Author Archives: Goddess in the Stacks

Library Loot Wednesday!

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I picked up three this week – a book about a sentient warship by an Asian author, a sequel, and a were-wyvern heist novel. (Because that sounded fun!)

Taste of Marrow by Sarah Gailey (sequel to River of Teeth)

A Spark of White Fire by Sangu Mandanna

Fire & Heist by Sarah Beth Durst

Top Ten Tuesday – Books I Meant to Read in 2018 But Didn’t Get To

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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, she has a linkup on her page so you can see what other people regret not reading!

Oh man. I have way, WAY more than ten books that should go on this list! First, the ones I meant to read and really SHOULD have read, for blogging reasons!

I snagged several books at the Baltimore Book Festival in September that I STILL haven’t gotten around to reading – The Root, the first Wrath & Athenaeum book, by Na’amen Gobert Tilahun, who I got to see in several panels that weekend. He’s fantastic, and I REALLY need to carve out the time to read his books. I also watched Charlie Jane Anders in a few panels, bought her book (All The Birds In The Sky), and received her second book (The City in the Middle of the Night) as an ARC through a Goodreads giveaway. It comes out in February, so I have to read it and review it before then! I also received a book free from a local author (The Shadow of the Rock), with a promise to review it on the blog, and I need to make that happen too. (Rather desperately. I feel pretty guilty about that last one.) I can’t believe I haven’t read ANY of the books I got from the festival. I’ve been too occupied with library books!

I haven’t entirely kept up with those, either. I never did read America for Beginners, which was on my summer TBR list, or Guidebook to Relative Strangers, which was one of Book Riot’s Persist Book Club reads. Both of those got turned back in unread, as did The Loneliest Girl in the Universe. They weren’t the only ones, but they were the three I felt worst about!

Other books I wanted to read and never got around to include Sabaa Tahir’s Ember in the Ashes, though given she’s of Pakistani descent, reading that series this year for the Year of the Asian might be better anyway! I also meant to read Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City – I even bought it for my Kindle! The last one I’ll mention is Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone, the start of the Grishaverse. I read Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, and they were AMAZING. But I haven’t read the rest, and lord, do I need to!

Even reading as much as I do, I can’t read as much as I’d like. I simply don’t have enough time in my life to cram as much information into my brain as I want to. That frustrates me to no end!

Book Review: Vox

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voxVox
by Christina Dalcher
Dystopia
326 pages
Published August 2018

I felt like I was reading a horror novel instead of a dystopia. The first third of the book, specifically, was enraging. It’s the setup – the explanation of how the world is now, and how it came to be that way – that made me have to set the book down twice and walk away to calm down.

The book is the story of Dr. Jean McClellan, cognitive linguist. The forced silence is particularly painful for her, a former scientist who was working on a cure for people who had brain injuries or strokes affecting the Wernicke area of the brain, where we process language. She was about to start restoring language to people who had lost it, only to have it stolen from her and every other woman in the country.

The book opens on Dr. McClellan being asked to return to her work, because the President’s brother suffered a brain injury while skiing and can no longer understand language. As one of the most important advisors to the president, the government needs him. In return for the removal of both her bracelet and her daughter’s, she agrees, hoping to find some way to sabotage the work.

Vox sets out a sequence of events that seems far too feasible for comfort. The religious right extends its foothold from the Bible Belt to more and more of the country, pushing a return to “traditional family values” while methodically stripping freedoms from women and LGBT people. Women’s passports are surreptitiously cancelled, schools are split and classes on Christian theology introduced to the boys’ schools. Girls’ schools consist of very basic math (so they can continue to do the grocery shopping and cooking!) and a ton of home ec. Sewing, Cooking, Housekeeping. LGBT people are sent to prisons/camps unless they marry someone of the opposite sex and produce kids. Basically, it’s the right wing’s dream world.

It’s a horrifying scenario. Even given all the dystopia I’ve read, this book rocked me. It definitely belongs in the league of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Power. My only complaint is I wish the ending had been a little more drawn out, and explained the fallout in a bit more detail. Other than that, though, amazing book.

From the cover of Vox:

Set in a United States in which half the population has been silenced, Vox is the harrowing, unforgettable story of what one woman will do to protect herself and her daughter.

On the day the government decrees that women are no longer allowed more than one hundred words per day, Dr. Jean McClellan is in denial. This can’t happen here. Not in America. Not to her.

This is just the beginning . . . 

Soon women are not permitted to hold jobs. Girls are not taught to read or write. Females no longer have a voice. Before, the average person spoke sixteen thousand words each day, but now women have only one hundred to make themselves heard.

. . . not the end.

For herself, her daughter, and every woman silenced, Jean will reclaim her voice.

#YARC2019 – The Year of the Asian Reading Challenge!

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Okay, so I’m adding one more reading challenge this year. I went back and forth on this, because I wanted to go easy on the challenges this year, but this one is SO CUTE and is hosted by some of my favorite bloggers!

There are four hosts:

Lily @ Sprinkles of Dreams
Shealea @ Shut Up Shealea
Vicky @ Vicky Who Reads
CW @ The Quiet Pond

CW has drawn such AMAZING art for this reading challenge! Definitely go to her blog and look at the adorableness. (The whole blog is pretty adorable, not just the YARC post!)

 

There are different badge levels, and though my brain says I should go for one of the lower ones, I want that tiger! That means reading over 50 books by Asian authors this  year. I actually have three on my table to read already – Kingdom of the Blazing Phoenix, Julie Dao’s sequel to Forest of a Thousand Lanterns, Emiko Jean’s Empress of All Seasons, and Yangsze Choo’s The Night Tiger from January’s Book of the Month. I might have a fourth, if When Dimple Met Rishi counts! (Wait, six, with Sangu Mandanna’s A Spark of White Fire and Roshani Chokshi’s The Star-Touched Queen.) We’ll see how far I get by the end of the year. It’s not exactly a challenge that will mesh easily with my 50 States challenge. I might be able to combine a few books. But there’s a LOT of amazing Asian fantasy coming out this year!

I’ll keep a page updated with my progress, the link is also available in the sidebar!

Book Review: How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?

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how long til black future monthHow Long ‘Til Black Future Month?
by N. K. Jemisin
Anthology of short stories/Science Fiction/Fantasy
397 pages
Published November 2018

I’ve only read one other N. K. Jemisin book – The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which is the first book of her NOT Hugo-award-winning trilogy. I really ought to read the rest of her backlist, as she’s an amazing author. How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? is a collection of short fiction – windows into futuristic or fantasy or even contemporary worlds, all centering black characters. I think my favorite was The City, Born Great, about New York City waking up. L’Alchimista, about a talented chef given an impossible challenge, appealed to my baker’s heart, as did Cuisine des Mémoires, about a magical restaurant that can recreate any meal from any time. The Narcomancer sounded like something that could happen in my D&D game, and The Evaluators was slowly horrifying. The Storyteller’s Replacement and Cloud Dragon Skies both have dragons, one of my favorite fantasy features, as does the story Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters.

Every story in this book was amazing. I’ve only specifically named a few, but every single one is excellent. Jemisin runs the gamut from sci-fi to cyberpunk to medieval fantasy to magical realism and contemporary fantasy. There are stories in parallel universes, purely online worlds, shattered universes, and worlds that seem to be our own with a touch of magic. Every one of them is brought to vivid life. Jemisin is an extraordinary writer, and her short fiction shows it.

These are intelligent stories, full of commentary on the current state of our world. From the Jim Crow South to the abandonment of New Orleans to floodwaters, to future apocalypses brought on by our negligence and space exploration spurred by climate destruction, Jemisin’s stories have footholds in reality that are hard to ignore.

Fantastic book. (And that cover is FIERCE.)

From the cover of How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?:

Three-time Hugo award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N. K. Jemisin sharply examines modern society in her first short story collection.

N. K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her short fiction, which includes several never-before-seen stories, Jemisin equally challenges and delights with narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.

Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo Award-nominated short story “The City, Born Great,” a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis’s soul.

Friday 56 – Vox

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voxThe Friday 56 is hosted by Freda’s Voice. The rules are simple – turn to page 56 in your current read (or 56% in your e-reader) and post a few non-spoilery sentences.

This week’s quote is from Vox by Christina Dalcher, a dystopia in which women in the US have been forced to wear bracelets that count the number of words spoken. If a woman goes over 100 words each day, it starts shocking her with increasing intensity for each word until she stops. Women also aren’t allowed to read or write. The book is terrifying and enraging.

He trained the counter to my voice, set it to zero, and sent me home.

Naturally, I didn’t believe a word of it. Not the sketches they showed me in their book of pictures, not the warnings Patrick read aloud to me over tea at our kitchen table. When Steven and his brothers burst in from school, full with news of soccer practice and exam results, while Sonia ignored her dolls, mesmerized by her new shiny red wristband, I opened the dam. My words flew out, unbridled, automatic. The room filled with hundreds of them, all colors and shapes. Mostly blue and sharp.

The pain knocked me flat.

Our bodies have a mechanism, a way to forget physical trauma. As with my non-memories of the pain of birth, I’ve blocked everything associated with that afternoon, everything except the tears in Patrick’s eyes, the shock – what an appropriate term – on my sons’ faces, and Sonia’s delighted squeals as she played with the red device. There’s another thing I remember, the way my little girl raised that cherry red monster to her lips.

It was as if she were kissing it.