Stacking the Shelves (597)

Posted on April 20, 2024April 25, 2024 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Stacking the Shelves

Clearly, I went down a reading rabbit hole this week and came out with more books. I found yesterday’s book, The Murder of Mr. Ma, every bit as good as that initial review in First Clue led me to believe. I was teased by the inclusion of Judge Dee, decided not to go diving into the Van Gulik translation/interpretation, at least not yet, found the vampiric version by Tidhar, was delighted to discover that they are all really short (also really cheap if you’re interested) and was off to the races. Races which included the first book in one of the author’s signature series as well.

I picked up the audio of Lovers at the Museum strictly for the narrator, as he voiced one of my favorite characters in Mass Effect Andromeda, and got Fourth Wing because I expect that one of these days I’ll want to see what all the fuss is about – although that day is not yet.

The prettiest cover in this week’s stack, hands down, is The Sins on Their Bones. The Best Life Book Club is plenty cute, but Sins is simply gorgeous – as they so often are.

judge dee and the poisoner of montmartre by lavie tidhar

see loss see also love by yukiko tominaga

judge dee and the mystery of the missing manuscript by lavie tidhar

judge dee and the executioner of epinal by lavie tidhar

judge dee and the limits of the law by lavie tidhar

lovers at the museum by isabel allende audio

and then and then what else by daniel handler

judge dee and the three deaths of count werdenfels by lavie tidhar

For Review:
All For You by Dena Reub Romero
And Then? And Then? What Else? by Daniel Handler
The Best Life Book Club by Sheila Roberts
Mother Doll by Katya Apekina
The Mummy of Mayfair (Irregular Detective #2) by Jeri Westerson
See: Loss. See Also: Love by Yukiko Tominaga
The Sins on Their Bones by Laura R. Samotin
This Will Be Fun by E.B. Asher
The Threshold of Dissent by Marjorie N. Feld
To & Fro by Leah Hager Cohen

Purchased from Amazon/Audible/Etc.:
Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi (audio)
China Trade (Lydia Chin and Bill Smith #1) by SJ Rozan
Judge Dee and the Executioner of Epinal (Judge Dee #7) by Lavie Tidhar
Judge Dee and the Limits of the Law (Judge Dee #1) by Lavie Tidhar
Judge Dee and the Mystery of the Missing Manuscript (Judge Dee #5) by Lavie Tidhar
Judge Dee and the Poisoner of Montmartre (Judge Dee #3) by Lavie Tidhar
Judge Dee and the Three Deaths of Count Werdenfels (Judge Dee #2) by Lavie Tidhar
The Locked Coffin (Judge Dee #6) by Lavie Tidhar
Lovers at the Museum by Isabel Allende (ebook and audio)
Marked by Magic (Tracking Trouble #1) by Lindsay Buroker
Seven Vampires (Judge Dee #4) by Lavie Tidhar

Borrowed from the Library:
Fourth Wing (Empyrean #1) by Rebecca Yarros

If you want to find out more about Stacking The Shelves, please visit the official launch page

Please link your STS post in the linky below:

A- #AudioBookReview: The Murder of Mr. Ma by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan

Posted on April 19, 2024April 18, 2024 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

The Murder of Mr. Ma (Dee & Lao, #1) by John Shen Yen Nee, S.J. Rozan
Narrator: Daniel York Loh
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Dee & Lao #1
Pages: 312
Length: 8 hours and 24 minutes
Published by Recorded Books, Soho Crime on April 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

For fans of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films, this stunning, swashbuckling series opener by a powerhouse duo of authors is at once comfortingly familiar and tantalizingly new.
Two unlikely allies race through the cobbled streets of 1920s London in search of a killer targeting Chinese immigrants.
London, 1924. When shy academic Lao She meets larger-than-life Judge Dee Ren Jie, his life abruptly turns from books and lectures to daring chases and narrow escapes. Dee has come to London to investigate the murder of a man he’d known during World War I when serving with the Chinese Labour Corps. No sooner has Dee interviewed the grieving widow than another dead body turns up. Then another. All stabbed to death withg a butterfly sword. Will Dee and Lao be able to connect the threads of the murders—or are they next in line as victims?
John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan’s groundbreaking collaboration blends traditional gong'an crime fiction and the most iconic aspects of the Sherlock Holmes canon. Dee and Lao encounter the aristocracy and the street-child telegraph, churchmen and thieves in this clever, cinematic mystery that’s as thrilling and visual as an action film, as imaginative and transporting as a timeless classic.

My Review:

It can be considered both sad and ironic that Ma Ze Ren had left his native China in pursuit of fortune and adventure among the Chinese Labour Corps in the trenches of World War I, survived, immigrated to London and opened a successful shop dealing in Chinese antiquities – having seemingly attained all that he had originally sought – only to be killed in the midst of his shop by means of one of those self-same antiquities he intended to sell.

When they both served in the Labour Corps, Ma Ze Ren and several of his compatriots had come to an agreement with the man who served as the liaison between the Chinese Labour Corps members and the British officers who used them as cannon fodder, Judge Dee Ren Jie, that Dee would make arrangements to send their bodies back home if the chances of war required such service.

The war may be long over when this story opens in 1924, but that contract still holds Judge Dee, so he has come to London to take care of Ma’s final arrangements. But before he can even begin, Dee is taken up in the midst of a labor riot along with other Chinese men protesting for fair wages and treatment in a city that considers them something less than fully human.

Which is where the chronicler of this tale, scholar and author Lao She, comes into the tale. Dee needs to be out of jail before an enemy realizes that he has this nemesis in his clutches. Bertrand Russell wishes to help his friend Dee without getting his own name attached to this scandalous business.

And Lao She is bored out of his mind – even if he is unwilling to admit it to himself – spending his days teaching Chinese language and literature to students who have no love or care for the language or the people who speak it, merely a desire to get a leg up on their fellows in the commercial opportunities opening up in a modernized China.

Lao is supposed to be clandestinely exchanged for Dee – but Lao gives away the game with every move he makes and every word he’s not supposed to be uttering. So a prison break it is, with Lao, Dee and Russell scattering along with the rest of the prisoners.

But Dee still has a mission, Lao has acquitted himself well in the melee and has acquired a taste for danger and adventure he never realized blazed within him. Reluctant partners, resistant friends, together they will uncover not one but two murder plots in a fascinating tale that takes readers from the homes of the intelligentsia to the alleys of Limehouse – with a stop among the pioneers of the silver screen along the heights and depths of its way – only to arrive frantic and breathless at one of the first principles in any investigation:

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Escape Rating A-: The Murder of Mr. Ma was the highlighted review in the online mystery/crime review newsletter First Clue several months ago, and something about that review caught my attention and held it more than long enough for me to mark the title in Edelweiss as “Highly Anticipated” and immediately grab it when my anticipation was rewarded with the availability of an eARC and later an early audiobook.

(The above is a hint. If you love mysteries, subscribe to First Clue!)

The comparison in many reviews of this book are to Holmes and Watson, particularly the Holmes played by Robert Downey Jr. in the Guy Ritchie movies – because that particular version of Holmes is considerably more active than most.

As has been confessed before, I am a sucker for a Holmes pastiche, so I would have been interested in this book on that basis alone, but I think that quick comparison sells Dee and Lao and The Murder of Mr. Ma a bit short in this particular instance.

There is a surface resemblance in that Dee is the more active and experienced investigator – with or without resorting to the martial arts – while Lao, like Watson, is the newbie at this particular game and is tasked with creating a record of the adventure rather than necessarily figuring out the solution on his own. And if this combination appeals, Barker & Llewelyn are a bit closer analog than Holmes and Watson in more ways than the initially obvious.

What takes this story up another notch or ten is that both Dee and Lao were real historical figures – who never met due to having lived centuries apart. But Lao was a Chinese scholar in London during this period in real life, while Dee was a figure out of legend whose adventures were popularized by Robert van Gulik in the mid-20th century. (So if you think Dee’s name sounds familiar, that’s most likely the reason.)

Of course, what makes any mystery is the way the case itself is laid out and investigated, and that’s where this one draws the reader in its whirlwind every bit as much as Dee pulls Lao along in his wake. Because at first it seems as if the murder was a result of the prejudice and anti-Chinese sentiment that Dee, Lao and their countrymen face on every side in London in 1924, not helped at all by the popular “Yellow Peril” movies that play on and sensationalize the British fear of “the other”.

But the more Dee and Lao, with the able assistance and frequent succor of Dee’s friend Hoong, search for clues and motives, the less that simple but terrible conclusion feels like the entirety of the answer – not that it doesn’t underlay that answer but it’s just not the whole of the thing. Particularly as that answer is made even more elusive by Lao’s struggles with his pride and his naivete, and Dee’s ongoing attempts to extract himself from his opium addiction.

This is a mystery with layers surrounding layers, wheels within wheels, two investigators neither of whom are having their best day and criminals whose overweening pride finally gets in their way. And it’s marvelous.

The audiobook, narrated by Daniel York Loh, was a delight, but as is so often the case, I switched to text near the end because I couldn’t figure it out either and I just HAD to know. I have two and only two quibbles with the whole thing. I REALLY wanted Lao to get over his mooning over his landlady’s daughter because it was obvious from the beginning that he was deluding himself about his prospects and almost willfully blind to the obvious. His vain hopes and how thoroughly they were going to be dashed took a lot of audio time. My other quibble – a much bigger one – is that the short story that introduced this fascinating pair “The Killing of Henry Davenport” in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine does not appear to be available online, and that there’s no second book firmly fixed on the horizon. Dee’s and Lao’s investigations NEED to be a series. So much. So very much.

Which means that I leave this review pleased that Lao finally let himself get hit with the clue-by-four regarding Miss Wendell, and that rumors of a second book leave me with hope on that front as well.

A+ #BookReview: What Cannot Be Said by C.S. Harris

Posted on April 18, 2024April 17, 2024 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A+ Reviews> book reviews

What Cannot Be Said (Sebastian St. Cyr, #19) by C.S. Harris
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: regency mystery
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr #19
Pages: 368
Published by Berkley on April 16, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A seemingly idyllic summer picnic ends in a macabre murder that echoes a pair of slayings fourteen years earlier in this riveting new historical mystery from the USA Today bestselling author of Who Cries for the Lost.
July 1815: The Prince Regent’s grandiose plans to celebrate Napoléon’s recent defeat at Waterloo are thrown into turmoil when Lady McInnis and her daughter Emma are found brutally murdered in Richmond Park, their bodies posed in a chilling imitation of the stone effigies once found atop medieval tombs. Bow Street magistrate Sir Henry Lovejoy immediately turns to his friend Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, for help with the investigation. For as Devlin discovers, Lovejoy’s own wife and daughter were also murdered in Richmond Park, their bodies posed in the same bizarre postures. A traumatized ex-soldier was hanged for their killings. So is London now confronting a malicious copyist? Or did Lovejoy help send an innocent man to the gallows?
Aided by his wife, Hero, who knew Lady McInnis from her work with poor orphans, Devlin finds himself exploring a host of unsavory characters from a vicious chimney sweep to a smiling but decidedly lethal baby farmer. Also coming under increasing scrutiny is Sir Ivo McInnis himself, along with a wounded Waterloo veteran—who may or may not have been Laura McInnis’s lover—and a charismatic young violinist who moonlights as a fencing master and may have formed a dangerous relationship with Emma. But when Sebastian’s investigation turns toward man about town Basil Rhodes, he quickly draws the fury of the Palace, for Rhodes is well known as the Regent’s favorite illegitimate son.
Then Lady McInnis’s young niece and nephew are targeted by the killer, and two more women are discovered murdered and arranged in similar postures. With his own life increasingly in danger, Sebastian finds himself drawn inexorably toward a conclusion far darker and more horrific than anything he could have imagined.

My Review:

Most readers, myself included, read mysteries for what one author has called “the romance of justice”. What we love about the genre is that no matter how dark the deed, the investigator is able to figure out ‘whodunnit’, justice triumphs and evil receives its just desserts, followed by the reader’s catharsis that order has been restored to the world.

That’s not what happens in this case – because it can’t. This is a case where there can be no justice. Even though the investigator does manage to figure out ‘whodunnit’ there is no catharsis to be had and it would be wrong if there were.

Two bodies are discovered in Richmond Park, a mother and her 16-year-old daughter. That they are cut down in the prime of – or even worse at the beginning of – their lives is unjust enough. Then the situation gets worse.

The bodies are posed in repose, in exactly the same way that the bodies of another mother and daughter were found in that same park, near that same spot, fourteen years previously. It’s the grief over the deaths of his wife and daughter that put Magistrate Henry Lovejoy on the road that led to his first case with Viscount Devlin nearly a decade later, and could be said to have changed both their lives.

Seeing these two bodies – so like his own wife and daughter – make Lovejoy question whether in his zeal to bring SOMEONE to justice all those years ago he pushed for the wrong man’s conviction and execution. In his reinvigorated grief, his crisis of conscience is profound. Yet he still soldiers on in a case that he should have passed on to another Magistrate. Because someone else might get it wrong – as he might have fourteen years ago. He has to see this through – even if – or especially because – he may have apologies owing now, at the end, that won’t begin to redress the damage he caused at the beginning.

Devlin has a crisis of another kind, as the more he delves into this case, both the past tragedy and the present conundrum, the less ANY of it makes sense. The mother had enemies. The daughter had indiscretions. There are plenty of people with motive to kill the mother and even a few who might wish to eliminate the daughter but seemingly no one with this deep an animus for them both – although the husband/father certainly comes closest. As those closest to the victim or victims often do.

It’s only when Devlin sets aside his initial assumptions that logic forces him to reckon with the maxim later attributed to Sherlock Holmes, that “when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” In this case, a truth that is so heinous, so previously unthinkable, that no one who confronts it with him can even conceive of a just punishment.

But one desperate man can see – if not justice – at least an ending.

Escape Rating A+: This was, as is usual for my reading in this series, a one-night read that wouldn’t let go of me until it was over. Which doesn’t mean that I’m over it. Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, certainly was not at the story’s end.

One of the things that has always fascinated me about this series is the way that even though the murder is always solved, the amount of justice available to be served along with that solution is always limited.

Not that this era didn’t punish its criminals harshly – and as is often shown during the course of the series – unjustly. Rather, it’s that Devlin investigates crimes among the highest and mightiest, and as the saying has always gone, “the rich are different from you and me”.

In other words, Devlin often finds himself in the middle of cases where many of the suspects and even the perpetrators are above the law and protected, as is the case of one suspect here, by someone even higher.

Also, in investigating the dark and dirty underbelly of the glittering Regency, Devlin all too often finds practices that, while perfectly legal, turn both his stomach and ours. As is true in this particular case, as his wife, as well as the murder victim, were pushing hard for reforms in the commonly abused apprentice system – not to mention the vile practice of baby farming – and ruffling plenty of important feathers along their reforming way.

That feather ruffling could have been a motive for one of the murders, but not both. A big part of what keeps the reader turning pages in this one is watching the normally indefatigable and unflappable Devlin flag and flap because the pieces of this puzzle don’t add up – not even badly.

And not that we ALL don’t hope that the husband did it and that Devlin can make THAT stick. Alas, that hope is in vain – which is good for the story in a peculiar way because that would have made things much too easy and considerably less unsettling for both Devlin and the reader.

In the end, this is a story about bringing the unthinkable into thought, and just how much justice is even possible in a case that is indubitably true that absolutely no one will want to believe. Those are hard questions, and they are just as valid in contemporary mystery as they are in this historical iteration.

This series, centered on the riveting character of Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, and the equally compelling cast of friends and enemies – definitely the enemies! – that have gathered around him and his “poking his nose into situations where many believe it does not belong” has had this reader caught in its unshakeable grip since that very first book, What Angels Fear, so very long ago. The fascination hasn’t let go yet, and I don’t expect it to.

What I, maybe not expect but certainly hope for, is yet another page-turning story in the Sebastian St. Cyr series, hopefully this time next year!

#BookReview: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

Posted on April 17, 2024April 16, 2024 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B Reviews> book reviews

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: science fiction, space opera, dark academia
Pages: 128
Published by Tordotcom on April 16, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Celebrated author Sofia Samatar presents a mystical, revolutionary space adventure for the exhausted dreamer in this brilliant science fiction novella tackling the carceral state and violence embedded in the ivory tower while embodying the legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin.
"Can the University be a place of both training and transformation?"
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out amongst the stars.
His whole world changes―literally―when he is yanked "upstairs" to meet the woman he will come to call “professor.” The boy is no longer one of the Chained, she tells him, and he has been gifted an opportunity to be educated at the ship’s university alongside the elite.
The woman has spent her career striving for acceptance and validation from her colleagues in the hopes of reaching a brighter future, only to fall short at every turn.
Together, the boy and the woman will learn from each other to grasp the design of the chains designed to fetter them both, and are the key to breaking free. They will embark on a transformation―and redesign the entire world.

My Review:

This didn’t go any of the places I expected it to go. But the places it went and the themes it explored turned out to be much bigger than I expected – even though they conducted that exploration in the narrowest of spaces.

The space-faring fleet on which both the Hold and the University exist is part of a vast armada of interstellar leeches. This is not a generation ship, although generations of humans have certainly been born and died on its journey.

Instead, this is a human colony designed and engineered to roam the black, much as Quarians were in Mass Effect, but without their tragic, albeit self-inflicted, backstory.

Rather, the human population of this fleet represents humanity in all its dubious glory, greedy and rapacious by design, striving and hopeful in only a part of its execution. The stultifying caste system of Braking Day, Medusa Uploaded and even Battlestar Galactica, as highlighted in the first season episode “Bastille Day” (It took me forever to locate exactly which episode had this plot point but I just couldn’t get the reference out of my head) is on full and disgusting display, particularly in the context of the University.

Not that academia doesn’t do plenty of caste stratification of its very own, and not that it can’t be both blood thirsty and bloody minded – particularly in its small-minded, impractical politics. If an exploration of that appeals and you enjoy SF mysteries, Malka Older’s Mossa and Plieti series, The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles plumbs those depths in all their ugliness while figuring out just whodunnit in a brave new/old world, while Premee Mohamed’s forthcoming We Speak Through the Mountain is a similarly searing indictment of the way that Academe rewrites its own history to obscure its pervasive condescension.

Howsomever, as is clear from the above citations, several parts of this story have been done before – and well – if not quite in this combination.

The place I wasn’t expecting it to go was into the metaphysical, quasi-religious depths of Andrew Kelly Stewart’s We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep, which is where The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain gets both its heart and its quite literal depth.

Because the story here, in the end, is both about learning that even people who believe they are free can be conditioned – or fooled – into forgetting that they are just as chained as the obviously and literally named ‘Chained’ people that they are taught to look down upon.

And that it is only by banding together, not through violence but through perception and mindfulness and just plain finding common cause – that they can all be free.

Escape Rating B: This is a story that, at first, seems a bit disjointed. And it does have a sort of metaphysical aspect that seems foreign to its SF story – also at least at first. At the same time, as much as the obvious abuses of the Hold system resemble the contemporary carceral state, the sheer bloody-minded small-minded nastiness of academia sticks in the craw even more harshly – if only because it makes the hypocrisy of the whole, entire system that much more obvious.

This isn’t a comfortable book. It’s beautifully written, compulsively lyrical, and manages to both hit its points over the head with a hammer AND obscure any catharsis in its ending at the same time. I’m not remotely sure how I feel about the whole thing, but I’m sure I’ll be thinking about the spoken and unspoken messages it left implanted in my brain.

Rain Drops on Roses Giveaway Hop

Posted on April 16, 2024April 15, 2024 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Blog Hops> Giveaways> Rain Drops on Roses Giveaway Hop

Welcome to the Rain Drops on Roses Giveaway Hop, hosted by Mama the Fox!

I have an earworm from this hop, one I plan on sharing. That phrase “Rain Drops on Roses” is from The Sound of Music, specifically it’s the opening line for the song, “My Favorite Things.”

I’ve shared. Sorry, not sorry. The duration of an earworm is inversely proportional to the number of people it’s shared with. So the more of you who catch it, the shorter I’ll have to put up with it. At least that’s my hope – because damn they’re persistent!

Still, there’s a potential reward for you for having this particular rather charming song stuck in your head. As per usual, I’m giving away the usual Reading Reality hop prize of the winner’s choice of a $10 Amazon Gift Card or $10 in books. All you have to do is tell us what one of YOUR favorite things might be!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

For more of everyone’s favorite things – PRIZES – be sure to visit the other stops on this hop!

MamatheFox and all participating blogs are not held responsible for sponsors who fail to fulfill their prize obligations.

A+ #BookReview: Mal Goes to War by Edward Ashton

Posted on April 15, 2024April 14, 2024 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A+ Reviews> book reviews

Mal Goes to War by Edward Ashton
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, military science fiction, robots, science fiction
Pages: 304
Published by St. Martin's Press on April 9, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The humans are fighting again. Go figure.

As a free A.I., Mal finds the war between the modded and augmented Federals and the puritanical Humanists about as interesting as a battle between rival anthills. He’s not above scouting the battlefield for salvage, though, and when the Humanists abruptly cut off access to infospace he finds himself trapped in the body of a cyborg mercenary, and responsible for the safety of the modded girl she died protecting.

A dark comedy wrapped in a techno thriller’s skin, Mal Goes to War provides a satirical take on war, artificial intelligence, and what it really means to be human.

My Review:

Mal does not intend to go to war. In fact, Mal thinks the war between the Federal army and the opposing Humanist forces is a pretty stupid war, which it is. Although not, as it turns out, quite as stupid as the apparent opposing forces make it look like it is.

Not that even Mal figures that out until well after he’s in the thick of it. The last place he ever wanted or expected to be.

Which may make it sound like Mal is a typical soldier, but if there’s one thing Mal isn’t, it’s typical. Or at least not typically human. In fact, Mal thinks of ALL the humans he’s observing as barely evolved from monkeys. Some moments, he’s fairly sure that they’ve actually devolved from monkeys.

Because Mal isn’t human at all. He’s a free A.I., or as his people prefer to be called, a Silico-American. He’s merely observing this stupid war from the perspective of an otherwise fairly autonomous but not intelligent drone when he gets the wild and crazy idea to see what it would be like to have a body.

So he downloads himself into the body of a nearby cyborg-augmented soldier. Even on the frontiers of this stupid little war, both sides have PLENTY of those for Mal to play around with.

It stops being play really, really fast. Because one side of this stupid war knocks out all the data communication towers, and Mal can’t upload himself back into the cloud. He’s stuck in the cyborg augmentation suite of a dead human body that he can only sorta/kinda manipulate and only for so long before the power cells run out.

He’s also acquired the dead cyborg’s entirely too human job. She was guarding a little girl who has managed to survive the carnage all around her – at least so far. Quite possibly because she’s considerably more dangerous than any of the soldiers around her could even possibly imagine.

Leaving Mal trapped behind enemy lines in this stupid war between the so-called Humanists who believe that ALL augmented people should be thrown into burn pits and incinerated to ash, and the ragtag Federals who are getting the asses handed to them by people who shouldn’t be able to handle their advanced weaponry because it all requires the augmentations that the Humanists believe are anathema.

Which means that one of Mal’s people is putting their cybernetic thumb on the scales of war in favor of the humanists who want to remove them from the universe with extreme prejudice.

A problem that seems much too big for Mal to solve, as his processing power is tied up in protecting his new charge – no matter how much she hates the acts he performs to keep her as safe as he can. Even if they’re not nearly enough.

Escape Rating A+: If you put Murderbot in a blender – if Murderbot would let you put them in a blender – with the nannybot Pounce from Day Zero and the independent investigative reporter A.I. Scorn from Emergent Properties, you’d get Mal (short for Malware).

(Who, by the way, does see himself as male as does Pounce, unlike both Murderbot and Scorn. I had to check. Multiple times.)

What hooks the reader, or at least this reader, from the very first page is Mal’s conversation with his two fellow A.I.s, Clippy and !HelpDesk. They’re all snarky to the max, and none of them think much of humanity. To them, we’re entertainment – and we’re bad, boring entertainment at that.

And from their perspective, they’re right.

But, when Mal downloads himself into the dead cyborg Mika and is cut off from the datastream he’s forced to make adjustments. A whole lot of adjustments. He’s suddenly become a whole lot smaller than he ever expected to be, and the world is a whole lot bigger than he ever imagined.

Which doesn’t change his initial opinion that humans are stupid and that this war he’s now at ground zero for is stupid, even as he begins to see that as stupid as humans are he has acquired obligations to some of them that his own concept of honor requires him to see to the end.

It’s not love and never claims to be. It’s not even Murderbot’s grudging respect and even friendship toward Dr. Mensah and her team, but it is a change in perspective and a big part of the charm of the story is watching that change take place – even as we listen in on Mal’s internal dialog about the fix he’s in, his boredom as it continues and his limited ability to get himself out.

So the story combines the kind of mission quest that Day Zero had, complete with the nearly cinematic drive and pace that propels that story forward, told in a voice that might not exactly be Murderbot’s but is certainly a chronological precedent for it, shot through – sometimes literally – with Scorn’s dogged determination to figure out the mystery no matter what it might cost.

If any of the above appealed to you, or if you enjoyed the author’s previous books, Mickey7 and Antimatter Blues, you’ll find a story that will take you on a wild ride that propels you through this story while never losing sight of just how stupid this, or any other war, can be.

It looks like the author’s next book will be titled The Fourth Consort, and it will be out next February. As Mal Goes to War is the third book of his that I’ve been captivated by, I’m already there for whatever he writes next – and this one looks like even more SFnal fun.

The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 4-14-24

Posted on April 14, 2024April 13, 2024 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | The Sunday Post> Virtual Nightstand

It’s time to bid this year’s Blogo-Birthday Celebration farewell. The posts have posted, the giveaways have all found winners, so it’s back to the usual here at Chez Reading Reality for another year.

Although the usual isn’t quite so usual this past week, as one of my rare ‘D’ graded reviews spewed itself over the blog earlier in the week. There have been a few books over the years that I detested every page but couldn’t put down – and then couldn’t get out of my head – and Space Holes absolutely was one of THOSE. Hence Wednesday’s rant-fest. I’ve heard that the audio makes it better, but I can’t even. I’d rather listen to something I’m actually enjoying – which I am at the moment with The Murder of Mr. Ma.

Staying with that enjoyment topic, we were treated to a rare sighting of the girl cats coexisting peacefully even as they are clearly exhibiting the traits that make that sight so very rare. Luna is looking up, all bright eyed and eager for any attention or her next adventure, while Hecate’s face is firmly fixed in a glower, declaring wordlessly but with a VERY speaking glance that she would much rather be alone – or at least alone with her humans and without any squeaky little interlopers harshing her not exactly mellow.

Stacking the Shelves (596)

Posted on April 13, 2024April 12, 2024 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Stacking the Shelves

What a wild and crazy stack this is!

There are several pretty covers, although as usual the pretty ones aren’t pretty in the same ways. My personal favorite is Sorcery and Small Magics, but Buried Deep and Other Stories, The Crescent Moon Tearoom and Wheel of the Infinite are definitely contenders.

The books I’m MOST looking forward to are Darkside and Where is Anybody? – and both for their cynical, snarkastic protagonists. The book I’m definitely the most curious about is The Full Moon Coffee Shop, because it’s about a magical coffee shop run by talking cats – although Sargassa is also making my curiosity bump itch even though there are no cats, at least as far as I know, in that one.

What about you?

scholar and the last faerie door by hg parry

saying no to hate by norman h finkelstein

buried deep and other stories by naomi novik

For Review:
Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik
California Dreaming by Noa Silver
Cast in Atonement (Chronicles of Elantra #19) by Michelle Sagara
The Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy Sivinski
Darkside (Planetside #4) by Michael Mammay
The Fan Who Knew Too Much (Kit Pelham #1) by Nev Fountain
The Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki, translated by Jesse Kirkwood
Goyhood by Reuven Fenton
Guide Me Home (Highway 59 #3) by Attica Locke
Home and Alone by Daniel Stern
Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg
An Instruction in Shadow (Inheritance of Magic #2) by Benedict Jacka
Love Live Evil (Time of Iron #1) by Sarah Rees Brennan
My Kaddish by Thérèse Masson
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Sargassa (Ex Romana #1) by Sophie Burnham
Saying No to Hate by Norman H. Finkelstein
The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry
Sorcery and Small Magics (Wildersongs Trilogy #1) by Maiga Doocy
Wheel of the Infinite by Martha Wells
Where is Anybody? (Gideon Sable #5) by Simon R. Green

If you want to find out more about Stacking The Shelves, please visit the official launch page

Please link your STS post in the linky below:

A++ #BookReview: Court of Wanderers by Rin Chupeco

Posted on April 12, 2024April 11, 2024 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A++ Reviews> book reviews

Court of Wanderers (Silver Under Nightfall, #2) by Rin Chupeco
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy romance, Gothic, horror, steampunk, vampires
Series: Reaper #2
Pages: 448
Published by Gallery / Saga Press on April 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Remy Pendergast and his royal vampire companions return to face an enemy that is terrifyingly close to home in Rin Chupeco’s queer, bloody Gothic epic fantasy series for fans of Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree and the adult animated series Castlevania.
Remy Pendergast, the vampire hunter, and his unexpected companions, Lord Zidan Malekh and Lady Xiaodan Song, are on the road through the kingdom of Aluria again after a hard-won first battle against the formidable Night Empress, who threatens to undo a fragile peace between humans and vampires. Xiaodan, severely injured, has lost her powers to vanquish the enemy’s new super breed of vampire, but if the trio can make it to Fata Morgana, the seat of Malehk’s court—dubbed “the Court of Wanderers”—there is hope of nursing her and bringing them back.
En-route to the Third Court, Remy crosses paths with his father, the arrogant, oftentimes cruel Lord of Valenbonne. He also begins to suffer strange dreams of the Night Empress, whom he has long suspected to be Ligaya Pendergast, his own mother. As his family history unfolds during these episodes, which are too realistic to be coincidence, he realizes that she is no ordinary vampire—and that he may end up having to choose between the respective legacies of his parents.
Posing as Malek and Xiaodan’s human familiar, Remy contends with Aluria’s intimidating vampire courts and a series of gruesome murders with their help—and more, as the three navigate their relationship. But those feelings and even their extraordinary collective strength will be put to the test as each of them unleashes new powers in combat at what may be proven to be the ultimate cost.

My Review:

I loved this second book in the Reaper duology even more than I loved the first book, Silver Under Nightfall. Which means that it is going to be damn near impossible to keep my SQUEE under enough control to write this review.

But then again, I loved this so hard that I have literally nothing truly serious to say, except to tell people to go out and read this duology and to start with Silver Under Nightfall and be prepared to forgo sleep until you’ve finished the set.

The story in Court of Wanderers picks up right after the ending of Silver Under Nightfall, and everything that happened in that first book is part of the setup for this second. So my one very serious thing to say is to start with Silver Under Nightfall to get acclimated to this intricately designed and convoluted world where the good humans are working with the good vampires, the bad vampires are killing the bad humans and someone or something is maneuvering behind the scenes on both sides for dastardly reasons of their own.

Because divide and conquer has been a sound strategy since the dawn of, well, strategy.

At the heart of this truly epic dark fantasy are Malekh, Xiodan and especially Remy. Malekh and Xiodan are vampires at the center of seemingly ALL the power plays among their people. A people who are distrustful of each other and seem to hold humans in contempt. But are forced to or hopeful of or a bit of both regarding an alliance with at least some humans in order to fight a common enemy that is targeting them both with armies of infectious, unkillable monsters.

(And yes, anything that a vampire thinks is a monster is pretty damn monstrous – as are the people (for loose definitions of ‘people’) controlling them.)

Remy Pendergast, the point of view character for the story, is a garden-variety human. Or so he believes, in spite of all the rumors to the contrary he grew up with and was constantly reviled for. His father leads the human armies on behalf of the Alurian Queen Ophelia.

His father, quite frankly, is also a bastard – the marital status of HIS parents notwithstanding.

Remy was supposed to be his father’s spy among the vampire courts. Instead, Remy has found the first place he could ever call home. A place where he is respected, appreciated, and most definitely loved. By Malekh and Xiodan, the leaders of the third and fourth vampire courts, who want to make him their acknowledged third, whether he remains human or lets himself be turned.

But Remy isn’t quite the mere human that he believed himself to. Then again, quite a few of the things he believed and the people he believed in are not exactly what he believed them to be, either.

The war that Remy is at the forefront of, on both sides at the same time, will test his courage, his mettle, his resolve – and most especially, his heart.

What comes out the other side – intact or otherwise – is for Remy to discover. If he survives – and if his world survives with or without him.

Escape Rating A++: The SQUEE is strong with this review. Let’s get into at least a bit of the why of that fact.

The comparison that keeps being made in the blurbs is to Castlevania. I’ve never played the game, so I can’t say if that’s on point or not. What is very much on point – and not just the pointy fangs of the vampires themselves, is that the Reaper duology does a fantastic – no pun intended – job of combining the battle of good vs. evil that so often lies at the heart of epic fantasy with epic fantasy’s complex worldbuilding AND its underlying thread of very long, downright historical forces teeing up to fight the same battles over and over again.

At the same time, and I think this is where the Castlevania reference comes in, some of the prime movers and shakers in this world are vampires. And it has been observed, at least by this reader, that vampire politics tend to run towards exceedingly long games and even longer grudges because those original movers and shakers are still doing the moving and the shaking down through the millennia. It’s difficult to get a fresh start when the people who need it are battling not against institutional memory or country-founding ethos but against actual memory – usually in worlds where therapy is not remotely a thing.

A big part of what is ultimately uncovered, the evil at the heart of this world, is that the forces arrayed have been maneuvering on the down low for longer than the short-lived humans could possibly imagine – not that plenty of them haven’t either been caught up in it or killed by it or both over the centuries.

Our point of view on those discoveries, and on those centuries of underhanded and underground dealings, is Remy Pendergast. In Silver Under Nightfall, we’re with Remy as he’s used and abused by everyone around him in the human world, and we follow his perspective as he learns that the vampire courts are not much like he’s always been taught. And that he has considerably more value as a person than the human courts – particularly his own father – have ever led him to believe.

As Court of Wanderers begins to unravel the plots and counterplots that have set up the epic confrontation, Remy learns that so much of what he’s been taught to believe just ain’t so. We feel for him as his illusions are destroyed, as some of them get rebuilt, and as the layers of the whole onion of his life peel back with tears every step of the way. We get caught up in his journey as well as the battle yet to come and its multiple horns of dilemma consequences.

I got caught up in this story for Remy, because it was impossible not to feel for him, and because the way that his continual discoveries of how the world REALLY works as opposed to how he thought it did gave me a captivating and compelling ‘in’ to this complex world.

I stuck around because as the romance – and it is absolutely a romance – between Malekh, Xiodan and Remy gets deeper I found myself feeling for them, both in the romance AND for the centuries of trauma they had experienced and the way that their world was damaged and how desperately they wanted to fix it in spite of the forces arrayed against them.

I was fascinated with the way that the good vs. evil battle that has been fought through the whole story wasn’t reduced in any way to the easy fixes. Although many people at the beginning believed it was vampires vs. humans, and the villains were trying hard to make that point stick, in the end there was good among both and evil among both and deception on all sides. And redemption as well.

When I closed the final page of Court of Wanderers, I left this world with a deeply conflicted reaction. The ending of this book, and this duology, is utterly right for the story that was told within. The mix of the bitter of loss with the sweet of possibilities was, in the immortal words of Goldilocks, ‘just right’. But I’m deeply sad that this marvelous story is over, and that I won’t get to see the outcome of the life-altering choices that Remy has before him – and I desperately want to know.

Maybe I’ll find out in some future story by this author. I hope so. I KNOW that I’ll be all in on their next adult fantasy, whenever it appears, because Silver Under Nightfall and Court of Wanderers constitute a tale that I’m going to remember for a long, long time.

Grade A #BookReview: A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke

Posted on April 11, 2024April 10, 2024 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | book reviews

A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fantasy, magical realism, literary fiction
Pages: 399
Published by Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster on April 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue meets Life of Pi in this dazzlingly epic debut that charts the incredible, adventurous life of one woman as she journeys the globe trying to outrun a mysterious curse that will destroy her if she stops moving.
Paris, 1885: Aubry Tourvel, a spoiled and stubborn nine-year-old girl, comes across a wooden puzzle ball on her walk home from school. She tosses it over the fence, only to find it in her backpack that evening. Days later, at the family dinner table, she starts to bleed to death.
When medical treatment only makes her worse, she flees to the outskirts of the city, where she realizes that it is this very act of movement that keeps her alive. So begins her lifelong journey on the run from her condition, which won’t allow her to stay anywhere for longer than a few days nor return to a place where she’s already been.
From the scorched dunes of the Calashino Sand Sea to the snow-packed peaks of the Himalayas; from a bottomless well in a Parisian courtyard, to the shelves of an infinite underground library, we follow Aubry as she learns what it takes to survive and ultimately, to truly live. But the longer Aubry wanders and the more desperate she is to share her life with others, the clearer it becomes that the world she travels through may not be quite the same as everyone else’s...
Fiercely independent and hopeful, yet full of longing, Aubry Tourvel is an unforgettable character fighting her way through a world of wonders to find a place she can call home. A spellbinding and inspiring story about discovering meaning in a life that seems otherwise impossible, A Short Walk Through a Wide World reminds us that it’s not the destination, but rather the journey—no matter how long it lasts—that makes us who we are.

My Review:

The title is only half right. The world that Aubry Tourvel walks through is indeed wide, but her walk is far, far from short – especially from her own perspective.

That walk begins in 1885, when Aubry is all of 9 years old, the protected and spoiled youngest child of middle-class parents in Paris, France. Whether her condition is caused by a mysterious puzzle ball, her unwillingness to sacrifice it, or merely the whims of fate is never 100% certain – and it doesn’t need to be.

However the malady, or perhaps curse is a better term, was visited upon her, nevertheless one evening Aubry sits down at the dinner table and starts bleeding from seemingly every orifice while going into convulsions that wrack her entire body.

Medical science has neither diagnosis nor cure. All Aubry has to go by, on, for, and with, is her meager experience that when she changes location she immediately starts to heal, but when she stays in the same place for too long, the blood starts dripping out of her nose and her condition takes over.

Fast, hard and with extreme pain in every limb.

So Aubry is off, and so is the story. At first, with her whole family, moving from hôtel to hôtel in the suburbs of Paris, but then, as she runs out of places she hasn’t been yet, out into the countryside with her mother, Aubry’s knowledge of her mother’s utter exhaustion and total depression, and her awareness of her family’s dwindling finances.

Aubry runs away and leaves her mother behind. She’s all alone, walking that wide, wide world, at the age of twelve.

This is her story. It’s not exactly an adventure, although there are certainly adventures within it. It’s absolutely a story about the journey and not the destination, because as far as Aubry can discover, the only destination is death.

But along the way, for as many steps and as much time as Aubry has, there’s an ever-changing, always moving, and utterly fascinating life.

Escape Rating A: If you could put Journey to the Center of the Earth and Around the World in 80 Days, both by Jules Verne and both still fairly new when Aubry begins her walk, into a book blender, you’d get at least the basic broth of Aubry’s long journey. A broth spiced with a bit of Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control.

The difference is that both of those classic stories are ‘there and back again’ adventures. The protagonists set out with every expectation that they will return home at the end, more or less safe and sound.

Aubry can neither go home, nor can she make a new one. She’s a human turtle, carrying her home on her back. And it’s HARD. It’s a hardness that both does and does not define her, and that’s what makes her journey so compelling to follow.

On the one hand, she has to be as self-sufficient as possible, because she knows that she will often be utterly alone, not because she wants to be, but because she travels through many of the empty places of the world, frequently on paths that no one else can see. At the same time, she learns that when she does find companions, the only thing she has to trade is her ability to use her self-sufficiency to help others.

But what keeps the reader with her is the emotional journey. She goes from spoiled to über capable. She goes from being done for to doing for others when possible and whatever is necessary to survive all the time.

And she goes from child to young woman to middle-aged and to elderly – one step at a time and always with the monkey of her condition on her back. She makes friends and loses them and drinks from all the springs of the world – but only to the shallowness of a teaspoon.

She samples but never stays. And we’re right there with her.

This is a story that grabbed me from the first page with the sheer puzzle of it. The idea of her endless journey, and even more fascinating still, the progress of it in a world where all the corners had not yet been filled in.

And that it was a woman’s journey and not a man’s. There were (and are) plenty of such journeys undertaken by men in fiction. When Aubry sets out, it was the age of such stories, often written by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Their tales often told stories of ‘big’ adventures of one sort or another.

Instead, Aubry’s journey is long rather than ‘big’. She’s not trying to become famous – although she does. She’s trying to survive and that gives her story a much different flavor and leads it towards a more authentic conclusion. In the end, as much as we may envy her ability to pick up stakes and travel, to make herself comfortable wherever she goes, we feel for her inability to ever take a break from it.

So, if you’re ever feeling like home is a bit too comfortable to ever leave, take A Short Walk Through a Wide World with Aubry Tourvel and travel by armchair with gratitude for the ability to take that walk with her without having to leave everything behind, and see the world from the perspective of someone else’s aching feet.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Current Giveaways:

Winner Announcements:

Blog Recap:

Coming This Week:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: