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Getting an e-reader got me back into reading in a big way (though a couple of the books I ended up reading were actually either physical books or read on my phone), and going through knee replacement surgery and the ensuing recovery meant that for the second half of February I spent a lot of time just lying around icing my leg (and, briefly, lying around actually in the hospital with an IV in my arm). All this created opportunities for reading, though I didn't write extended reviews of these. I got on a real Nnedi Okorafor kick.
Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch and Akata Warrior
These are YA fantasies in the "young person learns to be a wizard" subgenre. This kind of story, of course, long predates the Harry Potter series. But Akata Witch in particular seems like it was written in dialogue with Harry Potter, so to speak: it has many structural and plot elements analogous to the first few Potter books but executed completely differently, as if Okorafor decided to prove she could do this better, using a cultural background of modern Nigeria and West African juju, instead of Britain and Western lore (and it is better, in fact). Young Sunny Nwazue learns that she's a magic-capable Leopard Person, is inducted into the secret world of Leopard People and becomes part of a coven of young people destined to try to stop a sorcerer gone bad. (She's also an excellent athlete--but the sport isn't anything magical, it's soccer!) The second book branches out a bit and does some different things: Sunny gets in trouble with the magical authorities for rescuing her non-magical brother from a dangerous college confraternity, travels to a secret city of magicians on a giant flying rodent and has to stop a destructive supernatural being from reentering the world. One detail suggests that this may be set in the same timeline as Lagoon, though I doubt the plot of that would have played out quite the way it did if there were organized Leopard People in the world, so maybe not.
A warning: the titles of these books actually contain a fairly intense Nigerian slur aimed usually at African-Americans (they had to be retitled for the Nigerian and UK markets, to What Sunny Saw in the Flames and Sunny and the Mysteries of Osisi). It's something that Sunny Nwazue, who is American-born and also has albinism, gets called a lot. I suspect Sunny's albinism is not super-accurately depicted--her visual impairment only extends to the point of needing glasses--but there are implications that this manifests differently in Leopard People.
Nnedi Okorafor, Remote Control
Okorafor's latest novella is a vivid and remarkably sad story set in near-future Ghana, about a girl who gains death-dealing powers from a strange alien seed and inadvertently kills her family and everyone she knows, then becomes a legendary wandering figure, "Death's adopted daughter". I liked it but it isn't a feel-good read. There are interesting elements of futurism in the stage setting: stretchable TVs made of gel, a town dominated by a technology market whose point of pride is its traffic-controlling robot.
John Scalzi, The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire and The Last Emperox
This series is sort of John Scalzi writing a distant descendant of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. There's an interstellar space empire that is doomed to collapse for reasons beyond anyone's control (though it's FTL-travel physics rather than futuristic social science); plans must be made to save civilization in the aftermath; there are oracular holograms, scientists disbelieved by the dopey powerful, confrontations in boardrooms, battling plotters and counterplotters weaving tangled webs of subterfuge. The main difference is that the characters are John Scalzi-style smartasses. Also there's a lot more sex. Fun if you enjoy this sort of thing.
N. K. Jemisin, How Long 'Til Black Future Month?
N. K. Jemisin's novels are hit and miss with me, but I absolutely loved this short-story collection; almost all of the stories in it are brilliant. One of the best is "The City, Born Great", about a person seemingly destined to become a personal avatar of New York City, which seems to be the seed of her latest novel The City We Became. Many of them are fantasies about cities (often New York specifically), the power they have over people and the things that might secretly live within them. As Jemisin remarks in the prologue, several of the stories are responses to older classic works of science fiction; the opener, "Those Who Stay And Fight," is a barbed updating of/reaction to Ursula Le Guin's "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas", which might be puzzling to people unfamiliar with the earlier story. Elsewhere she does cyberpunk ("The Trojan Girl", maybe the story that worked the least well for me), steampunk ("The Effluent Engine"), fantastical food stories ("L'Alchimista" and "Cuisine des Mémoires"), fairy tales, and stories that became the basis for some of her novel series.
I have to admit that my emotional reaction to these stories was probably conditioned by the fact that I read them in the hospital while recovering from surgery and on a collection of powerful opiates and other drugs.
Kristen Arnett, Mostly Dead Things
I know Kristen Arnett mostly from her hilarious Twitter activity, but she's a fine mainstream novelist as well. Mostly Dead Things revolves around Jessa-Lynn Morton, the heir apparent to her father's Central Florida taxidermy business when he suddenly commits suicide. Her mother's reaction to his death is, to Jessa-Lynn, disturbing and unexpected: she starts rearranging his taxidermied animals into sexually suggestive tableaux, which attract the attention of a local art dealer... a woman who is also interested in Jessa-Lynn.
That relationship is a bit scary in itself, since Jessa-Lynn still is not over the longstanding love triangle in which she and her brother competed for/shared the affections of the same woman. The possibility that she may be the Other Woman once again is particularly concerning. On some level, Jessa-Lynn just wants everything to go back to the way it was. But the situation has to hit a real crisis point before she can accept that that isn't going to happen, and, particularly, reconnect in some meaningful way with her mother.
This is a funny and weird book, with gruesome details of taxidermy alternating with the swirling family drama. Ultimately it's a story about someone who is very set in her ways learning how to accept change, even catastrophic change, and get something good out of it in the end.
Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch and Akata Warrior
These are YA fantasies in the "young person learns to be a wizard" subgenre. This kind of story, of course, long predates the Harry Potter series. But Akata Witch in particular seems like it was written in dialogue with Harry Potter, so to speak: it has many structural and plot elements analogous to the first few Potter books but executed completely differently, as if Okorafor decided to prove she could do this better, using a cultural background of modern Nigeria and West African juju, instead of Britain and Western lore (and it is better, in fact). Young Sunny Nwazue learns that she's a magic-capable Leopard Person, is inducted into the secret world of Leopard People and becomes part of a coven of young people destined to try to stop a sorcerer gone bad. (She's also an excellent athlete--but the sport isn't anything magical, it's soccer!) The second book branches out a bit and does some different things: Sunny gets in trouble with the magical authorities for rescuing her non-magical brother from a dangerous college confraternity, travels to a secret city of magicians on a giant flying rodent and has to stop a destructive supernatural being from reentering the world. One detail suggests that this may be set in the same timeline as Lagoon, though I doubt the plot of that would have played out quite the way it did if there were organized Leopard People in the world, so maybe not.
A warning: the titles of these books actually contain a fairly intense Nigerian slur aimed usually at African-Americans (they had to be retitled for the Nigerian and UK markets, to What Sunny Saw in the Flames and Sunny and the Mysteries of Osisi). It's something that Sunny Nwazue, who is American-born and also has albinism, gets called a lot. I suspect Sunny's albinism is not super-accurately depicted--her visual impairment only extends to the point of needing glasses--but there are implications that this manifests differently in Leopard People.
Nnedi Okorafor, Remote Control
Okorafor's latest novella is a vivid and remarkably sad story set in near-future Ghana, about a girl who gains death-dealing powers from a strange alien seed and inadvertently kills her family and everyone she knows, then becomes a legendary wandering figure, "Death's adopted daughter". I liked it but it isn't a feel-good read. There are interesting elements of futurism in the stage setting: stretchable TVs made of gel, a town dominated by a technology market whose point of pride is its traffic-controlling robot.
John Scalzi, The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire and The Last Emperox
This series is sort of John Scalzi writing a distant descendant of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. There's an interstellar space empire that is doomed to collapse for reasons beyond anyone's control (though it's FTL-travel physics rather than futuristic social science); plans must be made to save civilization in the aftermath; there are oracular holograms, scientists disbelieved by the dopey powerful, confrontations in boardrooms, battling plotters and counterplotters weaving tangled webs of subterfuge. The main difference is that the characters are John Scalzi-style smartasses. Also there's a lot more sex. Fun if you enjoy this sort of thing.
N. K. Jemisin, How Long 'Til Black Future Month?
N. K. Jemisin's novels are hit and miss with me, but I absolutely loved this short-story collection; almost all of the stories in it are brilliant. One of the best is "The City, Born Great", about a person seemingly destined to become a personal avatar of New York City, which seems to be the seed of her latest novel The City We Became. Many of them are fantasies about cities (often New York specifically), the power they have over people and the things that might secretly live within them. As Jemisin remarks in the prologue, several of the stories are responses to older classic works of science fiction; the opener, "Those Who Stay And Fight," is a barbed updating of/reaction to Ursula Le Guin's "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas", which might be puzzling to people unfamiliar with the earlier story. Elsewhere she does cyberpunk ("The Trojan Girl", maybe the story that worked the least well for me), steampunk ("The Effluent Engine"), fantastical food stories ("L'Alchimista" and "Cuisine des Mémoires"), fairy tales, and stories that became the basis for some of her novel series.
I have to admit that my emotional reaction to these stories was probably conditioned by the fact that I read them in the hospital while recovering from surgery and on a collection of powerful opiates and other drugs.
Kristen Arnett, Mostly Dead Things
I know Kristen Arnett mostly from her hilarious Twitter activity, but she's a fine mainstream novelist as well. Mostly Dead Things revolves around Jessa-Lynn Morton, the heir apparent to her father's Central Florida taxidermy business when he suddenly commits suicide. Her mother's reaction to his death is, to Jessa-Lynn, disturbing and unexpected: she starts rearranging his taxidermied animals into sexually suggestive tableaux, which attract the attention of a local art dealer... a woman who is also interested in Jessa-Lynn.
That relationship is a bit scary in itself, since Jessa-Lynn still is not over the longstanding love triangle in which she and her brother competed for/shared the affections of the same woman. The possibility that she may be the Other Woman once again is particularly concerning. On some level, Jessa-Lynn just wants everything to go back to the way it was. But the situation has to hit a real crisis point before she can accept that that isn't going to happen, and, particularly, reconnect in some meaningful way with her mother.
This is a funny and weird book, with gruesome details of taxidermy alternating with the swirling family drama. Ultimately it's a story about someone who is very set in her ways learning how to accept change, even catastrophic change, and get something good out of it in the end.