Review: Red in Tooth and Claw by Lish McBride

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I do enjoy Lish McBride’s work. She is so creative with her stories and is able to find humor even in a serious story. Faolan Kelly’s Pops has just died. He was her last living relative, and as a 17-year-old girl living as a boy, because the world is kinder to men than women, she doesn’t have a lot of choices. The Mayor of her town is shipping her off to a nearby religious settlement. Faolan knows it’s because he wants her Pops’ land. She has a plan. All she has to do is work hard, not draw attention to herself for a few months, and then when she turns 18 years old, come back and claim her land. The thing is Faolan is not someone who can keep herself out of trouble. From the moment she arrives in the settlement, she knows something is wrong. She is quickly wrapped up in the mystery of the settlement when she starts to notice weird things but also weird sounds. Not going to lie, she spends a fair amount of time injured in this book. She really cannot keep herself safe and it is kind of funny how hard her new friends have to work to do just that. I liked the atmosphere of this book The Western setting invokes a certain image of American life that lends itself to a spooky tale. It is not my favorite Lish McBride but it’s a solid work to her cannon. A good read for anyone looking for a Western mystery with a little bit of supernatural mixed in.

Book Haul: New York Comic Con Edition

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Last weekend I went to New York Comic Con and the Javits Center. Always a good time but damn, is it exhausting. I truly cannot express how big the Javits Center is. I went on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Attended a few panels. My favorite was a Talk with Tomi Adeyemi, writer of the Orisha Trilogy, and the Futurama panel. I also spent way too much and included books. Here are a few new titles I picked up.

First, I got this mystery bag at the Simon and Schuster booth. I believe I got the Romantasy mystery bag. I haven’t heard of any of the titles before but I’m excited to read more.

Simon and Schuster were also giving away books. I was able to snag this one. I have never read any R.A. Salvatore before but this looks pretty cool.

I have read great things about Heir and liked Sabaa Tahir’s work in the past so I had to buy it. What the River knows was described as the Mummy meets a Death on the Nile and I was like, “I’m in”. Not to mention I got a pin with it.

They were giving away the ARC to Amelie Wen Zhao’s next book when purchasing her latest. Why not get a book about dragons and get another for free.

So that’s all the books I got and NYCC this year. I can’t wait to read them.

Review: A Fire in the Sky by Sophie Jordan

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Sophie Jordan first wrote about dragons years ago in her Firelight series. It was a kind of a Romeo and Juliet story of a Dragon who falls in a dragon hunter. When I started to read this, I didn’t realize that is a kind of prequel to the Firelight series The similarities are definitely there. Tasmyn is the whipping girl for the princesses of Penterra. She was raised along with the Princesses and treated as one but when they do something wrong, she gets punished. One day the warriors from the Borderlands will protect the kingdom. Fell, the Beast of the Borderlands demands to marry one of the Princesses in trade for continuing to keep them safe. The King tricks Fell into marrying Tasmyn instead, and things don’t start between them. Now Tasmyn is married to a stranger and is heading his home. She has a secret that she has to keep from him and everyone else. How do dragons factor into all of this? Dragons have been gone for over a century of them. Humans hunted them down and then started hunting witches and then turned against each other. Typical right? I like Tasmyn and I like Fell. They make a good couple if you ask me. They are both two young people who have lived hard lives. Tasmyn may have grown up in the palace along with the Royal family but she was always different. She suffered the punishments, actually the whippings when the real Princesses acted up. She didn’t complain because she knew this was her job. Her duty was to keep the princesses safe. Fell in a lot of ways is the same. He may not be the whipping boy but he takes the responsibility of protecting his people very seriously. They are obviously attracted to each other, often drawn to each other but there is so much distrust in each other and themselves for them to bridge that gap. However, I think they found some common ground in the end. Now, I really do need to start doing more research when starting books because I didn’t know this was a series and it while the ending didn’t surprise me, it was intriguing I do look forward to finding out where the story goes next and opening up the world more. I read this book in like days. It was that fast of a read. I hope that future books will be as entertaining.

Review: Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan

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What would you do if you were offered a chance to be a character in your favorite book series? What would you do if you were one of the story’s villains? That’s what happened to Rae. Rae is in her early 20s and has been fighting cancer since she was in high school. She and her younger sister have a favorite series, The Time of Iron written by Anonymous. Her sister would come to her hospital room and re-read the books to Rae and they would discuss each scene in character. Rae is very sick and one night, she gets a visit by a stranger who gives Rae an offer. Play a role of one of the characters in the Time of Iron Retrieve a flower before it blooms and she will cured. Fail and she would be forever in a coma. Rae doesn’t believe her but then she finds herself playing Lady Rahela, who is about to be executed in the first book. Rae is not as devoted to the books as her sister but she knows the story and she knows what comes next for her character and the other characters and uses that to her advantage. Leaning into her character’s villainous nature, she sets plans in motion to find the flower. She recruits the other villains of the story and gets to work She convinces the King that she is a prophet, saves the heroine, and befriends the leaders of thieves. This is such a fun book. All the characters fly off the page and you can tell that the author had a blast writing it. It is full of all the fantasy romance tropes that we become accustomed to and use it to tell a compelling story. It definitely plays on the whole, who really is a villain and who is a hero? Who decides? I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves fantasy books and is looking for a fun and entertaining read.

Review: Consent by Jill Ciment

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I don’t remember where I heard about this book, but I thought, “Oh, that sounds interesting.” So, I put myself on the waiting list for both the physical copy and the audiobook at the library. The audiobook came available first and I checked it out but I couldn’t make myself start it. It was something that I wanted to read and yet I was having trouble even beginning to read it. There was just something about the subject matter that made me think, “Oh, this is going to be a hard read. I don’t know if I feel like reading something hard right now…” And, I kept coming up with excuses until I had to return the audiobook unread.

Well, when the physical copy became available, I went and got it. The memoir is only 145 pages, so it is a little whisp of a book. That made it seem a little less daunting. (Although the audiobook is only four hours so, I don’t know what my deal was.) And it wasn’t hard to read. The prose was thoughtful and I was pulled into the story. Ciment’s memoir is about her relationship with artist Arnold Mesches and is part a revisiting of a previous memoir Half a Life and in part just a new memoir about a marriage seen from a new perspective. The story starts at the beginning of the relationship when she first started taking art classes from Arnold as a sixteen-year-old and follows through his divorce from his first wife, their marriage, and their life together up to his death at the age of ninety-three.

I think I was expecting something more negative and maybe not so much critical, there is nuance here. And a lot of questions are posed that the text really doesn’t answer. What we see is a relationship, the give and take and the joys and sorrows, just like you would have in any relationship. But there was also an investigation of power and understanding. Ciment tells us about being a teenager or someone in her early twenties and feeling powerful. She talks about when she felt jealous. She talks about when she felt supported or when she had to be supporting. As someone looking at a relationship that is now over, she has the 40,000-foot view, but also the memories of what it was like being inside it. She discusses how things that are obvious in hindsight, like how it feels cliche to think that she was, as a sixteen-year-old looking for a father figure, whom she found in someone her father’s age, but how clicheness of it part of the truth that we shouldn’t look away from just because it feels obvious. Ciment discusses what it is like being the younger woman, even as they age, and what that meant for her, watching her partner fall apart when she is still very much in her prime. I don’t know, I think I was expecting this to be more condemning of the relationship, but it wasn’t and I’m glad it wasn’t. Even though there was a power imbalance and even if, at seventeen, she hadn’t been considering what it would mean to be married to someone so much older than her, she still had agency and she exercised it. Following his divorce from his first wife, her husband had an artistic revival, something that may never have happened to him otherwise. And she went from painting to conceptual art to writing, a path she might not have otherwise taken without his support. This was thoughtful and interesting. And it left me with more questions than answers. I’m writing this review hours after I finished reading the book (so I could reference it before I have to return it to the library), but I have a feeling this is a memoir I am going to consider for quite a while.

Review: Readme.txt by Chelsea Manning

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So, here are things that I knew about Chelsea Manning before reading this book:

  • She is a transwoman who was in the US military during Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
  • She leaked some documents
  • She went to prison for leaking some documents

But, I knew there was more to the story than those things so when her memoir came up in my recommendations, I thought it would be a good idea to check it out. Manning narrates the audiobook, and hearing her story in her own voice made it feel very personal. She discusses growing up in Oklahoma, realizing she was trans, and the problems that caused for her at school and at home (although she didn’t come out as trans for a long time.) She talks about being interested in computers and finding a community. She talks about coming out. She talks about being homeless. She talks about struggling with being trans and how the army, with its enforced masculinity, was part of an effort to change something about herself. She also discusses at length her ideals, what brought her to join the military, and what eventually brought her to share classified documents with Wikileaks. The memoir then discusses her time in prison and the military trial that initially gave her a 35-year prison sentence. This was later commuted by President Obama before he left office in 2017.

I liked how Manning’s humanity is always front and center in this memoir. I mean, as a memoir, how else would it be? But still, as someone who doesn’t have a lot of interaction with military personnel, this reminder that they are individuals with their own problems, concerns, and ideas. I also learned a little bit about how intelligence gathering works, which was at times interesting and appalling. Thinking about what kind of information the government can and does track about people, for various reasons is something that I’m going to be considering for a long while.

I think transparency and a knowledgeable public are important for our democracy, and looking around the world today, with the US in the middle of a Presidential election and ongoing conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine (And Sudan and Congo and many other places where my attention hasn’t already been drawn), thinking about what America’s role is on the world stage and how information and the public back home is managed is important. I am glad that I read this, even if it was at times a very difficult read. Her time in prison and the descriptions of solitary confinement were brutal.

So, if you are interested in contemporary American history and would like to hear about it from someone who was involved, this is worth the read. But, go into it knowing that there are descriptions of solitary confinement, homelessness, war crimes, and mentions of suicide.