I’m trying to decide which overused sentence I should start this post with, and I can’t make a decision.
Because unfortunately, while I haven’t read this book before, I feel like I’ve written this post before. Dava Sobel’s excellent Galileo’s Daughter is a biography of a genius, and, well, I think you probably already know if you want to read a really good biography of Galileo. The title makes it sound like a thousand different literary fiction novels– there are so many The So-and-So’s Daughter novels out there that I’m surprised that there isn’t a parody of them with that exact title– but no, this book is at least a third or so about Suor Maria Celeste, Galileo’s oldest daughter, through the prism of the surprisingly large corpus of letters we have from her to him. Suor Maria was a cloistered nun, and her letters, or at least the translation of the letters in this book, show her to be a woman of lively intellect and wit, and starting each chapter with an excerpt of one of her letters was an inspired choice.
But ultimately this is a book about Galileo– a book called Suor Maria Celeste’s Father would not have sold many copies– and, well, Galileo was Goddamned fascinating, so if the author is of even middling talent writing a good book about him should not be especially difficult, and as it turns out Dava Sobel possesses far more than the typical allotted share of talent. So maybe this isn’t as comprehensive a review as I might have thought I was going to write when I sat down, but I assume the You Should Read This is still coming through at sufficient volume for you to hear it. Because you should.
Most of us have some sort of memories of Spring Break, although I suspect for most people they involve parties, or beaches, or some form of public drunkenness. For me, on the other hand, my strongest memory of Spring Break, one I reminisce about every time my own break rolls around, involves going to see a movie on the first night of a Spring Break in grad school with a good friend of mine who is a professor at Oxford now. We had to stand outside to wait for tickets in a driving, wet, utterly bullshit snowstorm in downtown Chicago, and Bill stepped out of line for a moment, threw his arms over his head, yelled “SPRING BREAK!” at the top of his lungs, and rejoined the line without another word.
I may not have partied enough as a young man, is what I’m saying here. And I openly laughed at anyone who asked me what I was “doing” for my break. I’m going to be sitting in a damn chair reading a book, that’s what I’m going to be doing. And it will be glorious.
There are actually quite a few good choices for Book of the Month in here. The Reformatory? Oathbound? The Unworthy? Martyr!? The Bones Beneath My Skin? All are great choices, but I have to go with Galileo’s Daughter, by Dava Sobel. Review coming in the very near future. Lots of great books this month, though.
I feel like I haven’t treated Tananarive Due with enough respect.
The Reformatory is the third of her books that I’ve read. I did not know that until just now! I remember reading her book My Soul To Keep way back in 2016, and at the time I really liked it, but for some reason every time I think of it now I feel like it wasn’t something I enjoyed. And I just discovered that I read her debut novel, The Between, in 2020.
When I tell you that I don’t remember anything about that book, I need you to understand that not only do I not remember any details about the story, I did not even remember the book existed. That cover looks unfamiliar. I cannot picture where my copy of it is in my house, and I surely read a print copy. I don’t know what the spine looks like. If you had asked me ten minutes ago what the name of Tananarive Due’s debut novel was, I would not have been able to tell you. My recall of books from years ago is not always great, I admit that, mostly because I read 100+ books a year. But forgetting a book existed or that I ever read it at all is not a thing that I do.
And that after my weird about-face on My Soul to Keep? I have no explanation for this phenomenon.
Anyway, The Reformatory is really good, and if six months from now I find that I’ve turned on it too, I’m gonna need someone to come get me.
The Reformatory is the story of Robert Stephens Jr., a 12-year-old boy who is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys for a supposed six-month sentence after kicking the son of a wealthy white man in the knee. The book is set in 1950 in Florida, thick in the middle of Jim Crow, and the Gracetown “school” is a segregated, haunted nightmare, run by a grotesque abomination of a man. It is widely understood that Robert won’t be getting out in six months, as the warden is renowned for finding excuses to hold on to any boy sent to him until their 21st birthday regardless of their original sentence. Beatings and torture are commonplace and the inmatesprisoners “students” are encouraged to turn on each other at any opportunity.
The book bounces back and forth between Robert’s story and his sister, who Robert was defending when he kicked the other boy. She is trying her best to get him released, which is easier said than done in any number of ways. Their father has fled to Chicago after his attempts at unionization upset the Klan, and it’s fairly clear that part of the reason Robert is being treated as poorly as he is is because the authorities can’t get at his father.
The book would be scary enough without the haints, is what I’m saying, and the presence of a large number of ghosts at Gracetown becomes almost a distraction from all of the more grounded evil taking place there. Of course, a number of them are ghosts of children who were murdered or otherwise died while incarcerated there, and, well, a whole bunch of them bear quite a serious grudge against the warden.
I won’t go into much more detail, because (as usual for books I enjoyed) you deserve to experience the twists and turns on your own, but this really is a hell of a book, and I’ve not heard a lot of people talking about it. Give it a read.
It’s well past time, I think, to declare TJ Klune one of my favorite authors. I have … eight books by him? Nine? Something like that, all of his adult novels, at least, and I’ve enjoyed all of them. In some ways, The Bones Beneath My Skin is one of his best books, up there with The House in the Cerulean Sea. It’s interestingly distinct from a lot of his other work, which usually has at least a little bit of the feel of a fairy tale about it, and one could make an argument that it’s his first science fiction novel. He calls it an “action movie” in the afterword, which I’m not completely convinced about but I see where it’s coming from.
At any rate, this book tells the story of Nate Cartwright, a reporter journalist (he never explains why he hates the word reporter so much, but damn, is he willing to be uppity about it) who in one fell swoop loses his family and his job at the Washington Post, and ends up at a family cabin deep in the woods in the middle of nowhere, where he is surprised to be greeted at gunpoint by a gut-shot, wounded Marine and a ten-year-old girl named Artemis Darth Vader. Shenanigans ensue. I don’t really want to spoil stuff all that much, to be honest, but it becomes quite clear really quickly that Artemis is not at all what she seems to be, and not just because she likes bacon more than any four normal people. (I burst out laughing when I randomly took the dust jacket off the book and discovered two pieces of bacon imprinted into the front cover. Bacon is a thing in this book.)
Klune’s strengths are on full display here– found family, great characters (Artemis is entirely unforgettable, although I can picture a reader she’s a bit much for) and a wry sense of humor. Artemis may be my favorite of all of his characters, although this book has some weaknesses, and it will be interesting to see whether the passage of a few months dulls the edges from the things I didn’t like about this book or brings them to the forefront. If I remember correctly I read Cerulean Sea similarly early in the year– February, maybe?– and it was still one of the best books I’d read that year when I got to The List. We shall see if history repeats itself.
But I want to talk about some of those weaknesses, because they’re interesting, so I’m going to put a little line here and then talk spoiler talk. Wander off now if you don’t want to see anything, but feel free to come back later.
This book was originally self-published, after Klune’s editor told him that it wasn’t great as a romance novel because there was “only one” sex scene. I contest the label of “romance novel” altogether; I don’t mind romance every now and again but while this book certainly has a romance subplot it is absolutely not part of that genre, but what I found interesting was that the book’s sole sex scene feels almost entirely out of place given the rest of the book. Maybe I’m off base here, but I feel like you can have a ten-year-old girl as a main character or a scene with explicit butt sex but maybe you shouldn’t have both. To be clear, the ten-year-old girl isn’t involved in the butt sex in any way, but still.
The book also pulls directly from the Comet Hale-Bopp/Heaven’s Gate mass suicide of 1997, to the point where it’s set at the same time, has a comet with a different name making an appearance (but the comet’s name is still hyphenated!) and there’s a mass suicide that is identical to Hale-Bopp right down to the silk coverings over the dead people’s faces and them all dying barefoot in bed. The entire subplot ties in to a character who is important to Artemis, but when I realized that he was literally just rewriting Heaven’s Gate and changing a couple of minor details, it almost killed the book for me.
It’s kind of ironic for me to say this, given that I’ve defended him in the past for pulling inspiration from tragic real events, but (to briefly recap that post) the influence of the Sixties Scoop on Cerulean Sea is so reworked and altered that many readers don’t notice it until it’s pointed out. This is not that– he has lifted the entire mass suicide and stuck it in his book. My problem isn’t with taking inspiration from real-world events, here; it’s that he’s doing so sloppily. There is absolutely no way anyone could have been alive and aware of the world in 1997 and not recognize the parallels here; they’re that glaring. And it throws you into oh no he didn’t mode in what should be one of the climactic events of the book, and the whole thing could have been done so so so much better, even if the main guy in the cult needed to be in the book somehow.
But again, in six months, who knows if this will still bug me when I think about this book. If I just remember how awesome Artemis is, you can expect this to show up at the end of the year, and one way or another it’s absolutely still a hit for Klune. I just wish he’d reworked parts of it a bit more before Tor reissued it.
Really, the phrase “bisexual nun” was all I needed.
Here’s the thing about Gabriella Buba’s Saints of Storm and Sorrow: it’s one of those books where a lot of what I have to say about it is negative, but I’ve already pre-ordered the sequel, out this summer, and I’m genuinely looking forward to reading it. I lost some sleep to reading this book, and several times I had to force myself to put it down at the end of the night to go to bed. There’s something compelling and propulsive about Buba’s writing that ended up outweighing some of the things about this book that didn’t make sense or didn’t quite work, and I guess I just need you to keep that in mind while you’re reading this, because I want to talk about the weird stuff. I ended up four-starring this, but in a different mood I could have been talked into a three, and for most of the first half it was going to be a five. So one way or another it’s kind of all over the place, but the tl;dr to this whole post is that the book is well worth the time to read it even if there are some issues.
So here’s the thing. The main character, Lunurin, is a nun. She is also a priestess, quite possibly against her will, of a storm goddess called Aman Sinaya. Now, when I first read this in whatever blurb or online review I saw that caused me to order this, along with the phrase “bisexual nun” and the phrase “Filipino-inspired,” I assumed that this meant that this book wasn’t set on Earth.
And … technically, it isn’t? But it totally is. Lunurin is a Catholic nun. The bad guys are the Spaniards. They speak Spanish. They’re in the Philippines. I’m pretty sure the word “Catholic” never shows up, but … there is no attempt to be subtle here. Lunurin and her female love interest are both Catholic nuns, biracial and despised for being so, in a colonial atmosphere that is more or less identical to the Spaniards colonizing the Philippines. (Do you know any Filipinos? Ever notice how they all have Hispanic-sounding last names? There’s a reason for that.) And the book wants to get into the syncretism that happened whenever Catholicism ran into indigenous religion, which is a fascinating and complex subject, but if the colonized people can literally call down typhoons while being literally possessed by their gods, and Jesus … doesn’t do any of that? It kind of wreaks havoc on your worldbuilding. Christianity toppled, say, Norse religion, sure. But you know who the Norse didn’t have? Actual fucking Thor. And Lunurin can call down lightning by letting her hair down. And everyone just acts like Christianity is a reasonable alternative to that, just because the priests say so?
Nah.
I would kind of love for a book where Christian missionaries run into a religion that literally grants powers to its priesthood, but this isn’t that book and that’s not the story that Buba is interested in telling. She wants to start a book that is already past the colonization phase and so that’s what she gives us, and it’s not exactly the book’s fault that it sent my brain down all sorts of other pathways once I realized what was going on. There’s something to be said about having trouble accepting the basic premise, of course, but I’m a lifelong fantasy/sci-fi reader and suspending disbelief is something I’m good at. But I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t an issue.
Let’s see, what else? This is something that’s going to get fleshed out better in the sequels, I’m sure, but I never quite understood the relationships between any of the main characters. Two of them end up married, and I’m not sure either of them wanted it except one of them kinda did and the other sort of shrugs and rolls with it, and the nun female love interest is an absolute mess of a character, which is yet another complaint that may or may not represent a problem with the book. Messy people exist! But holy shit is Catalina a mess. She’s inconsistent, jealous and a religious fanatic (nun, remember) and there’s also a healthy degree of self-loathing going on as well as some internalized racial hatred, and … she’s realistic, in a lot of ways, I think, maybe? But that doesn’t automatically make her fun to read about.
There are a couple of explicit sex scenes that tonally really do not match the rest of the book, too, so be aware of that. This is not a romantasy by any stretch of the imagination, and I let that fool me into thinking that at no point would glistening cocks be involved. Or, well, one cock that glistens at least once. And, again, I’m not convinced that the people fucking actually like each other, or whether they’re trying to play each other, and it’s okay for the characters to not know each other’s motivations, and it’s okay for the characters to be inconsistent in their motivations, but I definitely don’t get them and I’m not convinced the author did either. The problem is that in this particular scenario complicated characters come off exactly the same as characters with no actual arc and no planning, and I genuinely can’t tell which one this is.
So yeah. Again, I’ve bought the sequel. Lunurin’s relationship with her actual goddess– as opposed to Jesus, who doesn’t seem to be real and doesn’t occupy a lot of her time despite the nunnery going on– is fascinating, and again, she doesn’t appear to like her very much, and while I have my problems with the setting as it currently exists, it’s got its positives just out of sheer originality. It may be that I’ll read book two and tap out for what I’m presuming will be a third book in the future (this may be a duology, I’m not sure) or I might shift into full-throated approval. We’ll see. But I’m giving this one a thumbs-up regardless, now that you’ve read all the caveats and quid pro quos and such.
One good thing about being sick is that in between naps, coughing fits, randomly snotting all over my pillow and light hallucinations, I can get a fair amount of reading done. I was really hoping not to lose two more days this week but this is legitimately the sickest I’ve been since the last time I had COVID and right now I’m just hoping to be functional enough to go in on Monday.
Anyway, The God of the Woods is real real good, a missing persons story worthy of Tana French at her best, and you ought to read it. The story bounces around from the 1950s to the end of 1975, set mostly at a summer camp in the Adirondacks, a camp run by a multigenerational wealthy family that appears to own or employ most of the town it’s set in. The twist here is that while Barbara Van Laar has gone missing in 1975, her brother Peter Van Laar (the fourth, no less) also disappeared at the same camp fourteen years prior. The book bounces around several different timelines, giving a host of characters both inside and outside the family and inside and outside the investigation time as POV characters, and does a great job of both juggling multiple mysteries and character arcs and tying them all up in a satisfying fashion at the end. I have said this before; I am not the world’s most careful reader, unfortunately, and I’m further impaired by this bastard of a head cold I’ve got going on right now, so the fact that I was able to keep up with a mystery novel that was jumping around between three different timelines and half a dozen characters without completely losing track of what was going on is a testament to the author’s skill. I wasn’t aware of Liz Moore before this, and buying the book was a bit of a dice roll (to be honest, the title had me thinking there were going to be some spec fic/ horror elements, and … I admit, having finished the book, I’m not sure I get the title) but it’s one I’m glad I made and I’ll be checking out more books by her in the future.
Short and sweet, I know, but as I said, I’m kind of dying here, so just trust me on this one. You’ll like it.
My Illumicrate subscription has been kinda hit or miss, if I’m being honest, and I keep almost cancelling it. I think their version of this book is the best-looking of any of their books that I’ve yet received, but upon seeing what the cover of the paperback looks like, I may have to order that too. One way or another, though, the books are always pretty, but it’s only about 50/50 whether I’m going to like the book, and so far I think I’ve only gotten one book from them that I’d heard of prior to it showing up in my mailbox.
Hammajang appears to be Hawaiian Pidgin for cattywampus, and if you’re not white enough to know that word then we’ll go with “messy” or “chaotic.” The book is sort of an outer space Hawaiian diaspora Ocean’s 11 mixed with cyberpunk and lesbians(*) and a dash of The Fast and the Furious. That sentence has either sold you the book or caused you to keep scrolling, and I would encourage you to follow that impulse either way. It’s directly up my alley, though, and it gave me everything I might want from such a book– a great, character-centered heist story with a whole bunch of personal betrayal and criss-crossing loyalties and an ending that genuinely took me by surprise. Let me just say that I’ve read a whole lot of heist books and there is a certain way that they never, ever end, and if you’ve also read enough heist books that that counts as a spoiler, trust me, you’ll enjoy the hell out of this book. It’s on the short side; 340 pages in the Illumicrate edition with big print, and I think it took me maybe 3-4 hours in two sittings to get through, but I’m absolutely in for more of this world and more of these characters. (I haven’t mentioned Edie, the MC, by name yet; there is no reason this book has to have a sequel and it’s written as a one-shot, but I want more Edie, and I want it soon.).
(*) I have also seen this book compared by official publicity people to Gideon the Ninth, and the presence of lesbians is the only similarity to Gideon. Do not go into this book thinking you’re getting Gideon beyond the very, very loose plot descriptor of “lesbians in space.”(**)
(**) Actually, okay, this is another similarity, as there isn’t a lot of space in either book. Hammajang doesn’t take place on Earth, and to be quite honest I can’t quite describe how Kepler works. I think it’s a space station somewhere Out There but the book doesn’t dwell on it much other than one part involving a less-than-optimal oxygen supply. This is, effectively, urban sci-fi, which is not a bad thing.)
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