Uncanny Times / Laura Anne Gilman

 

3.5 stars (maybe even a little more) out of 5

This is my second time trying a Laura Anne Gilman novel. She has ideas that attract me, combinations of fantasy, supernatural, and mystery that I think ought to be excellent, but somehow I don't attach properly. This one has the Uncanny—all the supernatural creatures like werewolves and vampires—but they hide in the shadows. If they threaten humans, Huntsmen get sent to investigate and eliminate.

Aaron and Rosemary are siblings of a Huntsman family. They have been trained since they were children to wield weapons, to master the arcane knowledge, and to conceal their mission from regular humans. I loved their huge hound, Botheration, who is protection, early warning system, tracker, and defender, all wrapped in one furry body.

The Harkers get called to the scene of a cousin's death to determine its cause. They get mixed messages from both the clues and from the townsfolk. It's 1913 and industrialization is going strong. There's a new mill in town and no one wants to lose this economic driver. However, workers are thinking about unionization and women are active in the suffrage movement. It's enough to make a businessman cranky and there are a couple of grouchy movers and shakers staying at the same boarding house as Aaron and Rosemary.

The surname Harker may be suggest some relationship to the Harkers in Dracula? If so, it's very subtle. The siblings acknowledge that the Huntsman genome probably owes something to Fey ancestors, giving them a sensitivity to the Uncanny. Among their landlady's employees are two young women with a touch of the Sight and who end up helping them out in small but significant ways.

I like all of the ingredients, but the finished product failed to delight. It's good, but I am left reluctantly with the feeling that something crucial and unidentified is missing from the recipe.

A Tidy Ending / Joanna Cannon

 

3.5 out of 5 stars 

I have to hand it to Ms. Cannon, she kept me off kilter for all but the last few pages, when everything clicked into place. I kept reading, wondering what is wrong with Linda? She obviously doesn't understand people—is she autistic? What about her germ phobia? I spent a fair amount of time also considering what happened when she was a child in Wales. That at least became clearer as the novel progressed.

Was her mother actually as awful as Linda leads us to believe? Maybe she's trying to support a child with emotional problems and is being misinterpreted by that child. How in heck did Linda end up married to Terry? I had so many, many questions. Linda seems far too trusting and I cringed as I see dishonest people trying to take advantage of her. But Linda has a secret power: she has carefully observed other people all her life and she sees the details. She sees past the surface despite having difficulty determining the motives of salespeople.

I wasn't sure what I thought of the novel right until page 382. Those last two chapters blew me away! I can't give any details, much as I would like to, or I would be spoiling things for other readers. Give Linda a chance. She will frustrate and amaze you.

Filthy Rich Fae / Geneva Lee

 

4 out of 5 stars 

Well, if I didn't already know that I'm a visual learner rather than audio, I surely would now. Once again, my library only had this title available in audiobook format. I think the only reason that I remember enough to write a review at all is because this is complete fluff and there's not a helluva lot to have to recall. This romance is also proof (once again) that paranormal trappings make romance novels enjoyable to me.

I had a good time listening to this despite a lot of repetition and the heroine, Cate, being very nearly TSTL. What a centuries old fae would see in her is beyond me, but I still enjoyed the banter and the story arc. But I swear, if she had “lifted her chin" one more time….. Plus, her foster brother, Channing, is even dumber than she is.

Channing starts the whole plot off by being a stereotypical foster care graduate and getting involved in organized crime. Cate is a nurse and is on duty when Channing arrives in hospital while she's on duty. Despite the fact that the crime boss, Lochlan Gage, pretty much owns Gage Memorial Hospital, Cate decides it would be an excellent idea to go to a sketchy area of town to confront him and settle her brother's debt. See what I mean about TSTL? For reasons of his own, Gage releases Channing and takes Cate's soul instead. The relationship starts adversarial, which is my favourite trope, so I was willing to put up with the stupidity.

Warning to cliffhanger haters: there's a dilly! If my library won't order the next book, I'm going to be forced to spend my own cash (and they've rejected my request to purchase the second book of the Filthy Rich Vampire series, so……). Being weird in my own way, when I realized how much I want to read the next book, that added a fourth star to my rating. Perhaps I'm just as contrary as Cate.

Bad Men / Julie Mae Cohen

 

4 out of 5 stars 

What happens when a female vigilante serial killer gets a serious crush on a true crime podcaster? Homicidal mayhem, that's what! Saffy Huntley-Oliver has been killing bad men since she was a tween and accidentally killed the stepfather who was sexually abusing her and planning to move on to her younger sister. She and her sister inherit wealth from their parents and stepfather, leaving Saffy free to pursue whatever interests her. After a murder or two, she realizes that murder is her primary interest in life and that there is definitely no shortage of men who deserve her attentions.

Saffy uses her stalker skills to “run in to" her crush, Jonathan Desrosiers, and neatly inserts herself into his life. Heck, she even gets him a dog. She's a little concerned about his attachment to his ex-wife, but that can be dealt with later. Her commentary is surprisingly humorous, as she plots and plans.

Cohen cleverly contrasts Saffy, the sophisticated, well groomed woman, with two male killers. Jonathan is surrounded by the kind of people that he podcasts about without being immediately aware of it. This seems to me to be a sly commentary on the whole true crime industry so prevalent in our society and on the fascination with serial killers.

If you enjoy (or anticipate enjoying) this book, I would also recommend How to Kill Men and Get Away with It or Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide. If you don't want fictional true crime, consider True Crime Addict: How I Lost Myself in the Mysterious Disappearance of Maura Murray and I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer. If you want to read about obsessive investigators, consider Unmasked: My Life Solving America's Cold Cases and Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders. In the former, you'll meet a law enforcement officer who has ruined multiple relationships by ignoring the people he loves. In the latter, the author's marriage was still hanging together when the book was published, but I predict it won't last based on his proclivities.

Now You See Me / S.J. Bolton

 

3.5 out of 5 stars 

My enjoyment of this book suffered for a couple of factors. It was only available in audio from my library. I'm still relatively new to audio and sometimes found details of this convoluted mystery were getting muddled in my mind. The recording was made from a CD version, announced whenever the end of a disc was reached and annoyingly, the progress scale didn't match up with actual chapters. Secondly, there were some long breaks between my listening sessions, giving me time to lose the thread of what's going on. And there's a lot going on.

We meet DC Lacey Flint as she accidentally becomes part of her first murder investigation when the not quite dead victim slumps onto her car. Flint has been trying to stay on the down low at work, for reasons we don't learn until much later, and is dismayed to be plunked in the middle of things and coming to the attention of senior officers DI Dana Tulloch and Mark Joesbury. More murders happen and Flint continues to be the epicentre of events.

As a youngster, Flint was fascinated by the Jack the Ripper murders and is the first to see the linkages between those crimes and the current ones. (I was annoyed about some of the Ripper “facts" until I checked publication dates and realized this was published before Hallie Rubenfeld's The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper.) Flint becomes integral to the investigation and finds herself increasingly under the eye of Joesbury. She tries to deflect his attention by admitting to a past of homelessness and drug use, but insists that is all in the past. She is aware that Joesbury remains suspicious of her story and why the murderer seems focused on her, but believes that her only solution is running away (completely in character for someone with a precarious background).

Bolton deals out the bread crumbs gradually, letting the reader assimilate a new fact and adjust their view of the situation. Then she hits with another item, expanding our view again. She is a very effective tease. The ending was still a complete surprise to me, despite all those hints, but I love being surprised. Since Lacey has been seriously considering fleeing for the whole book, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that her future on the police force is questionable by book's end. As is her relationship with Joesbury.

Thankfully, the library has volume two in paper, as I am sure this one would have been a solid 4 stars if I had a dead-tree version instead of the audio.

The Martian / Andy Weir

 

4.5 out of 5 stars 

2024 Re-read

I recently finished A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, a book about the plausibility of sending people to the Red Planet. It reminded me of how much I had enjoyed this novel and inspired me to revisit it. Assisting this decision was the acquisition of my own copy of it in a charity book sale in May. I was amazed to realize that it has been 10 years since I first read it. I was also happy to see that Weir was well aware of the treaties governing space exploration. Mark Watney takes great glee in declaring himself a space pirate, taking possession of the Ares 4 MVA.

Incidentally, I did see the movie just before it left the theatres. I thought it was great, though in different ways than the book. I loved the panoramas on Mars, the awesome and beautiful setting.

I enjoyed this novel just as much as the first time. My rating and remarks remain the same.

Original Review

Actual rating: 4.5 stars.

“If the women don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.”—Red Green (for whom duct tape is the handy man’s secret weapon). Apologies to those unfamiliar with the Red Green TV show.

Mark Watney is indeed a handy kind of guy, right out of the Red Green mold. Mind you, astronauts have to be problem solvers and able to tackle everything from malfunctioning water dispensers during space walks to fixing the space station toilet (see Chris Hadfield's memoir An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth). Mark demonstrates this ability to take on whatever the planet Mars throws at him. (In this case, he is nothing like Red Green & the Possum Lodge members, whose motto is “Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati, If all else fails, play dead.”)

Reading this book was like eating peanuts—once I got started, it was really hard to stop. I found the device of log entries to be delightful, as I always have loved books that use the form of exchanged letters or journal entries. I also found Watney to be a charming narrator, if a bit of a smart aleck. Some reviewers have found his upbeat way of looking at his situation to be tiresome, but the log entries are always made after the worst of the crisis is over and Watney has survived to write another missive. He fully realizes his situation (“I’m fucked”), but chooses realistic optimism over simply giving up.

So, I enjoyed the form, the attention to scientific detail, and the humour. The pacing was relentless—just when the situation would settle down to a dull roar, the author would throw yet another problem at Watney. I was reminded of a GR friend of mine, talking about a writer in the noir detective genre, who would fix inaction in his plots by having a man with a gun walk through the door. Yet another equipment failure in The Martian replaces the man with a gun. As a reader, I was always anxious to know how he solved this problem. Although the journal entries were great, I was also glad to have the NASA view point interspersed with them, giving me another voice and viewpoint besides Watney’s.

The GR summary of the book describes it as “Apollo 13 meets Cast Away.” No accident to describe it in movie terms, rather than bookish terms, I think. And I understand that 20th Century Fox has purchased the film rights—I think it has potential to be a good movie and I will definitely go see it. I have mused before about whether modern books have the potential to become “classics” and I think this may be one novel that does have a chance at that status. Despite the moaning of the publishing industry, there seems to be a tidal wave of new titles produced each year and only time will divide the wheat from the chaff, but in my opinion The Martian stands a good chance of being in the wheat category. Or perhaps in this case it’s a potato!

 

A City on Mars / Kelly & Zach Weinersmith

 

4 out of 5 stars 

Why is there a subset of people who are obsessed with moving to Mars and how likely is this dream to come true? I suspect that they have a variety of reasons including adventure, loving technology, wanting a new start on a new frontier, and a long standing love of science fiction. If you have a thorough grounding in genre fiction, you can envision space stations, planetary colonies, asteroid mining facilities, and spaceships making regular flights just like airlines. The problem with these visions is the beginning: how do you get these things started?

How long have we (humanity, that is) had space stations? It's been decades and these facilities are nowhere near being self sufficient. They are close enough to Earth for regular resupply, as they must be. Going outside is a major endeavour, fraught with danger from debris and radiation, not to mention the cold vacuum out there. Heck, they still are constantly having to fix the station toilet (see An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth or Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. It turns out gravity really is your friend if you want well functioning plumbing).

The authors of this book state that they are concerned that space settlement seems to be becoming a purview of tech billionaires, who have unusual ideas about human behaviour that may skew the process. Indeed, if you pay any attention to these matters, you know that Musk has his eye on Mars while Bezos is a proponent of giant space stations. There seems to be a lot of hand waving about how the actual details will be worked out. Making a rocket to take people off Earth is easier than creating a balanced environment to welcome these travellers. Space agencies and rich guys all have a very entitled white guy mentality—they seem to take for granted that the environment will simply accommodate them, just as Earth does or that the new place will easily be adapted to human necessities. Since biosphere experiments here on Earth have been somewhat harrowing, this doesn't bode well for our space pioneers. Devaluing the natural world and its processes doesn't negate its importance. They also just seem to assume that pregnancy and fetal development will just happen naturally in low to no gravity situations, taking women for granted too. Shouldn't this be researched a bit?

I was very engaged in the first 200ish pages, as the technical details of survival are examined. Then the legal chapters followed, inspiring a great deal of yawning and very heavy eyelids on my part. Yes, it's important. Yes, it has implications for space development. However it's like reading your cell phone contract--only interesting to certain folks and a horrible slog for the rest of us. Of more interest to me was the discussion of company towns and the economic relationships between administrators and workers in the very isolated environs of space. Planners of space settlements seem to forget that humans aren't very good at utopia. We bring human nature with us wherever we go, even to Mars and beyond. (Read Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries and see if her corporate entities sound familiar. See also C.J. Cherryh's Company Wars series.) After all vanity, ambition, and stubbornness are known in every human society. You can rest assured that they will accompany us to space.

If this book interests you, I would recommend also reading Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires to get a good feel for how billionaires view the world. If you want to read fiction about tech billionaires trying to escape the rest of humanity, try The Future. Science fiction about the planet Mars is everywhere. Most notable is the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, which envisions humans moving to the Red Planet, doing some serious terraforming, and developing their own society and politics. I found that series technology and politics heavy, but I finished it eventually. More fun (and realistic) to my way of thinking is Andy Weir's The Martian (which I now have a burning desire to reread).