With few distractions and a lot of unsupervised time, I’ve been burning through stuff pretty fast. We’ll see how well that holds, but so far, I’ve read almost half again as many books as I set out to at the beginning of the year — which is fine with me, but does lead to some lengthy book round-ups. So:

After finishing up The Chronicles of Narnia, I launched into a book I knew I would love: Marina, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. My love of Ruiz Zafon’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books cycle is pretty well-documented, I think, and the author’s untimely death hit me pretty hard. So naturally, I sought out one of his other works, which I had not read; his earlier, arguably-YA novels have been translated more recently, and this one was available, in audiobook form, through the good offices of the Libby app for my local library system.

Delightfully campy, and absolutely doing a disservice to the novel it encloses.

I said “arguably-YA” because, while the novel’s protagonist is a teenager, as is the major deuteragonist, Marina reads perfectly well for adults, too. Even in this novel, Ruiz Zafon’s last before embarking on the Cemetery of Forgotten Books cycle, his perfect eye for the vanished and vanishing, the lost-as-it’s-happening quality of youthful experience, is in full flower, as is his love for Barcelona. Marina follows fifteen-year-old Oscar Drai, more or less abandoned at boarding school by his parents, as he falls in with German and Marina, a sometime-artist and his beautiful daughter. Their lives are bound up in art and literature and, of course, the unquiet ghosts of the past — and Oscar is soon completely enveloped in the mysteries that haunt Marina, her father, and the generation before German. To completely express my affection of Ruiz Zafon’s style — his flair for the gothic, his melancholy characters who are to a one driven by desperation for something, his preternatural gift for pacing — would take much more time than I have here, but suffice to say: I fucking loved it.

Continuing, unsuspectingly, in the neighborhood of the supernatural and the impact of one generation on another, I went from there into the audiobook of Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child. Shamefully, this is the first of her works that I’ve read; I intend to correct this in future. Read by Morrison herself, God Help the Child is her last published novel, appearing four years before her death in 2019.

Cover art for the audio version from here.

The novel largely focuses on Bride, a young woman on the cusp of career-making success, whose life has been shaped by her mother’s disdain for her and her blue-black skin, and by her part in sending an innocent woman to prison for years. Bride’s attempt to vindicate the latter action sets the plot in motion: the woman assaults Bride, and Bride’s healing from both that attack and her mother’s callous treatment of her takes up the bulk of the novel. Bride’s search for healing takes the form of a kind of quest to find Booker, her former lover who vanished from her life, but left a lot behind — but also, on the physical plane of the novel, by Bride aging in reverse.

This summary is, of course, radically simplified, but the quality of the novel, on every level, is indisputable. This is scarcely a surprise, but as so often happens, I am left kicking myself for having failed to read Morrison for so long.

The next book that I finished was in paperback form, and my path to reading The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso is one rife enough with coincidence that it seems worth relating. During the editing process of my first publication in my field, the developmental editor with whom I was working suggested the first chapter of the novel as a guide to help smooth over a particular passage. I was surprised when she did so, though, because a copy of it had been gathering dust on my shelves for literal years since I purchased it on a whim towards the end of my undergraduate career — and it was only as I was reading it that I learned of its deep connection to the top-secret translation project to which I have alluded elsewhere. It felt cool — the kind of thing that happens in books about books and the people who love them.

Since the cover is stupid, here’s the author, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Of course, the real question: is it good, though? The answer really depends. It’s a very moody sort of work, and I don’t mean that only in the sense that it displays Greco-Roman mythology in the kind of ambient, wandering way that someone who knows it very well would tend to. I mean you’d have to be in the mood for it; you’d want to be in the frame of mind to want to take a walk through the breadth and into the depths of that mythology, with an extremely knowledgeable Calasso as the Vergil to your Dante. I cannot, in good conscience, echo Gore Vidal’s blurb, describing it as “a perfect work like no other”; it’s a beautiful work — a work both in the sense of showing that work has been done on Calasso’s part to know all this stuff, and in the sense of its overall quality — but for all its sweep and grandeur, it nonetheless felt niche. It’s very much a classicist’s “perfect work,” but not one I’d foist on anyone without at least some of Calasso’s depth of study. I liked it; it hit me at the right time, and I very much was in the mood, but I can definitely say that there would be a wrong time, and not the mood. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

I followed it with the ebook (again, thanks, Libby app!) of A Blade So Black by L. L. McKinney, and then by the first two volumes in paper form of N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy — but we’ll return to these later, when I finished their follow-ups.

The next audiobook I finished brought me to the end of Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch series, Akata Warrior. I had read Akata Witch previously, and enjoyed it immensely, but I had to wait for this one. The wait, however, did not diminish the thrill in the slightest.

The covers of both books, from the Children’s Book Review.

Akata Warrior picks up a year after the events of Akata Witch, and finds Sunny Nwazue and her friends, Orlu, Chichi, and Sasha, further advanced in their studies as part of Leopard Society — and once again, called upon to avert world-shaking disaster. Like its predecessor, Akata Warrior is exciting and compelling, and Okorafor strikes a perfect balance between the workings of Leopard Society and Sunny’s burgeoning magical abilities, and transforming Sunny’s more normal activities, like her love for and skill at soccer, into exciting scene-setting opportunities. Although the books have sometimes been compared to the Harry Potter series, this does them a disservice (and Okorafor herself has pointed this out) for number of reasons, but most notably to me is the nature of Sunny’s character. Harry Potter is a cypher, his personality, by the latter books, nothing but yelling and feeling sad or scared; Sunny is bright and engaged, with a variety of interests and complex and beautifully-realized relationships. While the books are definitely written with a younger reader than my 30-year-old-self in mind, I am glad I read them, excited at the prospect of a third one, and equally anticipating my nephews and niece getting old enough for me to share these books with them.

And this is about where I finished the Broken Earth trilogy. The first installment, The Fifth Season, took me a little longer; it felt like a slower burn, a careful arrangement of parts that was nonetheless thrilling. But The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky I finished in a matter of days, one hot upon the next: having arranged her pieces, Jemisin topples them with speed, like dominoes — specifically, like those really complex domino set-ups that are impossible not to watch as they fall and branch in unexpected ways.

I realize I’m horrifically late to the party on this one; multiple people in real life — not even on the internet, like actually in-person people — whose taste I trust have been recommending them to me for some time. But I am not a smart man, and I tend to do stuff when I feel like it, which leads me frequently to arrive at a deservedly-popular thing long after everyone else has moved on.

The covers of all three books, from Ars Technica.

But Jesus H! All three books deserved all the praise they got; I have rarely if ever encountered novels so beautifully built and so well-realized on every level, from the formal structure all the way through the plot and the characters all the way down to the sentence structure. Thinking back on it, I’m pretty sure the last time I was this blown away by a trilogy of anything was Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, and that was almost ten years ago. The novels roughly center around Nassun, who returns home one day to find that her son has been beaten to death and her husband and daughter are missing, just as a cataclysmic environmental event, a Season, is beginning. I’m not saying any more; better to go in not knowing; better to be surprised and beguiled and (if you’re me) actually suspend disbelief for once in fucking ever.

I hit a bit of a slow patch here; as with Abercrombie’s work, Jemisin left me feeling grumpy and aching for more. I started some audiobooks and didn’t finish them; I was waiting on some holds from the library, and nothing was coming through; like a sensible lad I started reading something completely different on the meatside, of which more later.

In any case, I eventually settled on The Court of Miracles by Kester Grant. I somehow missed the memo that it’s a kind of reworking of Le Miserables, which I haven’t read (I spent my last Hugo token on The Man Who Laughs, which was awesome, but I also read it because I couldn’t afford to get more Batman comics, so perhaps reconsider your opinion of my taste), nor have I seen the musical. Honestly, I probably would have a very different opinion of it if I had any knowledge of the source material; as it stands, I liked it well enough: in this version, Eponine is a thief and the scion of one of the higher-ranker thieves in the titular court, which is comprised largely of the criminal underclass of Paris, circa 1830, give or take. The French revolution was utterly quashed, in this version — and frankly, when this was clarified, I got much more interested in the story, and didn’t really catch on to the fact that I was essentially reading Les Mis fanfic until rather later. In any case, we follow Eponine, here referred to as Nina, as she rises to prominence in the thieves’ guild (basically), gaining in skill and notoriety as the story progresses.

Personally, I liked the structure of the story, in spite of the somewhat heavy-handed “fairy tales” that convey to the reader what happened in this universe to give rise to the Miracle Court and thwarted progress of the revolution, to say nothing of the gratuitous French. Watching Nina become, basically, a chessmaster capable of pulling of the kind of gambit with which the story ends was plenty of fun, and it kept me amply entertained. I understand that it is the first of a projected trilogy (Jesus, I’m too deep into genre), and personally, I’m looking forward to the subsequent installments.

It was here that I finished A Dream So Dark, the sequel to A Blade So Black. As the titles and the cover art may suggest, L. L. McKinney’s Nightmare-Verse is a reworking of Alice in Wonderland, which centers on Alice Kingston, an Atlanta teen who is on track to become the greatest protector of humanity from the nightmare beings that now stalk Wonderland — let alone Wonderland’s warring royal family, and their various concerns and entanglements.

These two books — and at least one more is due out this year — definitely fall into the category of YA fiction where the fact that the main character is in high school is a major part of the plot. I’ll admit, I struggle with that part of the genre, because I was homeschooled and there’s only so much you can learn from movies. That fact made the books a little bit of a slower read for me, but ultimately, the compelling combination of Alice’s character and, in A Dream So Dark, the further exploration of Wonderland and the people who live there, kept me reading. Worth noting, too, that A Dream So Dark is notably better than A Blade So Black: Alice’s character is better established; her relationship with her mother and her knowledge of her own destiny are deepened and explored; basically, it was good enough that it balanced out the parts about, like, regular high school from the first book, and good enough that I’m looking forward to the third installment.

In meatspace, I finished another of the books I retrieved from the KU Libraries just before the shutdown (pro tip: resident borrower cards at university libraries are pricey but you can keep that shit for a while): Daniel Alan Herwitz’s Aesthetics: Key Concepts in Philosophy. I figured, given that I talk about it on a fairly regular basis, I should probably actually, you know… learn something about it.

And Herwitz provides an able introduction: his style is never too academic, nor does it condescend. Honestly, it was almost energetic, until a 20-page ramble through film theory, which I found interminable. But he bounced back after that, and I appreciated his occasional calls-to-action. It’s nice to feel included, and I have at least a general sense of the development of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline.

Again, though, that took me a minute, and I was still struggling with just not having anything as good as N. K. Jemisin to read (or listen to as an audiobook). I eventually settled on Wink Poppy Midnight by April Genevieve Tucholke to fulfill my listening needs, after a few abortive attempts at other things for which I was simply not in the mood.

Cover image taken from goodreads — and a beautiful cover it is.

Nor, I suspect, was a really in the mood or the demographic for Wink Poppy Midnight. It’s not bad, by any means, but it seems like the kind of book that hits you at the right time or it doesn’t (cf Le Grand Meulnes, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, etc), and for me, it was not. The novel follows the three titles characters as they… repeatedly are dicks to each other? I don’t know, man. The style was nice, and the whole proceeding reminded me, at its best, of Kelly Link in an oddly non-speculative mood — but at its worst, of something Daniel Handler’s Basic Eight might have produced while attempting to write a literary thriller. I don’t necessarily want my time back, but I did want this book to be more than it was, I guess.

I will remark that, just earlier today, I finished up Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir — another novel that amply lived up to its hype — but that will probably be discussed in greater depth when I get the sequel (and I intend to, because boy howdy). But that does bring us up to speed, and god only knows what will come next. On, like, any level.

※

If you enjoyed reading this, consider following our writing staff on Twitter, where you can find Cameron and Edgar. Just in case you didn’t know, we also have a Facebook fan page, which you can follow if you’d like regular updates and a bookshop where you can buy the books we review and reference (while supporting both us and a coalition of local bookshops all over the United States.)

Edgar's Book Round-Up, July-August