cyphomandra

I was surprised when SE Harmon's name didn't autopopulate in the tags of the last entry, as I remembered writing it up, and then I found it featured in the first half of a monthly booklog I hadn't finished. Here they all are. Of the new books I liked Venezia best, but all the re-reads this month are books I'm very fond of.

A Company of Swans, Eva Ibbotson (re-read)
The Bear and the Nightingale, Katherine Arden
The Hunting Party, Lucy Foley
Blueprint, SE Harmon
The Heartless Troll, Øyvind Torseter, translator Kari Dickson
This Wicked Gift, Proof by Seduction, Trial by Desire (Carhart series), Courtney Milan
Heels over Head, Elyse Springer
My Little Brony, Natalie Whipple/KM Hayes
Diana Takes a Chance, Catherine Christian
We Can Make a Life: a memoir of family, earthquakes and courage, Chessie Henry
El Deafo, Cece Bell
Venezia, Jiro Taniguchi
Into the Dream, William Sleator (re-read)
The Twelfth Day of July, Joan Lingard
Monica Muddles Through
Katy, Jacqueline Wilson
Binti, Nnedi Okarofor
Arabel’s Raven, Joan Aiken
Once Ghosted, Twice Shy, Alyssa Cole.
( Reviews under cut. )

Three books I had problems with first, and then I'll post the review of the one I really liked.

Parasite Pig, William Sleator. I read an interesting piece about Sleator’s writing (which I have no doubt bookmarked somewhere) that also had some really nice analysis about the sibling relationships that are so often a central part of his stories, and the recent death of Sleator’s sister Vicky. Anyway, what I have taken away from that and my own reading is that after a number of very strong novels (House of Stairs, Green Futures of Tycho, The Boy who reversed himself, etc), Sleator’s output deteriorated, with some books that were just thin and others that were plain nasty, but some of his more recent ones were supposed to be good again. I picked up The Last Universe as well, which is dedicated to Vicky, and which I think may be one of the good ones, but read this first, largely because I spent some of last night playing Cosmic Encounters and it seemed appropriate. It’s a sequel to the (much better) Interstellar Pig, about a board game involving aliens that turns out to be all too real, set in a beach town during a summer holiday.

( Parasite Pig, William Sleator. )

Everlight, Claudia Gray. I am supposedly on a no-vampires kick, with my last exception being Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (very good), although I will no doubt remember another exception once I post this. I picked Everlight, which starts with a flashforward with our heroes in a burning building surrounded by vampires, and jumps back to first person narrator Bianca starting at creepy private boarding school Evernight Academy, up despite that because I’ve read and enjoyed the author’s fanfic, which includes a number of pieces with interesting complex female leads (the author prefers no direct connections, so I can’t be more specific).

( Evernight, Claudia Gray. )

Dear Julia, Amy Bronwen Zemser. All Elaine Hamilton wants to do is cook, having been obsessed with Julia Child and French cuisine since age 6, but her mother is a US congresswoman who has been fighting for women’s rights most of her professional career and sees Elaine’s fondness for the kitchen as a weakness. Fortunately Elaine is about to meet Lucida Sans (self-named), another girl at her high school who is obsessed with being famous and spends most of her time in costumes but will eventually realise Elaine’s talent and push her into succeeding publically and, finally, confronting her mother.

This didn’t work for me at all, from the bizarre feminists can’t be chefs central conflict through the vast amounts of unconvincing quirkiness flung at the page (Elaine has five brothers, including one who is either cross-dressing or transgender but not all that well developed either way; there is an evil villain called Croton, also at the high school, who has one dead eye and is Lucida’s ex-boyfriend; recurring street festivals all end in chaotic and supposedly charming catastrophes) to the setting. Mainly, the timeline, which I’ve been trying to pin down – Elaine’s mother was at college in 1976, so I thought maybe we were in the early 90s, but when Elaine is 6, her mother says “twenty years since liberation” (and, with another ten years until the time of the story, that would put it close to present day). However, Julia Child, who died in 2004, is still alive but “quite old”. Tech level felt like the eighties - all filming on video tape, no one has mobile phones or the internet, but somehow they all recognise Lucida Sans as a familiar name (and it’s described in the text as “a font on the computer”. The food does sound nice, but it's all very, very rich (I began getting cravings for a ripe sliced tomato), the characters never really come to life, and the plot is extremely basic. Disappointing.