allways a smile, around and around

Today while waiting for my car’s brake pads to be replaced, I finish The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw. This is a short (fewer than 100 pages) fairy tale-inspired horror story about a mermaid and a plague doctor who get wrapped up in the sick games of a village they pass through.

I liked the idea of this story a lot more than the execution. Have you ever had the sense a book really wanted to say something profound about human nature? This book felt like that constantly. It also felt like the author desperately wanted the reader to be impressed with her large and esoteric vocabulary. Things were phrased and rephrased in ways that felt keenly like they were only there so the author could use a specific word. Which, fair, we’ve all done it, but the scaffolding showed so plainly here it felt very clumsy. I’m not usually one to fuss too much about purple prose, but the language here often felt decorative enough that meaning was obscured rather than clarified.

I like the vibes in this book, and the two main characters were engaging (although I felt like the half-mermaid children were a pretty glaring dropped thread) and the plot interesting, and some of the writing was beautiful, but more often it was distracting. I never sank into the book, which was too bad, because there were some cool moments.

Can’t say I’m inclined to look into more of Khaw’s writing, because I think her style is just not for me. I don’t think I wasted my time with this book, but I don’t need to see more from her.

I don’t know how I keep timing these so that I finish my audiobook and my paper book one right after the other. This weekend I also wrapped up The Black Fantastic, an anthology compiled by Andre M. Carrington. Thank you to pauraque for bringing this one to my attention! This is a collection of “Afrofuturist” stories by Black authors. If you want more detail, Pauraque has done individual reviews of each story which you can read here; I won’t get that specific.

With the usual caveat that all anthologies vary in quality, I enjoyed this one. There were a lot of very different stories, from some really fantastical stuff to ones that are just a little bit to the left of the world as it stands. On the high end of things, pieces like A Guide to the Native Fruits of Hawai’i by Alayna Dawn Johnson, where the protagonist grapples with her decision to collaborate with a group of vampire invaders to prey on the locals (and the metaphor of vampirism for the way Hawaii is treated by wealthy Americans is not lost in the shuffle); or The Orb by Tara Campbell, which was both strange and unexplained, choosing to focus not on the “why” or “how” of the situation but again on the moral quandary of its main character.

On the lower end, ones like The Ones Who Stay and Fight by NK Jemisin, which felt…narratively unclear, to say the least. It is either a satire of the kind of utopia writers create where its status as utopia is essentially dependent on eliminating any disagreement or contact with the outside world…or it’s a whole-hearted endorsement of that view. And if I can’t tell which, I tend to think the author’s failed at their purpose; or Ruler of the Rear Guard by Maurice Broaddus, which seemed to end just as it was getting to the plot.

Overall, I had fun with this anthology. SFF short story collections, done well, are such a scintillating showcase of creativity and I felt that here.

On Sunday I finished The Tainted Cup, the first book in the Shadow of the Leviathan series by Robert Jackson Bennett. This is a fantasy murder mystery with an element of political thriller.

The main character is Ana Dolabra, an eccentric but brilliant investigator, and I believe this is the first time I’ve ever seen a woman fill this role. The wacky but effective investigator is of course a very well-known stock character, but has always been, in my experience, a man. I found Ana delightful; strange but not off-putting, and without coming off like the author was working to hard to make her quirky.

However, our point-of-view protagonist is Din Kol, Ana’s put-upon assistant, on whose shoulders falls the managing of her many idiosyncrasies. They’re a fun team to watch work, and in this first book we get to see their working relationship unfold, as they’ve only recently teamed up at the start. Din is fine, but mostly I appreciated him as a lens for Ana.

Bennett’s fantasy world is characterized by fantastical use and manipulation of plants and the human body. Din, for instance, has been modified to be an “engraver”—someone with an eidetic memory. For obvious reasons, this serves him well as aid to an investigator.

I think Bennett does a good job of throwing you into the world and letting you use context to figure most of it out. I get bored with SFF novels that feel the need to hold your hand, as if you might be a first-time SFF reader who never encountered a magic system before, so I was relieved when Bennett just started telling the story and letting me figure the world out as it went along. I’d rather be a bit lost at times than be toddled along, but I never felt lost here.

The novel touches on some things that I feel are pretty keenly relevant, like the ability of the wealthy to avoid justice and their willingness to inflict suffering on the rest of society to better their own position (and then justify it to themselves).

I don’t read a ton of murder mysteries, so I may not be the best judge of this, but I also felt that Ana worked well. It’s a tough trick writing a character who’s meant to be much smarter than the rest of the cast (perhaps even than the author!), and it can fail a couple of ways: the supposed “brilliant” deductions are obvious to the average reader, making the rest of the cast look painfully dull for not seeing them; or the machinations are so obtuse with so little evidence the reader simply won’t believe the detective could have figured that out without an ass-pull from the author. I didn’t think Bennett fell into either of these traps and every detail Ana referred to in one of her deductions was something that had been mentioned before.

I only have one real criticism and that is about how unrealistic the sword fight scene was. I simply don't think it was necessary to showcase what the Bennett was trying to show us about Din, and <spoiler>having an untried swordsman defeat three--almost four--trained imperial soldiers on his own (partially because they do him the courtesy of attacking one at a time)</spoiler> was so unrealistic it jarred me right out of the scene. As Milgen points out later in the book--fighting is not just about memorizing the right moves.

I enjoyed this book and I plan to read the next one. Very interested to see where Ana’s adventures take her next!