Sci-Fi/Fantasy

The Devil’s Revolver by V.S. McGrath

/ Denise / 1 Comment
Cover of The Devil's Revolver

In the interest of full disclosure, I received a free e-copy of The Devil’s Revolver for the purposes of review.  That doesn’t change my opinions, but I probably wouldn’t have read this/been aware of it otherwise.  Just in case that counts as influence for some. 


American western meets fantasy is a fun world that The Devil’s Revolver drops us into.  We meet Hettie Alabama, a 17-year-old young woman preparing to enter a shooting competition to earn her family some money.  She lives with her parents, her younger sister Abby, and “Uncle” Jeramiah.

Things haven’t been easy for the family.  Hettie’s older brother, Paul, died protecting her from knife-wielding stranger years earlier.  Money is tight.  And perhaps most concerning for Hettie is Abby’s habit of slipping out of the house to wander down to the river to talk with friends no one else can see or hear. Such a habit is soon to garner unwanted attention.

Hettie can’t do much about two of those things, but she is a talented shooter. She enters the competition, determine to tackle the money issue.  Little does she know, however, that this decision will set into motion a chain of events that will lead her all over the West with a revolver that doesn’t miss, doesn’t run out of ammo, and doesn’t shoot without a cost.

McGrath does a splendid job introducing us to the rules of this world without any kind of exposition dump.  Within a few pages, we learn that magic is a regular part of life, but not everyone is gifted.  Most people use talismans and protection spells, but those cost money.  A government division seeks out children who show signs of being gifted, another concern for Hettie.  It seems clear that Abby has some kind of power, but no one in the family wants to risk her coming onto the government’s radar.  There are magical monsters roaming the terrain and plenty of human ones as well.  Aside from the magic, though, much of the rest is familiar to any Westerns fans. 

I really liked the character of Hettie.  While a talented shooter and a dedicated sister, she also still acts like most seventeen-year-olds.  There were a few situations where she makes choices that, as a reader, we can see are tricky or a trap, but if it was me at 17 and I didn’t know I was a heroine in a book, I would’ve likely done the exact same.  She can be rash and hot-headed, but her heart is in the right place, even with a demon-possessed revolver in hand. The other characters that move into her orbit are fun and interesting as well, but Hettie is definitely my favorite.

There are some aspects of the world and the titular revolver that remain unexplained or feel a bit underdeveloped, but I think it’s because this is just the first book in a series and you have to leave some questions and loose ends for the next story to take. 

Overall, this was a fun read with interesting characters and a cool take on Westerns.  Worth checking out!

Find it online here.

Fragile Things

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by Neil Gaiman

The book Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman surrounded by green leaves and pink and white flowers.

I rarely read short stories, but Fragile Things reminded me why I should.  This collection of thirty-one short stories and poems by Neil Gaiman was a treasure trove of tales, some of which I wished were full novels (which one did became). Others were perfectly designed to be just a glimpse of a secret world, hidden just under the reality we think we know.

This also coincided with me getting to see Neil Gaiman perform (read? speak? I’m not quite sure what the proper descriptor is) on tour last week.  It was an amazing experience and if you ever get the chance to see him live, I strongly urge you to take it. Enjoying a pre-show dinner, my friend and I happened to be sitting next to a pair of sisters who were also going to attend the show. When they asked if I could take their picture, I not only said yes, but pulled my copy of Fragile Things from my purse so they could use it as a prop. It pays to always have a book in your bag!

I’d seen Neil once before, when Norse Mythology came out.  I wasn’t sure what to expect this time, since there wasn’t a specific new book or project to promote.  But that didn’t matter.  He read a short story and some poems of his, he answered questions the audience wrote on index cards before the show, and talked about writing and reading and the power of stories.  Both times that I’ve heard him speak, I’ve come away wanting to do nothing more than grab a pen and paper and start writing.  What I would write, I have no idea.  But ideas are bouncing around and maybe someday they’ll find their way onto a page.

In the meantime, though, a few thoughts on Fragile Things.  I won’t go over each individual entry, but one of the things I enjoyed was the introduction, where Neil explained the genesis of each story and includes a bonus story within those descriptions.  The introduction’s an interesting insight into ideas incarnating into something tangible. 

I was then hooked right off the bat by “A Study in Emerald”, a Sherlock Holmes story set in an H.P. Lovecraftian world.  (This was one of the stories that I wished could be a full novel.) Even though I’ve technically never read either a Sherlock Holmes or H.P. Lovecraft novel, I really enjoyed both. (I have seen enough Star Trek episodes with Data playing Sherlock Holmes on the Holodeck, so that counts, right?)

Next, as someone who read The Chronicles of Narnia over and over as a kid, I really appreciated “The Problem of Susan.” Anyone who feels like Susan was mistreated by Lewis can find some characters here who share that righteous indignation. There are also several poems sprinkled throughout this collection, which again made me want to break out some of my old notebooks and start trying to write again.

I found Neil through Tori Amos and her numerous references to him in many of her songs.  By delightful quirk of fate or intentional ordering of the universe, she performed at the same theater I saw Neil at just a few days later, which I also attended.  (And I ended up sitting in almost the exact same seats just on opposite sides of the theater for both.) It was amazing and wonderful and magical to be able to bask in the presence of two of my favorite creators in such close proximity.  Fragile Things also served as a bridge, as two of the entries were character sketches he wrote for two of Tori’s albums – Strange Little Girls and Scarlet’s Walk.  You don’t need to know the albums or be fans of Tori to get them, but as someone who did obsessively go through the liner notes and has listened to the albums numerous times, it was a satisfying bonus. 

I could go on and on, talking about the what happened to Miss Finch, or the short sequel to American Gods that concludes this collection. But suffice it to say that this was a superb group of stories. If you like short story collections, pick this up.  If you like Neil, pick this up.  If you’ve never read anything by Neil, or if you think you don’t like short stories, pick this up.  Even if you hit a tale you don’t particularly like, you’ll be on to the next and visiting a whole new world. The only downside is having to leave them.

**Content warning: the story “Keepsakes and Treasures” deals with the sexual abuse and rape of the narrator’s mother and child sex abuse, within the first four or five pages. The main characters of Mr. Alice and Mr. Smith return in the final story, but if you need to skip this one, it won’t destroy your understanding of the last one.

Find it online:

Fragile Things

Black Sun and Fevered Star

/ Denise / 3 Comments

by Rebecca Roanhorse, the first two books of the Between Earth and Sky series

Book covers of Black Sun and Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse with shadows of birds in the background.

I love it when fantasy stories take place somewhere other than a medieval England/Europe setting.  Don’t get me wrong – I appreciate Tolkien and his influence and the many streams that branched off from there.  But whether it’s N.K. Jemisin’s Dreamblood duology (ancient Egypt), S. A. Chakraborty’s Daevabad trilogy (Middle East/North Africa), or Alina Boyden’s Stealing Thunder (India, and with a trans heroine), creating fantasy worlds drawn from different societies, different geographies, different cultures, and different time periods is so much fun. (And there are so many more I could talk about, but then we’ll never get to the actual review.) 

Rebecca Roanhorse’s Between Earth and Sky series (Black Sun and the recently released Fevered Star) takes Mesoamerican/borderland societies/settings (with some Polynesian sailing influences as well) as her steppingstone in a story about a corrupt political structure, religious zealotry, magic, superstitions, and survival.

Black Sun follows four characters, bouncing between their perspectives: Serapio, destined to be the Crow god reborn and avenge his people, the Carrion Crow; Captain Xiala, a Teek sailor who we meet in jail after her night of drinking and seducing, hired to transport Serapio to the city of Tova; Naranpa, the Sun Priest, head of the Watchers who rule Tova and keep the peace, determined to root out corruption and guide the Watchers back to their original purpose; and Okoa, son of the matron of the Carrion Crow, trained as a warrior in a society that has forsworn war.

As we soon learn, the convergence approaches, aligned with a solar eclipse on the winter solstice.  Prophecy hints that when the sun is at its weakest, the Crow god will destroy it.  And as the planets move into position, so too do our characters converge on Tova.

I can’t talk too much about the plot for Fevered Star without giving away major plot points for Black Sun, so suffice it to say that Roanhouse delivers a solid sequel that gives us more insight into the world she created.  There’s the usual second book issue of feeling like it was really setting up even bigger things while leaving them for the next installment.  It definitely left me impatient for the next book.  Since this was just released a month ago, however, I’m going to have to wait. But it’s clear the gods aren’t done yet with the people of Meridian and the people have their own plans as well.

Overall, I enjoyed both books.  I really liked the world that’s created and most of the characters.  There are assassin priests, non-binary and queer characters, and a nice dose of various kinds of magic.  Serapio and Xiala are both fascinating and I loved reading their chapters.  I sympathized with Naranpa, but found Okoa’s chapters a bit of a weak link.  Thankfully, Serapio and Xiala get a lot of page time in Black Sun, though not as much in Fevered Star.  When you read Black Sun, by the way, pay attention to the dates at the beginning of each chapter – there’s a lot of jumping around, timewise.  Fevered Star is more straight-forward, chronologically speaking, and gives us some additional character voices. 

There’s a line from a Tori Amos song (“Bliss”) that asks “what it means to be/made of you but not enough of you” that kept floating back into my head as I read.  There is a theme of exploring culture and blood while being an outsider, raised away from your family or your people.  Fevered Star in particular delves into what happens when a child who never had a chance to be part of their community can finally return as an adult, with mostly only second-hand knowledge about their heritage. 

There’s a hint of Roanhorse’s own background in that, but it also ties in to a much longer and darker history in the United States and Canada of white governments stealing indigenous children, shipping them off to boarding schools, and quite literally trying to beat their culture and language out of them, not only physically separating them from their families, but linguistically and culturally as well.  (Some ties to themes from Almanac of the Dead fit in here as well.) It’s deftly handled and not a blunt object with which you’re hit on the head, but if you know, it’s a connection that you can glimpse and ponder.  Or you can focus on a fascinating fantasy world sailing seas, climbing cliffs, and watching the sun go black, wondering what comes next. Or both!  Regardless, it’s a great way to spend your time. 

When I bought Fevered Star, I debated whether I should jump right into it or if I should re-read Black Sun first.  I ended up going back to the beginning and I’m glad I did.  I liked being able to revisit the world and I especially liked being able to move straight into the next book when it ended.  (It’s so hard reading series as they come out because I hate waiting for the next one, but I also like knowing that there’s still going to be more.  Also, it’s better for the author if we’re reading stuff as it comes out, since it reassures publishers that it’s worth sticking with!) So do yourself a favor and make sure you have Fevered Star on hand as you approach the end of Black Sun! And then when the next book comes out, we can do it all again.     

Find them online:

Black Sun

Fevered Star

Book Review: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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Book Sea Of Tranquility standing up in front of a photograph of stacked rocks at sunset.

When I was in 7th or 8th grade, I read The Hot Zone, which traced the history of Ebola outbreaks, including one at a monkey house in the United States.  It hooked me.  For a time, I imagined myself becoming a scientist, traveling around the world, studying diseases.  And somewhere, in one of the multiverses, that’s what I did.  But in this universe, I went into history while retaining a fascination with reading about diseases and outbreaks and pandemics – real and fictional.  (There’s going to be a point to this, I promise.)

So a few years ago, when I heard about Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, a story of survivors of a terrible flu pandemic, I started reading it and stayed up most of the night to finish it.  As soon as I saw her next book, The Glass Hotel, I grabbed that too (even though it wasn’t about a disease.  Well, there was a lot about capitalism and unchecked greed.  So maybe it was).  It took me a bit longer to connect with that one, but I enjoyed it and found the characters compelling. 

Sleeping dog with ear on the cover of Sea of Tranquility book
My dog decided she’d sleep for me

Then I picked up Sea of Tranquility a few days ago and once again I had to accept that I was going to miss my bedtime.  (One of the perks of being an adult is that I don’t have to tell my parents I’m scared of the dark and need the hall light on when I go to bed, so I can then crawl to the edge of the door and read that way.  I can just stay on the couch.)

I loved how her style of writing in the first few chapters moves quickly, with short, fast-flowing paragraphs written in third-person present tense. By the time it transitions into a more standard format, I was hooked. (In fact, as I was going back through the first few pages to re-experience it so I could try to capture what it was like, I almost fell right back in to re-reading the whole thing.)

We open with a young Englishman named Edwin sailing to Canada in 1912.  He has no plan, no idea of what he will do in Canada.  As the youngest son in a wealthy family, there’s no inheritance for him in England, but he gets his remittance, so there is no urgency for him to find an answer.  He lingers at the boarding house he first lands at until a new friend convinces him to go west with him, then, when farming doesn’t do it for him, he continues to Vancouver, until finally he finds himself on a small, wooded island (that seems familiar to those who’ve read The Glass Hotel).  While wandering through the woods, he experiences an inexplicable break in time that leaves him confused, disoriented, and very sick to his stomach. 

It is something other characters experience, in other times, including folks from The Glass Hotel, and Olive, a novelist from one of the moon colonies (located by the Sea of Tranquility), who is traveling Earth in 2203 as part of her book tour regarding her novel about a post-pandemic world, unknowingly just as Earth (and its lunar colonies) are on the brink of an actual pandemic. And then there’s Gaspery, a man who seems to be everywhere and everywhen, and constantly grappling with the question of what’s real and how we can know. 

I enjoyed the thematic similarities between this and To Paradise. There are loose connections from century to century.  There’s a great deal of flexibility with time and universes, particularly with versions of the folks we met in The Glass Hotel reappear here. I couldn’t tell you if this is supposed to be the exact same time and place, or if we’re in a slightly alternate reality, but it really doesn’t matter in terms of enjoying it.  If you haven’t read The Glass Hotel, don’t feel like you must before reading this one.  The story works even with no background knowledge.  But if you have, it’s a fun little reunion.  And once again, a pandemic is central to part of the tale, with Olive’s experiences elegantly calling back to the early days of the Covid shut down. The earlier chapters also all take place just a few years before a pandemic will sweep the globe (the 1918 influenza for Edwin, Covid-19 for Miranda and our near-present-day characters).

Like Plato’s Cave, Sea of Tranquility prods us to question what we see and experience around us.  Or as we phrase it these days, are we all simply existing in a simulation?  Should we all periodically be whispering “Computer, end program,” to make sure we aren’t stuck in some sort of holodeck malfunction in a Star Trek: TNG episode?  What if we start finding evidence we are in a simulation?  How would (or should?) it change how we live? 

As Olive’s world shrinks to a couple of rooms, she continues to give her lectures on why postapocalyptic literature is so popular, now through whatever the future’s version of Zoom may be. And her theory resonated with me:

My point is, there’s always something.  I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story.  It’s a kind of narcissism.  We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now, is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.

And yet, we continue on.  As dark and as hopeless as things may seem, there is still time for us to find a new way, to grapple with our unknowns, to find solace and comfort in one another, to pull the drowning out of the water.

Find it online:

Bookshop.org

Amazon

Book Review: Noor by Nnedi Okorafor

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Book cover for Noor by Nnedi Okorafor, standing next to a decorative fake tree

When I mentioned to a friend that I was starting a book review blog, her natural response was “What book are you going to review first?”

A sensible query, yet one that stopped me in my tracks.  What would I start with?  What would my choice say?  Should I start with a beloved classic, one I know backwards and forwards?  Something brand new, fresh in my brain?  With the potential to spiral into a debilitating amount of indecision that would prevent this blog from ever launching, I finally opted to just go with the first book that I read this year and then follow along chronologically as I read.  I’ll intersperse those with books I’ve previously read as well, but in the meantime, without further ado, the inaugural review of Worlds Between Words: Noor by Nnedi Okorafor. 

Okorafor is a fantastic Naijamerican (Nigerian-American) writer. She specializes in Africanfuturism, which she deftly explains in this post of hers.  (Go read it; I can wait.) I’ll review her Akata series in a later post (I just finished the third book last month); in addition to those, I’ve read Who Fears Death?, the Binti trilogy, and Remote Control.  I have even more books of hers on my TBR list, which I hope to get to soon. I don’t remember how I found her books, but I’m grateful I did, as she quickly became another favorite author of mine (I can’t have just one). I love her characters, her style of writing, her evocative descriptions of Nigeria. I haven’t read comics (yet), but she’s also written several, including some for Marvel on Black Panther and Shuri.

Noor is a fast-paced book, set in Nigeria in the not-too-distant future and opening with our main character, AO, contemplating the giant sandstorm named the Red Eye, the winds of which will quickly destroy any living thing that wanders in without some kind of shield.  Yet she is ready to enter.  We then flash back to precipitating events, which occurred a mere 48 hours earlier. 

At that point, AO was just a regular woman, attempting to adjust to life after her fiancé suddenly left her.  Well, most people probably wouldn’t describe AO as a “regular woman.” AO goes by her initials, which she prefers to have stand for “Autobionic Organism” rather than the name her parents gave her, Anwuli Okwudili. (Quick note: on the dust jack of the book and in most of the online summaries/reviews I’ve seen, it says AO stands for Artificial Organism. But on page 42, AO states twice that it stands for Autobionic Organism. I’m not sure where the discrepancy comes from, but I prefer “Autobionic.” There’s nothing artificial about AO!) Born with birth defects and then later surviving a freak car accident as a child, which cause even more damage, AO is a mix of flesh and cybernetic parts.  Her legs and feet can grow and grip any surface; her enhanced hands allow her to flourish as a mechanic.  This is to say nothing of the new organs that allowed her to live in the first place.  The headaches caused by the neural implants that help her control all her parts seems a small price to pay.  Yet despite the life saving and life enhancing nature of augments, much of the population regards such treatments – and those who would embrace them – as suspicious and possibly evil.  AO is confident in who she is, but also feels the disconnect from her family and her community. 

Shortly after her fiancé leaves her, she is quickly and brutally confronted with the knowledge that her neighbors have only been tolerating her.  She is soon forced to flee, but how do you escape a society that’s even more connected and watched than our own?  AO has a few tricks up her sleeve, but it’s only going to buy her limited time.  She soon runs into a Fulani herdsman who goes by his initials, DNA, who is likewise coping with the fallout of an unexpected confrontation. We’re soon back at the book’s opening, standing in front of the giant, ecological/climatological disaster that is the Red Eye.  Sheltering in the storm seems to be the only feasible option to avoid surveillance drones and the coming authorities, but only if they can survive in there. 

The story is incredibly fast-paced.  Okorafor isn’t the type of author to spend 15 pages describing a character’s meal.  Things are happening, things are moving, and we have to keep up.  Occasionally, I wish for a bit more detail, but usually I’m so swept up in the story that I’m grateful we aren’t dawdling.  It’s not a breezy overview though.  There are plenty of themes and questions and challenges to unpack throughout.  What does it mean to be a person, and more specifically for AO, a woman?  How do we deal with giant corporations that we know or suspect are creating significant issues in terms of labor, privacy, environmental damage, etc., but also have become integral parts of society? How do we balance technological progress and tradition?  Can nature and technology live in harmony?  How do society and individuals treat the disabled?  What does our ability to watch tragedy instantaneously from our phones, without context, do to us and our understanding of others, of justice?

Overall, I found this book fascinating, well-written, and thought-provoking.  Generally speaking, you don’t need to have read a particular book of Okorafor’s to understand the rest (with the obvious exception of one of her series; then yeah, you should probably start with the first book), so if you haven’t read anything else by her, you can jump right in with this one.  Then start reading more. 

Have you read Noor? Thoughts? Other books you enjoyed by Nnedi Okorafor? Start/join a conversation in the comments!

Where to buy online:

Bookshop.org
Amazon