Review of The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Volume 3, by Beth Brower

Fiction Review, Historical 0

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion

Volume 3

by Beth Brower

Rhydon Press, 2020. 217 pages.
Review written July 16, 2024, from my own copy, a birthday gift.
Starred Review

Again, I first have to thank my sister Becky for giving me these delightful books for my birthday. I was a little dismayed when I realized it wasn’t a 3-volume work, but more of a serial – indeed like a journal. But the good side of that is that the fun doesn’t end soon!

Volume 3 is thicker. It covers two months, like the others, this time July 1st through August 31st, 1883. In this volume a new sort of subplot was introduced — revealing another quirk of St. Crispian’s. It turns out that every July 15, a secret performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is performed – and those who want to attend must follow a series of clues in order to win tickets. Emma and the odious Cousin Archibald (who lives in her home at Lapis Lazuli House) become temporary allies in order to obtain the prize. But alas! There is a disaster with repercussions that last the rest of the book.

And while this is going on, Emma finds out more about the Mysterious Tenant. She attends parties to be a foil for her cousin Arabella, some of them being tedious and some frightfully interesting. She deals with the scoundrel Jack, her friend Mary’s fake cousin. And she’s in more interesting situations with intriguing people.

And as the volumes go on, I really shouldn’t say too much about each one, because I don’t want to give spoilers from what’s gone before. This isn’t exactly a Jane Austen read-alike, because Emma is far too unconventional and interested in so much more than finding a man. (Oh, and she’s in London about 75 years after Jane Austen’s heroines.) But I can safely say that if you love Jane Austen’s books, chances are good you’ll love Emma M. Lion as well.

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Review of Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, by Heather Fawcett

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries

by Heather Fawcett
read by Ell Potter and Michael Dodds

Random House Audio, 2023. 12 hours, 6 minutes.
Review written July 23, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

This one is wonderful! Our main character is Emily Wilde, a young academic living in an alternate reality to ours where the main difference is that the faeries exist and can be studied. And Emily is writing the authoritative guide on the subject.

As the book opens, she is beginning her field work in the Arctic village of Hrafnsvik. She’s got a shack to stay in – if she can figure out how to chop the wood. But Emily’s not much of a people person, planning to spend her time out in the field, not socializing with the villagers. So she’s dismayed when she gets a letter at this remote place from Wendell Bambleby, her colleague at Cambridge whose work gets far more notice than hers, and she thinks it’s more than his annoying good looks that make this happen.

Emily has a breadth of knowledge of faeries and faerie stories that is unsurpassed, but no one has done field work among the Hidden Ones of this area before. She starts simply, by befriending a brownie but making mistakes with the people of the village. When Wendell Bambleby does show up at her door, he takes care of some problems, but adds new ones.

In spite of herself, Emily finds herself caring about the villagers. Can she use her knowledge of faerie to help some from the village who have recently been taken by the fae? But before the book is over, her actions get her into more and more trouble and she gets pulled ever more deeply into the faerie world.

The characters here are marvelous. I can relate all too well to Emily, more interested in her studies than the people around her. But then her vast knowledge of her subject serves her well. And could it be love sneaking up on her? The book felt a little dry at the start – because Emily introduced herself as an academic making field notes, but I got more and more absorbed until I was finding excuses to keep listening at the end. My next step is to put Book 2 on hold.

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Review of The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Volume 2, by Beth Brower

Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion

Volume 2

by Beth Brower

Rhydon Press, 2019. 151 pages.
Review written July 16, 2024, from my own copy.
Starred Review

First, thank you again to my sister Becky for giving me the first three volumes of The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion for my birthday. I have been devouring them. Perhaps I should be a little annoyed that her gift prompted me to order four more volumes, but it seems only fair to just send someone the beginning of a series. What if I hadn’t liked it? Though that’s hard to imagine in the case of these fictional journals.

In this volume, the plot very much thickens. And we learn more about various intriguing characters. Something I liked about these books is that by the end of Volume 2, I had no idea where Emma will find romance — there are several fine upstanding men in her acquaintance, and I like her relationship with all of them. Of course, Emma is not looking for romance, because the love of her life was killed in Afghanistan.

When I started Volume 2, I still thought the series was a trilogy, so assumed all would be revealed soon. Now I’ve ordered Volumes 4 through 7 and peeked to learn that’s not the end either – so who knows if Emma will find romance at all? But I’m enjoying her relationships (think witty banter and interesting situations) with various interesting men – all of whom are quite different from one another. (Well, except the brothers who are up to mischief. But I think of them as one character different from the other men Emma encounters.)

In this volume we also begin to learn some of the quirks of St. Crispian’s, the part of London where Emma resides. There’s a resident friendly ghost who makes appearances from time to time. But also, objects in St. Crispian’s tend to wander. So, if you don’t keep a white feather on top of an object, it may suddenly show up in someone else’s home. So you need to put your name clearly on your belongings so you can claim them on the shelves set aside for that purpose in a local tea house.

In this volume, we also learn more about the mysterious tenant in Lapis Lazuli Minor, and he and Emma get better acquainted. We get a grasp of Aunt Eugenia’s plans for Emma. She is to serve as a foil for Aunt Eugenia’s daughter, the beautiful Arabella. Emma’s fine with this, as she is not interested in romance, and Aunt Eugenia is willing to buy her a fine wardrobe so she’ll look presentable. And further intriguing situations and people kept me eagerly turning pages and again immediately grabbing the next volume as soon as I’d finished this one.

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Review of When Women Were Dragons, by Kelly Barnhill

Fiction Review, Science Fiction, Starred Review 0

When Women Were Dragons

by Kelly Barnhill

Doubleday, 2022. 337 pages.
Review written July 6, 2024, from an Advance Reader Copy I got at an American Library Association conference.
Starred Review

Okay, this novel is something else. And I say that in a good way – it’s not like anything else I’ve read. I’m very glad I finally got around to reading it — I’ve been meaning to since before it was published in 2022. But I did some traveling and like to take Advance Reader Copies on my travels and give them away to friends before I return. This one I didn’t finish in time, but it still provided hours of entertaining reading on airplanes.

This book takes place in an alternate reality mostly in the 1950s and 1960s. The only thing that’s different from our world is that women have a tendency to spontaneously turn into dragons and take to the skies. In fact, in 1955, there was a Mass Dragoning event in which 642,987 American women transformed into dragons.

Here’s a matter-of-fact description of the event by our narrator, Alex Green, whose Aunt Marla left them during the event:

The facts, of course, are indisputable, but that did not stop people from attempting to dispute the facts. There were eyewitnesses, photographic evidence, utterly destroyed homes and businesses, and no fewer than 1246 confirmed cases of philandering husbands extracted from the embrace of their mistresses and devoured on the spot, in view of astonished onlookers. One dragoning – from its initial gasp, to the eruption of tooth and claw and wing, to the explosion of speed and fire – was caught on 35mm film, taken at a child’s birthday party in a backyard in Albany. Only one of three national news broadcasters attempted to show the film, but was censured immediately by FCC (and slapped with a hefty fine for the dissemination of obscene and profane material) and forced to suspend operations for a full week before having their license re-instated. It is assumed that more such films exist, but they were presumably either confiscated by local authorities (and in that case, are lost forever) or have been simply socked away in stacks of film canisters, hoarded in boxes in basements, likely decomposed by now. Too embarrassing to look at. Too inappropriate. It’s dragons, after all – tainted, it would seem, with feminine stink. Such things are not discussed. Best forgotten, people said.

The drive to forget dragons was so intense that when Alex’s family took in her cousin Beatrice after Beatrice’s mother’s dragoning, Alex was forbidden to call Beatrice anything but her sister. She’d always been her sister. Aunt Marla must be forgotten.

This is the story of Alex and Beatrice. For two of her teen years, Alex was solely responsible for bringing up Beatrice. It’s also about the drive to turn into dragons and women’s place in society and life choices and all the ramifications of all of that. The chapters are interspersed with notes from a scientist who surreptitiously studies dragons.

Although many of the dragons transform in a moment of rage, many also do so in a time of great joy. The book is dedicated to Christine Blasey Ford, “whose testimony triggered this book,” so it is indeed about rage, but it is also about joy, about taking up space, and about living lives with magnificence.

All told, it’s a fascinating book that makes me want to find my inner dragon.

KellyBarnhill.wordpress.com
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Review of The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Volume 1, by Beth Brower

Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion

Volume 1

by Beth Brower

Rhydon Press, 2019. 110 pages.
Review written July 16, 2024, from my own copy.
Starred Review

First, a great big thank you to my sister Becky for sending me the first three volumes of The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion to me for my birthday. At first I thought it was one story divided into three volumes, so I was going to wait until I finished it all to post a review. But no! There’s more! I went on Amazon and ordered the books through Volume 7, and then checked the back of it and Volume 8 supposedly will be published soon. So it’s an ongoing saga, and I am decisively hooked.

Emma M. Lion is a young lady of twenty years old who arrives in London on March 5th, 1883. She comes to the house that is her inheritance, which she will own outright when she turns twenty-one, but which is now occupied by her odious Cousin Archibald.

Both Archibald and Emma are glad their relationship is not by blood. Archibald had married Emma’s father’s cousin, and that cousin had died not long after – but left the house, Lapis Lazuli House in St. Crispian’s quarter of London, to Emma’s father, but the books in the library to Cousin Archibald. Emma’s father let Cousin Archibald stay there out of compassion, and wished Emma to do the same. But three years after her parents’ deaths, Emma arrives and the relationship between the two of them is strained. He has her stay in the rooms in the garret, and before long Emma discovers more ways he is working against her.

Some of the situations in these journal selections, which cover March 5th through April 30th, are that Emma is going to let the small subsection of the house – Lapis Lazuli Minor, which was long ago sectioned off from the main house – in order to help make ends meet. A tenant has been found, and he is a man of mystery. Also, as the volume ends, her Aunt Eugenia has just learned that Emma has come to London and is poised to begin interfering. But Aunt Eugenia doesn’t know that Emma has not, after all, engaged a chaperone. Meanwhile, speaking of chaperones, Emma’s school friend Mary is also in London and has hired a man named Jack to pose as her cousin to the owner of her boarding house. Emma is convinced he’s a scoundrel, but Mary is happy with her freedom.

Emma is not a very traditional young lady. This first volume pretty much sets up intriguing situations and characters, and I challenge anyone at all to be able to stop without learning more. When I finished this short volume, I dove right into the next one. So much fun!

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Review of Remarkably Bright Creatures, by Shelby Van Pelt

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

Remarkably Bright Creatures

by Shelby Van Pelt
read by Marin Ireland and Michael Urie

Harperaudio, 2022. 11 hours, 17 minutes.
Review written July 9, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Oh, this one is truly wonderful. Here’s a feel-good story about some good people – and a Giant Pacific Octopus – whose lives entwine.

The first character we meet is the octopus, Marcellus. He speaks with a sardonic, knowing tone and tells us how many days he’s lived in captivity at the Sowell Bay aquarium – in a small town in Washington, off the coast of Puget Sound.

It turns out that Marcellus likes to roam the aquarium at night and help himself to snacks from the other tanks – as our next main character learns one night when he gets stuck in some electrical cords. Tova Sullivan is in her 70s, and she started cleaning at the aquarium after her husband died, because she wanted something to do. She has no living children – her son Erik disappeared in an apparent boat accident thirty years ago when he was eighteen years old. She rescues Marcellus and starts to notice how remarkable he is.

Our third main character is a thirty-year-old drifter named Cameron. He lost his job – again – and then his girlfriend kicked him out because he lied about it. So he’s at loose ends until the aunt who brought him up gives him some things that belonged to his mother – the mother who left him when he was nine years old. It turns out that his mother went to high school in Sowell Bay. She left a class ring and a picture of herself with a man – a man whom research reveals to be a wealthy real estate developer. If this is his father, Cameron finally has a way to get a boost in life.

So he borrows money from his aunt, heads north to Washington, and one thing leads to another – and Cameron ends up getting a temp job at the aquarium after Tova sprained her ankle. Unbeknownst to others, Tova can’t stay away, so she comes in at night and shows Cameron the proper way to clean. And she says hello to Marcellus while she’s at it, showing Cameron that he’s friendly.

Marcellus can see things about them that they are blind to. But how can he tell them? While Cameron is waiting to get an appointment with his would-be father, he gets pulled into small town life, where everyone seems to know about everybody else. Meanwhile, after her ankle sprain, Tova is coming to terms with aging without anyone to look after her, and she thinks it’s time to retire to an old folks’ home.

This book is completely charming as the different threads come together and we come to care about the conscientious and capable woman living alone as well as the irresponsible young man who might be learning a thing or two about putting down roots. And of course, also about the Giant Pacific Octopus.

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Review of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers, read by Rachel Dulude

Fiction Review, Science Fiction 0

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

by Becky Chambers
read by Rachel Dulude

HarperAudio, 2019. 14 hours, 24 minutes.
Review written June 4, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
2019 Hugo Award winner (with following books) for Best Series

I heard about this book from attending a library staff webinar about fantasy and science fiction books, and I was glad I followed the recommendation.

The first character we meet in this book is of a young adult woman named Rosemary traveling to her first job off Mars on a spaceship. She’s paid all her money to change her identity and we don’t know why. The next scene shows the ship’s captain being told off by the algaeist for hiring such an inexperienced person. And in that interaction we learn that Ashby is a patient man who wants what’s best for his ship, that Corbin is abrasive to people, but good at his job, and that Rosemary is a highly qualified clerk who speaks multiple languages, but she’s young.

This book reminded me of a season of Star Trek or maybe Firefly, since it’s a ragtag bunch and the captain is in business for himself, not part of a government fleet. The ship, Wayfarer, is cobbled together from mostly secondhand parts, but it’s sturdy, and it gets the job done — the job being to create wormholes that other ships can travel through.

In the beginning of the book, the interplanetary alliance they’re part of has decided to add a group of aliens who are still at war among themselves — at least one faction of them. So Ashby jumps at the chance to get the lucrative job of constructing the wormhole to connect that planet with the rest of the alliance.

But of course since the wormhole doesn’t yet exist, it will take them almost a full standard year to get there to put the other end of the wormhole in place. This book takes us with the crew on that journey.

This is a story about world-building and about community among extremely diverse cultures. There are three non-human sapients as part of the crew, as well as an A.I. entity monitoring the ship. Every crew member gets some time as viewpoint character, so it’s very much episodic. The different episodes show the characters’ interrelationships. This includes stories of intimate relationships, some not with the same species, but there’s not an overarching love story, so those descriptions have us a little at a distance.

But if you like world-building in a science fiction novel, this one has it in spades. Arising naturally out of the story, we get a detailed picture of what life might be like living in space and interacting with multiple species that evolved differently from us. Humans aren’t particularly admired among the other cultures, having been let into the alliance almost out of pity. The book shows the implications of many different things that might come up in such a society.

My one quibble — call me stone-hearted, but I can never bring myself to believe that A.I. entities can experience pleasure or pain — or love. I just don’t have a lot of compassion in my heart for machines so when an author tries to pluck my heartstrings with something happening to a machine — no matter how lifelike it seems — it’s going to fail. I try to care for the sake of the story and at least relate to how the humans around them would miss the A.I. they’re used to if something bad happens — but I don’t think it has the poignancy the author’s going for.

But the characters are delightful. (And don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed the character of the A.I.) Even the abrasive one that nobody really likes turns out to be someone we care about when trouble comes his way. And many of them are downright lovable. I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with these people. It did feel episodic — but that way I got insights into each character’s background and current situation and what they cared about. It was also fun when a couple of the aliens grumble about things humans do – giving a new perspective on what’s “normal.”

This whole delightful story is a grand adventure about a group of wildly different people living and working together and caring about each other.

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Review of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

Version 1.0.0
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin
read by Jennifer Kim and Julian Cihi

Random House Audio, 2022. 13 hours and 52 minutes.
Review written May 3, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

I’m behind everybody else on reading novels for adults, but not being on an award committee right now, I’m trying to catch up on some of the titles that are popular at Fairfax County Public Library. (I can see how long the Holds lists are.)

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the story of Sadie and Sam, both video game designers who treat their work as art. The book covers decades of their lives, as their friendship – and their art – evolves and changes over time.

They first met when they were kids. Sadie’s sister was in the hospital with cancer, and Sam was in the hospital having his foot put back together after a devastating car accident. They used to play video games together for hours. Sam’s parents were excited because Sadie was the first person Sam had talked to after the accident, and he’d been in the hospital for weeks.

But the book doesn’t start there. It begins when Sam and Sadie spot each other at a subway station in Boston, where Sadie is attending M.I.T. and Sam is at Harvard. Sam hadn’t spoken to Sadie in years – and we find out their history as back story.

Eventually, Sam and Sadie make a video game together and go into business together. And this book is far more interesting than that summary sounds.

There were times when I didn’t like the characters and thought about quitting reading the book, but was just a little too invested. Then later, I was mad at the author because I thought she’d completely cheated to resolve a love triangle.

But it turned out that wasn’t what was happening, and the event I thought was a cheat led to some innovative storytelling as the book went on and the characters were dealing with some tough things.

In a lot of ways, this author was like the characters: Trying to tell a story in innovative and creative ways, going beyond entertainment into art. I think she succeeds.

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Review of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Historical 0

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

by James McBride
read by Dominic Hoffman

Books on Tape, 2023. 12 hours, 22 minutes.
Review written April 13, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a sweeping historical novel about the 1930s Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, outside Philadelphia, where immigrant Jews from all over Europe and African Americans from the South were trying to live a good life — despite the annual parade where prominent white members of the town council marched in their KKK regalia.

The main focus of the book is Chona Ludlow, who lives above the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store with her husband Moshe, who runs a theater, and found business got better when he brought in Black performers. Chona grew up in Pottstown, with a limp from polio, and Moshe fell for her when he began working in her father’s store.

There are lots more characters, and each one is introduced with a rambling tale of their back story and how they relate to the other characters we’ve met. I didn’t approach this literary novel the right way — taking an unplanned break from it for three days when I went with a group of friends to see the total solar eclipse. It was already hard to keep the various characters straight, and that about did me in.

But as I was thinking about quitting in the middle, I read the audiobook description and was reminded that the book began with a dead body found forty years later in an old well. And it sounded like things were heating up about the deaf Black boy that Chona was helping keep hidden from the authorities, who wanted to put him in an institution.

So I was glad I finished. The various plot lines and various characters all came together at the end of the book, forming a kind of heist novel — trying to rescue the deaf Black boy.

Read or listen to this when you’re in the mood for a literary novel, and don’t pause for three days in the middle — and I’m sure you’ll find it’s well-crafted. I did listen to the beginning all over again when I was done to more fully appreciate how the author brought things full circle and explained everything they’d found with the body in the well.

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Review of Dial A for Aunties, by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review 0

Version 1.0.0
Dial A for Aunties

by Jesse Q. Sutanto
read by Risa Mei

Penguin Audio, 2021. 10 hours, 22 minutes.
Review written April 16, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.

I checked out this audiobook because of how much I enjoyed the author’s book Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers. This one, too, had a lot of madcap fun.

Dial A for Aunties answers the question, at least for one Chinese Indonesian American twenty-something young woman, “Who would you call if you have to dispose of a dead body?”

Since graduating from college and breaking up with the love of her life so that she wouldn’t hold him back, photographer Meddelin Chan has been working in her family’s wedding business. Her mother and her mother’s three sisters provide flowers, make-up, cake, and entertainment, especially at big Chinese or Indonesian weddings.

The night before one of their biggest events ever, Meddelin goes on a blind date that her mother set up for her by posing as Meddy on an online dating site — and completely missing the sexual innuendoes of what the guy was going to expect. When the date goes south, Meddy pulls out her taser — but causes an accident.

She comes to in a deserted area of Los Angeles with a dead cellphone and nobody coming by. The guy appears to be dead. What’s a girl to do? She ends up putting the body in her trunk. (Not necessarily thinking clearly, but hey, extenuating circumstances.) She calls her mother, who calls in the Aunties. They all rally together to figure out what to do.

But the next day they’ll be leaving early for the wedding at a resort on an island off the coast. They don’t want the body to stink, so it needs to go in Big Aunt’s cooler, because she’s the one who has enough room.

But in the morning, the very helpful assistant brings all the coolers to the island. So now there’s a body in one of their coolers at the island wedding, and they need to get rid of it with no one noticing and hundreds of people coming and going.

Oh and then? Turns out the love of Meddy’s life (Remember him?) is the new owner of the resort. This is his first big wedding and it needs to go well.

Madcap hilarity ensues. This author was definitely not going for realism. However, since every coincidence serves to make things worse, the reader buys it, because what can go wrong will go wrong, right? It’s pretty much over-the-top silliness, but it adds up to a whole lot of fun. The bickering Aunties are wonderful in what they will do for Meddy — even if their ideas don’t always work out in the best ways.

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