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WoGF Review: The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Allie McCarn (Allie), reviews science fiction and fantasy books on her blog Tethyan Books. She has contributed many great book reviews to WWEnd including several Grand Master reviews featured in our blog. Allie has just kicked off a new blog series for WWEnd called New Voices where she’ll be reviewing the debut novels of relatively new authors in the field.
Editor’s Note: This review counts for October.
The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Published: Roc, 2012
Awards Won: Stoker Award, Co-Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.
Awards Nominated: Nebula Award, Shirley Jackson Award, Locus F Award, Mythopoeic Award, World Fantasy Award
The Book:
“India Morgan Phelps (Imp) is a mentally ill woman who is also haunted, for a certain definition of the word ‘haunted’. Her ghost story involves mermaids and wolves and two women rescued from the side of the road. One is Abalyn, a transgender woman who becomes an integral part of Imp’s life. Another is Eva Canning, a mysterious woman who brings chaos with her.
In her journal, Imp tells the story of the time(s) she met Eva Canning, and tries to separate truth and fact, in order to come to terms with the events of one summer and/or fall—both the events that happened, and those that did not. The facts may never be clear, but perhaps the truth can be found.” ~Allie
WoGF Review: Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin
M. Fenn (mfennvt) has been reading speculative fiction for so long, she can’t remember what her first taste was. It could have been The Hobbit; it may have been A Wrinkle in Time. There’s been a lot more since. Recently, she’s fulfilled a lifelong dream of getting her own speculative fiction published. She blogs about what she reads and writes at M. Fenn – skinnier than it is wide.
Editor’s Note: This review counts for October.
Suzette Haden Elgin published Native Tongue, the first book in this eponymous trilogy, in 1984. I was 22 in 1984.
I remember Reagan’s election and how many of us on the left (I was already quite at home way over on the left wing) were frightened by the possibilities, many of which have come to pass. I also remember the beginnings of the backlash on feminism, a backlash that just keeps growing 30 years later. So, I get where Haden’s coming from with her story of a dystopian future USA where women have lost all their rights and are now the property of men in worse ways then they were before the second wave of feminism. My 22 year-old self would have eaten this book up and looked for more.
I’m sad to report, however, that the book didn’t really do much for my 51 year-old self. The story immediately irked me with the premise that the constitutional amendments revoking the 19th amendment and turning women into minors under the law would have happened by 1991. I mean, okay, Reagan and his ilk scared me, too, but 1991? That seems awfully premature.
WoGF Review: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Clare Fitzgerald (thecynicalromantic) started reading feminist deconstructions of fairy tales in elementary school and grew up to major in literature and something called “discourse studies.” She reads a lot of teen fiction, gothic novels, and retold fairy tales, and is especially interested in feminist issues in fantasy and sci-fi. She reviews books at A Room of One’s Own because otherwise she is liable to forget what she’s read and what she thought about it. She currently works as a technical editor, but aspires to be a vampire witch queen pirate sorceress when she grows up.
Editor’s Note: This review counts for October.
Much like everyone else who has gone through the American school system in the past few decades, I have read Shirley Jackson‘s famously creepy short story, The Lottery. I think The Lottery is one of those pieces that I had to read multiple times at different grade levels; however, I had never read anything else by Shirley Jackson, until now. In honor of it being Halloween, the latest book for my Classics book club was We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a short but exquisitely creepy novel about the last living members of a wealthy family, who live in a big house overlooking a small New England village.
Our narratrix in this novel is Mary Katherine Blackwood, generally known as Merricat, who is eighteen years old. The other two remaining members of her family are her older sister Constance, and her Uncle Julian. Uncle Julian is very sickly, having survived the poisoning that killed the rest of the family six years earlier. We discover, eventually, that Constance and Merricat were the only family members not poisoned, Constance because the poison was in the sugar, which she never used, and Merricat because she had been sent to her room without dinner.
WoGF Review: The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas
Guest blogger and WWEnd Uber User, Charles Dee Mitchell, has contributed a great many book reviews to WWEnd including his blog series Philip K. Dickathon and The Horror! The Horror! He can also be found on his own blog www.potatoweather.blogspot.com.
Suzy McKee Charnas published her vampire novel in 1980. That was four years after Anne Rice had beguiled the American pubic with her romantic and sexed-up vampires. Charnas’ effort must have seemed pretty dry stuff by comparison, but it garnered good reviews and has stayed stubbornly in print. And it is a remarkable piece of work: a vampire tale stripped of gothic trappings, sexual metaphors (although not of sex), and most all the traditional attributes writers attribute to undying bloodsuckers.
Dr. Edgar Wyland is not human. He lives by drinking the blood of his prey, and tracking that prey and overcoming that prey is his chief concern. Although he kills when he finds it necessary, he prefers to use the needle like projection under his tongue to take only what he needs to stay alive. His bite, even when fatal, does not produce new vampires. To his knowledge, he is the only one of his kind on earth. He has lived for centuries, and one of his greatest challenges is to learn, after a period of hibernation that may last for months or years, how to fit into the new society he encounters. The rapid advance of technology in the 20th century has made that transition trickier, but he does well for himself, taking on manual labor when nothing better presents itself.
WoGF Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Alix Heintzman (alixheintzman) recently earned herself a graduate degree in history from the University of Vermont, and has circled back to her Old Kentucky Home with her partner Nick Stiner. She spends her time semi-desperately repairing the abandoned house they just bought, writing history high school curriculum, and reading fantasy books. She reviews books on her blog, The Other Side of the Rain, and is a staff reviewer at Fantasy Literature.
However Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has been described to you—Jane Austen mixed with Harry Potter, or Dickens dusted with Phillip Pullman—it isn’t any of those things, because it isn’t like anything else. Jonathan Strange is a beautifully-wrought story filled with half-remembered fairy tales and shadowy woods and madness. It is one of my very favorite fantasy novels. It is also one of the most brilliant historical novels I have ever read.
“Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic,” (1).
In the first two sentences, we are introduced to the two major premises of the book: That the English past had magic, but its present does not. Under the rule of the Raven King, the Middle Ages were a time of powerful magicians and unruly faeries. But the Raven King abandoned England, and magic slowly seeped away from the country. By 1806, magicians are old men in wigs who study magical history and debate the theoretical application of spells (the books magicians study, like Lanchester’s Treatise concerning the Language of Birds or Strange’s The History and Practice of English Magic, are endearingly described in footnotes throughout Jonathan Strange).
WoGF Review: Mindscape by Andrea Hairston
Rae McCausland (ParallelWorlds) was raised on speculative fiction and dedicated most of her teenage years to the dream of writing fantasy novels. During her college years, her interests shifted toward science fiction thanks to Star Trek and Isaac Asimov’s robot stories. She writes reviews for Parallel Worlds Magazine as a way of building connections between the perspectives of fellow sci-fi nerds and people of marginalized gender and sexual identities.
Aqueduct Press, 2006
Intended Audience: Adult
Sexual content: Explicit
Ace/Genderqueer characters: Yes
Rating: R for language, violence, and sex
Writing style: 1/5
Likable characters: 3/5
Plot/Concepts: 2/5
When the Barrier came—a cosmic and organic life-form, restricting travel between arbitrary zones on Earth—the world changed forever. A hundred years later, Celestina dies to bring an end to the wars between the zones, and five years after that, the treaty is still not being lived as it should be. Instead, many of the zones reject the treaty, already too set in their individual agendas and cultures. Soldiers, actors, directors, ambassadors and Vermittler (humans who can commune with the Barrier) are thrown into a conflict with and against one another that will decide the future of Earth.
At 445 pages, Mindscape is a fairly hefty read. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked it up, as the synopsis I’d read was fairly vague. I soon learned that this was for good reason. I’m not sure if Hairston was trying to pull the reader into a particular “mindscape” via her writing style, or if the muddled feel of it was accidental, but I was nearly a hundred pages in before I had any sort of clue what was going on. In the first scene, the reader is dumped right into the thick of an important political event, with foreign names and words being thrown around helter-skelter with very little indication of which ones are important or what they really mean. Then comes the realization that there is no single main character; the reader is bounced back and forth between first and third-person perspectives and multiple points of view. The only explanation of anything comes in dialogue or flashbacks, which could be real, or could be visions or legends—it’s impossible to tell for sure. I can appreciate the effort taken to teach by immersion, but in this case I would have preferred an info-dump over feeling so lost for the entirety of the book.
WoGF Review: Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal
In his youth, Barry F. (bazhsw), really enjoyed reading science fiction and fantasy, and then stopped for the best part of twenty years. In 2012 Barry made a committment to “read more science fiction” and decided the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge would be his launchpad.
Shades of Milk and Honey is an openly acknowledged homage to Jane Austen. It’s a Comedy of Manners set in the Regency period where pretty much the only thing a young rich woman can do is wait for an eligible suitor. Young women in the hope of attracting a husband are expected to be proficient in the skills of music, art and Glamour. Glamour is the magic of the book. Strands of Glamour are pulled from the ether and used to change the environment. They can be used to create illusions, create sounds and smells and entertain. On a day to day basis these skills are used to beautify rooms (and people!) and create a pleasant ambiance.
Jane is exceptionally proficient in the use of Glamour although being of plain appearance and at the ripe old age of 28 (!) feels destined for spinsterhood. Melody is her beautiful sister who appears to have men queuing for her attentions but herself is insecure at her lack of skill using Glamour compared to her sister.
Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge: September Review Poll Winners!
The Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge September review poll is now closed and we have our three winners!
September WoGF Review Poll Winners:
Congrats to Alix, Rae and M and thanks to everyone who participated in the poll. Our winners will find an Amazon gift card, $25, $15 and $10 respectively, waiting for them in their email inbox.
There are still 3 more months of prizes to be awarded so if you didn’t win this time there are still more chances.
WoGF Review: Arslan by M. J. Engh
Guest Blogger and WWEnd member, Rob Weber (valashain), reviews science fiction and fantasy books on his blog Val’s Random Comments which we featured in a previous post: Five SF/F Book Blogs Worth Reading. Be sure to visit his site and let him know you found him here.
For my tenth read in the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge I picked Arslan by M. J. Engh. I’ve read a couple of more recent works in the past few months so I thought I’d pick an older one this time around. Arslan is Engh’s first novel and was published in 1976. To date, only four novels by Engh have appeared but with that small oeuvre she did manage to make quite an impression. She was named author emerita by the SFWA in 2009. Engh is also a scholar of Roman history. Something that clearly influenced this novel. The edition I’ve read is the Gollancz SF Masterworks edition. I guess the editors of that series have a knack for picking controversial books. Personally, I’m not sure I would have included it.
Some time during the later stages of the cold war, a figure from the small nation of Turkestan rises to prominence in the world. Caught between China on one side and the USSR on the other, he cleverly uses a combination of politics and extortion to gain control of the armies of the major powers in the world. What he means to do with it remains unclear but the inhabitants of the small town of Kraftsville, Illinois get a shot at finding out when the new dictator of the world settles there for a time. His motives are unclear but he brings great change to the town. Whatever Arslan is up to, he has changed the world for good.
WoGF Review: Summer of Love by Lisa Mason
Stephen Poltz (spoltz)‘s love of anything SF and Fantasy was inspired by his childhood heroes Carl Sagan and JRR Tolkien. Oh yeah, and by watching cheesy ‘50s sci-fi movies on a black and white TV. He got a book-reading-reboot when he met his partner, Jacob, a voracious reader from a family of hard-core, genre fiction enthusiasts. After seeing a display of Hugo Award winning books at his local bookstore, Steve became obsessed with reading all the winners. Now, when not QAing software, learning Polish, or finding new books to read on WWEnd, he writes reviews on his blog It Started With The Hugos…
For some reason, when somebody tells me, “You have to read this book,” I normally raise my hackles and resist. I prefer discovering books on my own, perusing the shelves at the library or bookstore, or finding a recommendation on a website or NPR. Over time, I’ve learned to keep those hackles a little lower and be more open to other people’s suggestions, but it still creates cognitive dissonance in my head. So when my partner recommended Summer of Love by Lisa Mason to fill my time while waiting for a hold on my next book at the library, I reacted with outward enthusiasm and my usual internal hesitancy. He’s a good judge of books, and I know that; I’ve read his recommendations before. The psychedelic-designed cover of his trade paperback first edition is in tatters from the numerous rereads, so I know he loves it. I needed another book for my Women of Genre Fiction challenge anyway. I acceded and took the book… and loved every word.
Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco, a time traveler from the year 2467, comes back to San Francisco 1967, the Summer of Love, to find a young girl, Susan Stein, aka Starbrite. His mission is to protect her so that the timeline leading to his present, his Now, is conserved. Ruby A. Maverick, a metaphysical shop owner in the Haight district, meets Susan and later Chi, and reluctantly lets them crash at her place. Together they must make it through the summer avoiding the craziness of the hippy culture and demons of an alternative future.
