Books 13-15 of 2022: The Door to the Lost, Karen Memory, In Our Own Worlds | DNF: Slave Stories
The Door to the Lost - by Jaleigh Johnson. This could have been an interesting story, but the characters were all paper-thin with no more characterization than their names.
Set in a fantast world, all the magic suddenly dies. For unimportant plot reasons, only some children are left with magic, and so they become outcasts and are hunted down and locked away. Two girls with magic are living together on the street.
The two girls, Rook and Drift, had no characterization other than one was braver than the other. I wanted to like this book, the plot could have made for a fun story, but without characters to connect to, it was a slog to get through.
Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear. It's odd, I thought I had read Bear before and loved her, but I seem to have no record of having read anything by her...
The book started out so good. Set in a light steampunk version of the old west, the main character worked in a high class whorehouse. I LOVED the world. I enjoyed so much learning about how the business was run, the other girls, the customers, the town, all that.
Then it took a turn into left field. An Evil Politician was the enemy of the madam who ran the whorehouse. Karen and the other girls go on all sorts of adventures and plots to fight him. It was just so out there and unbelievable... I wish the whole book had been like the first third.
In Our Own Worlds #2: LGBTQ+ Tor.com by assorted authors. This book contained four novellas:
- Miranda in Milan by Katharine Duckett. A retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I couldn't get into it at all and stopped trying a few pages in.
- Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire. This one was AMAZING. Set in our world, now and then doorways into other worlds open for certain children. Sometimes the doorways later open again and they are returned. There are secret schools for those kids, since they're now so different and can no longer fit in to our world. So so so so good. I can't wait to read the rest of the books in the series.
- Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather. This was such a strange story, but I really enjoyed it. Set in the distant future, nuns set out on living space ships to tend to groups of people around the universe. I don't generally enjoy stories about real world religions, but this one was so interesting. The living ship was a fascinating "character" as well.
- Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson. I'm not sure how this even got onto a "best" list. It really needed an editor (author used semicolons so often and every time wrong). Story didn't hook me at all (seemed to be set in the past, but the characters all used very modern, urban slang), so I dropped it.
DNF
21: Slave Stories - Slave State by Chris Kelso. Summary of this book was: "The Slave State is a place located in the 4th dimension, a place where humans are forced to work extracting inessential minerals from mining enclaves until the end of their lives...". It was so badly written, I wanted to toss my Kindle across the room. It was one of the oldest books I had, I must have gotten it for free or something. Blech.