River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

A little while ago, I was putting together a list for my SF/F book club about heists. My first pass ended up being all male authors, so I frowned and tried to do better. I ended up adding two books I'd never read, and this was one of them, when it was described to me as "Leverage, if the crew were told to steal a lake."  I was in at pretty much that moment.

Then, when it was nominated for a Hugo for novella, I had even more reason to read it. And it was pretty much exactly as advertised - a thoroughly enjoyable alt-U.S. romp, in a world where a crazy plan to import hippos for meat worked, but led to a lake infested with feral hippos that can kill a man in seconds - and do, regularly, which is used by the mustache-twirling bad guy when people cheat on his casino steamship.

The main character used to have own hippo ranch before he lost it and almost all his hippos to a fire, and when he decides to take this job for the U.S. government, to get the hippos out of that lake and disperse them down river, he thinks he'll be able to get revenge on the person who caused the fire.

Of course, we start off with a traditional "getting the crew together" montage, where Winslow Houndstooth, our protagonist, finds the people he's going to need to pull this particular heist off - Archie, a large woman who is a master thief; Hero, a nonbinary person who can blow up anything; Cal, Winslow's former ranch hand who knows the territory, and Adelia, a pregnant hired killer who has more going on than anyone realizes.

These are all delightful characters, and that's another important aspect of a good heist story - you need to care whether or not these people manage to rob the bank or hoodwink the rich, or...blow up a dam and unleash a flood of hippos on the river below the lake. Because that is the plan, with each member of the crew providing a valuable service as they set out to unleash a flood of feral hippos without getting eaten by them.

Which is a bit of a trick - described are many eaten-by-hippos moments, and it sounds like a fairly terrifying way to go. Each of our heroes also has their own hippo (or hop, I think the term is), to which they are greatly attached - one is an albino, all are fiercely loyal to their owners, and seem to be hardy steeds - as long as you are relatively close to water so they don't dry out.

Not everyone on the team is working for the same person, which I'm sure surprises you all tremendously!  There are betrayals, the beginnings (and ends) of love affairs. There are twists and turns. People are eaten by hippos.

I don't have a lot else to say about the book, but I really did enjoy it tremendously. I don't think it's going to top my Hugo ballot, but it was rollicking fun, and I look forward to discussing it in my book club when it rolls around. I'm ahead of the game for once!

The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon

This is the third Michael Chabon book I've read. I absolutely adored The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and I found Mysteries of Pittsburgh okay, but not great. However, when I recently punched Jo Walton's Farthing into NoveList, looking for a "read-alike," this is what came up. In general, I haven't been overly impressed with the read-alikes - they tend to get some of the same broad strokes, while generally the books are unuttterably different from the book they're supposed to be like.

It's a fairly strong example of Roger Ebert's axiom that it's not "what it is about, but how it is about it." I always believed that, but these recommendations have been more proof.

However, while I didn't fall in love with the last two read-alikes for books I loved, this time the comparison was not only apt, the book I read as a result was an utter delight. They are similar in that they're both alt-history and deal, in greater or larger part, with Jewishness. (Chabon more, Walton as part of a constellation of issues.)

The Yiddish Policeman's Union adds to the alternate history a hard-boiled noir detective novel. Complete with a detective who just can't let a case go, and a suitably twisty story and resolution. I was a little surprised at how well these two went together, but I was engrossed in the mystery, and the backdrop and larger politics gave it more heft.

The book is set in Alaska, where, after the fall of Israel in 1947, the United States government gave Jewish people a temporary homeland. After sixty years, though, it's about to revert to U.S. control, and the residents are uncertain as to their fate. They're a Jewish people who feel like they might be expelled from somewhere else, yet again. Or at very least, feel unwelcome in the city they built.

The main character is Meyer Landsman, an alcoholic and divorced police detective, who is woken up one night at the fleabag hotel at which he lives because there's been a murder in the building. Despite being told to let it go so that everything is neatly wrapped up when it gets handed back to the Americans, he of course, can't, and drags along his partner and cousin, Berko, a half-Native, half-Jewish man who is much more sensible and grounded than Meyer himself.

Berko's father ran intelligence services in Sitka with and without the U.S. government's approval, which led to his eventual release from service. The CIA and other agencies are not uninterested in the fate of Sitka and its inhabitants, and that becomes more and more clear, particularly when it comes to theories about how that might play into Messianic prophecies.

The dead man turns out to have been the estranged son of a prominent rebbe, head of a relatively closed Jewish community that dabbles heavily in organized crime. He was also reputed to have Messiah-like powers.

It's a twisty story, and I don't intend to go into it, but it's thoroughly satisfying, and the ways in which Chabon weaves together genre convention with alternate history and Jewish culture were always delightful. It might be 2008 in the book, but you can see easily Landsman sharing a cigarette with Bogart and shrugging before wandering off for another drink.

Goliath by Scott Westerfeld

*Some Spoilers Ahead*

I'm done this series, I think. In that I think it's done? And even if it's not, I'm not sure I need to go on with it. It has been passable young adult alt-history, but it never really grabbed me. I haven't minded reading any of the three books, but I was never delighted when they came around on the Kindle.

Plus, Tesla doesn't shake hands. And it's almost the first thing he does when he is introduced in this book. In fact, most of his quirks don't appear, and he's turned into something of a villain. I'm rather fond of Tesla as a historical figure, and this version missed most of the eccentricities, and made him unlikeable, which is unlikely to win my approval.

In this one, the Leviathan drifts out of Europe, into Russia, Asia, across the Pacific. (I think they go across the Pacific? Maybe they reversed and went across the Atlantic. But no, they end up in California, so....) They're out of the main theatre of war, mostly there to ferry Tesla on a mission to finish a weapon he claims will bring peace to the world. Alek buys into this most thoroughly, apparently not having learned anything from history.

In California, they meet Hearst. Hearst sends them to meet Pancho Villa, to get better newsreel footage. This story is less driven by plot about the two main characters than it is by a travelogue, trying to fit in as many historical personages as possible.

This is possible because the romance takes centre stage. Deryn's pining becomes known. Alek thinks he can't reciprocate because he has to become Emperor of Austria. Can anyone who has ever read a young adult novel guess whether or not Alek will follow his duties or his heart?  The romance was never my favourite part of these books, but it's not terrible. At least it developed slowly and avoided insta-love at any point.

Still, it wasn't the part of the book I was breathlessly waiting on. The problem is that there weren't any parts I was breathlessly waiting on. There's very little tension in this book until the very end, and even that feels a bit predictable.

My other little quibble is that these perspicacious lorises are introduced, and then nothing much is done with them. I know they knew Deryn was a girl, but other than that, I figured they'd play a big part at some point, when people finally realized that what they were repeating was relevant to the situations they were in, but not only did that seem to happen less often in this book, nobody really realized it. Which takes all that potential and roundly squanders it.

Most of the drama hinges, yet again, on whether or not Deryn will be revealed as a girl. I won't tell you which way it goes, but she is closer to that revelation in that book. That's interesting, but at a certain point, the consequences and what happens next would be more interesting. (Okay, I guess I just told you.)

This series isn't bad. It just never really caught my imagination or made me excited. It's competent YA fiction. That's about the best I can say.

Farthing by Jo Walton

I got off to a rocky start with Jo Walton. Among Others didn't wow me - I liked it, but the pacing felt off, and keen tension lacking. Since then, however, I've read two of her other books that have simply blown my mind. Tooth and Claw - Victorian society with dragons - made it on to my Top 10 list of last year. And I will not be at all surprised if Farthing joins it there next year.

So far in 2015, this is one of the books that has hit me the hardest, and one of the few that has made me evangelical. It's so, so, so freaking good. It's also terrifying. Walton pulls no punches, and our own knowledge of what happened in our world colours what could happen in ways that are unsettling, stark, and, necessary.

Digression.

I went to see Children of Men in the theatre when it first came out, and it also blew my mind. But what struck me the most, other than how good that movie is and how much I carried it around with me for weeks afterwards, was the reaction of one of the people I'd seen it with. Their reaction was "thank goodness that could never happen here." I was agog - what I took from the movie was that that could happen anywhere, under the right circumstances.

That's a little bit like what Jo Walton has done here. In a world where Britain made peace with Germany in 1941, German atrocities continue unabated. What never happened was the wide media coverage of the liberation of the camps, the wholesale outrage of the world as the horrors of the concentration camps were made public as part of the end of the war. And so, they continue. People know, but don't want to know - similar to the lead-up to the war. They're a little uncomfortable with Jews too, and maybe it's all being exaggerated. Homosexuals aren't really any more legal than they are in Germany, the response is just of a different magnitude.

In a world where the Third Reich continues, how long before Britain unleashes its own antisemitism and homophobia?

This book gives a terrifying answer, where a weekend at a country house of the political elite turns into a murder investigation, as one of the most prominent of the "Farthing Set," the conservative politicians who ousted Winston Churchill in this version of history, turns up dead with a Jewish star pinned to his chest.

A little obvious, you might think, and indeed so does Inspector Carmichael. He suspects that this is a frame-up of Daniel Kahn, who married the daughter of those who own the country house, to their dismay and semi-disinheritance. The book flips back and forth in chapters between Carmichael, who is himself gay, and Lucy, the daughter who married Daniel. The trap closes tightly around all of them, as what is at stake is more than just one Jewish man, but indeed, the political fate of the country, and the inexorable slide towards camps of their own. Personalizing that is the question of the integrity of one man, whether or not he can stand by quietly, knowing full well what has happened and what will happen, but all he holds dear is threatened if he speaks up.

This is tense and terrifying, and rejects soundly the belief that it couldn't have happened here, that somehow this was due to a particular fault of the German people. Having spent some time on exchange in Germany, people there have spent decades grappling with the knowledge of what they and their grandparents were capable of. And we have learned very little from the Holocaust if we use it as a way to think of what those people over there were capable of, and distance ourselves.