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brigdhFoundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett. A fantasy novel set in an Early Modern-ish world, where most (perhaps all?) of the characters are people of color. Oh yeah, and there's a f/f romance. Basically, this book is FANTASTIC.
To me, Foundryside's worldbuilding stood out as the most remarkable thing about it. It's wonderful and complex and extremely different from any other fantasy novel I can think of. Being Early Modern rather than Medieval or present-day is enough to stand out all by itself; this is a world with factories and colonies and sugar plantations and merchant houses and patents on inventions. I mean, when was the last time you need a fantasy novel that had insights to chattel slavery? (I don't feel Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad counts, since it's not a secondary world story.) Plus, as I said: it's a world where brown people are the default. I picked up a slight Southeast Asian feel to the descriptions of food and climate, but overall it's too different from any specific real-world culture to draw a direct line. In addition, Foundryside is a world with magic and I absolutely loved the rules that Bennett set up. Basically, magic works like computer coding. You write a line of logic, but for it to function you must be absolutely clear and not include any lapses that might be self-correcting to a human reader but would cause a strictly literal reader to misinterpret the whole thing. For example, let's make someone fly by reducing their gravity! Except whoops, they actually exploded instead, since there's no longer anything holding their parts together.
Our main character is Sancia, an extremely skilled thief who for some reason (even she doesn't know why) can hear magic and talk to inanimate objects. This talent obviously is very helpful for a thief, but it also makes everyday actions like wearing clothes and lying on a bed difficult, since she doesn't know how to turn it off. Sancia is hired for what seems like a simple job – steal a small box – except that it turns out whatever is in the box is immensely, world-changingly, valuable, and now everyone in the city wants to kill her to get it for themselves. She slowly gains some allies, including Gregor (quite possibly the only person in this world who believes in the concept of impartial justice and who wants to start a police force), Orso (a loud, self-involved, arrogant head magician), Berenice (quiet and competent; Orso's assistant), and Clef (a magical object who has lost his – its? – memory but who is quite literally the key to solving all sorts of mysteries). Together they have a wonderful found-family vibe, despite many overt differences.
Foundryside combines fun action and bloody battle scenes and multiple incredibly well-done heists with big questions like the concept of freedom in a capitalistic society, the veneration of war heroes in the aftermath of atrocities committed on the battlefield, if a few individuals are capable of changing the whole system, and the price of power. It's emphatic and enthralling and exciting and just so, SO good. Foundryside ends in a satisfying place, but I absolutely cannot wait to read the sequel.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins. Part murder mystery, part gothic horror, part f/f historical fiction. In 1820s London, Frannie Langton, a black servant, is found blood-covered and asleep next to the violently stabbed bodies of her employers. Despite being the obvious murder suspect, she swears she would never have done such a thing, having been in love with her mistress. Unfortunately she doesn't remember what did happen. Memory loss not being a great legal defense, her lawyer provides her with paper and pleads with her to write down anything she does remember. Frannie starts at the beginning: her childhood as a field hand on a sugar plantation in Jamaica. The Confessions of Frannie Langton is this first-person, autobiographical account.
Frannie is not your usual former field hand. Ferociously well-read and highly knowledgeable, she's the sort of writer who can casually throw around references to Latin classics or the latest scientific discoveries. Her education came about partly due to her role as a pawn in the bitter games played between her owner and his wife, partly due to an experiment in the possibilities of black intelligence, and partly due to Frannie's own love of reading novels. It also turns out that such memory blackouts are not a new experience for Frannie, having first started as a result of her traumatic early life and encouraged recently by the laudanum addiction her new mistress pressed upon her. As Frannie reveals more and more of her life, from the horrors of slavery to sexual abuse to petty arguments with her fellow servants in London to her complicated family history to her tangled sexual relationship with her London mistress, the mystery of that specific night grows more complicated: If Frannie commited the murders, why? If she didn't, who did?
The writing is absolutely beautiful and the horror is very real. It specifically involves medical experimentation and vivisection on enslaved people; personally, I was incredibly grateful that The Confessions choose not to get graphic, but perhaps violence doesn't need to be explicit when its emotional weight is the black hole at the center of the narrative, the obscene gravity warping everything around it. The historical research is outstanding; I actually spent about half the book convinced that Frannie's London employer, George Benham, was a real historical figure. (He's not, but he so closely resembles abolitionist leaders who were also dickheads such as Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson that I think the mistake is understandable.)
The Confessions of Frannie Langton is a dark, angry book that offers absolutely no escape to its characters or its readers, but I loved it. It's gothic horror in its original, most awful, sense. The haunted house has long been the power structure of the patriarchy and classism, but now it's white supremacy and homophobia too.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
To me, Foundryside's worldbuilding stood out as the most remarkable thing about it. It's wonderful and complex and extremely different from any other fantasy novel I can think of. Being Early Modern rather than Medieval or present-day is enough to stand out all by itself; this is a world with factories and colonies and sugar plantations and merchant houses and patents on inventions. I mean, when was the last time you need a fantasy novel that had insights to chattel slavery? (I don't feel Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad counts, since it's not a secondary world story.) Plus, as I said: it's a world where brown people are the default. I picked up a slight Southeast Asian feel to the descriptions of food and climate, but overall it's too different from any specific real-world culture to draw a direct line. In addition, Foundryside is a world with magic and I absolutely loved the rules that Bennett set up. Basically, magic works like computer coding. You write a line of logic, but for it to function you must be absolutely clear and not include any lapses that might be self-correcting to a human reader but would cause a strictly literal reader to misinterpret the whole thing. For example, let's make someone fly by reducing their gravity! Except whoops, they actually exploded instead, since there's no longer anything holding their parts together.
Our main character is Sancia, an extremely skilled thief who for some reason (even she doesn't know why) can hear magic and talk to inanimate objects. This talent obviously is very helpful for a thief, but it also makes everyday actions like wearing clothes and lying on a bed difficult, since she doesn't know how to turn it off. Sancia is hired for what seems like a simple job – steal a small box – except that it turns out whatever is in the box is immensely, world-changingly, valuable, and now everyone in the city wants to kill her to get it for themselves. She slowly gains some allies, including Gregor (quite possibly the only person in this world who believes in the concept of impartial justice and who wants to start a police force), Orso (a loud, self-involved, arrogant head magician), Berenice (quiet and competent; Orso's assistant), and Clef (a magical object who has lost his – its? – memory but who is quite literally the key to solving all sorts of mysteries). Together they have a wonderful found-family vibe, despite many overt differences.
Foundryside combines fun action and bloody battle scenes and multiple incredibly well-done heists with big questions like the concept of freedom in a capitalistic society, the veneration of war heroes in the aftermath of atrocities committed on the battlefield, if a few individuals are capable of changing the whole system, and the price of power. It's emphatic and enthralling and exciting and just so, SO good. Foundryside ends in a satisfying place, but I absolutely cannot wait to read the sequel.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins. Part murder mystery, part gothic horror, part f/f historical fiction. In 1820s London, Frannie Langton, a black servant, is found blood-covered and asleep next to the violently stabbed bodies of her employers. Despite being the obvious murder suspect, she swears she would never have done such a thing, having been in love with her mistress. Unfortunately she doesn't remember what did happen. Memory loss not being a great legal defense, her lawyer provides her with paper and pleads with her to write down anything she does remember. Frannie starts at the beginning: her childhood as a field hand on a sugar plantation in Jamaica. The Confessions of Frannie Langton is this first-person, autobiographical account.
Frannie is not your usual former field hand. Ferociously well-read and highly knowledgeable, she's the sort of writer who can casually throw around references to Latin classics or the latest scientific discoveries. Her education came about partly due to her role as a pawn in the bitter games played between her owner and his wife, partly due to an experiment in the possibilities of black intelligence, and partly due to Frannie's own love of reading novels. It also turns out that such memory blackouts are not a new experience for Frannie, having first started as a result of her traumatic early life and encouraged recently by the laudanum addiction her new mistress pressed upon her. As Frannie reveals more and more of her life, from the horrors of slavery to sexual abuse to petty arguments with her fellow servants in London to her complicated family history to her tangled sexual relationship with her London mistress, the mystery of that specific night grows more complicated: If Frannie commited the murders, why? If she didn't, who did?
The writing is absolutely beautiful and the horror is very real. It specifically involves medical experimentation and vivisection on enslaved people; personally, I was incredibly grateful that The Confessions choose not to get graphic, but perhaps violence doesn't need to be explicit when its emotional weight is the black hole at the center of the narrative, the obscene gravity warping everything around it. The historical research is outstanding; I actually spent about half the book convinced that Frannie's London employer, George Benham, was a real historical figure. (He's not, but he so closely resembles abolitionist leaders who were also dickheads such as Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson that I think the mistake is understandable.)
The Confessions of Frannie Langton is a dark, angry book that offers absolutely no escape to its characters or its readers, but I loved it. It's gothic horror in its original, most awful, sense. The haunted house has long been the power structure of the patriarchy and classism, but now it's white supremacy and homophobia too.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-23 12:25 am (UTC)That is a great parenthesis.
(Also, hello! Glad to see you back.)
no subject
Date: 2019-06-23 05:13 am (UTC)Thank you, I shall look this up. ^_^
no subject
Date: 2019-06-23 10:41 am (UTC)