Bright's Passage by Scott Ritter

This is part of one of my stranger lists, the "read-alikes" suggest by NoveList. I took my top ten lists from each of the last five years, and picked one book from the recommendations for each. In many cases, I haven't loved the read-alike, for reasons I'll go into, but once, just once, a read-alike for a book on one year's Top Ten list made it on to the following year's Top Ten list. So I persist.

I mostly persist because I loved Roger Ebert's style of reviewing movies, and I find this particular grouping of books a very strong object lesson in Ebert's Law - that a movie is not what it is about, but how it is about it. The same is true for books, and in nearly every case, I can see why NoveList picked a book as a "read-alike," but in every case, the end result is very different. The books tend to have plot elements in common, but oh, they couldn't be more dissimilar.

So imagine my puzzlement when I sat down with Bright's Passage and tried to figure out why in the world NoveList had thrown this up as a read-alike to Salman Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life, which is a book I absolutely loved. Eventually, I determined that it must be because, very loosely, both are about a main character going on a journey with a motley crew, including some talking animals. Which, yes. They have that in common.

Other than that, though? Virtually nothing. Rushdie's book is joyous and exuberant (but made me cry), untidy in its sheer energy bringing in so many references to so many things. There's a delight and expansiveness, even as Luka is working to save his father's life, which is very high stakes indeed, and taken seriously.  Where Rushdie's book opens its metaphorical arms to welcome the whole world in, Bright's Passage is narrower, darker, and dingier.

I do realize that Josh Ritter's book was at a disadvantage, starting out with Luka hanging over its shoulder, daring the book to be as good. It's not. It's not terrible either, but it ended up being very much not my cup of tea. There's a little too much withheld, and far too much of women just being there to enhance the main character's story - not as sex partners, which is a nice change of pace, but as potential mothers to Bright's infant son.

The book seems to be about the after effects of war, in this case, the First World War. Bright went away to war. When he came back, he stole/liberated his cousin from her father's house (where, it's insinuated but never said, she was abused by either her father or her brothers or both) and married her. She dies in childbirth just before the opening pages of the book.  We go back and forth between Bright's time in France and his first days with his son. Which are heavily influenced by his horse, talking to him.

Bright believes that an angel he saw on the ceiling of a church in France is in the horse, and the horse is the one who convinced him to free his wife. If the wife had a name, I don't remember it, which isn't great. The horse claims that the baby is the future King of Heaven, and for a while, Bright does what the horse tells him, even though burning down his house, as the horse demands, sets a devastating forest fire.

Ahead of the fire, Bright goes to a small town, and tries to find a new mother for his son, at the horse's command. He also takes a non-talking goat with him. It's unclear whether or not Bright is just hallucinating voices, but in many ways it seems likely, particularly since the horse/angel seems to be wrong about just about everything. Of course, so is Bright.  The horse wants Bright to make every woman he sees the baby's mother, but Bright is slightly more discerning. Which doesn't mean that's not what he's looking for too.

I think my biggest problem is that this just doesn't seem to come to much. Bright does eventually resolve things with his angel, but that leaves his war experience and the encroaching fire and his grief over his wife and his future life with his son open-ended questions, not to be resolved in this book. It feels like it's an artsy ending, but I didn't find it a satisfying one.

It's not surprising that a book about war and about poverty in rural areas and evil family members has no lightness about it. (Bright's uncle, who is never named such, just "The Colonel," is close to a cartoonish villain, aiming to take his grandson back from the man he thinks killed his child.) But if it comes to a comparison, the way Luka and the Fire of Life could encompass both joy and sorrow is a large part of what makes it, even now, loom large in my memory. This is just sorrow, and it's okay, but I wouldn't really recommend it.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

*Major Spoilers Below*

This is a very nice book, and unfortunately, I'm not using that as a form of praise. It's a little too nice. If I laid out all the things that happen in this book, it would sound like it's rife with trauma and difficulty and life, but the truth is that the reader is allowed/encouraged to keep such a distance from the pain that it's all just very...nice.

As such, reading this book was vaguely pleasant, but leaves me with nothing much to grasp on to. And, while I don't need every book to be doom and gloom, having lived with grief myself, I do kind of resent this genteel handling of multiple bereavements that never come close enough to the reader to have any effect on them.

I need to take a step back to talk about the book as a whole, and why, although it's pleasant, I'm not sure it's particularly good.  It takes place in a small bookstore on an island, which does seem like the sort of book that would be up my alley. The book is framed with a recommendations of short stories at the start of each chapter, from the main character to someone we don't know as the book begins.

A.J. Fikry is a widow in his thirties. His wife died, and he is sunk in grief, but it's not the kind of grief that invites the reader in to share it. A priceless book he owns is stolen. A two-year-old is left on the floor of the shop and her mother is found drowned by her own volition. A.J. adopts Maya. The death of her mother is at a remove.

There is a representative from a publishing company who comes out to the island, and they flirt, and fall in love from a distance, and eventually get together, and this section is possibly my favourite, because it is sweet, and it's not sweetness at the cost of glossing over pain. (Let me say the book thinks the characters are in pain, and says so, but doesn't show so, and none of the pain seems to have much of a long-term effect on anyone.)

There are affairs of surrounding characters. Another death. But it's very sweet through all of that. And then, and here is the major spoiler, A.J. is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Now, let me make this perfectly clear. I lost my father to cancer seven years ago. I lost my mother to a stroke just over a year ago. I have grieved and am grieving, and will continue to grieve. It is a part of who I am, and just because I am functional in this world does not mean that I do not carry that with me, all the time.

Because I lost both my parents before I turned 40, I am particularly vulnerable to books in which parents die. Salman Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life has wrecked me both times I've read it. It's not hard to touch me emotionally with that particular plot point. So here's the thing - A.J.'s impending and actual death touched me not at all. At any moment. It felt, as the whole book had, rather sweet, but not real, or raw, or like it was happening to a real person or would affect real people.

Again, I don't need ugly, but this book feels like it thinks pain is best ignored and happiness foregrounded. I guess I'd rather read books where happiness is hard-won and pain is real, and both exist at the same time. If what you want is slight comforting fiction, you could do worse. But if you want anything that takes a risk, lets in an emotion, or explores something deeply, this isn't the book for you.

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

This book is very hard to review, due to reasons that were entirely my own damned fault. I read the first two-thirds of the book before the Hugo nominees were announced, and then dove into that for months. As a result, it was three or four months later that I made it back and read the last third. I perhaps should have started from the beginning, but at the time, I didn't quite feel like it. So this review may be hazier than usual, because it's been such a very long time.

Too Like the Lightning is a very challenging book, in what I mostly think are very good ways. It posits a future built on Enlightenment ideals, but then incorporates the darker sides of those ideals in ways that are truly unsettling. I never knew what was going to happen next, and was frequently uncomfortable, but the writing was so good that I couldn't stop reading.

It is, however, perhaps not a neatly rounded book. We don't so much end at the end as much as the book just breaks off, to be picked up in the second volume. There's not a really sense of rising and falling action in its own separate form, but I have hopes that the second book will do that for us.

One important note: I do not know that much about the Enlightenment and Enlightenment philosophy. Ada Palmer evidently does, and mixes new ideas of human freedom with sexual debauchery behind closed doors that rivals the Marquis de Sade, and incorporates a mythic "free man" whose freedom is expressed in violence and terror, because he is bound by no laws.

As we get deeper and deeper into the psyche of that particular character (and I won't say a lot more), it becomes more and more uneasy - there are things so very wrong with him, and then, spiralling out, with the society that he exists within. It's on the surface a utopia, but to run as a utopia, it has to embrace the very irrationality it is supposed to despise.

The world has been broken up into Hives, something that is not a nationality, but an affiliation based on preference. Families, too, look very different, combining multiple adults and children into a "bash."  Gendered pronouns are not a thing anymore, except for our narrator, who is unable to use the "they" that is common in the rest of society. This dilutes the impact of such a choice on the world, but also brings it to our attention fairly often. Bashes are kept healthy by frequent visits from Cousins, who fulfill some of the same function of priests, but without being able to express any particular religion in their conversations with their charges.

Okay, add into this a ton of machinations between the leaders of the different Hives, a bash that has some of the most sensitive and important information to the running of the world as it is, and then, on top of that, a child who has the ability to make what he thinks real, from dolls to more mental pictures. It's a lot, but it does mostly work.

A list has been stolen, a list of influence that comes out yearly, stolen before publication date, and, as it turns out, a version of the list that was never meant to be seen. Further to that, the way it was stolen - with a device that allows one to avoid the constant surveillance present in society. On these small pegs, the story turns, and it is difficult and intricate and sometimes it feels like Palmer almost loses all the threads she's trying to pull together. But the writing was excellent and if I don't understand everything yet, and if I feel like the book doesn't so much end as stop, we'll see what the next book brings.

Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Chris

I wonder if it is that to get a book published when you're an Indian ex-pat author, it needs to be really, really good. I suspect that may be the case, but I have to say that by far and large, the books I've read by authors (mostly men) who come from India have been just so good. Dynamic, interesting, compelling, often very difficult. It'll be a mark of progress when you don't have to be this good to get published, when mediocrity is allowed you the same as it is allowed white authors, but at the moment, damn.


Narcopolis was recommended to me a long time ago (possibly a couple of years ago) by a colleague in grad school. I tucked it away on my list and forgot about it, more or less, but when it made it to the top of that particular list a few months ago, I was happy to get it out from the library. Then I got sidetracked by my first year of voting for the Hugos, and just kept renewing the book until I finally finished all my award reading. So this was also the first book in about four months that I was picking up not because it was science fiction or fantasy and had been nominated. It was a very enjoyable return to my more usual mix of mainstream and genre fiction.

I devoured this book. I was eager to get back to it, never wanted to put it down, and yet, despite that, I am having a hard time summing it up. This is not a book you read for plot. It is only partially a book you read for characters. But it is definitely one you read for atmosphere and prose, and on those counts, I was pulled along in a haze not entirely unlike the drugged lens the characters put between themselves and the world they live in, Old Bombay in the 1970s.

The first chapter quickly plunges you into the world in a way that is not stylistically mirrored by the rest of the book, but works to give the reader an entry - it is one very long paragraph, and I'm not even sure there are sentence breaks. It is not linear, it does not make sense, but it never feels like it needs to make sense. We are brought into an opium den with the first viewpoint character. From there, the prose gets a little less experimental, but was never anything less that intriguing to read.

I don't remember much about that first viewpoint character, because we get to know him relatively little - that he had been in the U.S. but had to return to India, that he quickly turned to opium, that he drifts between a mainstream world and this shadowy one. We see his misadventures shepherding a former enfant terrible of the expat Indian literary and artistic scene to the opium den, then leaving him there - long-term sense of responsibility not being a notable feature of his drug haze.

We get to know Dimple, the woman who works the pipe, coming from a former (and present? The timeline was never entirely clear to me) profession as a prostitute. We hear her history, including how she came to smoke opium and then to work for the Chinese man who ran the opium den in its first incarnation, after fleeing mainland China and the Cultural Revolution. We learn about Rashid, the next proprietor of the opium den, and his family, and relationship with Dimple.

This book is not a diatribe about drugs. It is not idyllic about them. It is just exactly what it is, and feels like an attempt to capture the whole experience, as closely as the author can. (Wikipedia says it's based on his own twenty lost years of addiction.)  There are dangers on the street, people become more and more desperate for the release of drugs, and newer, harsher drugs enter the scene. There are attempts at rehab, moments of cynicism concerning recovery, honest attempts and regretful changes, and reversions.

I don't think this is a book for everyone. This is another in a long line of books I've said are for people with high tolerances for ambiguity and meandering. Who are open to an experience rather than a straighforward narrative. Who want to spend time in a world where squalor is escaped from into smoke.

Summer in Orcus by T. Kingfisher

I am not sure how I came to read Castle Hangnail a year or two ago, but I do know that I've been recommending it to everyone I know with children, and quite a few adults, ever since. It was just so thoroughly delightful, with wonderful turns of phrase and good-hearted messages at the core of the story of a young girl taking over an evil castle and installing herself as the new evil sorceress in town.

When I saw that one of the young adult novel nominees was by Ursula Vernon under a pseudonym, I was really looking forward to it. Then I sat down to read it, and it was even better than I had expected. It was just simply delightful, an excellent mix of realism and fantasy, difficult situations and unexpected answers, all with an avoidance of easy tropes of winning through war or even of absolute victory.

I particularly enjoyed the main character's background and struggles - Summer is an eleven-year-old only child with a single mother. Specifically, her mother seems to be struggling with fairly extreme anxiety about almost all aspects of her life, but particularly when it comes to perceived dangers to her daughter. Summer has had to learn how to negotiate her mother's issues, but she's yearning to be able to do more and dare more than her mother allows.

So when a house comes down an alley she's not allowed to go down, and settles down in the yard next door, Summer figures out how to visit, and meets Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga promises Summer her heart's desire, but doesn't tell Summer what that is. Although she is given a talking weasel.  Summer and the weasel (the weasel is never named) go back out the front door, but not back to the neighbour's lawn - instead they find themselves in a magical land, Orcus.

Once there, she finds a land where the wondrous is slowly withering away - personified by a tree that should drop leaves that turn into frogs, but is not even managing tadpoles. She goes on a journey, as one does, that finds her many strange and wonderful companions, including Glorious, a werehouse (a wolf who turns into a house at night); a rather dandyish hoopoe who is perhaps avoiding the bird Ton; two geese who are sent by the hoopoe's aristocratic father to guard him; an antelope woman who definitely intends to mess with Summer; and a flock of valet birds.

As the withering of the wondrous suggests, there is an evil force in the land, personified, more or less, by three circles getting tighter with malice. We have Grub, who pursues Summer, Zultan, a general-type who directs Grub to pursue Summer, and the legendary Queen-in-Chains, who no one has ever seen, although her destruction of the Tower of Dogs made everyone quite aware of her power.

Yes, there are lots of details. There are lots more - Donkeyskin and her sisters, the Wheymaker, the woman in the forest, more and more. The point I'd like to make about them is that each is still very vivid in my memory, in a way that I often lose. I remembered far more of the names, the details, the enchanting story than I often do. It all fits together perfectly out of discarded little pieces that somehow make much more than the sum of their parts.

Summer's journey is difficult - she is often sore and alone and scared, up against odds that pull her down. But she is also resourceful, brave, and has particular skills developed by her life to date, and the ending is delightfully not about a battle or an obstacle to be beaten. But it is about Summer becoming who she is, and what that might mean for her future. 

A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge

A Skinful of Shadows was another book I read because it was nominated for a Hugo. Well, a not-a-Hugo YA award that will be handed out at the Hugos, in this case. I get the reasoning for doing it that way, but it is confusing to write about. I picked this up during the last push to get books finished before the voting deadline, and managed to get it done with time to spare.

When it came time to do my rankings, I knew this wouldn't be top of my list. That's not to say it's a bad book - as I've been saying all the way through this process, these are very strong categories, and it's been hard to choose. But while I think this was good, it didn't vault into the realm of great in any one of a number of ways. I just never felt as engrossed as I wanted to, never really sank down into the story.

However, that aside, if you're looking for some good historical YA fiction with nary a focus on romance to be seen, let alone intense insta-love, I could definitely recommend this one. It's good, the main dilemma is strong, the characters and world interesting. It's not quite like anything I've read before, not that I'm well read in this particular genre.

This takes place during the reign of Charles I, just at the start of the English Civil War. Makepeace is raised among Puritans, but her mother never really fit in, and neither did she. There are hints in her early life that her mother is in hiding from something, but her mother is not one to share, nor one to coddle - when Makepeace starts to become aware she can see ghosts, and that ghosts attack her, her mother takes her to the cemetery, over and over, and leaves her there overnight so she can learn how to fend them off.

When she grows up, after a traumatic moment that leaves her motherless, followed by another that gives her an unintentional mind-mate, she finds out what her mother was hiding from, and to be more precise, what she was hiding - Makepeace herself from the family of Makepeace's father, rich lords, the Fellmottes, who want to hold on to power by making alliances with Charles, but are holding on to rather more than that.

Because, as it turns out, the sensitivity to ghosts is an inherited trait, and the Fellmottes have been using it in a manner strikingly similar to the plan of the old people in Being John Malkovich. And in so doing, destroy the hosts they take over - hosts who have to be their descendants, of one sort or another. Which...seems like it would suck? And give the descendants lots of reasons to rebel? Not just the illegitimate ones, the legitimate and totally screwed ones?  And yet, only one does.

From here, it's about Makepeace trying to get and stay away from the Fellmottes, and coping with her newfound and growing power - and her hope to bring down her family of birth so that they can't hurt anyone else, most of all someone she cares for. (Not a romance.)

I can't put my finger on exactly what didn't grab me about this book - and that seems like it would be a feat, wouldn't it? To be able to say exactly why a particular book didn't grab me. There's nothing wrong with it that I can pinpoint, it just never took flight. Still, as it stayed firmly on the ground, at least the ground was unobtrusive and mostly interesting.

Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng

I haven't written all the reviews for Hugo-nominated works and authors yet, but I have now read them all and put my ballot together, which was very exciting. It's going to take me a few days to catch up on writing about the books I pushed to finish on time, and here was one of the late entries. It was also one I like a whole heck of a lot. Jeannette Ng was nominated for the Campbell Award this year, and I think this is a very strong contender in that category.

This is at least partly because this book appeals to a few very specific areas that I know about more than the average bear, and does interesting things with them. I have, of course, a well-documented weakness for fairy tales, and stories where fairies interact with the human world. Add to that a couple of well-meaning Christian missionaries, and an author who knows the theological tangles they'd get themselves into while trying to establish a mission in Fairyland? You have to know that I'm thoroughly in. Ng does a marvellous job of taking the Fae seriously and creating something unique and inhuman about them, and taking her human missionaries and their beliefs seriously and combining the two to create a marvellously twisty tale.

My one quibble, and it was by no means a dealbreaker, is that the reveals, of which there are two major ones, were telegraphed well in advance. In neither case did this spoil the twist, as having figured it out (quite easily) didn't detract from the enjoyment of seeing how we'd get there. But when the mysterious woman arose, it was quickly apparent who she was, if not why she was that way, and the final reveal about Cathy's origins wasn't hard to figure out, given what we know about the caprices of the Fairy Queen Mab. So those didn't land as surprises, but there was enough else going on that they didn't need to.

This is the story of Catherine Helstone, whose brother Laon has gone to Fairyland, under the titular pendulum sun, and moon fish, to minister to the inhabitants there, to bring the word of Christianity to truly foreign shores that can only be found by the lost. Once he gets there, communication cuts off, and Cathy goes in search of her brother. After Cathy finds her way to the shores, she finds an empty gothic castle where her brother resides. It is also the castle where the one former missionary had resided, although he died in mysterious circumstances.

Her brother is away, seeking audience with Queen Mab to extend his field of mission further than just the castle and the few inhabitants inside, who include Ariel, a changeling, Benjamin, the only Christian convert fairy so far, and The Salamander, a mostly unseen housekeeper. Catherine settles in impatiently and starts to amass the clues as to what happened to the previous minister, if not to understand them.

Laon returns, with the Queen close behind, and she is more than happy to play with the siblings like toys, wielding lies and truth with equal cruelty and caprice. How do you convert people who have no sense that they are fallen? What do you run away from, and what happens when that thing follows you? What happens when desires meet strictures and desires win? It's all woven together quite wonderfully, and I was glad I got to read this book.