Well, we’ve managed to make to August. Congratulations us! August is traditionally the time of year where I do kind of crash and burn, so reading a pleasantly fanficish story starring queer, black, female Holmes and Dr. Watson was absolutely 100% what I needed.  A Study in Honor, by Claire O’Dell was so exactly on point for me that I read it in a day and have the sequel lined up for tonight. ^_^

Dr. Janet Watson is a veteran of the New American Civil War and has no patience for the bullshittery of the VA. She wants her life back, but the emergency replacement of her arm with a part that’s too big and too clumsy to do surgery is only one of a dozen problems she’s got. She’s too Black, too female, too everything else an uncaring government and society attaches to those two words and she’s running out of options. When an old friend introduces her to the wholly, wildly, unreal Sara Holmes, Watson’s life becomes a study in perseverance, and of course, honor.

I loved this book. It has everything I needed in a Holmes fanfic, that is to say, an understanding of what makes a good fanfic, and a good story as well as a comfortable familiarity with the source material. And it has everything I want in good science fiction and in a good war story. The plot was comfortable and original in equal parts, the unreality of the tech balanced by the realness of the politics. I loved that Watson’s voice felt wholly grounded in the now, with attention to the kind of details that many white readers largely still don’t understand about being a Black woman in the United States. It helped me feel Watson’s daily, everyday discomfort and helped further to highlight her other levels of discomfort as a veteran, a disabled person, a queer woman.

This book is political, as well. Current politics are extrapolated into future politics, which blossom into the socio-political background radiation of this book, and create the scenario that allows the bad guys to do what must be discovered…and stopped.

It’s a rollicking yarn, as well, with chases, and gun fights and cyberish crime, all of which culminate in Newark, NJ. As you can imagine, this was the coup de grace for me. ^_^

Watson, in this iteration, is coming off a failed relationship and while no Mary Morstan appeared, it gave Watson room to develop the friendship with Holmes we’ve all come to know and adore. Holmes is a far less well-developed character and there is a great deal about Sara Holmes we’re left not knowing. Since the original Sherlock Holmes was a whole piles of handwaves in a suit, I’m content allowing the enigmas to exist without complaint. ^_^

Ratings:

Overall – 9

It was an honest, fannish joy to get the queer, Black, female Holmes and Watson we’ve always deserved.

Now, on to Hound of Justice!

I know you know, because I tell everyone, that I love my state. I love it with a deep and visceral love. I almost weep with joy at the loamy smell of the Northeast woodlands and the salt/tar/sugar/suntan lotion air of our much-maligned Shore. I love the hot burning smell of asphalt on summer days, the scent of wet snow about to bury us in the winter, the warm autumn days and the clarity of the air on autumn nights, the green of spring for a month before flowers show up. I love the traffic, the vulgarity of the people, the diversity, the everything.  

The thing is…I’m not alone. Our closest friends feel the same way. Sometimes, we’re stuck in traffic caused by poorly planned construction or at a Hungarian festival, eating sausages made by some old lady sold out of a cooler and we’re full of glee at the New Jerseyness of it all. We’ve all talked for years about how deeply rooted we are in this place, how much we honor our genus loci; the loud, dirty, impossibly beautiful place we live in and which is part of us.

The moment I opened up N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, I felt that this was a book about those of us who love a place so deeply, so viscerally, that everything beautiful and awful about that place become a beacon of existence for them.

A man stumbles off the train to find he has lost who he was and has become, beyond belief, part of a city. An artist whose ancestry is traced back to the first people on the land and to many of the people that colonized that land after, a musician turned politician, a homeless person and a unloved woman find themselves drawn inexorably into an ancient battle as part of a Lovecraftian paean to New York City.  I didn’t want this book to end and I’m so very glad that there will be a sequel.

I loved this book. It’s angry and it’s hateful and it’s gorgeous and it’s beautiful and it is real. I do not doubt for a second that there are avatars of places, because as I said above…I know people whose roots run deeper than the sewer systems of their cities.

If you like MURCIÉLAGO, you will very probably like this book for many of the same reasons – eldritch horror, queer characters, creeping paranormality. This book also has characters you will believe in and root for, sometimes even when the decisions they make are the wrong ones for the worst reasons. They are immensely well-conceived characters and well-written. I can tell you nothing about them that wouldn’t be a spoiler. ^_^

Ratings:

Characters – 9
Story – 10
Queerness – 9

Overall – 10

This novel had the perfect climactic scene. Made me sit up and say, “Fuck, yeah…!”

The Hero’s Journey consists of leaving a stable and welcoming home, facing trials which grant power and skill, gaining a psychomp who will – one way or another, through some great trauma – force the Hero into a predictable series of sacrifices, culminating in, but not ending with, the sacrifice of the hero themselves. They may return from this journey but they can never go back home again. Not as the person they were.

There is a second path available, however. Let us call it the Anti-Hero’s Journey. The Anti-Hero might begin with an apparently stable beginning, but as their journey commences, we come to understand that there was nothing stable about it. Limned with trauma, betrayal, loss of hope and self, the Anti-Hero begins their journey with nothing left to sacrifice, clawing their way back to a purpose and forming a personality from the wreckage of their torment. They may may come back, but they can never return.

In Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth, there is a third way –  a course that never leaves the liminal, rebounding from one interstitial to another with no “there” there. The choice is never normative versus non-normative – what we might think of as sanity or insanity. The choice is between this form of insanity or this other one, with options for a third or fourth form waiting in the wings.

Harrowhark, née Nonagesimus, is a prodigy among necromancers at the very pinnacle of achievement for her House. She should be spending her days in study, in refinement of her skills as the hand of God. Instead she is drowning, insane (by her own admission) and overwhelmed, surrounded by the most amazingly shitty people you can possibly imagine…or, more accurately, that Muir could imagine for you. Harrowhark learns that Immortals are capable of being both appallingly human and incredibly shitty immortals as the world is ending and it does not make her happy.

What made Gideon the Ninth a most delightful mix of filth still exists here. People continue to be peopley, cursing and fucking and eating, (although rarely enjoying anything but the cursing.) Gideon was a brilliant book. Harrow, too, is a brilliant book. It is a completely different brilliance, darker and colder, with at least as many sex jokes, possibly more. Harrow (and Harrow,) also is queer as fuck, in case you were worried at the end of the first book that the lesbian had left the building.

The fact that a stable foundation is both unattainable and, frankly, unimaginable, means that we spend most of this book doing high-wire tricks with our comprehension skills. Going with the flow is an absolute imperative, even as the flow is full of dead bodies and hungry ghosts.

Ratings:

Overall – 10

Harrow the Ninth will be available on August 4th in digital, paperback and hardcover. Alecto the Ninth is tentatively slated (based upon an unconfirmed rumor) for August 2021, but I hope to all the gods and the Necrolord Prime that humanity can hold it together long enough for me to read it. Then we can explode into the sun or be ripped apart by revenants or however we’re going down.

My very sincerest thanks to Tor for the review copy, to Meryl for facilitating, and to Tamsyn Muir for writing these most extraordinarily creative and intelligent books about necromancy. Absolutely stunning.