Fiction:
I started off the month of May with three DNF mystery novels; it might be me and not the books!
Darksight Dare by Lois McMaster Bujold is latest in her Penric and Desdemona series; it’s also latest in the series chronology. Penric’s duties as a Divine of The Bastard bring complex issues to his door; first, making sure a willing demon passes to a willing candidate when its human dies, and second, teaching the new sorceror, who wasn’t trained to house an other-dimensional being. As usual, the plot grows out of Bujold’s splendid characters, and the plot is filled with interesting worldbuilding. My only complaint is that the story felt far too short; I am hoping these characters will show up again.
Water into Wine by Joyce Chng is a novella whose lead character inherits a vineyard on a distant planet, just before a war breaks out. The war slowly advances on the protagonist and family, destruction in contrast to the growth and building of a vineyard; the family put downs roots and defends themselves and their land. We never learn much about the two sides or why they’re fighting, other than “Loyalists” and “Traitors.” For such lowkey prose, I found the story to be very emotionally dense and affecting. I don’t want to spoil too much, so I’ll stop here.
Call Me Traitor by Everina Maxwell is due out December 1, 2026; I read a copy from NetGalley. Unlike Maxwell’s previous novels, this one is fantasy, and had themes that reminded me of The Winter Soldier arc in the Captain America comics as well as the magic system in Avatar: the Last Airbender. The protagonist is En, a “War Tank,” a person whose skin in incised with runes for enhanced spell casting; her memory is periodically wiped and she is always under the control of a commander, who uses a rune to get her attention or inflict punishing pain. En, like the reader, awakens into situations without context; but via flashbacks, the reader is given some of the context that En lacks, and roots for her as she begins to rediscover her sense of self. The flashback story, featuring a group of naive senior mage students experimenting, eventually intersects with En’s present-day story. For me, the flashbacks were less effective because I already guessed the outcome and don’t usually enjoy reading about slow-building disasters; but I did enjoy the way the story concluded, and was curious as to what would happen next.
Fanfiction:
I spent a couple of weeks reading a Star Wars alternate universe that was over 700,000 words, but alas it stretched on too long and was too epic for my powers of concentration. Also, the author never met a homonym they didn’t misuse, which is a personal peeve of mine. However, I loved how the story incorporated ground-level activism into its plot, at least for the first portion. So, another DNF.
