School officially ended and summer officially begins! We had a successful camping and kayaking trip at Deer Creek Reservoir to kick off the summer. The lake is so much fuller than it was last year. The rocks I remembered being halfway up the beach were almost completely underwater! A testament to Utah’s insane water year.
Some really good writing news this month: I sold a story! “Birthright” will appear in an anthology of speculative fiction detective stories by Inklings Press! This story features a very costly magic system that twists the relationships in a family to the breaking point. I’m sure it will be a while before the anthology will be available, but I’ll keep you up to date on it. I also turned in my edits on “Reclaiming the Desert” to Wayfare, so hopefully you’ll see that one sooner.
On the other side of the writing desk, I’ve finished the developmental edits for my portion of Irreantum‘s genre fiction issue. I should be diving into copy edits soon. The stories we received for the issue are truly amazing and only getting better with every draft. I’m excited to share them with you.
For Mother’s Day, we released an episode of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree about the portrayal of Mothers in the Media. Our other episode was one of my kids’ favorites for me to prep for, an episode of the Australian sensation that is Bluey.
This month was a bit light on the reading with all the end of school activities, but I’m hoping to get back on track with the summer months before grad school takes over my reading list in the fall. That is, if I don’t spend all my spare time exploring Hyrule in Tears of the Kingdom. I cannot believe they made a game this good with a reused map. Every minute of the seven year wait was worth it.
Book reviews after the jump!
Speculative Fiction
Lent by Jo Walton – I had been in kind of a slump with trying to slog through the end of War and Peace, so I decided to reward myself with this title which had been on my TBR of religious speculative fiction for a while. I have enjoyed other books by Jo Walton (Among Others and Tooth and Claw), so I hoped this book would hit the right spot. I am so glad I did because this book was amazing: an alternate history(/ies) of Renaissance Italy with meticulous research, at least as far as I could tell, with a heavily religious speculative element.
The substance of the story started slowly. I had to pay a little attention to the dates at the beginning of each chapter to catch how much time was passing between events. But when I hit the reveal at the 1/3 mark, the entire concept of the book changed and sucked me right through until the end. I can’t reveal too much about the twist without ruining the nature of the book, but if you enjoyed The Screwtape Letters, A Short Stay in Hell, or The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue, this book might be for you. Some of the characters were more distinct to me than others, and I loved how the refrains surrounding certain events changed in meaning as the story continued.
I believe the author isn’t religious, but I would love to follow up on the use of the war in heaven and fallen angels in this book, as well as the thoughts on free will and God’s presence or absence in history. So many interesting things to pick at in this one. I’ll be picking up another Jo Walton soon.
Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater – This book reminded me of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell mashed up with Ella Enchanted. Though Dora’s curse was occasionally less than consistent, I loved the characters so much that I didn’t really care. I liked the worldbuilding of the fairy realm, something that I’ve struggled with in my own writing. As a non-romance reader, I thought this romance was well-formed and worth my time to read. If you’re craving a little regency romance with a good amount of fantasy mixed in, this is one of the highest quality ones I’ve read.
The Lord Sorcier by Olivia Atwater – This novelette, which was included on the Half a Soul audiobook, explains how Elias Wilder became the Lord Sorcier of England. It’s short and to the point, but really added to the characterization of Elias. There does seem to be a sort of trope of reimagining the Napoleonic wars with magic in the genre, I think more than any other war. Is it just because it coincides with fun regency stuff? Or maybe the Napoleonic wars seem just serious enough without going over into brutal modern warfare. The last gentleman’s war, as it were.
This Ever Diverse Pair by Owen Barfield – This book contains a mishmash of things that I like and so I enjoyed it. I don’t know if it really coheres together as a whole, and it certainly hasn’t made the splash across history that books by the other Inklings have. The premise (largely autobiographical, as I understand it) is that a London-based lawyer has so suppressed the part of himself that was artistic and literary in favor of the part that is hardworking, practical, and lawyerly that he has split himself into two people, respectively Burgeon and Burden. The book is largely written in Burgeon’s voice, and his laments over the need to focus on the practicalities of earning a living to support his family over the indulgences of creating poetry seem strikingly modern. (Specifically, it reminded me of the students cited in the recent “End of the English Major” article in the New Yorker, saying they’d love to study literature, but they needed to study something like marketing or bioengineering instead because its more practical.)
The style is patchy and uneven. Some chapters are narrated to the reader as if Burgeon is writing them down in a diary. Other chapters revert to a screenplay format with the two characters arguing back and forth. And some chapters take the form of long legal conversations and treatises which are difficult to follow. Sprinkled throughout are Burgeon’s attempts at literature: poems, plays, speeches, mostly in a doggerel style which is all he can manage after an exhausting day of lawyering. There’s also a long philosophical section on the Platonic ideal of a lawyer and two chapters that are almost entirely dreams. I am left thinking that the book could have been a classic with a few more editorial passes to smooth out and expand the book further. But perhaps that misses the point of a book that’s written in the scraps of time between cases.
I am overall shocked by how much this book feels relevant to today. Burgeon could have been written by a modern Twitter correspondent, complaining about the dehumanizing nature of capitalism. And Burden’s complaints about the constant interruptions that ruin his carefully laid work plans and the “tyranny of the telephone” constantly ringing sound exactly like the complaints about Slack and email today. Additionally, there’s a chapter predicting a possible future where the idea of marriage will be bifurcated between those who think it’s a contract between two people to be broken at will, and those who think of it as a solemn religious covenant in which the community has an interest. It sounds straight out of the early 2000s arguments over gay marriage, only inspired by the author’s experiences with divorce cases in England in the 1940s instead.
In many ways, this book makes me depressed about all the art we’ve missed out on because we are not all free to pursue our heart’s desire but are bound by practicalities. What else could Barfield have written given the time and space? On the other hand, I agree with the novel’s eventual conclusion that every person needs the humanities in their life as a source of meaning, and that even the most technical of jobs can be at least partly done in a way that satisfies the impulse to create within ourselves. Overall, an underrated book. If you can deal with the unevenness of the novel, the insightful contents will surprise you.
Fiction
Refugee by Alan Gratz – As a short YA study of refugees, this book was absolutely unrelenting. We rotate between the stories of three refugee families: a family of Jews fleeing the Holocaust, a family from Cuba heading to the United States, and a family fleeing the civil war in Syria. From the moment the Jewish family stepped onto the St Louis, I knew that plot line wasn’t going to have a happy ending, but I didn’t anticipate the tragedies in every single chapter of this book. I had to take regular breaks from reading as it never lets you rest from gut punch after gut punch of terrible things happening to kids and families.
Not that it’s not valuable. Those of us who have never had to run from an untenable situation ought to gain some empathy for the many, many people who do. Perhaps we would soften our immigration policies as a result. But because of the level of the material, I would hesitate to recommend this book to my kids, even the one who absolutely loves historical fiction and devours the I Survived and Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales books. I think it might be too much for the intended audience. It was almost too much for me. It was fascinating the way the stories connected at the end, weaving a tale of hard-won empathy.
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George – Sped through this one as part of research for a novel idea currently in the greenhouse. I had never read it in elementary school like many did. I was under the impression that the wolves were much more involved with Julie’s survival than they were, so the book turned out to be of only moderate use for my purposes. But man, that ending! The first fake-out ending felt cheesy to me, but then when it all fell apart–that’s a brutal ending for a children’s book. I can’t believe Jean Craighead George went with that.
