Archive for the Novel Category


Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

October 2nd, 2022

Imagine, if you will, a world in which you are familiar with all the people – except the ones with whom you aren’t, and new ones you haven’t met yet – and you have lost yourself and don’t know why these people or you are in this world, except that you are, and you like it, despite the complicating factors.

It is into this story that we are dropped at the beginning of Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir, the fourth book of a trilogy that began with Gideon the Ninth, and continued with Harrow the Ninth and will, (most probably) end with Alecto the Ninth next year.

Where Gideon put us in the middle of a fantasy/science-fiction action story and Harrow stuck us into the depths of a psychological horror tale, Nona feels very much like contemporary Urban Science Fiction, until the boots begin dropping.

The thing is, from the moment the book begins, you KNOW the boots are going to drop. You don’t know how many boots, how big they are or from how high they will drop, but they are hanging there in the sky as surely as Varun is. So when they begin to fall, it’s just a matter of waiting to see how many you anticipated correctly. ^_^ There’s a certain amount of purely fannish fun in trying to identify which boots – whose boots – you’re waiting for. When you get it right you feel VERY SMART. And then, sometimes, the story makes you feel not smart at all, so you sit there, waiting for the next boot.

Once again, Tamsyn Muir has populated a world with terrible people you really want to to hang out with. Really queer people who you just know would eat your for lunch and never notice, but you’d be so delighted to have had them be the ones to destroy you. ^_^

Ratings:

Overall – 10

The dog is fine. No need to worry about the dog. Everyone else, though…?





Nona the Ninth Day

September 14th, 2022

No review today, Nona the Ninth has arrived!

If you haven’t already read the previous Locked Tomb novels, I hope you will. They are very in the exact wheelhouse we care about here on Okazu. Here are links to my previous reviews:

Gideon the Ninth.  the first part of this, ギデオン　第九王家の騎士 上, is also available in Japanese, now. ^_^

Harrow the Ninth was astounding.

Now I’m off to read Nona. I’ll catch you later! ^_^





A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys

September 11th, 2022

Today’s review was brought to you by the many people who suggested I read this book, beginning with Ada Palmer who suggested in it during our Yuri Studio chat about Tezuka, Revolutionary Girl Utena and her own amazing Terra Ignota Series, (of which I reviewed the first book, Too Like The Lightning and last book, Perhaps the Stars, here) to our own YNN Correspondent David M, some folks who worked on the book and many others.

Today we’re talking about A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys.

As a long-time science fiction fan, I have read and watched my share of first-contact stories, but rarely have I encountered one so fully thought through. It’s a joke among scifi fans that so many of the cultures we encounter are humanoidish, but from a visual media perspective, until computers caught up with human imagination, it was just..easier to represent. In good media, issues of language and  and culture are addressed. In many media sex and mating are addressed, good, bad and indifferent. In A Half-Built Garden, Emrys takes a look at not only the cultural differences and similarities between human and alien, but between humans and other humans, among individuals who represent different environmental and economic priorities, religions, gender and sexuality constructs, clothing, language, and desires for the future.

Like Rose of Versailles, in which Riyoko Ikeda-sensei attempts to make sense of the vast scope of the French Revolution, by having us experience it through one person’s perspective, Emrys too, takes on a First Contact situation from the perspective of one woman. Set in an immediate future where humanity has turned the tide of climate change by bonding in “watershed” polities, with limited central government and corporate influence significantly curtailed, to the point of physical exile, Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes to find an alien ship polluting her local watershed. With her wife and infant daughter, she heads out to make contact with the aliens.

What follows is an extraordinary story of negotiation, adventure, personal relationships and making new friends across all the possible gaps that can exist between cultures.

What drew to this story was that it was positioned by many people as aspirational science fiction. I know there are plenty of folks who prefer their scifi gritty, but personally, what draws me to science fiction has always been the ability to create new solutions for old problems then new solutions to the new problems that come from them. Because I am also a realist, I am a believer in change – and that unintended consequences are a reality of that change. Therefore reform needs to be updated over time. Emrys’ book is wholly grounded in this idea – that every change, every moment of progress needs to be constantly monitored and adjusted…and problems that develop are an inevitability and, possibly, an opportunity.

As readers of queer media we highlight here on Okazu, folks may also find this story interesting for what it does in terms of addressing gender and sexuality…and in certain cases, gender role. Where the watershed folks, known as the Dandelion Networks, have roughly the same level of nuance about gender and sexuality as you and I, the corporate folks have a far, far more elaborate and political series of genders, indicated by clothing, pronouns, roles and behavior. Because gender is presumed to be fluid, they have a gender for someone you haven’t seen in at least a few hours, and therefore may not know which gender they currently are. I found this fascinating…and felt the entire segment of corporate life was left open-ended for a book of it’s own.

Parenting is a major chunk of the cultural exchange here with the Ringers, the name the aliens give themselves in English. When they meet the head Ringer Glycosine, a  Mother (a kind of ship captain) with two children, Judy and Carol are co-parenting two children with another couple, both of whom are trans as we understand that concept. Judy herself is Jewish and keeps kosher, while other characters are vegan, pagan and ex-fundamentalist Christian. The Ringers’ ideas of religion, food, ritual, storytelling, sex, gender and sexuality are all addressed within the story in ways that feel utterly organic. At one of the first meetings between humans and Ringers, Judy’s family puts out gender ID pins and several of the Ringers choose pins for themselves…one, at odds with the gender the rest of the Ringers associate with them. It was a fantastic, small shake-up, one that portends many much larger questions that both humans and aliens had to ask of themselves.

Of the Ringers, it is almost impossible to dislike Rhamnetin, whose job it is to ask – and answer – awkward questions. Other Ringers are richly written, with fully fleshed-out personalities. One spent the book hoping that everyone could make this work. And whether they do is left to our imaginations, which is exactly where it should be.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

If you are looking for aspirational science fiction or what Ada Palmer terms Hopepunk, I can highly recommend this book to you. A Half-Built Garden leaves plenty of space for our own imagination to grow.





Plain Bad Heroines written by Emily M. Danforth, illustrated by Sara Lautman

July 17th, 2022

In 1902, at a boarding school for young women in Rhode Island., a book is making an indelible impact upon both the student body and the school headmistress, leading to a series of tragedies. In 2022, the same book – is having an equivalently huge impact on the stars of a movie about those tragedies. In Plain Bad Heroines, Emily M. Danforth creates a meta-novel about a meta-novel, full of gothic horror, women in love and the memeification of fear and desire.

Brookhants (pronounced, Brookhaunts, we are assured early on) is a school on the property of a man who was deeply, obsessively, interested in the occult. The grounds, the buildings, the flora and fauna of Brookhants are saturated with the occult. But  the occult is just the gold lame draped over this story. Under the turban and giant earrings, is a psychological thriller about social media in 1902 and 2022. The girls at Brookhants share their obsessions through songs and rhyme and images, and promises, the young women of the 21st century share Instagram photos and memes, images and promises. What ties these two threads together is a book that was a huge hit in 1901, The Story of Mary Maclane, one girls’ diary of desire for other girls and desire to be released from a boring life. Both this book – which is a real book – and the “author” of the novel are ever present in the narrative. They will be there with us, every step.

This story begins with a tragic sapphic love; two young women who die a horrible death together instead of living horrible lives apart. These deaths bring about more deaths, and the separation of an adult lesbian couple who had, until this tragedy, managed to find joy together….they hoped.  A hundred years later, a movie about these stories is being filmed as a kind of true-horror story, with real, imagined and staged mysteries that keep the two leads – a famous up-comingstar and the daughter of a B-movie has been – and the woman who is credited with writing the book about the book, in a state of high anxiety, until they find each other and redeem both the film, themselves and each other. The several levels of meta-novel lean heavily on one another. If you were, for instance, to pretend that memes don’t have power, this book probably would have no power over you. But…you’d have to pretend, because we know for a fact that memes do have power. ^_^

What this book does right is the slow-burn of the obsessive thoughts and behaviors that creep in and out of the pages until, unbidden, they come to your own mind in a similar situation….the perfect meme, even if that meme is a bit destructive, like invoking Bloody Mary on Halloween.  Even though the book is not entirely happy, if you’re fond of gothic romance – the penny dreadfuls of the turn of last century – you’ll probably enjoy this. Certainly, Sara Lautman’s illustrations remind us exactly how we should be reading this story – late at night, with a candle or lamp for atmospheric lighting, maybe on a stormy, cold, dank day.  Whether from the cold or the fear, or the quiet longings of our own history, doesn’t matter – we should be shivering.

Despite the many tragedies of the story, it does have what I consider to be a happy ending. The happy ending is tied up in the existence of a three-person relationship that exists in a space that isn’t one thing or another, yet.  Where the girls and women of 1902 were not given the space to determine what they might be to one another, the happy ending is that the three of 2022 will have time and freedom to figure it out for themselves…

Ratings:

Art – Atmospheric
Story – A LOT of story
Characters – Fascinating and deeply flawed, like people
Service – Yes, actually. But I can’t tell you what it is or I’d ruin it
Lesbian – Several different kinds of sapphic relationships, spanning a century.

Overall – Complex, overwrought, a very good read that will stick with me for a long while

Listening to the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast over the past several months I find I do not actually enjoy that much historical fiction. As I mentioned when LHMP interviewed me last month, I do tend to prefer contemporary fiction that becomes historical over time. The historical part being just one layer of this novel gave it depth, rather than being a lesson on “the time period I researched” as so much historical fiction feels to me. And the contemporary side of the story is cemented in it’s time and place with any number of cultural touchpoints that will disappear and become historical footnotes, for a doubly historical piece any day now. ^_^





Secret Identity, by Alex Segura

May 22nd, 2022

Carmen Valdez eats and breathes comic books; ink flows through her veins. She’s moved away from her beloved Miami and her family to the rough streets of 1975 New York City in an attempt to create a space for herself in comics. And, she has, but not the space she wanted.

As the secretary to a cheap, not-quite-incompetent boss at a small third-rate comic book company, Carmen knows she can do so much more, if only she got the opportunity. Then something like the opportunity arrives – even knowing it’s the longest of long shots, she takes it.

When Carmen finds her writing partner’s body with a bullet hole in his head and only his name on their comic, everything comes crashing down around her. But, the Lethal Lynx is her character, too, and she’s not going to back down from trying to save the comic book, and herself.

Secret Identity by Alex Segura is a great read. With an all-around solid story that comics fans and insiders will love, it reads very much like a comics-industry version of Umberto Eco’s Focault’s Pendulum. There’s an incredible depth of knowledge and experience that Alex brings to the book.  Those of who remember NYC of the 70s will nod to the tense beat of life there, the smells and sounds of the streets, and the faces of the real names with which Segura sugars the story. Carmen feels like a character right out of an episode of Wonder Woman on TV, or any drama about women “making it in the big city,” with NYC as a backdrop.

What came as a pleasant surprise to me was the narrative about Carmen’s past and present. Her relationships (romantic and non) with other women are as critical to the narrative as the interactions she has with the men in the book, but they do not overwrite of obfuscate one another. Carmen is a lesbian and she’s got the effed up ex to prove it, but that is not at all the sum of who Carmen is as a human. In fact, Carmen’s friendship with her roommate was among my favorite developments. The ending of this book is spot on. I could not have asked for better.

One of the loveliest aspects of the book are the comic pages of the Lethal Lynx. They tell a subtle story of their own. The art is excellent – especially when it is bad. The badness was incredible, just such a skilled example of bad comics art in the 1975 (although I think it could have used more sleaze) that I have to give it props. The excellent pages create quite the punch. BUT, this leads me to the one criticism I have of this otherwise perfect book. Personally, I would have loved if Segura had chosen women as his artist and letterer as a hearty “Fuck you comics in 1975.” Alas, he did not. While he credits many woman with the making of his book, both artist and letterer were men. A petty complaint, but it rankled. Not enough to lessen how much I enjoyed this book. ^_^

It’s summer. It’s a perfect time to go read a great rollicking superhero comics-flavored mystery (and caperish and queer) novel written by someone who does right by all of those things. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 9 Nailed it. Every time.
Story – 9
Characters – 9
Service – 2 Rather, some good sexual tension where it needed.
Lesbian – 9

Overall – 9

Great book, fast-paced and fun, with an ending that nails the landing.