspect as you will(1) there is no ignoring the fact that his prose is far superior to the run of the mill. It is particularly noticeable because, this being something of an event release, they have got in an A-list reader in the form of critical theatrical and indie darling and mainstream rubbish monster actor Michael Sheen, whose delivery would not have shamed countryman Richard Burton(2). Matched with a pacy adventure, solid protagonists - although, as with His Dark Materials, our heroes are outshone by their antagonists, if nowhere else then in the scene where Malcolm witnesses Bonneville striking his own daemon and the narrative hits the reader with this as hard as the fact of it does Malcolm, who has a lifetime absorbing the implications of what such an action means(3) - and just a smidge of fanservice foreshadowing, this makes for an excellent read.

Speaking of that fanservice, this is the real balancing act of a prequel; to set up a familiar situation without being predictable. La Belle Sauvage succeeds in this, as while Lyra's future is known, and characters like Lord Asriel and not-yet-Fader Coram are guaranteed to survive, Malcolm and Alice's future is unwritten, and it is entirely possible that one or both of them might die to deliver the infant Lyra to safety, or that Hannah Relf might take a bullet for her young protégé, or any number of nuns die for their young charge.

Far more than just a prologue, however, La Belle Sauvage serves to dramatically expand Lyra's world, increasing the reader's understanding of daemons, and even more so of the Magisterium and the power that it wields. Coming back to my Found Horizons project, it's interesting to note that the League of St Alexander - an organisation which recruits children to act as Magisterial informants against their parents and teachers - may be reminiscent of the Inquisitorial Squad in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but having also read Wild Swans this year is terrifyingly plausible in its parallels to Mau's Red Guards.

La Belle Sauvage is not a lightweight read in any sense. The prose is dense and rich, the story straightforward, but layered, and the hardback makes Order of the Phoenix look like a newsstand pulp thriller. It definitely rewards effort and focus, however, in a way that more disposable fiction(4) can only envy.

In some ways - most notably that of technical prose construction - Magnus Chase and the Ship of the Dead, the final novel in the Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard trilogy, falls far short of the standards set by La Belle Sauvage, but to focus on that would be to deny it its own virtues.

The Ship of the Dead follows on from The Hammer of Thor, with Magnus and his allies from Floor 19 of the Hotel Valhalla preparing to sail across mythical seas to prevent the launch of Njaglfar, the triumph of Loki, and the coming of Ragnarok. In a quest which leads to the halls of Aegir, the Shambles of York, the wilds of Alfheim and the frozen shores of Niflheim, the crew of the good ship Big Banana(5) uphold the great scavenger hunt tradition in search of a means for Magnus to defeat Loki in a flyting; a contest of insults(6).

Now, the most singular achievement of this book is that it realises the potential of the first transgender love interest in a mainstream early teen book, and by extension features what is at best a rare example of a bisexual teen hero, as Riordan establishes without fanfare or show that Magnus is into Alex Fierro both as a man and as a woman. In discussing the coming out of Nico di Angelo in the Percy Jackson series, Riordan explained that part of his reason for teaching and writing was to advocate for children who conventionally lack a voice in society, and he does so splendidly here(7).

In addition, Riordan once more weaves a rollocking adventure yarn from the yarn of myth, and gives bountiful screen time to the previously under-utilised veterans of Floor 19: Mallory Keane, Halfborn Gunderson and Thomas Jefferson Jr. The children of Loki - devout(8) Muslim Valkyrie Sam, and the persistently binomial Alex Fierro - are each in their own way a refreshing break from the norm that would do their estranged father proud if he were less of a dick. As for Magnus himself, since despite possession of the peerless blade Sumerbrandr(9), he essentially takes the role of healer girlfriend and self-confessed coward, which is pretty odd biscuits for a central hero protagonist. There's also something of Caiphas Cain in his self-deprecating narrative, which makes him much more likeable than in his first appearance; or maybe that's the better narration.

Finally, for the month - the last few weeks have been all family time - I went back to revisit Anthony Trollope's The Warden, part of a grand adaptation of the author's Barsetshire and political novels, all read by Timothy West. Now, I'll be honest, I could probably listen to West read the phone book and get a respectable distance into the Bs before it began to wear, and I've been a fan of Trollope's writing for years now, so this was likely to appeal to me. The slightest of the Barsetshire novels, The Warden tells the story of Mr Harding, a well-off and kindly cleric, who finds himself assailed by attacks in the popular press when the administration of the sinecure secured for him by his friends in the senior clergy is called into question by a dear friend. It is at once a rather cosy affair, with no real villains, and a satire of both the clergy of the time - while superficially very much in the corner of Mr Harding's high church, it is notable that the same characters who question what the beadsmen of St Hiram's could even do with £100 a year are aghast at the thought of Mr Harding supporting himself on less than £800 - and the popular press.

Politically it may not have a great deal to say in an era without clerical sinecures and livings, but it remains a warm and bright read (or listen), perfect for cold, wet commutes.

(1) For myself, the central relationship didn't feel particularly off or creepy, but like nearly all m/f romance or semi-romance relationships these days, felt like a waste of a more nuanced and unusual platonic pairing.

(2) The gold standard of voice performances.

(3) Having written fanfiction in which a character had significant conflict with their own daemon, which repulsed the young protagonist, I also felt a little smug at this point in the book.

(4) Newsstand pulps, more than Harry Potter.

(5) Because it is very, very yellow.

(6) Once more, props to Rick Riordan, because this is so totally a thing in Norse sagas.

(7) At least in as far as I, a cis het guy, can tell.

(8) For most of this novel she is fasting for Ramamdan and still taking names.

(9) Or Jack, for short.