Book Review: Max in the Land of Lies
Aug. 7th, 2025 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI had a number of criticisms of Max in the House of Spies. (You can also read
skygiants wrote a review here.) My biggest criticism was that it saddles Max with a dybbuk and a kobold on his shoulders, who serve no particular purpose but to Statler and Waldorf about how recruiting a twelve-year-old spy is in fact a terrible idea. Of course they have a point, but let’s be real, when I picked up a book about a twelve-year-old spy, I did it in the spirit of “Damn the realism! Full spy ahead!” And when Max in the Land of Lies begins, we are indeed going full spy ahead!
( Spoilers )
Back on pilgrimage
Aug. 6th, 2025 09:36 pmmrissaGood news, fellow humans! My short story A Pilgrimage to the God of High Places, which appeared last year in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, is a finalist for the WSFA Small Press Award for short fiction.
I am seriously chuffed about this for a number of reasons. One, you know how everyone always says it's an honor just to be a finalist? You know why they say that? Because it is in fact an honor just to be a finalist. So many wonderful stories come out in this field every year that--well, you've seen my yearly recommendation lists. They're quite long. Winnowing them to any smaller group? Amazing, thank you, could easily have been a number of other highly qualified stories by wonderful writers, I am literally just glad to be on the team and hope I can help the ball club. Er, programming staff.
But here's another reason: if you've read that story--which you can do! please do! it's free, and it turns out people like it!--you will immediately see that it is a story about a disabled person. That disabled person is not me, does not have my family or my career or anything like that. But it is my disability. I put my own disability into this story. I gave someone with my disability a story in which they do not have to be "fixed" to be the hero. And...this is not a disability-focused award. This is just an award for genre short fiction. So I particularly appreciate that the people who were selecting stories looked a story with a disabled protagonist whose disability is inherent to the story without being the problem that needs solving and said, yeah, we appreciate that. Thank you. I appreciate you too.
Blood over Bright Haven (Wang)
Aug. 6th, 2025 05:39 pmcahnI was first recced this book during a conversation I had with someone in RL who said that she felt that Some Desperate Glory was kind of your run-of-the-mill YA dystopia and recommended this one instead. I also read
rachelmanija's take on it, which was a helpful counterpoint to my RL convo. I ended up feeling about it maybe in the middle of the two reactions? I did end up liking it, but I also... thought it was much, much more of your run-of-the-mill YA dystopia than SDG.Now... I have read a fair amount of YA dystopia for various reasons, and some of it can get incredibly and eye-rollingly anvilicious, where the heroine (it's always a heroine) talks like tumblr posts and the villains kick puppies for fun. This was actually in some sense not that way on the surface, in the sense that Sciona is herself reasonably realistically racist, and there is at least one of the Highmages who is presented as a reasonably nice and not-as-sexist person. However, by the end there is a sufficient divide between the Kwen (who are basically perfect) and Sciona (who is flawed) and pretty much everyone else (super racist) that I was feeling somewhat anvil-icized, even though at the same time I do think that it was much better on this front than the average YA dystopia.
There is a plot twist in the middle which I did not guess (although I did feel rather like I should have, and perhaps would have if I'd really sat down and thought about it) and which I greatly enjoyed. I suspect that one's enjoyment of this book may be predicated on whether one guesses it or not. That part was pretty great, but then I felt that much of the second half of the book was sort of a slog as Sciona then figures out what to do about the plot twist, but it got better once she had her plan in hand. I also did not guess her plan / the ending. I did not think that the book would go there, but it did and I admired it for having the courage of its convictions, and I admired the depiction of Sciona for being extremely consistent all through. I respect that Wang didn't try to make out like Sciona was better or more perfect than she actually was. Though the book, in my opinion, does suffer when compared to SDG, which doesn't just go for character consistency but for really hard change which takes an entire book to work through.
Spoilery thoughts
So yeah, I didn't guess that Sciona was going to burn the entire Magistry and government down! Literally! While she was herself poisoned!
But... it also seemed like maximum chaos for both Tiran and the Kwen, and a bunch of people, both Tiranish and Kwen, have already died and a lot more are probably gonna die, and it really isn't super clear that what is going to come out of all the chaos will be anything better than what was there before, except possibly it might be forced to be less dystopian because all the people running the dystopian technology have been destroyed. On the other hand, I did rather admire how Sciona's flaws of (a) not really caring about other humans and (b) not having any idea how other humans would react to things, because, well, see (a), were really consistent here.
And I loved how she does embrace all her flaws at the end: She had always belonged here with insatiable men, her brothers in greed and ego. Sciona's only distinction among these mages was that she was a more honest monster than any of them. Yeah, that's... pretty accurate! And like I said before, I respect that.
I must say I prefer books where the resolution at least makes stabs towards breaking the cycle of more and more violence, instead of accelerating the cycle (well, Thomil did make one effort towards that, which was nice; Sciona sure did not), but I do enjoy reading one of the latter every once in a while.
A couple of other spoilery issues I had:
- I totally did not buy that Sciona would have a different reaction to the plot twist (that all of their magic was causing the Blight) than every other Tiranish we see in the entire city (except maybe poor dumb Mordra, and it's not even entirely clear what his reaction is). I mean, to be fair, her negative reaction wasn't instant either (and that was well done), but she's grown up in Tiran her whole life, she's not devout but she's reasonably religious, she's been told her whole life that Kwen are inferior (and even says things to that effect), she just doesn't care about other people in general; it's not at all clear to me why she should be the one person to think differently than the others. The book explanation that no one else cares, I think, is that everyone else is horrible and racist, except I guess one offscreen guy who was so overcome that he committed suicide when he found out the truth before the book even started. Idk, I think there should have been more Tiranish who shared her reaction, or at least some who spanned more of a space of reactions. But I guess that would have been more complicated.
- What do people in Tiran eat? Aren't there, like, farms and things outside the city? Wouldn't the Blight affect those? Do they not trade with anyone? Use wood? It really seems to me that the ecological issues of the Blight would have a definite impact on Tiran by now.
I also thought the magic system was hilariously awesome. The mages use a typewriter -- they call it a spellograph -- to type up spells with very precise coordinates and variables (there's a great bit where Sciona is explaining to Thomil what a variable is, without using that exact term of course). So there are parts like this: She assigned the name POWER. Next, she wrote an action sub-spell called FIRE, inside which she assigned the carbon ball the name DEVICE. (I'm not even gonna get into the if and only if CONDITIONS of this spell, because it's quoted in
rachelmanija's review.) I mean, yes, cool! I'm totally on board with algorithmic magic! Then I showed it to D and he was immediately like, "Wow, they use COBOL to do magic in this world!" (He does feel opposed to this on principle... mostly because it's COBOL.)Wednesday Reading Meme
Aug. 6th, 2025 10:01 amosprey_archerAs per
lucymonster’s recommendation, I read Susan J. Eischeid’s Mistress of Life and Death: The Dark Journey of Maria Mandl, Head Overseer of the Women’s Camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, a compulsively readable though very grim book about how a nice German girl rose to head overseer at Auschwitz. Alongside her usual concentration camp duties, Mandl started an orchestra among the prisoners, partly as a bid for status (one in the ear of the male guards, if you will), but also out of a genuine love of music. There’s a general western cultural belief that art appreciation of all kinds should be morally uplifting, so one might be tempted to infer from this that Mandl was a rare spark of humanity among the camp apparatus. This is absolutely not so. Mandl was famously vicious, and her other interests included kicking prisoners to death and riding through camp like a Valkyrie just to show off her power.
I picked up Simon Barnes’ How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher on a whim from a display in the library, and found it an absolute delight! Barnes offers a few tips for the novice birdwatcher (acquire binoculars), but mostly the book is about the joy that watching birds in even the most incidental way can bring to your life: the thrill of Canada geese returning in spring, that wonderful moment when a hawk swoops down and you thrill to its power and majesty.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve begun Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, which I’m not loving as much as I’d hoped, but it’s still early days so perhaps it will grow on me.
What I Plan to Read Next
I picked up Kimberly Newton Fusco’s The Secret of Honeycake on a whim because I liked the cover. We shall see what we shall see!
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Aug. 5th, 2025 09:25 pmskygiantsThe Tainted Cup follows Din Kol, a young man who has been magically altered to have perfect memory recall in order to act as an assistant to a highly-placed investigator, Eccentric Detective Ana Dolabra.
genarti tells me Ana Dolabra is not a Holmesalike but a Nero Wolfe-alike, which I have to take her word for since I've never experienced any Nero Wolfe; anyway, I admit her Eccentric Behavior did not always really land for me, but I can't deny it's in the Tradition and I do like Din, who's very polite. This dynamic duo live in an Empire that is constantly under threat from Extremely Large Beasts that live outside the Big Wall and wreak massive destruction whenever they breach it. The existence of and need to defend against the Extremely Large Beasts justifies the rule of the Empire; the center of government exists in the center of the country and then people live in sort of concentric rings of safety around it, with the least safe of course being the area right next to the Big Wall. In order to defend against the Extremely Large Beasts, the Empire is constantly pushing forward experimental magical bioresearch projects that do things like 'alter people to have perfect memories' or 'grow very large and scary vines very very fast.'
When an important nobleman turns up dead by way of having very large and scary vines grown very very fast through his entire body, this is an interesting little murder problem. When a bunch of other people also turn up dead by way of having very large and scary vines grown very fast through their entire bodies -- in a way that also causes the vines to damage the structural integrity of the Big Wall -- this immediately becomes a large and scary murder problem which Din and Ana have to truck out to the absolute least safe bit of the country to try and solve.
As you can hopefully tell from this summary, the logic of the mystery and the logic of the world are very well-integrated with each other. The beats make sense as they land, and at every point you're given enough information to go 'ah, this clicks perfectly with what I already know about this world, and now I've learned a little more.' It's a good fantasy-mystery novel! I would like to see more fantasy-mystery that does this sort of thing well! The murder by exploding vines is very creepy!
I don't think it's a particularly spectacular novel for character -- there are Din and Ana, and there are a bunch of people who are required to make the mystery go, and there's a sort of flash-in-the-pan love-interest-shaped fellow for Din -- and I don't think it's much of a novel of ideas. Which absolutely not all books need to be, and which would not have been looking for it to be, had it not been multiply award-nominated. But that brings us right back around to the beginning of this post again.
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Aug. 4th, 2025 11:10 pmskygiantsAnyway, we just finished watching Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born, the Kim Tae Ri vehicle about 1950s Korean all-female theater troupes in which the entire plot revolves around aspiring young lesbians competing to see who's going to be the Prince of the Theater.
Please admire these official portraits of the main cast:
Jeongnyeon! Our Heroine. Baby butch. Massive protagonist energy. FORBIDDEN to sing by her mother, who has some kind of tragic lesbian performance backstory, despite that she has the BEST VOICE in a GENERATION. In episode four someone tries to make her sing full femme with no genderplay and she revolts on live television.
Moon Okyeong, the established theater prince!! beloved of every baby lesbian in 1950s Korea!! fishes Jeongnyeon out of the sticks and inspires her to join the troupe in the hopes of molding her into a COMPETITOR who can CURE Moon Okyeong's TRAGIC ENNUI and SCHRODINGER'S MORPHINE ADDICTION with the power of HOMOEROTIC RIVALRY.
Seo Hyerang, the theater's most important femme. Moon Okyeong's toxic partner who does not approve of Okyeong experiencing homoerotic protege/rival emotions.
Heo Yeongsoo! My favorite. Jeongnyeon's OWN baby butch rival that she made HERSELF in the classic rival mode, a stiff and reserved rich girl with Family Issues whose Haughty Pride covers a Profound Passion for Theater, who only really comes alive when she gets to go onstage in full drag and play a prince or a villain. A real Mr. Darcy of a lesbian.
Jeongnyeon and Yeongsoo also have their own same-age femme whom they're constantly competing to perform with who for some reason does not get lead actress billing or one of these cool character portraits even though she is to all intents and purposes the female lead ... anyway here she is, she's extremely cute but needs to pick up some skills in communication
The experience of actually watching the show is a a bit of a roller coaster ... like one episode you're watching Jeongnyeon make the worst decisions that a human has ever made in their life, and the next episode you're just sitting back enjoying the experience of Theater Lesbians Practice The Big Villain Seduction Scene In Every Possible Casting Variation, and the next episode everyone is getting together to do the big performance when apparently nobody has ever practiced their actual blocking together before and you're like "why are you like this. surely a theater troupe cannot run this way" and then the next episode Moon Okyeong is looking simply unbelievably good in a suit.
Honestly most of the time even when something annoying was happening there was some lesbian looking good in an Outfit, so even at the times I was suffering I did not suffer! And most of the time I was not suffering, because a truth about me is I love absurd Method Theater Drama where people are constantly going out to Find their Characters and saying to each other 'show me ... your interpretation of the Foolish General! The one only you could bring!' My many years of reading Skip Beat! have prepared me perfectly for this experience.
[nb: when I say lesbians, nobody is doing anything more than tender embraces or fraught handholding on screen, and nobody is saying 'I am a lesbian', but like they are very unambiguously lesbians. The entire plot is powered by lesbian drama. Every two episodes or so a man shows up to do something like 'embezzle money' or 'vaguely menace' and then exits again.]
Do I think the ending is fully satisfying? No. Will I be requesting it for Yuletide? DESPERATELY. I hope they keep letting Kim Tae Ri play intense lesbians forever.
(Also, if anyone knows where to find scanlations of the webtoon it's based on, I am Extremely Interested in reading them ...)
notes from my birthday month
Aug. 4th, 2025 11:01 pmelisemIt was a wonderful thing.
Seen anything wonderful lately?
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Aug. 3rd, 2025 11:14 amskygiants( Voyager Season 5, Episodes 12-26 )
WHEW. OKAY. Now let's see if I manage to write up the first half of S6 before we're actually done with the second half of S6. I still wish these writers knew what a B-plot was.
Books read, late July
Aug. 2nd, 2025 04:22 pmmrissaWilliam Alexander and Wade Roush, eds., Starstuff: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Celebrate New Possibilities. This is that rare thing, an anthology of MG SF. Even rarer, the authors in it are generally experienced at writing for children but were not giving us (or the kids) a pile of tie-in stories, rather doing SF that works as short stories. Count me in. There were several favorites here with new work--Fran Wilde and Carlos Hernandez stood out.
Elizabeth Bear, Blood and Iron, Whiskey and Water, and Ink and Steel. Rereads. One of the strange things about having been in this business this long is that I can now have the entirely new experience of rereading something that a peer wrote twenty years ago, that I read when it was new. That's basically what I'm doing with the Promethean Age series, and it's fascinating to be able to see not just how a person might do some things differently but how my friend, specifically, definitely would. A person would not have someone's female mage title be Maga in 2025 (ope); but I've been there the whole time for how my friend handles writing about trust and betrayal and other themes like the ones in this book, and...she wouldn't do it the way she does now without having done it the way she did then. Looking forward to finishing the series reread when I've made a bit of a dent in my birthday books.
A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower. Reread. What's interesting to me about the structure of all this on the reread is that Byatt sets it up for herself so she never has to make Frederica's marriage work on the page. Frederica was married after the previous book, and by the time this one starts, the marriage is already absolutely ghastly. So we never have to live through the "oh, this is why she picked this guy, I see it now" moments. We can go with accounts, summaries...which are never the whole story. I also feel like it's clearer to me on the reread that the level of domestic violence that had to be involved to be sure that the reader would take Frederica's side was absolutely appalling. Which is not to say that level of domestic violence doesn't happen, just...well. This is very well done, and I will want to reread it again but not often, oh lordy not often.
Agatha Christie, Murder Is Easy. This sure is a murder mystery by Agatha Christie.
Alexa Hagerty, Still Life With Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains. Oh gosh, this was extremely well done, one of the best books I've read lately, and also of course harrowing. Of course. The title tells you what you're getting--specifically, the author did forensic anthropology on mass gravesites in Guatemala and Argentina--you should not be surprised at what is in here. And indeed I was not, because shocked and surprised are not the same thing, especially not in 2025. I think the thing that I found notable, that I have been turning over and over in my head as a speculative fiction writer for the last several years and not finding solutions to, is that there were very clear examples of how the people who are wrong--who are very wrong, morally wrong, villains of history wrong--very often do not have a point where they change their minds and see that they are wrong. And I think that we are ill equipped for shameless wrongs, and I am probably going to be thinking about that for many years more.
Barbara Hambly, Murder in the Trembling Lands. This is the latest Benjamin January mystery, and it leans on the complexities of family structure (emotionally as well as socially) in Louisiana in the early 19th century when the different sides of the family were racially differentiated. Which is an interesting thing to do, and I am still enjoying this series twenty-some books on.
Kat Lehmann, No Matter How It Ends a Bluebird's Song: A Haiku Memoir. There is a whole spectrum of how nitpicky you are about what does and does not make a haiku, and if you are (as I am) toward the nitpickier end of that spectrum, you will find that many of these things are not haiku. They are brief, fragile, fleeting, fascinating. Sometimes it doesn't matter whether they're exactly haiku. (Also sometimes it might.)
Elizabeth Lim, A Forgery of Fate. This is an East Asian-inflected Beauty and the Beast retelling wherein the Beast is a water dragon and Beauty is an art forger. That part was great, and I find Lim's prose compulsively readable. What was less great for me is that it featured the trope that if someone is being mean and unpleasant it means that he secretly likes you and is doing it to protect you from something something who cares. BIG NOPE from me, people who are mean and act like they don't like you probably do not like you and should not get to have sex with you. (There is not a great deal of actual sex here. This is a YA. But still, message remains the same.)
Molly Knox Ostertag, The Deep Dark. The twist was very telegraphed for me, and I'm not sure that the author stayed fully in control of the metaphor throughout, but it was a fun coming of age self-acceptance magic comic that I will probably give to a young person in my life.
Victor Pineiro, The Island of Forgotten Gods. Discussed elsewhere.
Helen Scales, What the Wild Sea Can Be. This is nonfiction (title could go either way!) about marine life and how it is adapting (or not) to climate change, and it was very cool and full of a wide range of sea creatures. I like sea creatures. Yay. Also Scales was very conscious of walking the line where she reported accurately but did not inculcate despair, which in climate writing is crucial.
Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. This is very short and pithy, and probably people who are not disabled and spend less time with other disabled people than I do need it more than I do, but also it was a fast read and well done, good to know that I have this as a resource to recommend. Also kudos to our librarians for putting it on the Disability Pride Month display, which is where I found it. Also kudos to our librarians for having a Disability Pride Month display in this year of 2025.
Jennie Erin Smith, Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure. This specifically deals with the families in Colombia that have strong clear lines of genetic tendency toward Alzheimer's: how they have suffered, how they have been involved in Alzheimer's research, the ways in which that has not been handled very satisfactorily by people with more resources and power. Smith interacts with these families as individuals and groups, as real people, and it is a correspondingly difficult read, and also a correspondingly worthwhile one.
Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, David Rafferty, and Christopher J. Dart, eds., How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond. Kindle. This is a series of papers mostly about the transition from Roman Republic to Roman Empire, with several that venture beyond that to historical parallels. It's interesting stuff even if you aren't someone who thinks about Rome all the time, definitely worth the time, and as with many of this type of collection, if you don't find one paper particularly interesting, another will be along in
A bridge too far
Aug. 1st, 2025 01:41 pmmrissaA Comedy of Errors
Jul. 31st, 2025 01:03 pmosprey_archerWhen I was in junior high, the local university put on a production of A Comedy of Errors, which my mother and I loved so much that we invited my best friend and her mother to see it with us the next weekend. And then (I only learned this recently) apparently my mother snuck out one day and watched it yet another time, while I was at school! You can see why she didn’t inform me of this traitorous plan. Watching A Comedy of Errors without me indeed!
So of course I was delighted when I saw that one of the Indianapolis Shakespeare companies was going to Shakespeare-in-the-park A Comedy of Errors this summer. I retained dim memories of the plot (to be fair, the plot is basically “Two sets of identical twins separated at birth! SHENANIGANS!”) but intense memories of the hilarity, and I am happy to say that Shakespeare in the park delivered.
That formative junior high production was set more or less when and where the play was originally set, and featured actors who genuinely might be mistaken for each other as the twins. The Shakespeare-in-the-park version is set in Daytona Beach in 1984 (but a version of 1984 where you can’t contact the Coast Guard or otherwise use a telephone to try to track down your lost wife and children when you are all tragically separated in a shipwreck), and raised many chuckles by replacing the place names with cities around the Gulf of Mexico: Boca Raton, Cuba, Venice Beach.
(The merchant who is from Syracuse in the original is here from Venice Beach, and in perhaps a nod at The Merchant of Venice, dressed like the Rabbi from Robin Hood: Men in Tights, while everyone else is running around in Hawaiian shirts. Props to the actor for running around in a long coat on a hot humid evening.)
Also, every time they go to “the mart,” they replaced it with “Kmart.” I believe Shakespeare would have approved this pandering to the giggling crowd.
Also, the twins in this production were only vaguely similar, but dressed alike so you could definitely tell who was twin to whom. The Dromios were cross-cast, but the characters were still male, which made for a very funny moment near the beginning of the play right after the Dromios have been “born” (to a character who was pregnant with a beach ball): “male twins,” emphasizes the Merchant of Venice Beach who is narrating this flashback, and at once the Dromios slouch into a masculine posture and one of them grunts, “Whiskey club.”
All in all, just a grand old time, the kind of slapstick hilarity that you can enjoy even as a thirteen-year-old who is a little bit vague about what a lot of this Shakespearian language means.
Also, although I have at this point seen a number of Shakespeares, this was my first Shakespeare in the Park experience. We brought along a picnic and drank three bottles of wine between the four of us and had a wonderful time.
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Jul. 31st, 2025 07:52 amskygiantsosprey_archer alerted us that Adam Gidwitz had written a children's WWII espionage thriller called Max in the House of Spies, I immediately jumped on board for a buddy read, about which here is osprey_archer's post. I knew from the inside cover that the plot of this book involved German Jewish refugee Max getting shipped off to the UK on the kindertransport and subsequently recruited for espionage, with an invisible dybbuk and an invisible kobold on his shoulder.
I did NOT know that it was also RPF ABOUT EWEN MONTAGU, MR. 'OPERATION MINCEMEAT' HIMSELF?!?!
The fact that the spy foster uncles whom Max meets in England are Ewen and Ivor Montagu, respectively Mr. Operation Mincemeat and The Communist Plot Device In Several Fictional Operation Mincemeat adaptations, altered the experience of the book significantly for me. I don't know that it made it better or worse per se but it immediately became much, much funnier.
To be clear Operation Mincemeat is not referenced at all in the text of the book, although Jean Leslie and Charles Cholmondeley make significant cameos (alas, no Hester Leggett, though we were eagerly awaiting her!). Ewen Montagu was chosen out of the many available interesting historical British intelligence officers this RPF project both because he's Jewish and he had a brother who was both Also an Interesting Guy and Also a Communist Spy. By putting Max between Ewen and Ivor, Gidwitz gets to explore the complex position of Jews in England, point out the moral ambiguities of Britain's role in the war, bring in some alternate political viewpoints, and also discuss the Inevitable Betrayals of Espionage in a way that remains appropriate for a middle grade novel. I think it's a very smart move and I appreciate it. It is just also, again, very very funny. I want the Ewen Montagu scion who wrote the politely scathing review of the Colin Firth film and its unnecessary romance plot to review this one for me please.
Now both
osprey_archer and genarti, in reading this book at the same time I did, thought perhaps it was a bit implausible that British Intelligence would recruit a thirteen-year-old for active service duty. I did not have the same stumbling block. I have read Le Carre! And so has Adam Giswitz, because he talks about it at the end of the book. If you put yourself in Le Carre mindset, as indeed this book is very determined to be in the middle-grade version of the Le Carre mindset, it is only a small hop, skip and a jump to 'let's recruit a thirteen-year-old.' ("But," osprey_archer pointed out, "it's RPF and Ewen Montagu told us about everything he did and so we know he didn't recruit a thirteen-year-old." Small details.) However, the thing that did throw me is the fact that the dybbuk and the kobold mostly seem to exist in this book to point out how absurd it is that British intelligence is attempting to recruit a thirteen-year-old. They Statler and Waldorf angrily around on Max's soldiers going 'this is ABSURD. why are they letting you do this! you are going to DIE!' I think it must be an intentional irony that the supernatural creatures are there as the voice of the reader/voice of reason, but I'm not sure it's an irony that ... works ...... I mean they're quite funny but if we are expected to believe these critters have been around since the dawn of time they surely have seen worse things in their thousands of years than a thirteen-year-old going to war.
Okay, aside from that, one other thing did throw me, which is the several times I had to stare at the page and hiss 'EXCUSE ME! THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT!'
With those two caveats I did have a great time, and I was both annoyed and excited to find out at the end of this book that it's part one of a duology and I have a whole second Max Espionage Adventure to experience.
The Island of Forgotten Gods, by Victor Pineiro
Jul. 30th, 2025 12:28 pmmrissaReview copy provided by the publisher.
This is an unsubtly sweet book, an homage to Puerto Rico and its people and also a lovely depiction of being a second-culture kid. Nico is a budding filmmaker, desperate to win the approval of the most famous Puerto Rican in the world, filmmaker and musical writer Juan Miguel Baranda. (I said "unsubtly," didn't I?) He's spending a glorious summer with his abuela and his two primos, looking forward to lazy days at abuela's house, glorious snacks, and beach time.
But the three cousins have far more adventure than they bargained for when they encounter a chupacabra--and the rest of the legends of Puerto Rico are not far behind. Nico and his family have to figure out what the mysterious creatures and sublime beings are trying to tell them, before the island they love faces devastation again--this time possibly for good.
Sometimes Nico's angst about his movie career and his parents' relationship slows the pace of this middle grade fantasy, but cousins Nessi and Kira are always there to pick up the pace--and Pineiro succeeds in what Nico hopes to do, painting a portrait of the island he loves so that the rest of the world can see what he loves about it.
When listicles go wrong
Jul. 30th, 2025 08:53 ammrissaWednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 30th, 2025 08:17 amosprey_archerAnother Newbery! Lois Lenski’s Phebe Fairchild Her Book, which is set in Connecticut in the 1830s and features Phebe Fairchild, sent from the port of New Haven to stay with her Puritan farming cousins upstate, where she has to hide her Mother Goose because the Puritan farming cousins do not approve of silly rhymes. Phebe learns some farming skills, the Puritan cousins learn to unbend a bit, and a good time was had by all.
I’ve vaguely meant to read Liz Kessler’s The Tail of Emily Windsnap for years, and then
troisoiseaux posted about it, and then asakiyume decided to read it (and later posted about it too), so obviously its time had come.Unfortunately, I think I just waited way too long on this book. I might have liked it better if I had read it back in 2003, when I was still reasonably young and impressionable, although I might equally have been even more annoyed by the fact that mermaid society is not a thoroughly worldbuilt society in its own right, but merely an underwater reflection of the land world. The court stenographer may be writing her report in squid ink, and the presiding judge may be the King of the Mermaids himself, but otherwise the court functions exactly like a law court on a TV show.
What I’m Reading Now
Nearing the end of Lord Peter. Read the MOST HORRIFYING story this week, in which ( spoilers )
What I Plan to Read Next
Two Newbery books left to go! The project is almost complete, a mere seven years after it began!
Book Review: Enchanted Cornwall
Jul. 29th, 2025 08:20 amosprey_archerJ. M. Barrie was du Maurier’s uncle and her older sister Alice played Wendy in one production of Peter Pan.
(There are some other connections that I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it certainly confirmed my feeling that the entirety of the early 20th century British art world - art encompassing theater, painting, writing, etc - was in fact one extended social network where everyone knew everyone and half of them were related by marriage.)
During the filming of Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock referred to the (nameless) main character as Daphne de Winter, an identification which du Maurier cheerfully accepts.
Although the grounds of Manderley were based on the grounds of du Maurier’s beloved Menabilly, the house itself was based on a different country house, Milton.
Although du Maurier recounts her courtship with her husband (which seems to have loosely inspired Frenchman’s Creek), the real love story of this book is with Menabilly. Du Maurier devotes an entire chapter to wooing and winning the house. The distant glimpses from sea and land. The first visit, cut short when an early darkness descends while du Maurier and her sister approach the house on the winding forested front drive. The second visit, when du Maurier rose before dawn to approach by the sea. Repeated visits to explore the grounds, culminating at last in a visit where du Maurier found a window open, and climbed in to explore the crumbling abandoned house…
All this culminated in du Maurier securing the house for a twenty-five year rental, begun during World War II. Everyone told her that she’d never be able to repair the roof, get electricity installed, or otherwise render the place habitable, and she proved all of them wrong.
Du Maurier considered Frenchman’s Creek her only really romantic book. So if you’ve ever read her other books and wondered “Am I supposed to consider this horror show of a couple romantic?”, the answer is apparently no!
Picture Book Monday: Sakimura
Jul. 28th, 2025 12:26 pmosprey_archerSaki, in the story, is a cat with everything a cat could want. He has a yellow water bowl and a green food bowl, which is filled daily with cubes of raw beef. (This was before the days of kibble, and a cat could live well.) He has a catnip mouse and a ball and a window where he can watch people pass by on the street.
But what he doesn’t have is a friend. And so Saki sneaks out and traipses away into the woods, where he tries to befriend a bird, and a squirrel, and three fat frogs, whereupon he falls into a pond with a splash and decides (after paddling frantically to shore) that perhaps the woods is not the best place to find a friend.
So he goes on, and finds a farmhouse, where he is too big to befriend the ducks and the chickens and too small to befriend the horses and cows. After a long drink of milk, he decides to take just one last look for a friend…
…whereupon he finds a tiger cat sunning on the porch! They take one look at each other and are bosom friends. They run and play on the lawn, and then when they are tired they curl up to sleep.
(no subject)
Jul. 27th, 2025 11:17 pmskygiantsSo now you all know two things, which is that I have no poker face when reading in public and also that Behind Frenemy Lines is a delight. It's a particular delight to me because this book is a really fantastic, affectionately grounded example of bring-your-work-to-the-rom-com; my brother works in the same kind of big law firm as the protagonists and every word of it rang true. As soon as I was done I texted my long-suffering sister-in-law to tell her that she should read it immediately. (My brother should read it even more, but he will never have the time to do so, because, again, he works in big law.)
So, the plot: our heroine Kriya Rajasekar has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend and followed her boss to a new firm, which has unfortunately resulted in her sharing an office with the competent but deeply awkward lawyer whose presence throughout her career has coincidentally but unfortunately coincided with all the most screwball catastrophes in Kriya's career.
Charles Goh does not know that he is Kriya's bad-luck charm. Charles actually has kind of a crush. This is regrettable for Charles given that life has provided them with a couple of perfect reasons to fake date (Charles needs a date to his cousin's wedding and Kriya needs to fend off the increasingly inappropriate attentions of her recently-divorced boss) and also a good reason they should not real date (Kriya is busy fending off the increasingly inappropriate attentions of her recently-divorced boss and does not need romantic complications from her office-mate/fake boyfriend.)
As a sidenote, the cousin's wedding is a Fandom Wedding, the details of which I will not spoil but which are the other half of why I was laughing visibly out front of my office building (and which I did not explain to the volunteer.) I would not trust a lot of authors to write a Fandom Wedding, but this book carries it off with charm and ease. It really helps that the leads do not understand what is happening and do not really care except inasmuch as it's nice to see a person you like get married.
Of course everybody catches feelings, but also everybody also catches more serious ethical dilemmas, as the corruption case from The Friend Zone Experiment rebounds back into the plot and forces both Charles and Kriya to figure out where their professional lines actually are. I love where the characters make their respective stands, and where they end up; the stakes feel exactly right for the book, deeply grounded and deeply personal to the characters. It's so nice to pick up a Zen book, and know I can trust her to always be very funny but also to always make her books about something real.