The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty

I’m so glad to be wrong about a fantasy trilogy. By mistake, I started the Daevabad Trilogy at an awkward place—the beginning of the second book—because I mixed up City of Brass with Kingdom of Copper. At the start of Kingdom of Copper, the three main characters, Nahri, Ali, and Dara, are reeling from the events of the first book. I thought that they were flailing about with no motivation, and that the worldbuilding was too cute. Why was “grand vizier” spelled “grand wazir?” Why should I care what the abandoned hospital in Daevabad looks like? Couldn’t the zulfiqar just be called a magic sword? But about a hundred pages in, the three main characters choose new directions for themselves, and I got sucked in to rooting for them.

Nahri, an orphan teenager in Cairo, discovers she has magical ancestry. She’s not only djinn, but lost djinn royalty. She travels to Daevabad, the magical hidden city of the djinn, where she grapples with court intrigue and her birthright. This premise should be a pile of epic fantasy clichés, with djinn swapped in for elves, but S.A. Chakraborty is cleverer than that.

Chakraborty has a deep understanding of Middle Eastern history—scholar was her original career plan. She draws from Middle Easter folklore about djinn, ifrit, daevas, marids, and ghouls, and all of these peoples have roles in Daevastani society and fraught interactions. King Solomon, who commanded demons in Biblical and Quranic legend, plays an outsize role in their collective history. Disney-style genies, who are obedient and attached to a bottle? They’re real, all right, and the reason is horrifying.

Chakraborty herself is a Westerner, so she takes all that knowledge of Middle Eastern folklore and weds it to her knowledge of the Tolkien-style fantasy canon. The look of the trilogy will be familiar to fans of the genre. These books are doorstoppers with maps in the front and glossaries in the back. There are epic battle scenes and a lot of backpacking.

She knows exactly what she’s doing combining Middle Eastern folklore with high fantasy tropes, especially the trope about magical bloodlines. You know how Aragorn’s ancestors used to rule Númenor dozens of generations back, which makes him blessed with long life and also destined to be the king of Gondor? Or the Targaryens, who used to rule Westeros until another noble family deposed them. The survivors, with their fire magic, want their birthright back. Nahri’s royal family, the Nahids, resembles the Númenóreans and the Targaryens. The resolution of the Nahid situation is so satisfying that it gives me closure about my Targaryen anger.

Nahri, Ali, and Dara are all very human characters, even though they’re technically not. The plot is driven by their gray decisions, and conflict arises from okay people working at cross purposes to each other. They don’t drift, like I thought in the awkward middle of the trilogy.

The Daevabad trilogy has a slow build, but if you stick with it, you get a rip-roaring adventure across the lands of the djinn. Give the world time to soak in, and read the trilogy in the right order!

The Lockwood & Co. series by Jonathan Stroud

I’m a fan of Jonathan Stroud because of his awesome Bartimaeus series from the early 2000s. As part of my quest for literary comfort food during the pandemic, I looked up what he’d written lately. Boy, was I rewarded.

The Lockwood & Co. series describes an alternate universe where, starting in the 1960s, ghost hauntings get much, much worse. As the ghostly epidemic spreads across Britain, private ghost-hunting agencies spring up to keep hauntings in check. Also, only children and teenagers can see ghosts. The result? Ghostbusters, if it had an improbably young staff who also happened to be British. An utter delight.

Teen psychic, Lucy Carlisle, rolls into London looking for work. She eventually finds a position at the Lockwood agency, headed by the mysterious Anthony Lockwood. Over the series, the Lockwood crew diagnose haunted houses, solve murders, and defend the agency’s reputation and integrity. As time goes on, they think they’re on to the cause of the ghost plague.

This series is so wonderful because Stroud treats ghosts like hard magic and works out all the implications to their logical conclusion. For instance, the touch of a ghost causes a heart attack. Ghosts are vulnerable to silver. Ghosts can be contained in silver-lined glass. Suppose you trap a ghost in a silver-glass sphere and load it into a grenade launcher … you got yourself a terrorist weapon.

When members of the largest ghost-hunting agency start getting jobs at DEPRAC, the Department of Paranormal Research and Control, Stroud even examines ghost regulatory capture. These novels are marketed as kiddie stuff, but there’s plenty in here to delight an adult.

They’re also wonderfully morbid – I like Sweeny Todd a little bit too much, and these books are like that. The Lockwood agency has a job opening for Lucy because their previous agent fell off a roof and died. Skull, a possessed skull that the agency keeps around in a jar of broth, is totally the reincarnation of the smart-aleck genie Bartimaeus. Yet the books are oddly heartwarming, too. The main characters are decent people and their problems have solutions. I need more of that this year.

I’m especially fond of Quill Kipps, a 22-year-old who recently lost his psychic powers. Despite his muggle status and insistence he’s not a heroic person, he keeps acting heroically. I think I like him because I am reading this as an uncool 32-year-old. (Stroud so thoroughly convinced me he was going to die at the end, that when he started talking, I thought he was a zombie.)

The series left me feeling like I’ll miss these brave young ghost hunters, and I wish I knew when Jonathan Stroud will publish again.

Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

A world that vaguely resembles Industrial-Revolution Japan reels from the aftermath of a cross-continental war. Humans, demons, half-demons, and cats are all nursing old wounds and scheming against each other. Meanwhile, a young half-demon, Maika Halfwolf, has an eldritch abomination in her arm that’s getting more powerful by the day. She has to cut it out of herself before it causes a fate far worse than another war.

Monstress is produced by a creative duo, Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. As you can tell from my description above, the plot is kind of all over the place. The first volume of Monstress especially takes us a long time to figure out what is going on, because there are so many flashbacks to catch us up on all the political machinations. Takeda, the illustrator, is the real star of this show. Her rendition of the Monstress world is lush, and culturally rich, and full of visual background jokes. She make herself a professional challenge in Monstress to draw three-quarters of the characters as women, no explanation. It is so refreshing to see regular old palace guards as women! And they wear proper clothes!

The gender ratio makes me curious about the social structure of this world. I get a vibe that women marry women for life mates, and consort with men for babies.

Maika Halfwolf ties the story together, as the character trying to prevent the end of the world. But the side characters are even more interesting than her. Kippa is a genuinely good person, despite the scars of war. I especially enjoy Sir Corvin, who dresses like a tormented emo vampire but enjoys excellent mental health. When he witnesses a pair of eldritch abominations fighting each other, he decides he has no skin in that game!

Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal

WEAPONIZED CARTESIAN DUALISM. That’s all you need to know about how awesome this book is.

It’s World War One, and British soldiers are trained that if they die, they should report to headquarters and tell a medium the last thing they saw, to coordinate with military intelligence. Naturally, a ghost and a medium work together to solve the ghost’s murder because that’s the coolest thing you can do with this magic system.

Ghost Talkers is surprisingly light-hearted given all the death. I will love any book that contains lines like this:

“In that case, you’re forgiven.”

He winked. “Thank you. Hey … that’s the light. Thought they were foo…” And he was gone.

It’s also a great of example of how rip-roaring adventure stories are done. Kowal sets up Checkov’s guns and Checkov’s gunmen all over the beginning of the story. No detail in the first few chapters goes to waste. How does she keep the stakes high, when one of the main characters is already dead? Lingering on Earth isn’t good for ghosts. They shed memories until there’s nothing left but a blob of grief and unfinished business that can’t cross over to the afterlife because it doesn’t remember how. Bingo – the murder mystery has a built-in time limit. Kowal also does a great job with the recurring motif of kissing in all its forms.

Ghosts are hard magic in this universe. Souls follow rules and clever people use those rules to support technology. Ghost Talkers explores the implications of the rules from many angles. For example, ghosts make pretty good air conditioning and excellent spies. Mediums make good therapists because they can see the souls of the dead and the living. Ghost Talkers doesn’t quite answer all the questions it raises, though. Could a ghost kill somebody by sitting on them? If you drop the temperature of somebody’s heart by a couple of degrees, I think that heart wouldn’t work well. And most important, what happens if you astral project while drunk?

Ghost Talkers has some flaws. The best medium is a black woman from Antigua. The other main characters get over their racism as they work with her. I have an easier time believing that dead people can talk. But I see why Kowal did it – to make the heroes heroic in the eyes of a 2016 reader.

The ending is also a bit choppy. I had a few moments where I wondered how that character got all the way over there between scene breaks.

I found the culprit a grayer character than I think Kowal intended. [Merrow isn’t a traitor. He’s an enemy combatant. He grew up persecuted for having the Sight, fought for his country anyway, and suffered the psychological torture of the man he murdered following him around. Now he’ll spend the rest of the war in a military prison under suicide watch as Germany gets crushed. If he’s unlucky enough to get old, he’ll get to see World War Two. He was Germany’s finest, but he failed anyway.]

On balance, I found Ghost Talkers loads of fun, and I especially recommend it to writers who want to watch an expert at work.

Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly

I’ve been looking forward to the finale to the Amberlough Dossier series for some time, and Amnesty did not disappoint. If Amberlough was like fantasy Cabaret and Armistice was like fantasty Casablanca, then Amnesty was like the fantasy Nuremberg trials. Gedda is trying to put itself together after seven years of OSP rule, and trying to work out how much each person is guilty for what happened. It’s a meditation on what justice is and whether anybody can get it. None of the main characters get just fates, but they do get satisfying ones.

Mad artistic props to Donnelly for not being afraid to write about permadeath.

As in the other books, she excels at characters and their inner workings. I wanted to know what happens to these screwed-up people to the last page.

My main complaint is the same I had for the other two books: I want politics. Donnelly’s really a romance writer who happens to have spies and governments in these books. Why was Gedda a GLBT paradise before the One State Party came to power? What was OSP ideology? They were homophobic, I guess? What was Hearther doctrine? The Hearther religion had political power under OSP rule and then they lost it again. Hearthers should remember this, yet lingering OSP support is nowhere to be found.

Gedda is supposed to be having a European-style election over the course of the book, yet Gedda’s parliament is nowhere to be found, either. Most irksome of all, two characters are running for prime minister. If Donnelly didn’t catch that, then Tor’s fact checkers really should have.

But I’m so glad the Amberlough Dossier exists. I don’t see nearly enough 20th-century fantasy, especially in a low-magic world that focuses on its people. My favorite scene of Amnesty took place at an all-night automat. As a smuggler cuts a deal with a radio broadcaster, the city of Amberlough shows how it isn’t how it used to be. Spec fiction has never ventured inside an automat before, so bravo for being on the vanguard.

Brienne of Tarth is my favorite character in Game of Thrones

Although I fully expect her to bite it within the next few weeks.

I love that Brienne isn’t sexy. I’ve seen plenty of women warriors in TV and movies, but they wear suspiciously sternum-cracking armor, they’re magically better at combat than the men around them, and they look fabulous. Hollywood’s compensating for sexism, sure, in the laziest way possible.

In Rogue One, for like three seconds we see one of the fighter pilots say something like, “Yep, got it.” And … she’s wearing a regular old flight suit. She’s not special. She’s part of the army. The moment is magical.

We got a lot more than a moment with Brienne. She walks like The Hulk, her armor’s designed to keep her alive, her hair’s a messy crop, she’s exhausted, she hasn’t bathed in weeks. I love it every time she goes NYAAAAAAAAAARG when she’s killing zombies. She makes combat look hard. And it is hard. Her character suggests how a woman can get to be the best of the best in her field – by working her ass off.

I’m five foot seven, so I’ve got nothing on Gwendoline Christie’s six foot three. But I also crop my hair. I like machines. I choose my clothes based on what I won’t destroy in a few days. I think that Brienne is a cisgender, butch woman, but Westerosi doesn’t have words for those things, so she thinks she’s doing womanhood wrong. I also have questions about whether I’m feminine enough, and I love Brienne for it.

There are some characters who just stick with you, and I’ve kept a running list of their names. Brienne of Tarth is one of them. Lee Scoresby. Shevek. Susan Calvin. Brienne.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Why didn’t I learn about Malcolm X in school? Before I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I was vaguely aware that X existed, and that he was more militant than Martin Luther King.

X had an extraordinary life, and Alex Haley (of Roots) convinced him to tell him his story in a series of interviews. Then Haley crafted those interviews into this book. During his life, Malcolm X went through the foster care system, shined shoes, wore a really regrettable zoot suit, dodged the draft twice, dealt drugs, stole Oriental carpets, served six years in prison, joined the Nation of Islam and became its most prominent spokesman, went on the Hajj, made friends with Muhammad Ali, and got himself banned from France.

I don’t know what to make of him. I think he was an unreliable narrator, certainly. I think I share his bilious view of American-style Christianity. I think his criticism of smug Northern liberals was totally on point and still relevant today. But man was he harsh on black civil rights leaders who wanted to fight for rights any way other than his way.

For all his criticism of white people, he was awfully light on policy demands. What did he want white people to do? Maybe white people were never his intended audience. Maybe he would have come around to some policies if he had lived longer.

X was sexist. He complains of the white men who just knew he was stupid, yet he just knows that women are weak. His blind spot is all the more amazing because his sister Ella stands as such a towering counterexample in this book. His wife, Betty, barely gets a voice in this book. I wonder what she thought about her life.

I wonder what Malcolm X would have made of black immigrants. People who have weighed their options and decided that America is a safer place to live than home.

I think Malcolm X danced at the outer provinces of sanity, like Daenerys Targaryen, and he made it into his strength.

I think my favorite chapter of the autobiography might have been Alex Haley’s afterword. When he’d finally convinced X to grant him an interview, X refused to talk to him. Haley was on the verge of giving up. But he noticed that X drank enormous amounts of coffee, and always scribbled on any piece of paper nearby. So Haley served X coffee with napkins, harvested the scribbled napkins, dated them, and cribbed from them for interview questions. I’m not sure what I think about X, but I definitely appreciate Haley.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant

The Traitor Baru Cormorant was recommended to me at last year’s 4th Street Fantasy convention. It has a great premise: a fantasy set in a world without magic magic, where the magic system comes from politics and economics. Young Baru Cormorant grows up on a Polynesia-like island that gets colonized. She decides to rise through the ranks of her colonizers’ society and destroy it from within.

But it didn’t work for me. Baru’s story contained so much gratuitous misery and awfulness that it had the opposite effect on me than the gut-wrenching that other reviewers have described. I pulled back from it. I couldn’t suspend disbelief or the feeling that most of the prose is designed to be LOOK HOW GRITTY I AM.

Man, I care what happens next, though. I flipped through this book enough to get a sense of the plot, as well as The Monster Baru Cormorant. I’m eager to see how Baru’s master plan turns out in the third book.

The Man Who Bridged the Mist by Kij Johnson

While reading “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, I wondered who this Kij Johnson was and where I could find more of her work. Turns out she also wrote The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe. No wonder this novella is so good.

The “Man Who Bridged the Mist” has a perfectly shaped plot. The story opens when Kit Meinem, an engineer/architect, rolls into town with a suitcase full of plans for a bridge. It closes just before the bridge opens to the public, as Kit prepares to move on.

Normally you’d expect Kit to meet resistance from the locals, or get snapped at by the monsters in the mist river, but the conflict in this story is subtler: he falls in love with the ferrywoman, who will become obsolete when the bridge is finished. She loves to ferry, but she agrees the job is so dangerous nobody should do it.

But especially you get sucked along by the main question. Will the bridge work?

The novella reads like an antidote to The Fountainhead. Kit needs the people who will put in the labor to build his bridge, and they need him. He’s socially awkward and struggles to form bonds with people, and learns he’s more connected to them than he ever realized.

Armistice, by Lara Elena Donnelly

It’s a solid middle book.

Three years after the events of Amberlough, three Geddan exiles cross paths in the tropical nation of Porachis: Lillian DePaul, a press attaché blackmailed into serving fascist Gedda’s foreign service; Aristine Makricosta, a smuggler who got out of Gedda early and went (mostly) legit; and Cordelia Lehane, a railway bomber on the lam. They draw each other into a plot to do a de-kidnapping.

Donnelly, who was a debut author with Amberlough, hits her stride here. She’s ironed out the pacing issues she had with the previous book and toned down the overwrought description so it’s just lush. Middle books are hard, and Donnelly does a good job teasing out threads from Amberlough and weaving them into a setup for the events of Amnesty.

I like what she does with gender here – Porachis is a believable matriarchal society, not this. Men have some options and some room to negotiate, but they have to deal with a stereotype that women are practical and men think with their balls. Matriarchy isn’t the end of days, but it isn’t fair, either. One of the women characters chooses career over family, and Donnelly does an unflinching job of showing how that choice is hard, and has some consequences that the woman didn’t want.

Sometimes it feels like this world’s cultures are cut and pasted from Earth cultures without thought about how those cultures got there. Cordelia’s kind of Cockney, Gedda’s kind of German, Tatié’s kind of Russian, Porachis is kind of Indian, and the Chuli minority are kind of … Welsh. How did those cultures get next to each other? Which one invented the Industrial Revolution? Which one manufactures the airplanes and the cars? Which one invented democracy, and in general, how well is democracy doing on this planet?

Amberlough and Armistice are maddeningly light on specifics on what the One State Party wants. They’re supposed to be like Nazis and the main characters are disgusted like they’re Nazis, but all I ever see the Ospies do is act vaguely conservative and nationalist. I’m not convinced Ospie Gedda is worse than, like, Turkey right now. In real life Nazis made soap out of people. Maybe this gentle treatment doesn’t do justice to history. Or maybe Donnelly is biding her time. In Germany, the worst atrocities happened towards the end of the war. For Gedda, the war is about to begin.

So the geopolitics is flimsy, but the love affairs are wonderful. With the threads set up here, the conclusion of the series just might be gay Orpheus and Eurydice. That would be awesome.

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