Fiction reviews
Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky: Another adventure of Tiffany Aching and the Wee Free Men, with Granny Weatherwax along for various parts. Because it's pitched to younger readers, the book has fewer footnotes and sly references to non-Discworld events than Pratchett's usual, but it's still fun and not shy about moral complexity, as Tiffany is briefly possessed by an ancient spirit that brings out the worst in her.
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Hallowed Hunt: This book is set in the same world as Bujold's Chalion books, but in another country (and besides, the wench is dead - oops, wrong story). A loyal retainer with a troubled past is sent to investigate the death of a prince and take the killer into custody. Problems arise when it becomes clear that the prince died trying to rape and perform dark magic on his killer, and our protagonist has to navigate political and magical complexity to do the right thing. The story was engaging, though the people seemed to have fewer human weaknesses than Bujold usually allows them.
Marc Scott Zicree & Barbara Hambly, Magic Time: Suddenly, technology (including guns, batteries and planes) stops working and magic begins. The narrative follows a Secret Service agent, a young New York lawyer struggling to take care of his younger sister, and the inhabitants of a West Virginia mining town as they deal with the collapse of civilization and its transformation into something new and strange. This includes physical transformations for some of them, as people morph into gargoyles and trolls and other things. I enjoyed the story, despite the needless lawyer-bashing (there are plenty of terrible things lawyers do without needing to go beyond both ethics and plausibility), and the characters differed enough in their reactions to the shock to justify the multiple POVs. If apocalypse is your thing, you might like this too; there are two more books in the series by Zicree & someone else.
Philip E. Baruth, The Dream of the White Village: I bought this because I enjoyed Baruth's recent book The X-President, a sort of time travel fantasy about Bill Clinton and his biographer. This earlier work, comprising a series of shorts about various intertwined lives in 1970s and 1990s Vermont, was less interesting to me. Without genre trappings, it seemed more self-consciously literary, which is fine as far as it goes but gave me little to care about - will the disillusioned woman whose poet mother exposed every aspect of her life find love? Will the racist/thug with political aspirations succeed in manipulating rootless young men into a new army? Actually, that could be kind of interesting, but because of the short-story form and the shifting limited POVs, that story doesn't get enough time to make me happy. Baruth's writing and characterizations are fine, but I'll only try him again if he returns to sf-ish stuff.
C.J. Cherryh, The Pride of Chanur: This short novel introduces Pyanfar Chanur, hani captain of a merchant vessel, who picks up a member of a strange new species - human - on the run from torture by members of a third species, the kif. I liked that the hani were internally divided into competing clans willing to make deals with other species in order to improve their positions with other hani, since many sf writers write as if spacefaring species must have united interests. Other than that, everything seemed a bit mechanical and distant, with a lot of detail about space transit but not much emotional resonance. Maybe the novel was too short for me to work up much enthusiasm; I’ve always found Cherryh a bit cool, though her worldbuilding is quite interesting. I have a few more set in this universe on my to-read shelf from one sale or another.
C.J. Cherryh, Chanur’s Legacy: And here we are, with another hani novel, this time about Pyanfar’s niece Hilfy, now in charge of her own ship. Humans only show up in flashback/dream, as Hilfy tries to negotiate a complicated political situation involving at least three other species, plus whatever the methane-breathers are doing, as she also gives refuge to a hani male, who scandalously wants to go to space instead of staying at home and fighting like a good male should. The male, whose POV we get at several points, is constantly wringing his hands (or flattening his ears, the hani equivalent) and fretting about how useless he is while still insisting on getting in the way, and it wasn’t attractive regardless of gender. I’ll read the other Cherryh I’ve got on my shelf, but I don’t think I’m interested enough in the social structures she sets up to go looking for the rest.
Deborah LeBlanc, Grave Intent: This is airport horror, a plane-ride’s worth of supernatural suspense about a family running a funeral home whose security is shattered by the unfortunate coincidence of the return of the skeezy patriarch and the funeral of a gypsy girl. When the patriarch steals from the girl’s coffin, he sets off a chain of events threatening the sanity and life of his five-year-old granddaughter - will her parents be able to protect her from the curse? I lack a feeling for the trailing vines and gothic dampness of the south this was supposed to invoke; I also got confused about the rules of the game that the malevolent forces were playing. I was neither suspended nor horrified.
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Hallowed Hunt: This book is set in the same world as Bujold's Chalion books, but in another country (and besides, the wench is dead - oops, wrong story). A loyal retainer with a troubled past is sent to investigate the death of a prince and take the killer into custody. Problems arise when it becomes clear that the prince died trying to rape and perform dark magic on his killer, and our protagonist has to navigate political and magical complexity to do the right thing. The story was engaging, though the people seemed to have fewer human weaknesses than Bujold usually allows them.
Marc Scott Zicree & Barbara Hambly, Magic Time: Suddenly, technology (including guns, batteries and planes) stops working and magic begins. The narrative follows a Secret Service agent, a young New York lawyer struggling to take care of his younger sister, and the inhabitants of a West Virginia mining town as they deal with the collapse of civilization and its transformation into something new and strange. This includes physical transformations for some of them, as people morph into gargoyles and trolls and other things. I enjoyed the story, despite the needless lawyer-bashing (there are plenty of terrible things lawyers do without needing to go beyond both ethics and plausibility), and the characters differed enough in their reactions to the shock to justify the multiple POVs. If apocalypse is your thing, you might like this too; there are two more books in the series by Zicree & someone else.
Philip E. Baruth, The Dream of the White Village: I bought this because I enjoyed Baruth's recent book The X-President, a sort of time travel fantasy about Bill Clinton and his biographer. This earlier work, comprising a series of shorts about various intertwined lives in 1970s and 1990s Vermont, was less interesting to me. Without genre trappings, it seemed more self-consciously literary, which is fine as far as it goes but gave me little to care about - will the disillusioned woman whose poet mother exposed every aspect of her life find love? Will the racist/thug with political aspirations succeed in manipulating rootless young men into a new army? Actually, that could be kind of interesting, but because of the short-story form and the shifting limited POVs, that story doesn't get enough time to make me happy. Baruth's writing and characterizations are fine, but I'll only try him again if he returns to sf-ish stuff.
C.J. Cherryh, The Pride of Chanur: This short novel introduces Pyanfar Chanur, hani captain of a merchant vessel, who picks up a member of a strange new species - human - on the run from torture by members of a third species, the kif. I liked that the hani were internally divided into competing clans willing to make deals with other species in order to improve their positions with other hani, since many sf writers write as if spacefaring species must have united interests. Other than that, everything seemed a bit mechanical and distant, with a lot of detail about space transit but not much emotional resonance. Maybe the novel was too short for me to work up much enthusiasm; I’ve always found Cherryh a bit cool, though her worldbuilding is quite interesting. I have a few more set in this universe on my to-read shelf from one sale or another.
C.J. Cherryh, Chanur’s Legacy: And here we are, with another hani novel, this time about Pyanfar’s niece Hilfy, now in charge of her own ship. Humans only show up in flashback/dream, as Hilfy tries to negotiate a complicated political situation involving at least three other species, plus whatever the methane-breathers are doing, as she also gives refuge to a hani male, who scandalously wants to go to space instead of staying at home and fighting like a good male should. The male, whose POV we get at several points, is constantly wringing his hands (or flattening his ears, the hani equivalent) and fretting about how useless he is while still insisting on getting in the way, and it wasn’t attractive regardless of gender. I’ll read the other Cherryh I’ve got on my shelf, but I don’t think I’m interested enough in the social structures she sets up to go looking for the rest.
Deborah LeBlanc, Grave Intent: This is airport horror, a plane-ride’s worth of supernatural suspense about a family running a funeral home whose security is shattered by the unfortunate coincidence of the return of the skeezy patriarch and the funeral of a gypsy girl. When the patriarch steals from the girl’s coffin, he sets off a chain of events threatening the sanity and life of his five-year-old granddaughter - will her parents be able to protect her from the curse? I lack a feeling for the trailing vines and gothic dampness of the south this was supposed to invoke; I also got confused about the rules of the game that the malevolent forces were playing. I was neither suspended nor horrified.