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Nov. 15th, 2024 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThe Forbidden Book by Sacha Lamb
A young Jewish woman flees an arranged marriage in czarist Russia by dressing up in a man's clothing, only to find that the man was murdered and is now inhabiting her body uneasily as a dybbuk.
To sort things out, they must assemble a ragtag crew of outsiders and solve the murder, which leads to two kinds of forbidden books- politically sensitive anti-government tracts, and a mystical book of angels that encodes a different vision of the political order altogether.
This was maybe slighter than When the Angels Left The Old Country, and didn't have quite as memorable characters, but I liked it a lot, and I liked the final resolution of the angel plotline a lot.
At a reading last month, Lamb described the book as capturing a sort of Trans awakening where the main character slowly realizes that this male soul she is now carrying completes something for her. YMMV on that, it felt more like a romance than a transition to me.
Asunder by Kerstin Hall
People were buzzing about this in the Worldcon discord and then as I was reading it I was wondering if maybe I got duped, if maybe the buzz was from friends of Hall or something. But I eventually realized I had subconsciously read cues early in the book that had me expecting the book to be interesting on different axes than it actually was. I had thought the book was telling a story about politics and difficult choices, but that was mostly just scaffolding, what the book was really about was the somatic experience of a soul possession, and Hall does this extraordinarily well. She makes this thing, which often is represented as this purely spiritual thing, into a deeply embodied experience, amplified by a magic system that is powerfully and weirdly organic. It's really cool and justifies the buzz.
The Inheritance Games Series by Jennifer Barnes
Advertised as a modern take on the Westing Game, in which a corrupt billionaire uses his will to play games with his heirs for a variety of not so justifiable reasons, and also all of the heirs are incredibly hot, horny teenagers.
It does not live up to the Westing Game for puzzle quality or emotional heft. I was very frustrated with the puzzles, Barnes seems to think a good puzzle is just one where you have to try every combination of the lock to open it. The shady billionaire who fucked up his grandchildren part of it is better done, but often shades too extreme or too coincidental to be fully satisfying. I wanted less murder and more complicated family dynamics.
But the adventure plotting was fairly fun. I just kinda made me laugh because people have been posting a meme of authors you have read 5 books by, and I raced through the five books in this series in a couple weeks and I doubt I'll remember much about it by next year. 5 books is just not a useful metric for how I read.
The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer
Recced to me by a friend after I bitched about the Inheritance Games, this book is much more explicitly pegged to Willy Wonka as opposed to Sam Westing, but I think it does scratch the same itch. The puzzles are mostly riddles rather than puzzle hunt puzzles, but all of the characters are very well rendered, the stakes are clear enough to feel fair while slippery and ambiguous enough to be satisfying narratively, and it was really enjoyable emotionally.
A young Jewish woman flees an arranged marriage in czarist Russia by dressing up in a man's clothing, only to find that the man was murdered and is now inhabiting her body uneasily as a dybbuk.
To sort things out, they must assemble a ragtag crew of outsiders and solve the murder, which leads to two kinds of forbidden books- politically sensitive anti-government tracts, and a mystical book of angels that encodes a different vision of the political order altogether.
This was maybe slighter than When the Angels Left The Old Country, and didn't have quite as memorable characters, but I liked it a lot, and I liked the final resolution of the angel plotline a lot.
At a reading last month, Lamb described the book as capturing a sort of Trans awakening where the main character slowly realizes that this male soul she is now carrying completes something for her. YMMV on that, it felt more like a romance than a transition to me.
Asunder by Kerstin Hall
People were buzzing about this in the Worldcon discord and then as I was reading it I was wondering if maybe I got duped, if maybe the buzz was from friends of Hall or something. But I eventually realized I had subconsciously read cues early in the book that had me expecting the book to be interesting on different axes than it actually was. I had thought the book was telling a story about politics and difficult choices, but that was mostly just scaffolding, what the book was really about was the somatic experience of a soul possession, and Hall does this extraordinarily well. She makes this thing, which often is represented as this purely spiritual thing, into a deeply embodied experience, amplified by a magic system that is powerfully and weirdly organic. It's really cool and justifies the buzz.
The Inheritance Games Series by Jennifer Barnes
Advertised as a modern take on the Westing Game, in which a corrupt billionaire uses his will to play games with his heirs for a variety of not so justifiable reasons, and also all of the heirs are incredibly hot, horny teenagers.
It does not live up to the Westing Game for puzzle quality or emotional heft. I was very frustrated with the puzzles, Barnes seems to think a good puzzle is just one where you have to try every combination of the lock to open it. The shady billionaire who fucked up his grandchildren part of it is better done, but often shades too extreme or too coincidental to be fully satisfying. I wanted less murder and more complicated family dynamics.
But the adventure plotting was fairly fun. I just kinda made me laugh because people have been posting a meme of authors you have read 5 books by, and I raced through the five books in this series in a couple weeks and I doubt I'll remember much about it by next year. 5 books is just not a useful metric for how I read.
The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer
Recced to me by a friend after I bitched about the Inheritance Games, this book is much more explicitly pegged to Willy Wonka as opposed to Sam Westing, but I think it does scratch the same itch. The puzzles are mostly riddles rather than puzzle hunt puzzles, but all of the characters are very well rendered, the stakes are clear enough to feel fair while slippery and ambiguous enough to be satisfying narratively, and it was really enjoyable emotionally.