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hawkwing_lbBooks 2017: 18-25
18. Kameron Hurley, The Stars Are Legion. Angry Robot, 2017.
Read for Locus and for column. A fascinatingly squishy space opera, which Hurley has been promoting as LESBIANS IN SPACE (it is). It's less of a mess than her fantasy, and a lot more fun, although Hurley does sometimes confuse brutal for interesting.
19. Jacqueline Carey, Miranda and Caliban. Tor, 2017.
Read for review. A retelling of The Tempest. Honestly, I don't see the point of a novel that spends so much time dwelling on an abusive parent-child relationship that doesn't ever allow the victim of the abuse to get away. NOT my cup of tea.
20. Lara Elena Donnelly, Amberlough. Tor, 2017.
Read for column. Fascism and amoral gay boys in love. Promising debut.
21. Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders. Tor, 2017.
Read for review. It doesn't quite succeed in living up to the promise of the first volume, which is a shame, but together Too Like The Lightning and Seven Surrenders make a very promising debut.
22. Caitlín R. Kiernan, Agents of Dreamland. Tor.com Publishing, 2017.
Read for review. Creepy Lovecraftian horror novella. Not exactly my jam. Also parasitic mind-controlling fungus.
23. Justine Saracen, The Sniper's Kiss. Bold Strokes Books, 2017.
A romance novel involving women who love women set during WWII. A Russian-speaking American clerk in the Lend-Lease programme and a Russian soldier, later a sniper, encounter each other first during international meetings about the Lend-Lease programme. Later, the American clerk gets into trouble investigating corruption on the Russian end of the Lend-Lease problem and ends up at the front, where she disguises herself as a dead Russian sniper and partners with the live Russian sniper. Saracen has done her research: the WWII setting feels believable. The characters are reasonably well-rounded, the relationships make sense in context, and the writing is better than tolerable. As F/F romances go, it's definitely in the top 10%, particularly for historical ones.
(I always feel sad judging F/F on these particular merits. But in any given month where I look at six or eight F/F books from Netgalley and at best only half of them are even readable, they are certainly the merits.)
24. Yolanda Wallace, Divided Nation, United Hearts. Bold Strokes Books, 2017.
A romance novel involving women who love women set during the American Civil War. One disguises herself as a man in order to fight for the Union, the other is trying to keep a farm running while her father and brother are fighting for the Confederacy. I finished it: it's not a particularly good novel, but it is an entertaining tropetastic mess.
nonfiction
25. Hubert Wolf, The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent Scandal. Vintage, 2015. Translated from the German by Ruth Martin.
I first heard of this book via Lady Business, where it was spoken of in very complimentary terms. I can confirm that it is extremely solid history writing, clear and thorough and immensely readable: the kind of history where you keep reading in order to find out just what happened next.
Wolf deals with a particular convent scandal, one that took place in the convent of Sant'Ambrogio in Rome and was investigated as a result of a complaint made by the German Catholic Princess Katarina von Hohenzollern to the Holy Office for the Doctrine of the Faith (the office of the Inquisition). Katarina had entered the convent as a postulant and then a novice (after two marriages and a previous unsuccessful attempt to become a nun in a different convent) and came to believe that she was being poisoned by the sisters of Sant'Ambrogio, as a result of her opposition to certain practices she believed were entirely improper.
Wolf draws on several archival sources, including the Inquisition's own files and the testimony of the witnesses and defendants in the case, to illuminate the life of the Hohenzollern princess, the convent, the other nuns, Church politics, and the case itself. False saints, poisonings, political manoeuvring in the Jesuit order, the curia, and the papacy, Solicitatio by priests in confession, sexual assault of novices, female sodomy: this is history mixed with true crime, and Wolf lays it all out in fascinating detail.
Including a good deal of detail on how the Inquisition actually investigated the charges laid before it, which is fascinating in its own right.
18. Kameron Hurley, The Stars Are Legion. Angry Robot, 2017.
Read for Locus and for column. A fascinatingly squishy space opera, which Hurley has been promoting as LESBIANS IN SPACE (it is). It's less of a mess than her fantasy, and a lot more fun, although Hurley does sometimes confuse brutal for interesting.
19. Jacqueline Carey, Miranda and Caliban. Tor, 2017.
Read for review. A retelling of The Tempest. Honestly, I don't see the point of a novel that spends so much time dwelling on an abusive parent-child relationship that doesn't ever allow the victim of the abuse to get away. NOT my cup of tea.
20. Lara Elena Donnelly, Amberlough. Tor, 2017.
Read for column. Fascism and amoral gay boys in love. Promising debut.
21. Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders. Tor, 2017.
Read for review. It doesn't quite succeed in living up to the promise of the first volume, which is a shame, but together Too Like The Lightning and Seven Surrenders make a very promising debut.
22. Caitlín R. Kiernan, Agents of Dreamland. Tor.com Publishing, 2017.
Read for review. Creepy Lovecraftian horror novella. Not exactly my jam. Also parasitic mind-controlling fungus.
23. Justine Saracen, The Sniper's Kiss. Bold Strokes Books, 2017.
A romance novel involving women who love women set during WWII. A Russian-speaking American clerk in the Lend-Lease programme and a Russian soldier, later a sniper, encounter each other first during international meetings about the Lend-Lease programme. Later, the American clerk gets into trouble investigating corruption on the Russian end of the Lend-Lease problem and ends up at the front, where she disguises herself as a dead Russian sniper and partners with the live Russian sniper. Saracen has done her research: the WWII setting feels believable. The characters are reasonably well-rounded, the relationships make sense in context, and the writing is better than tolerable. As F/F romances go, it's definitely in the top 10%, particularly for historical ones.
(I always feel sad judging F/F on these particular merits. But in any given month where I look at six or eight F/F books from Netgalley and at best only half of them are even readable, they are certainly the merits.)
24. Yolanda Wallace, Divided Nation, United Hearts. Bold Strokes Books, 2017.
A romance novel involving women who love women set during the American Civil War. One disguises herself as a man in order to fight for the Union, the other is trying to keep a farm running while her father and brother are fighting for the Confederacy. I finished it: it's not a particularly good novel, but it is an entertaining tropetastic mess.
nonfiction
25. Hubert Wolf, The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent Scandal. Vintage, 2015. Translated from the German by Ruth Martin.
I first heard of this book via Lady Business, where it was spoken of in very complimentary terms. I can confirm that it is extremely solid history writing, clear and thorough and immensely readable: the kind of history where you keep reading in order to find out just what happened next.
Wolf deals with a particular convent scandal, one that took place in the convent of Sant'Ambrogio in Rome and was investigated as a result of a complaint made by the German Catholic Princess Katarina von Hohenzollern to the Holy Office for the Doctrine of the Faith (the office of the Inquisition). Katarina had entered the convent as a postulant and then a novice (after two marriages and a previous unsuccessful attempt to become a nun in a different convent) and came to believe that she was being poisoned by the sisters of Sant'Ambrogio, as a result of her opposition to certain practices she believed were entirely improper.
Wolf draws on several archival sources, including the Inquisition's own files and the testimony of the witnesses and defendants in the case, to illuminate the life of the Hohenzollern princess, the convent, the other nuns, Church politics, and the case itself. False saints, poisonings, political manoeuvring in the Jesuit order, the curia, and the papacy, Solicitatio by priests in confession, sexual assault of novices, female sodomy: this is history mixed with true crime, and Wolf lays it all out in fascinating detail.
Including a good deal of detail on how the Inquisition actually investigated the charges laid before it, which is fascinating in its own right.
no subject
Date: 2017-02-12 11:10 pm (UTC)Heh. Seriously, that sounds great to me. I'll try to look for it.
...I don't know, I wasn't really paying attention after the enthusiastic hayloft-post-chest-wound-sex.
That's fair! I confess that it is not the first thing that I would think of doing, unless I had only been shot a very little in the chest, and maybe still not even then.
(Also, I have to say that the ethics of the ending kind of sound like a mess to me, although I understand that wasn't what the novel was in it for.)
no subject
Date: 2017-02-12 11:28 pm (UTC)It's from a lesbian small press, so it might require special-ordering for libraries and the like. (I'd never see any of these without Netgalley.)
I confess that it is not the first thing that I would think of doing, unless I had only been shot a very little in the chest, and maybe still not even then.
(Also, I have to say that the ethics of the ending kind of sound like a mess to me, although I understand that wasn't what the novel was in it for.)
Me neither. I confess it is a very easily-treated chest wound, for someone shot with a 19th century bullet -- no damage to ribs, no fracturing of the bullet, no lung involvement, no major blood vessels: I cannot for the life of me figure out how it could work at all, anatomically, especially since the bullet wasn't a through-and-through and required digging around with tweezers to extract.
The ending -- yeah, ethically it doesn't work at all for me. Or emotionally, really: there's no character development from "loyal soldier" to "screw that, I'm staying here and having hayloft sex for the rest of my life and helping run the farm and protect My Girl."
no subject
Date: 2017-02-13 04:17 am (UTC)I don't actually know anything about Netgalley—is it a service you sign up for on your own time or is it part of your arrangement with Tor.com?
I confess it is a very easily-treated chest wound, for someone shot with a 19th century bullet -- no damage to ribs, no fracturing of the bullet, no lung involvement, no major blood vessels: I cannot for the life of me figure out how it could work at all, anatomically, especially since the bullet wasn't a through-and-through and required digging around with tweezers to extract.
I'm just flashing on the relevant surgery scene from Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003).
Or emotionally, really: there's no character development from "loyal soldier" to "screw that, I'm staying here and having hayloft sex for the rest of my life and helping run the farm and protect My Girl."
—they just have a romantic ending because it's a romance.
no subject
Date: 2017-02-13 05:12 pm (UTC)You remind me I want to watch that film again.
they just have a romantic ending because it's a romance
Pretty much.