Rutabagas and Unicorns: The Windflower by Laura London

Posted on November 6, 2022 by Victoria Janssen

This essay was written in 2012 for Heroes and Heartbreakers; it is no longer available there, as the site is defunct. I’m posting the essay again because Sharon Curtis passed away on September 4, 2022.

Every lady of breeding knows. No one has a good time on a pirate ship. No one, that is, but the pirates. Yet there she was, Merry Wilding—kidnapped in error, taken from a ship bound from New York to England, spirited away in a barrel and swept aboard the infamous Black Joke….There she was, trembling with pleasure in the arms of her achingly handsome, sensationally sensual, golden-haired captor—Devon. From the storm-tossed Atlantic to the languid waters of the Gulf Stream, from a smuggler’s den to a gilded mansion, Merry struggled to escape…to escape the prison of her own reckless passions, the bondage of sweet, bold desire…

The Windflower by Laura London (aka Tom and Sharon Curtis) is one of those classics of the Romance genre perennially referenced as one of the best romance novels ever written. It’s unfortunately out of print, but used copies can be acquired. Originally published in June 1984, it was reissued in 1995.

The story is an epic of the sort that’s rarely published these days: It’s longer than most modern romances, told from an omniscient point of view, and the language is more elaborate, the sort of prose often parodied as purple. Occasionally, I did find the language so overblown it became confusing, but for the most part, the style really suited the epic sweep of the story. The language was a major high point for me, because it surprised me. How? Because The Windflower is actually really, really funny.

I don’t mean “funny” in a mocking sense. I mean that the novel is funny. Note that the pirate ship is named Black Joke. Even aside from the ongoing clever banter of the hero and heroine, there are multiple funny characters who say funny things.

This morning, when she had chanced to make a remark praising the sparkling seascape, Cook had said prosaically, “I can’t see what you find to admire in the ocean. Jeez, what is it besides diluted fish piss? When you think of all those fish in all those centuries …” And then encountering severely critical looks from Cat and Raven, he had added, “Oh. Sorry, Merry. Fish urine.”

Even funnier, to me, is the voice of the omniscient narrator. The narrator is very much in on the joke that this is a romance novel, and that the seemingly feckless heroine, Merry, is going to end up with Devon, the dazzling older man who seems completely out of her reach. It’s pretty clear to me that this joking is deliberate, almost a “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” antidote to Merry’s dramatic adolescent emotional storms. This novel is all about the sexual tension, and the language used emphasizes that throughout.

There are repeated metaphoric references to sexual awakening, beginning from the very first page, that are in sharp contrast to the actual sex scenes in the last quarter of the book.

Merry Patricia Wilding was sitting on a cobblestone wall, sketching three rutabagas and daydreaming about the unicorn.

…The rutabagas weren’t coming out right. The front one had a hairy, trailing root that jutted upward at an awkwardly foreshortened angle. Though she had corrected the drawing several times, the result remained an unhappy one.

If there is a funnier vegetable than a rutabaga, please tell me what it is. A phallic rutabaga! I was immediately eager to read the rest of the novel and see where this narrator would take me. And the unicorn, you ask? We’re told that Merry has long dreamed of a unicorn. It appears again in her dreams like a portent, just before the story begins.

…until last night. It had burst through the window in a frightening rush of energy, glass flying everywhere, and it had reared in the corner of the room, pawing and snorting, looking bigger than it had been before, its muscles white and glistening beneath its creamy hide, its chest broad and heaving, its horn poised and thick.

Its horn is thick. I just thought I would repeat that, in case you missed it. Ahem.

He wants me to ride him, she had thought…

Oh, yes, honey. He does want you to ride him. The connection is made more explicit (heh) when Merry first sees Devon.

…this man was beautiful, in a way uniquely masculine, as arrogant and tender as a Renaissance archangel sitting in liquid, unattainable splendor…as she stared at him Merry felt the hot embers of that same confusing blend of yearning and fear that had brushed into her soul when she had dreamed of the unicorn.

At numerous places within the novel, nature also conspires to inform us, metaphorically, exactly what is ahead for Merry if she continues in her relationship with Devon.

The pool was fed by a warm underground spring…she leaned back luxuriantly into his arms as the warm, relaxing fluid lapped about her thighs. A mound of swollen scarlet flowers dripped from the limestone outcropping overlooking the pool, and the musky scent tickled at her nostrils…The sunlight…probed at her, awakening her…losing herself in the sudden penetrating sensation of hot, hard stone beneath her thighs…melted from the fabric [of her gown] and explored the inside of her thighs in an oddly dulcet manner.

There is a lot more going on in The Windflower than humorous sexual titillation, of course; there’s adventure, an intriguing relationship between hero and heroine, appealing secondary characters, and suspense. But for me, the rutabaga and the unicorn were the hooks that dragged me into the story and kept me there.

By the way, Merry ate the rutabaga.

I wrote two additional posts about The Windflower:
The Gorgeousness of Cat [3/19/2012]
Rand Morgan – Hot Pirate [5/7/2012]

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#TBRChallenge – Exile by Lisa Bradley

Posted on October 19, 2022 by Victoria Janssen

Exile by Lisa Bradley is a post-apocalyptic, character-driven science fiction novel which I bought because I had met and liked the author. The apocalypse in this novel was local, affecting people living nearby with uncontrollable, violent rage. The federal government subsequently quarantined the town, and it’s remained shut away from the outside world, though they do have wifi at least.

Mother was pregnant with Sweet William when an unregulated semi biffed the turn into the parking lot for the QuanTex mixing plant. I was three, and we lived close enough to the industrial park that I heard the truck’s 6,500-gallon cylindrical tank rolling like a giant beer can across three lanes of traffic. Father, who’d been leaning under the hood of a pickup in our backyard, said I scrambled up his leg and onto his back like a chimp, said he nearly severed his thumb in the fan blade. The semi’s tank wasn’t properly annealed. It crumpled and cracked, spilling a toxin (to this day undisclosed) that ate into the surrounding vehicles, some of them ferrying other chemicals for QuanTex. Within minutes, a gangrene-yellow fog blanketed half the town. The neighborhoods nearest ground zero, like my family’s, became the Inner Radius; the ones farther out became the Outer Radius. Both zones were indefinitely quarantined by the federal government due to what the media called “Spill-Induced Rage.” Technically, Exile was half of an already-existing town (the other half cleared out by mandatory evacuation), but we rezoned and renamed ourselves. And if anybody called Exile by its old name, they got schooled fast with a blunt object.

Bradley tells this story from the point of view of Heidi, who is desperate to escape Exile and her ultra-violent family, enough so that she takes up with the outsider who killed her brother. Tank is an Outsider, a man who is not utterly consumed by the nonstop street battles; he came to Exile to run a construction business. Outsiders are only allowed to stay in Exile for five years. Natives of Exile have to pass a test in order to go into the outside world, and very few pass it because of course they have no control over what’s required of them.

The quarantine imposed on Exile was semipermeable. Just as we couldn’t see into the panopticons but the guards could see us via one-way glass, we couldn’t leave town unless we passed the feds’ 4-S test: you had to be strong, smart, sane, and sterile. (All defined, of course, exclusively by the feds.)

Heidi has already failed the test several times, being forced to wait years for each chance to attempt it again. One of the test requirements is “Sanity,” which seems like a difficult thing to prove, and not necessarily related to The Rage; another is “Sterility,” which has uncomfortable echoes of forced sterilization in the United States. There’s resonance with restrictive United States immigration laws, and our society’s treatment of disabled people, and people at the mercy of oppressive systems, all underlying and shaping the surface conflicts. Most dramatically, it’s about people who are trapped, both physically and by being Othered because of barriers between them and the rest of the world.

The novel has the claustrophobic feel of a zombie siege movie, tension ramping up to an explosive, tragic climax. Though the affected people aren’t dead, their unreasoning fighting and the potential contagiousness of the Rage felt, to me, a bit like a “Human versus The Environment” conflict. Please note there is a lot of explicit, bloody violence, some of it direct, some of it collateral. Bystanders are not immune.

Bradley skillfully layers in a plethora of ideas, bringing them to life with poetic specific detail. I am not a huge fan of either horror or apocalyptic novels, but Bradley’s prose style and intriguing setting pulled me in from the shocking first sentence. Heidi’s longing and scheming for escape and a better life felt extremely relatable. The story only grew tenser and more involving as a noose of danger tightened around the lead characters, but the payoff was worth the pain. Highly recommended!

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My September Reading Log

Posted on October 14, 2022 by Victoria Janssen

My September #TBRChallenge Book was Black Maestro: The Epic Life of an American Legend by Joe Drape; I also read and wrote about Wink: The Incredible Life and Epic Journey of Jimmy Winkfield by Ed Hotaling in the same post.

Fanfiction:
The Lych Yew Gambit by Delphi for mimsical was an very excellent AU outsider-POV on Severus Snape. I liked this a lot and really wanted to know more about the narrator, a Soviet defector who used to be a chess champion.

A case of you by lotesse is a series of short AUs about the Ekaterin Vorsoisson and Miles Vorkosigan romance in Lois McMaster Bujold’s series.

The Rose and the Serpent by atalan recasts Crowley and Aziraphale from Good Omens, tv version, into the Beast and the Beauty, with some fun twists on the fairy tale characters and curse. It’s a very sweet story and I enjoyed it.

only fools rush in by andromeda3116 for FebruarySong very unexpectedly recast two of the main characters from the Star Wars movie “Rogue One” as a Christmas Holiday Fake Dating AU. Jyn Erso is a graduate student with unpleasant, very rich grandparents; Cassian Andor is her best friend who’s had a crush on her practically since they met, a fact which their friends recognize but Jyn does not. He agrees to travel with her to the annual family gathering on an English estate, where he defends her from relentless negging and Jyn slowly falls for him but has to learn how to communicate that. It works out for them in the end!

This month, I also re-read Infinite Coffee and Protection Detail by owlet, a particular favorite MCU post-Winter Soldier series in which Bucky Barnes overcomes programming to protect Steve Rogers rather than kill him, with poignant, hilarious, touching results.

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Romancing the Beast – Embracing Monstrousness in Romantic SFF

Posted on September 23, 2022 by Victoria Janssen

I have a post up at the SFWA blog: Romancing the Beast – Embracing Monstrousness in Romantic SFF.

Because the Romance genre is based on plot structure, it can easily be merged with a Speculative Fiction setting. Magical secondary worlds, alien planets, and far future empires can all include romantic relationships as the primary or secondary plot. One of my favorite romantic sub-genres is Beauty and the Beast, a very old story archetype popularized in Europe by French author Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. The basic story type can be traced even further back to “Cupid and Psyche” (Greek) and “The Woman Who Married a Snake” (Indian). The core idea, being forced into an isolated situation where the goal is learning to live with a monstrous being, generates a compelling plot with built-in conflict.

In a recent Nature article, Sibylle Erle and Helen Handry discuss how monsters “disrupt and unsettle”, but also encourage readers to feel empathy. I would argue that it is almost a duty of Romantic SFF to show how empathy can develop between wildly differing personalities; Beauty and the Beast provides a splendid canvas.

Speculative monstrousness can include aliens, supernatural beings, or artificial intelligences as well as humans changed by magic. The couple’s isolation, whatever the reason for it, heightens narrative tension. Imagine a Beauty and the Beast trapped on an isolated mining asteroid, or in a decaying habitat deep beneath the sea. Imagine a Beast constructed solely of energy, or a Beauty kidnapped by incomprehensible aliens.

Almost always in this story type, the monstrous character is paired with a more socially conventional character, their differences usually emphasized by a power imbalance between the two. Most commonly, the monstrous character is male, possibly because the origins of this story type reflect a common historical reality, inexperienced young women with minimal agency being given over to a husband’s family. Usually, the ostensibly less-powerful character “tames” the Beast in that the true monstrousness of the Beast character is behavior more than physical appearance. Monstrousness can also be entirely in the eye of the beholder, or of their society.

The joy of speculative fiction is that we can explore the core elements of Beauty and the Beast from different angles, whether metaphorical or literal.

Romance novels often address Beauty and the Beast pairings in a purely metaphorical sense; for example Judith Ivory’s archetypal historical romance Beast. In her novel, the monstrousness of the hero is purely human misbehavior including male arrogance and entitlement; he must overcome this obstacle through learning communication and empathy, while the heroine, who has less social power, inhabits and must overcome some monstrous behavior of her own as she fights against her own social powerlessness.

In the literal sense, the Paranormal Romance sub-genre as well as Urban Fantasy frequently focuses on conflicts between vampires or werewolves and their human partners. Their isolation from others might be physical, or might be because the world at large does not believe in the existence of supernatural beings. The common trope of Fated Mates harks back to the forced relationship in Beauty and the Beast. Reversals of these tropes, or exploratory dialoguing with the structure of this sub-genre, is another way to explore the theme.

Writers are not limited by the prescriptions of earlier versions of this story, however. One can reconsider who or what is considered a beast, and who or what is considered a beauty. Empathy might be developed by science fictional means, such as telepathy. There are myriad ways to overcome disruptive “beastly” behavior—or not overcome it at all while still finding a solution. Beastliness can be embraced or revisualized as a form of self-discovery, or as a necessary oppositional force in society.

Does the beast need intervention or assistance from the beauty, or the reverse? Is becoming less beastly the appropriate goal for their setting? Is the solution to oppose a conformist, fascist society through disruption? Does remorse for beastliness lead to practicing restorative justice? Are, in a surprise twist, both characters beasts? What is the function of a beast, or a pair of beasts, in a utopian society? There’s no limit to the possibilities.

Romantic fiction might not save the world, but it can explore, model, and encourage potential empathetic solutions to problems, including problems we can’t see yet. And isn’t that the heart of speculative fiction?

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#TBRChallenge – Animals: Black Maestro: The Epic Life of an American Legend by Joe Drape

Posted on September 21, 2022 by Victoria Janssen

And now for something completely different! I went with horse racing as the sport for this month’s theme. Black Maestro: The Epic Life of an American Legend by Joe Drape is a biography of Black jockey Jimmy Winkfield (1882 – 1974), winner of the Kentucky Derby in both 1901 and 1902, the last Black jockey to do so and one of very few who managed it back-to-back.

Winkfield was the youngest of seventeen children; his father had been freed from slavery via joining the Union army during the American Civil War. His parents both worked to support their family in Kentucky, his father a sharecropper and seasonal worker and his mother taking care of the children, which would have been the equivalent of several full-time jobs. Winkfield loved horses and learned the business by hanging around nearby stables; at the time, Black horsemen were considered to have a special skill with the animals and found it relatively easy to find work. This didn’t last.

When Black jockies, many of them very successful, were being pushed out of the sport by Jim Crow laws, Winkfield traveled overseas to work. He went on to have successful careers in Russia and, after the Russian Revolution, in France, where he became a trainer until expelled by the Nazis, who confiscated his horses. He made and lost several fortunes; he loved a number of different women, marrying three of them, and having several children. His eldest son with his Russian wife Alexandra, George, was also a jockey, but died from tubercular meningitis at twenty-four. Winkfield himself passed away in France in 1974, and is buried there.

Black Maestro was informative about the subject and the surrounding history. I particularly enjoyed the section about horse racing in Poland and Russia, as that history was completely unfamiliar to me. The author researched extensively, using translators when necessary, and interviewed Winkfield’s surviving children. The author’s note and bibliography are an interesting window into all the different angles from which Drape researched.

Now for two birds with one stone! The second biography of Winkfield, also from my TBR, is Wink: The Incredible Life and Epic Journey of Jimmy Winkfield by Ed Hotaling. It’s more journalistic in tone, and with a few additional photos not seen in the Drape biography. Though I’d found Drape’s prose a little dry, I ended up preferring it to Hotaling’s; however, Hotaling’s sometimes anecdotal approach was an enjoyable read as well. Hotaling’s research also included interviewing surviving family members.

Here’s a brief documentary I found on YouTube:

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My August Reading Log

Posted on September 9, 2022 by Victoria Janssen

Fiction:
Prisoner of Midnight by Barbara Hambly is eighth and most current of the James and Lydia Asher series about vampire hunters and their uneasy vampire ally, Don Simon Ysidro. I was excited to find it’s set in 1917, with James on leave from serving as a spy at the front and Lydia recently returned from the front herself. I definitely need to find volume seven soon, as it’s set in the beginning of World War One. After a desperate call from Simon, who’s being held captive, Lydia and daughter Miranda end up on a luxury ship to America, trapped with a killer and hunted by German submarines. Hambly emphasizes the differences between first and third class passengers. A wealthy American capitalist, his thug/private detectives, and union labor struggles form a background. Meanwhile, back in Europe, James must negotiate with Paris vampires to help Lydia solve the mystery. Content warning for child deaths. There are assorted anti-Romany/anti-Semite/anti-Muslim/anti-Catholic/anti-Protestant sentiments among the passengers, including a little anti-black racism; a powder keg in a confined space.

Kindred of Darkness by Barbara Hambly is fifth in the series, set in 1913. I continue to read these out of order! This volume, like number eight, also includes a wealthy American capitalist with his own bully-boys, though he’s secondary to vampire villains, one the Master of London, Dr. Lionel Grippen. Gripped is on the trail of another vampire who fled the Balkans when war broke out; he forces Lydia’s help by kidnapping James and Lydia’s small daughter Miranda, along with her nursery maid. Meanwhile, Lydia has been dragooned into chaperoning her niece’s comeout, which unsurprisingly leads to have uncovering some vampiric connections. This one had a cinematic feel to me, especially the dramatic ending sequence.

Aunty Lee’s Chilled Revenge by Ovidia Yu is third in the Singaporean Mysteries series. I figured out a key element of the mystery almost immediately, but there were enough indications of more going on with the murders that the plot held my interest. Familiar characters mingle with new ones as always-busy Aunty Lee struggles against feelings of uselessness while recovering from a sprained ankle. It turns out she can still solve a mystery even when she can’t walk far. Content warning for past animal harm, mental illness, and internet abuse; before the story begins, a fostered dog is euthanized unnecessarily, resulting in a storm of internet abuse aimed at the perpetrator, who very probably was mentally ill.

Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather is a novella about Nuns! In! Spaaaaace!!! Basically, a small group who travel in a living ship to be of service. So they do things like weddings and baptisms, but also healthcare, especially for nasty futuristic contagious diseases. They’re roughly a generation past a devastating war caused by Earth trying to bring all the other worlds, both in its solar system and two others, under their thumb. The effects of the war are still very present. The sisters of the Order of Saint Rita have almost no contact with Earth and get news from the Vatican only sporadically, but they’re beginning to see disturbing hints of another attempt at central governance, which nobody in the colonies wants. The characters were great, each one having a different reason for having taken vows, including one who wants to be of service but has no faith. There’s also neat worldbuilding around the living ships, how they’re grown, and how they’re modified to be used by humans.

Sisters of the Forsaken Stars by Lina Rather built on the conflicts established in the first novella. It left the Nuns in Space ready to spring off into a new chapter, which I am totally ready for.

My August TBR Challenge book was Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart.

Nonfiction:
1973: Rock at the Crossroads by Andrew Grant Jackson is popular nonfiction ostensibly about how the popular music of 1973 (with a bit of 1972 and 1974 overlap) reflected and interacted with mostly American current events, including the end of the Vietnam War and Watergate. There is some of that social history I was hoping for, but I felt a lot of the wordcount was extraneous. The book is jammed with anecdotes about musicians’ drug habits, unwise relationships, and infidelity that I found tiresome and repetitive fairly quickly, as well as depressing. As the book wore on, I felt a single interesting point about, say, songs written about Nixon’s dishonesty, would go into a somewhat relevant anecdote about a musician and then spiral down a black hole of other anecdotes that let the topic wander off somewhere else. By the end, I was questioning the relevance of many of the anecdotes; Joni Mitchell’s boyfriends were not the ones writing her songs. Perhaps these rabbit holes were the intent, and those were the transitions. By the last half of the book, I was already tired. Good things: the author included women artists (which seems obvious but doesn’t always happen), and though the title refers to Rock, he also included reggae, rhythm and blues, outlaw country, and the dawn of hiphop.

A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee by Danny Fingeroth didn’t tell me much I didn’t already know about Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber), which is basically that he was exactly as gregarious and full of hustle and ideas as his public persona would lead you to believe. He seems to have been an extreme extrovert and very dedicated to his career, which was a bonus for some and a massive irritation to others (like Jack Kirby…though it seems to me their relationship had a bit of an “I love you, but I can’t live with you” vibe). Growing up with a father who was perpetually unemployed, after Lieber graduated high school at sixteen he immediately went to work and ended up at his cousin Martin Goodman’s publishing company, becoming an editor at age seventeen; he chose “Stan Lee” for his name pretty early, though he didn’t change it legally for a while. Part of Goodman’s company, Timely Comics, eventually became Marvel, with whom Lee was associated for the rest of his life. He also always had side projects going, just in case he could break into something bigger, or he lost his main job; he was determined to always be able to support his family himself. Numerous times, he wanted to get out of comics, into something more respectable. Instead, without at first realizing it, he made comics respectable.

What I primarily got out of this book was exactly how and how much Lee shaped what Marvel became. The responses he gave on 1960s letters pages, the Bullpen Bulletins and Stan’s Soapbox features, as well as the chatty meta narration in the comics he wrote, were all his creations and his voice, not something that other comics publishers did in that same way. (I wondered how much his comics narration owed to the radio shows he’d loved as a kid.) Fingeroth pointed out how those prose features created a community of readers who felt like insiders, which of course made them buy comics, but ended up helping to keep the company going through some rough times. The comics themselves were important, of course, and even when he didn’t script them in detail he added a gloss of his narrative voice to them, like a polish atop the storytelling provided by his collaborators. There were many, many battles, legal and otherwise, over who actually “created” the early Marvel characters, and the battles were never entirely resolved (I think it’s impossible that they could have been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction). But I am pretty sure the Marvel brand as it is today would not be at all the same without Lee’s input.

Fanfiction:
gold in the seams of my hands by napricot is a post-“The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” story in which Bucky discovers he has a measurable psychic power, with interesting implications. There’s also a good plot and a lovely romance between Bucky and Sam. Recommended.

To Be Where You Are by roboticonography is a lovely WWII-era Peggy Carter and Steve Rogers romance story, positing that Steve is demisexual.

this ocean is yours, and mine by inmyriadbits and rosepetalfall is a Star Wars AU set in our contemporary world; all the characters are academics at Theed University in Connecticut. Unusually, there’s a sweet romantic pairing between Religion professor and science fiction novelist Luke Amidala-Lars and new history faculty Poe Dameron. I enjoyed the cleverness of the conceit and how the characters were shifted in their new reality. It was fun.

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#TBRChallenge – Blue Collar: Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart

Posted on August 17, 2022 by Victoria Janssen

Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart is one of those books I pre-ordered and then kept on my TBR for years afterward. Stewart is one of my all-time favorite fantasy writers, but he has gotten away from writing novels in recent years, and I don’t know if he’ll ever write another. These days, he writes interactive fiction and “mixed reality” games. My response to this change in his career was hoarding this last novel, waiting for the perfect time to read it. Rejoice! The time is now!!!

This review contains some plot spoilers for this 2004 novel.

Perfect Circle, which I belatedly learned was named for the R.E.M. song, fits this month’s theme, “Blue Collar,” like a glove. Protagonist Will “Dead” Kennedy grew up in Deer Park, a suburb of Houston mostly occupied by workers at nearby chemical plants. Most of his family members still live and work in the area. Will decamps to Houston proper, where he lives near his ex-wife Josie, his daughter Megan, and Josie’s husband Don.

Will has never gotten over his divorce or moved on with his life; he works a series of retail jobs while trying to stay ahead of rent and expenses. He only feels joy when seeing his daughter once every two weeks, and clings to the ghost of his marriage. In parallel to the gray drabness of his daily life, Will sees ghosts everywhere, and sometimes ghost roads that lead to unknown lands; he can recognize ghosts and ghost roads only because he sees them in black and white. Will has to learn how to deal with the presence of ghosts in his life, both real and metaphorical.

On several occasions, he sees the ghost of one of his uncles, who was vaporized in an industrial accident when Will was in elementary school. Though the chemical company was at fault, his uncle’s family was not compensated for their loss of income, a stark example of how corporations victimize workers and through them, their families.

Eventually, Will learns or rather is taught to monetize his ghost-spotting skills, but the main theme of the novel, to me, is depression. Will has a constant sense of futility; he can’t advance because he doesn’t have enough education or the means to obtain it. He has no examples on how to get ahead in life except for one cousin, who learned about computers while in Boy Scouts. A loner, Will is reluctant to reach out to his family when the book opens. Part of his journey is realizing, as the story progresses, that he has that resource, and that he has the ability to help his family in return.

Domestic violence is also a theme. Will’s favorite cousin was murdered by her boyfriend in her early twenties, and Will sees the ghost of a young woman murdered by a more distant cousin, Tom Hanlon. Will manages to escape being killed by Hanlon in his turn by causing a deadly fire; he’s subsequently haunted, and taunted, by Hanlon’s ghost, who exacerbates his fears that he or former Marine Don will harm Josie (spoiler: she makes it out of the book just fine).

There’s a lot going on in this story, but thanks to Stewart’s lyrical prose style and period-specific, location-specific significant detail, I read the entire novel in two days, unable to put it down. I highly recommend this author and this book; the unexpected ending felt like a transformative gift.

Perfect Circle was a Nebula and World Fantasy Award finalist; a Book Sense Notable Book; and Best of the Year at Booklist, Locus, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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My July Reading Log

Posted on August 12, 2022 by Victoria Janssen

Fiction:
Abandoned in Death by J. D. Robb is the fifty-fourth in that series, wow, and there are currently two more scheduled to follow. These are comfortingly repetitive despite being about sometimes truly gruesome serial murders, because the killer is always caught and jailed in the end. I also find it interesting to watch the near-future worldbuilding shift and change as it gets closer to present-day. In Romance, the plot is Happily Ever After; in Mystery, the plot is Justice is Served. This series began publication in July 1995 and is set in the mid-twenty-first century; time creeps very slowly forward from book to book, so as it now stands, I think the history of this alternate future needs to shift and is shifting, very gently, from book to book. Robb (Nora Roberts) early on has the “Urban Wars” or “Urbans” as a landmark event in that world’s history that seems to have resulted in mass destruction of neighborhoods, and induced societal changes such as the creation of paid professional motherhood, android servants and beat cops, and sex workers becoming Licensed Companions. Offworld resorts and prisons have both been frequently referenced but only shown once, if I recall. Early in the series, I thought of the worldbuilding as a Jetsons future. But it’s been quite a while since androids have shown up; I think it’s become clear to the author that they don’t really work with the timeline. Likewise, this current installment flashes back to the 1990s, but at no point are The Urbans mentioned as a cause of any difficulty in obtaining records, as has been an issue in past books. I am wondering when The Urbans are supposed to have happened. When did this reality split off from ours? I am overthinking this because I’m using my speculative fiction brain. Anyway. I enjoyed my trip back into this world and am glad it continues to make me think.

Prisoner of Midnight by Barbara Hambly is eighth and most current of the James and Lydia Asher series about vampire hunters and their uneasy vampire ally, Don Simon Ysidro. I was excited to find it’s set in 1917, with James on leave from serving as a spy at the front and Lydia recently returned from the front herself. I definitely need to find volume seven soon, as it’s set in the beginning of World War One. After a desperate call from Simon, who’s being held captive, Lydia and daughter Miranda end up on a luxury ship to America, trapped with a killer and hunted by German submarines. Hambly emphasizes the differences between first and third class passengers. A millionaire American capitalist, his thug/private detectives, and union labor struggles form a background. Meanwhile, back in Europe, James must negotiate with Paris vampires to help Lydia solve the mystery. Content warning for child deaths. There are assorted anti-Romany/anti-Semite/anti-Muslim/anti-Catholic/anti-Protestant period typical sentiments among the passengers, including a little anti-black racism on the side; a powder keg in a confined space. But justice is ultimately served.

Kindred of Darkness by Barbara Hambly is fifth in the same series, set in 1913. I continue to read these out of order! This volume, like number eight, also includes a wealthy American capitalist with his own bully-boys, though he’s secondary to vampire villains, one the Master of London, Dr. Lionel Grippen. Grippen is on the trail of another vampire who fled the Balkans when war broke out. Grippen forces Lydia’s help by kidnapping James and Lydia’s small daughter Miranda, along with her nursery maid. Meanwhile, Lydia has been dragooned into chaperoning her niece’s comeout, which unsurprisingly leads to uncovering some vampiric connections. This one had a cinematic feel to me, especially the dramatic ending sequence in Scotland.

My July TBR Challenge book is Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Two different library books were DNF this month. One of them was a bit darker than what I was in the mood for; the other just bored me within the first chapter because the point of view character had no hint of vulnerability.

Fanfiction:
One of my favorite fanfiction writers, whom I did not know personally but whom friends did, passed away in June. Since then, I’ve been revisiting A.J. Hall’s wide-ranging, witty, beautifully-written work. I particularly recommend The Queen of Gondal, an epic “quasi-historical AU of the BBC Sherlock series set (more or less) in three fantasy kingdoms devised by the Bronte children.” There’s also a bit of Pride and Prejudice, and Cabin Pressure, and Life on Mars mixed in there, to pleasing effect. You do not need to be familiar with any of the source material to enjoy the stories.

Angel in the Architecture by bluflamingo is an AU story set after Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Canon did not show us what Hawkeye was doing when S.H.I.E.L.D. fell; in this story, he’s being held captive in a foreign country until he’s rescued by The Winter Soldier, who’s recently escaped the destruction of the crashed helicarriers. Clint is injured and Bucky is recovering bits of his memory as they flee together and form a bond. For two deadly assassins, they’re surprisingly sweet together, and I would read a lot more about them. They should totally take a road trip.

Ordinary Love by audreyii_fic, also an AU, starts with the idea that MCU Thor and Loki are banished to Midgard together; Thor becomes best buddies with Darcy and Loki forms a relationship with Jane. The epic story started as a series of humorous drabbles but then acquired a rather good plot, using Hydra as the antagonist instead of Loki, with similar results to the first Thor movie. There are some fun original characters and appearances by Hawkeye, Coulson, Erik Selvig, and Iron Man, among others from the Thor universe. This was a lot of fun.

There will come soft rains by Silence89 crosses over Leverage with The Laundry Files books by Charles Stross. You don’t need to have read the Stross books for this story; it’s almost better if you haven’t, I suspect. Eliot Spencer was badly injured helping to fend off an interdimensional invasion of Earth which he literally cannot speak about; Hardison and Parker are determined to save his life. This story gave me serious old school hurt-comfort vibes while also having an excellent plot and a some emotional rollercoaster moments. Content warning for hospital ICU, difficult medical decisions, and fear of loss. The story has a happy ending, it just gets rough for a while.

From the Top by garamonder spins off from the end of Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, crossing over into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Peter B. Parker gets dragged off course on his way home and ends up having to defeat another version of Kingpin with the help of his younger counterpart Peter, Ned Leeds, and Tony Stark. The author did a beautiful job fleshing out Peter B. Parker’s emotional life and continuity, including the character growth he’s just experienced. It’s essence of Spiderman as he sticks to his principles. Also, it was a cracking good adventure story.

Hotel Heart by Laughsalot3412 is a Leverage AU set in a universe where psychic powers are a Thing, and because of those powers, terrible things have happened to Parker at the hands of a shady government agency and to Eliot Spencer at the hands of evil empath Damien Moreau. Alec Hardison has helped Parker to recover somewhat, but Eliot was on his own until Eliot is sent to kill them. Eliot ends up in their orbit, drawn in despite himself; angst and healing and victory over Moreau ensue. I love that because of life experience, telekinetic Parker often understands how to help baseline human Eliot better than empath Hardison.

Two Colors, White and Gold by Carelica for frostbitebakery is a surprisingly cozy snowy post-apocalyptic Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers story set in an alternative universe where an apocalypse happened while Hydra still had Bucky in cryofreeze. He awakens and heads from Siberia to the Altai. He finds an animal friend and starts to make a home for himself without knowing what’s happened to the world or what’s going on elsewhere. Luckily, Steve is looking for him. The dog wolf does not die. The story has a happy ending.

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#TBRChallenge – Vintage: Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Posted on July 20, 2022 by Victoria Janssen

On one of the few occasions when I met the late Ursula K. LeGuin, I asked if she would recommend me a book to read. She suggested Lolly Willowes: Or the Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner, published in 1926. Though I bought a copy of the book fairly soon after, it was soon buried under books I was reading for review, and has been languishing on my TBR shelf for a number of years.

I am here to tell you that this was a splendid recommendation. Despite knowing many people who love Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work, I had never read any of her novels or stories before this, but I’m glad I’ve done so now.

Lolly Willowes is the story of Laura Willowes, a single Englishwoman who upon the death of her father in 1902 leaves her beloved country home behind and goes to live with her eldest brother and his wife in London, where she becomes a very useful maiden aunt, called “Lolly,” who is very much taken for granted. When she goes to live with them, she’s twenty-eight; when she finally decides to move to the country, alone, she is forty-seven and it’s 1921. Both World War One and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic are covered briefly but intensely at the end of part one.

She continued to do up parcels until the eleventh day of November 1918 [the Armistice]. Then, when she heard the noise of cheering and the sounding of hooters, she left her work and went home. The house was empty. Everyone had gone out to rejoice. She went up to her room and sat down on her bed. She felt cold and sick, she trembled from head to foot as she once had done after witnessing a dog fight…On the mantelpiece was a photograph of [her nephew] Titus. ‘Well,’ she said to it, ‘You’ve escaped killing, anyhow.’

Immediately after World War One, the number of single young women in England was very high, because many of their husbands or potential husbands had been killed. (Think of Miss Climpson and her agency in Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels.) Many of the jobs women had held during the war were taken from them once the surviving soldiers came home; women were expected to quietly return to the domestic sphere, though many no longer had that option because they had lost the financial support of their job or husband. Laura is from a landowning class, so her immediate needs are met. The passive oppression by Laura’s family, however, confines her emotionally if not physically. They think they are doing the right thing by giving her a home and an occupation; at first, they assume she will marry, but don’t seem to do much to help her towards that goal (which she doesn’t share).

At the beginning of part two, we learn Laura suffers from what seems to be seasonal depression in the autumn. She “dreaded it” and felt “restless and tormented.” She begins to daydream of being in the country, alone, in the dark; eventually, she chooses a location and tells her family she is moving there. They do not take her seriously. She finds her brother has poorly invested her money, but stands up for herself for the first time in order to recover some of her funds in order to move. Once living in the isolated town of Great Mop, Laura needs time to find her feet, but she soon finds joy in solitude, makes a female friend, and begins to be curious about the strange goings-on in the village…which might or might not be supernatural.

I know spoilers aren’t really a thing for a book published in 1926, but I’ll stop there so far as plot details; just know towards the end this novel might become fantasy, or it might not; it’s impossible to tell (though I lean towards the fantastical element being real). What I loved about this book, aside from the wry, engaging prose which swept me along, is how much I recognized myself in Laura, or rather a person I might have been in other circumstances or at another time. (I definitely have never experienced a guaranteed income!) I’m an unmarried aunt, and I felt trapped and frustrated before I was able to live on my own and support myself and make my own way. Laura finds that freedom in her own unique fashion. There aren’t enough stories about that, I feel; not enough stories about how family can love us but not really see us, can keep us static with unacknowledged selfish intentions.

Thanks, Ursula.

Posted in sf/f, women | Tagged | 1 Comment

My June 2022 Reading Log

Posted on July 11, 2022 by Victoria Janssen

Fiction:
Aunty Lee’s Deadly Specials is second in this mystery series set in contemporary Singapore. Aunty Lee provides catering, including a dish that can be deadly if prepared improperly, and two people die after eating it. As you might imagine, the dish did not kill them. As in the previous installment, the mystery is very character based, with Aunty Lee being a classic Nosy Old Lady Who Solves Mysteries character; I like her and her sidekick Nina a lot. One of the murder victims is a gay character, and the previous book had a lesbian victim, neither of whom did anything wrong; I’m hoping this trend will not continue. At least one gay couple is thriving! Content warning: human organ trafficking.

Knot of Shadows by Lois McMaster Bujold is the most recent of the Penric and Desdemona series; it felt a bit thin in comparison to a recent longer installment, despite centering on a tangled theological issue tied into a mysterious not-death that Penric and his demon Desdemona must unravel. See what I did there? I’m in this series for Bujold’s narrative voice and for her characters, so I’m always happy to visit again. Content warning for reference to a child’s death.

Personal Paradise by Barbara Hambly is a short fiction tie-in to the Windrose fantasy series; there are a number of these that I’ve slowly been working my way through. In this one, exiled wizard Antryg Windrose of the Empire of Ferryth and computer programmer Joanna Sheraton, living together in 1980s Los Angeles, encounter aliens who’ve created a series of pocket universes for elites that are starting to fail, possibly destroying the multiverse in the process; both of them are needed to solve the problem. Just Like Real People by Barbara Hambly, more with Antryg and Joanna, begins with a missing person and ends with grief and a meditation on making reparation and whether true justice can ever be achieved.

The Magistrates of Hell by Barbara Hambly is fourth in her James and Lydia Asher, and Spanish vampire Don Simon Ysidro, series; I skipped the third but will be going back to it. I read the original novel in the late 1980s, when I was first getting into Hambly’s work, and the second several years later. It’s been about fifteen years since then! I only recalled a very few things about the previous two books: James was older than his wife Lydia and studied linguistics; Lydia wore glasses (Hambly has multiple glasses-wearing characters); Simon had white hair and unrequited something for Lydia. All of those things seemed to carry over. I had forgotten that James had been a secret agent for the British Empire, though, and that Lydia trained as a doctor! This installment, set in 1912 Beijing (Peking at the time to the English-speaking characters), features The Others, zombie-like vampiric creatures that can control rats and work as a hivemind; they were apparently introduced in volume three. Asher and an old mentor, the Rebbe Karlebach (also probably introduced in volume three), fear the Others have made their way from Prague to Peking. Then a woman is murdered, but not by the Others, and it’s not even a major part of the plot; it’s almost dropped completely. This book has a lot going on. There are bandits, and gossipy colonialist diplomats, and a diplomat who is abusive to women and has murdered a couple (he’s not a vampire), and on top of all that there’s organized crime, and Japanese diplomats who are handy with swords, and the late appearance of a mysterious Chinese priest with psychic abilities, and of course Simon Ysidro fading in and out of places and dreams. Also rats. Content warning for many rats. Blankets of rats. Face-chewing rats. Did I mention the rats? This was one of the more grim and piteous Hambly books I’ve read; it reminded me a bit of Hambly’s Darwath books, but on a smaller scale. I feel bad for the rats, who didn’t ask for the plot they got.

A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske is a fantasy male/male romance set in a 1908 England which has a secret community of magicians who hide their existence via a drug called lethe mint and occasional dangerous memory spells. Unmagical Robin Blyth is “unbusheled” when his new government job turns out to be liaising with the magical community. He’s swiftly embroiled in a dangerous and deadly magical plot; he relies on magical Edwin Courcey, his magical liaison counterpart, to get him out of it while discovering he might not be as unmagical as he thought. Robin is an athletic extrovert; Edwin is an intellectual loner with very little magic, who’s spent his life bullied by his older brother. I loved that the looming threat of World War One is part of the villains’ motivation. The characterization is great and multiple systems of magic are shown, that I suspect will be explored more fully in future installments. I’m looking forward to more from this author. This book is first in a planned trilogy.

Blood Maidens by Barbara Hambly is third in the James Asher series, and it does indeed reference his mentor Karlebach and the vampiric “Others” of Prague, but more briefly than I’d guessed given their appearance in book four. Also, there are significantly fewer rats. In 1911, Asher travels to St. Petersburg with the vampire Ysidro to investigate the disappearance of a vampire friend of his, which might be linked to vampires allying with Prussia. Eventually, Lydia Asher follows there to investigate a German scientist’s mysterious experiments involving blood. There are many train journeys between Russia and Germany, the danger from vampires sometimes less worrisome than danger from humans, because Asher used to be a spy for the English government, and could be recognized and jailed or killed at any moment. This was a tense thriller, and I loved the many plot twists. I did want more interaction between James and Lydia; they are mostly working separately throughout. Content warning for brief description of Lydia’s past miscarriage.

The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison is the newest from this author, a sequel to The Witness for the Dead. It’s a secondary world fantasy with a mystery plot; really there are several mysteries. If you liked the first one, I am pretty sure you will like the second one; first-person narrator Thara Celehar continues to be a quiet badass who does not realize he is a badass, and who also has trouble recognizing that other people like and value him as a persongiv. This gives an extra layer of emotional intensity to his various griefs and struggles. The opera composer from volume one is back and his agonizingly slow burn potential romance with Thara takes another step or two. A fascinating new female character is introduced and I have hopes she will be a bigger part of volume three (I’m told there will be three total).

I reread The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison after The Grief of Stones; it features the initial appearance of Thara Celehar, and I caught a few things I’d missed before.

The Bride Test by Helen Hoang is second in a trilogy, but I read it last thanks to the vagaries of my library holds. Heroine My/Esme is a mixed-race single mother in Vietnam who lives with her mother and grandmother. She works as hotel housekeeping because she had to drop out of school. Khai is American-born, on the autism spectrum, and convinced he has no feelings thanks to a traumatic event in his youth. Khai’s Vietnamese immigrant mother offers Esme the chance to spend a summer in California, to see if Esme and Khai might be able to form a relationship and a marriage. Esme realizes this gives her a chance to search for her father, who left Vietnam before her mother knew she was pregnant; he was an American who went to school in California. Though not a Marriage of Convenience plot exactly, the Arranged Marriage plot feels similar, and since I love Marriage of Convenience for the character conflicts it can generate, this story was catnip to me. Esme (the American name My chooses for the summer) and Khai are both smitten by each other on sight, at least as far as physical appearance. Outgoing Esme repeatedly reaches out, and introvert Khai, while bemused and sometimes confused by her efforts, responds swiftly. The largest conflict arises when commitment to marriage grows closer. Khai firmly believes he doesn’t love Esme, though it’s obvious to his family and to the reader that he does. Khai thinks he is “addicted” to her. Esme takes him at his word, since he’s a very truthful person. Though he offers a marriage of convenience, she is too in love with him to tolerate that shadow of a relationship. Meanwhile, Esme works harder toward ways to stay in the United States where she has more opportunities, and Khai helps her to look for her father. As with the other two Hoang books I’ve read, this is a romance between good people who are sweet together but have to overcome realistic obstacles to achieve their happily ever after. Recommended!

Nonfiction:
My TBR Challenge book for June is After the War: The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson.

Fanfiction:
Freedom’s Chance by ladysorka is a space opera AU of Stargate: Atlantis in which Rodney McKay has grown up on an obscure, isolated moon where the chief industry is gas diving, extracting valuable gases In Spaaace. John Sheppard, on the run, is forced to stop at the outpost to get his ship fixed. This had the feel of a wide-ranging space opera even though confined to a small outpost, helped along by a lot of cool details about the larger world mentioned in passing. The outpost’s economic and political conflicts with the hegemonic Fleet and Core were very well-thought-out and realistic.

Posted in contemporary, fanfiction, mystery, reading | Tagged | Comments Off on My June 2022 Reading Log