Book review: Masquerade by O.O. Sangoyomi
It’s an interesting work of alternate history in which a naive young girl has to grow up fast when she is abducted and installed in a foreign court as the intended bride of a warrior king. Ignorant at first, Òdòdó learns fast that kindness can conceal cruelty, and tenderness can be a distraction from tyranny; eventually, she learns how to make allies and take control of her own life, and more.
Book Review: Sherwood by Meagan Spooner
Lady Marian is left heartbroken when her fiance, Robin of Loxley, is killed in the Crusades. Already feeling constrained by society’s expectations of her as a noblewoman, she finds herself also increasingly struggling against the unjust laws and taxes levied against Robin’s people—her people in all but name. When she sneaks out one night to help the fugitive Will Scarlet evade Guy of Gisborne, she is mistaken for Robin and drawn into a double life. This feminist retelling was everything I could have wanted. Marian doesn’t conform to traditional ideas of femininity. She has Opinions about the injustice she sees around her, but is smart enough not to be too vocal about it; she knows well enough that her voice will be ignored and that there is a limit to what talk will accomplish. She’s also uncommonly tall, is terrible at embroidery, has a head for figures and is a brilliant archer (natch). This makes it sound she’s Not Like Other Girls, and I feel she definitely skirts the line. However, the story belies this by showing how she’s supported by other intelligent women. Some of these women are more traditionally feminine, but, like Marian, are smart enough to know that speaking up will get them ignored (at best). Instead, they act strategically in an effort to support a more just world.
Interview: Catherine Lundoff on the Scourge of the Seas anthology
Today on Skiffy and Fanty, an interview with SCOURGE OF THE SEAS editor Catherine Lundoff.
Book Review: Romance and Ghosts: Delia’s Shadow by Jaime Lee Moyer
Delia Martin’s early 20th-century American life as a woman of money and means is not all peaches and cream. Delia has an unwanted and rather terrifying ability to see ghosts. After the Great Earthquake of 1906, Delia left her San Francisco home, and she thought, the ghosts forever. One determined spirit that crossed the country to find Delia brings her back to her hometown. Delia, with the ghost, which she has named Shadow, arrive just in time for her best friend’s wedding and the Pan-Pacific Exposition besides. And the possibility of a new romance for Delia. Oh, and also just in time to wind up in the middle of the bloody run of a serial killer. A serial killer who has killed before. And a serial killer to which Delia’s shadow might have a connection. The eponymous Delia’s Shadow is the debut novel of Jaime Lee Moyer.
Socratic Dialogues and the Nature of Excellence: Jo Walton’s The Just City
Plato’s Republic is a book that has been debated and studied since its composition nearly 2400 years ago. It delves into some of the deepest questions of society. How do we design a city, a world, a political entity to benefit the most people? How should people be ordered? What is Justice? What is the practical upshot of creating a society, a city, ordered on the lines of The Republic? And what happens when the Goddess Pallas Athena decides that the thing to do in order to respond to Plato is to create a city based on The Republic, and populate it with people drawn through time and space, and several thousand children to be raised in the ways of the Republic, to carry the experiment truly forward? To create an experiment in a time and place where it cannot affect history but the pursuit of its excellence can be sought free of entanglements?
Mining the Genre Asteroid: Mary Renault
Jo Walton’s Among Others works as an interesting reading list of novels and authors that the author herself read and thought about growing up. Much of the matter of the book is her protagonist reading, and thinking about the many writers whose work she discovers. One of those writers mentioned by Mori that she discovers in the course of growing up and reading is somewhat different than the more familiar science fiction and fantasy authors in her self-created curriculum: Mary Renault. Mary Renault was a mid-century British writer. In 1948, after her novel Return to Night won an MGM prize worth $150,000, Renault and her lifelong lover Julie Mullard immigrated to South Africa, where they remained for the rest of their lives. Starting in the 1950s, Renault turned from writing contemporary fiction, to ancient historical fiction. The King Must Die (1958) is the second of her ancient historical fictional novels, and the first that tackles a character straight out of ancient myth and legend: Theseus.
