Reading (almost) Wednesday
Mar. 7th, 2019 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhNew Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color edited by Nisi Shawl. An anthology of short stories, which, like any anthology, has its highs and lows. Some of my favorite stories:
Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex by Tobias S. Buckell. In a New York City that has become a backwater tourist-trap for aliens, a taxi driver accidentally ends up with a dead alien in his cab and has to deal with the intergalactic consequences. There's a sharp sense of humor here (like aliens asking to go somewhere that has "real human food", not that commercialized stuff) that really worked for me.
The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations by Minsoo Kang was a wonderfully lovely take on the role of minor players in grand historical events, how history gets told, and what happens in the gaps historians can never recover.
Come Home to Atropos by Steven Barnes was my absolute favorite story out of the whole book. It's very short, only two or three pages, and consists of the script for a commercial advertising a very unique Caribbean vacation. This is some dark, dark satire, but it had me laughing out loud.
The Fine Print by Chinelo Onwualu combines djinn ("be careful what you wish for...") and the current capitalist, commercial world in extremely clever ways, though I felt like the ending got off a little too easy.
The Freedom of the Shifting Sea by Jaymee Goh was about a gory, inhuman mermaid, and of course I loved it; I am always here for mermaids as predators of the sea.
Three Variations on a Theme of Imperial Attire by E. Lily Yu consists of three separate retellings of "The Emperor's New Clothes". I think Yu could easily have made her point with just the first retelling, but goddamn, some of the lines in that last sequence have really stuck with me. Such powerful language and imagery.
The Robots of Eden by Anil Menon is a chilling look at a future where emotions are repressed for the sake of stability. The glimpses of anger, sadness, and jealousy trying to break through the protagonist's veneer are just so devastating.
There wasn't any story that I actively disliked, though I suppose Deer Dancer by Kathleen Alcalá came the closest. I didn't hate it, it just didn't work for me; I didn't quite understand anything that was happening, or what it meant, or why. Which I suppose is why it's sometimes hard to commit to reading authors out of your wheelhouse, but in the case of New Suns overall, I'm very glad I did.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon. A horror novel set in small town Vermont. The story follows three intertwined narrators: in 1908, Sara lives in a farmhouse outside of town with her husband and daughter. From the very beginning we know that the husband is eventually accused of murdering them both, and now their ghosts are said to haunt the farmhouse. In the modern day, teenager Ruthie lives in the same farmhouse with her mother and younger sister. Her mother has always been fanatical about staying "off the grid" and when Ruthie wakes up one morning to find her mother has disappeared, she has no idea where to even begin looking for her. The third narrator, also in the modern day, is Katherine, whose husband has just died while on a visit to the same small town as Sarah and Ruthie. Katherine, unaware that he had any connection to the town or why he was there on the day he died, decides to move there herself and begin dealing with her grief while researching the history of the place. All three of these threads ultimately join together.
It's a book about ghosts and the otherwise undead, about grief and how much you would risk to bring back a loved one – there's more than a few similarities to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, which for me is a plus rather than a minus – and McMahon is very, very skilled at bring the heebie-jeebies. She keeps up the tension, brings the scary, has several unlooked-for twists, and overall has written a book that's very hard to put down.
On the other hand (and again much like Pet Sematary), the supernatural in the story originates with a Native American woman who is eventually revealed to be vicious, revengeful, and generally evil. As soon as this character showed up I was watching The Winter People warily, really hoping McMahon wouldn't go for the same tired old racist "Indian Burial Ground" trope, but unfortunately she totally did. Which really puts me off recommending this book, as much as I enjoyed the experience of reading the 95% of it that didn't feature menacing old Native American women. I think I'll try another book by McMahon and hope that it manages to avoid racist cliches, but this one loses its promise under the sore spots.
Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex by Tobias S. Buckell. In a New York City that has become a backwater tourist-trap for aliens, a taxi driver accidentally ends up with a dead alien in his cab and has to deal with the intergalactic consequences. There's a sharp sense of humor here (like aliens asking to go somewhere that has "real human food", not that commercialized stuff) that really worked for me.
The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations by Minsoo Kang was a wonderfully lovely take on the role of minor players in grand historical events, how history gets told, and what happens in the gaps historians can never recover.
Come Home to Atropos by Steven Barnes was my absolute favorite story out of the whole book. It's very short, only two or three pages, and consists of the script for a commercial advertising a very unique Caribbean vacation. This is some dark, dark satire, but it had me laughing out loud.
The Fine Print by Chinelo Onwualu combines djinn ("be careful what you wish for...") and the current capitalist, commercial world in extremely clever ways, though I felt like the ending got off a little too easy.
The Freedom of the Shifting Sea by Jaymee Goh was about a gory, inhuman mermaid, and of course I loved it; I am always here for mermaids as predators of the sea.
Three Variations on a Theme of Imperial Attire by E. Lily Yu consists of three separate retellings of "The Emperor's New Clothes". I think Yu could easily have made her point with just the first retelling, but goddamn, some of the lines in that last sequence have really stuck with me. Such powerful language and imagery.
The Robots of Eden by Anil Menon is a chilling look at a future where emotions are repressed for the sake of stability. The glimpses of anger, sadness, and jealousy trying to break through the protagonist's veneer are just so devastating.
There wasn't any story that I actively disliked, though I suppose Deer Dancer by Kathleen Alcalá came the closest. I didn't hate it, it just didn't work for me; I didn't quite understand anything that was happening, or what it meant, or why. Which I suppose is why it's sometimes hard to commit to reading authors out of your wheelhouse, but in the case of New Suns overall, I'm very glad I did.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon. A horror novel set in small town Vermont. The story follows three intertwined narrators: in 1908, Sara lives in a farmhouse outside of town with her husband and daughter. From the very beginning we know that the husband is eventually accused of murdering them both, and now their ghosts are said to haunt the farmhouse. In the modern day, teenager Ruthie lives in the same farmhouse with her mother and younger sister. Her mother has always been fanatical about staying "off the grid" and when Ruthie wakes up one morning to find her mother has disappeared, she has no idea where to even begin looking for her. The third narrator, also in the modern day, is Katherine, whose husband has just died while on a visit to the same small town as Sarah and Ruthie. Katherine, unaware that he had any connection to the town or why he was there on the day he died, decides to move there herself and begin dealing with her grief while researching the history of the place. All three of these threads ultimately join together.
It's a book about ghosts and the otherwise undead, about grief and how much you would risk to bring back a loved one – there's more than a few similarities to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, which for me is a plus rather than a minus – and McMahon is very, very skilled at bring the heebie-jeebies. She keeps up the tension, brings the scary, has several unlooked-for twists, and overall has written a book that's very hard to put down.
On the other hand (and again much like Pet Sematary), the supernatural in the story originates with a Native American woman who is eventually revealed to be vicious, revengeful, and generally evil. As soon as this character showed up I was watching The Winter People warily, really hoping McMahon wouldn't go for the same tired old racist "Indian Burial Ground" trope, but unfortunately she totally did. Which really puts me off recommending this book, as much as I enjoyed the experience of reading the 95% of it that didn't feature menacing old Native American women. I think I'll try another book by McMahon and hope that it manages to avoid racist cliches, but this one loses its promise under the sore spots.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-07 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 04:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-07 06:49 pm (UTC)*perks up*
On the other hand (and again much like Pet Sematary), the supernatural in the story originates with a Native American woman who is eventually revealed to be vicious, revengeful, and generally evil.
Oh, come on! What is the in-story excuse for this?
no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 03:45 am (UTC)*perks up*
I think you would very much like it! Unsurprisingly but sadly, it doesn't seem to be available anywhere online, at least not yet.
Oh, come on! What is the in-story excuse for this?
Sara (the one from 1908) was raised by the Native American woman, after Sara's own mother died in childbirth. During this time, the woman teaches her how to raise the dead as part of generally teaching Sara everything she knows (how she herself knows how to raise the dead is not explained beyond a 'Indians have a special connection with the land' vibe). Later, when Sara is a teenage, the woman is driven out of town by racists, culminating in her house being set on fire with her inside. She thinks Sara is part of it (Sara actually just stood around in shock and neither participated nor stopped it) and feels so betrayed by her pseudo-daughter that she vows to destroy her and her family.
Which... I see why one would want revenge! It's just unfortunate that this is the only Native American character in the book.