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Racing the Dark – Alaya Dawn Johnson

Reread of a book I vaguely remembered reading in high school and liking.

I still like this quite a bit on a reread, although it's very obviously a debut novel (from 2007; Johnson has written several more novels in the meantime which I haven't read). The plot is very ambitious, dealing with politics, mythology and magic from angles that I haven't seen in fiction much. The magic system is based on sacrifice – of pain, body parts, even death -- and the cultures in the book are I believe based on south Asia and the Pacific islands in trappings, although this is very much a secondary world fantasy novel, not a fictionalization of a real culture.

Characters grapple with ethical struggles that aren't often examined in fantasy, coming to unusual situations; as an example, at one point the main character's mother sells her into apprenticeship in order to support the entire family's financial situation, and while it's clear that this has unforeseen and dangerous consequences and it ends their family life as it previously existed, the choice is never condemned. Likewise, while sacrifice is sometimes clearly used unethically and characters criticize it in some situations, the book never goes so far as to suggest human sacrifice is wrong. On the other hand, when the main character comes into contact with a society that eats the meat of animals (as opposed to plants or fish), she's completely appalled. I found the unusual ethical landscape and magic, and the transformation in the climax, interesting and generally compelling if not always convincing.

There are significant flaws, as you would expect in a first novel; some threads of the plot aren't really balanced well, the prose is functional at best and occasionally felt intrusively clumsy, and while disability and ethnicity are handled, they aren't always handled well. I will be reading the second in this series for the first time soon.

Lies and Prophecy – Marie Brennan

Another reread of a vaguely remembered book I basically liked at the time. The characters are students at a university that offers prestigious courses in paranormal abilities, a generation after our world's history was changed by the emergence of psychic abilities. One of them is a wilder, a sort of super-psychic group of people who are wards of the state because they require special measures to control them in childhood, who are often outcast because they inherently make non-wilder humans nervous. They're caught up in a new set of potentially catastrophic magical events as fall term unfolds and the fey become involved.

Much like the previous book, there are parts of this I liked a lot, and parts I thought weren't executed very well. The slice of life quality of pieces of it as the characters deal with class, and the worldbuilding with its political history and glimpses of academia were interesting. I basically liked the characters, although I didn't find the romance terribly convincing. (It becomes an established relationship in the second book without any particular drama or plot and I liked it much better that way, as a background thing.)

Pieces of the plot seem strangely stereotyped against their execution, and it sometimes makes it feel like there are two books smashed together here – the book where the group of college sophomores save the world with magic, and the book where a diplomatic and magical crisis requires years of work by multiple countries to resolve. (It's worth noting that this is a book that was written pre-career and then revised by the author once they had several publications done, so that's probably some of why.) Again, the prose is at best functional, though not intrusive.

Chains and Memory – Marie Brennan

The sequel to the previous book. This is the sequel to the second book that was mashed into the first, where change results in massive political action and crisis. Spoilers for the first book follow because it's really hard to explain the premise without them: the main character, transformed into a wilder by the events of the first book, now is fighting to maintain her legal rights, as an adult who doesn't require government control to avoid killing herself and others in infancy. The book opens with her having a meeting with a senator who is preparing legislation on the subject, and continues as the political battle is fought through multiple legal and illegal channels. Meanwhile, the fey are involved, and interfering as usual.

This is probably, out of everything I have read including a lot of nonfiction, the book that goes into the most information about the American political process, despite being set in an alternate universe. That amused me, and I did think it was handled well. Petitioning the Supreme Court and Congressional representatives just aren't solutions fantasy characters usually seek. In general, a better and more coherent book than the first, well worth reading. The established relationship was sweet and supportive without being intrusive. I'm still not sure I find a lot of the premise of the political situation plausible, unfortunately, there are shades of the issue that comes up a lot in fantasy where allegories become borderline offensive, even if this book averts a lot of the usual problems by having a knowledgeable writer. The fey continue to not really feel properly like fey, although the climax came closer than anything else in the series.

Spirits Abroad – Zen Cho

Anthology of stories by a Malay-Chinese-British fantasy writer. They run the gauntlet from horrific and grotesque to hilarious to romantic to combinations of the above. In general I like nearly everything Cho writes; I did find one story that was trying to do something nonlinear with video games completely incomprehensible but that was the exception. Memorable stories include an interesting take on fey as taken on by Chinese exchange students in Britain that I liked, a story set during a national forum on minorities that is abruptly disrupted when an invisible delegate for a mythological people arrives, and a story about a grandmother who becomes a vampire posthumously in order to emotionally blackmail her relatives; also a short story about a family of vampires that I've reviewed before when I read it online, The House of Aunts.

Warning: Zen Cho's fantasy work tends to be disturbing, and this volume includes violence, self harm, child murder, and other similar themes in places. She does include content warnings at the beginning of stories.

Urban Tribes: Native Americans in the City – eds. Lisa Charleyboy, Mary Beth Leatherdale

Anthology of nonfiction pieces by indigenous people living in cities in the United States and Canada. A lot of this seemed to be reprints of online pieces, artwork, etc, although there were also interviews and original pieces. This was a fairly quick read, interesting and very political, worth getting out from the library and would probably serve as an accessible introduction to indigenous politics to someone unfamiliar with the subject, but I didn't think any of the individual pieces were brilliantly memorable.