Book Review: The Vengeance, by Emma Newman
The Vengeance is an enjoyable romp by Emma Newman, a flintlock fantasy about a pirate girl’s quest to find her long-lost birth mother. The publisher’s tagline calls it a “swashbuckling adventure set in a version of Alexandre Dumas’s world haunted by vampires” but there isn’t any real hint of the supernatural in the text until about two-thirds of the way through. So if you’re primarily interested in horror, or if you’re really not into pirates, this may not be the book for you. If you enjoy a feisty female protagonist getting into fish-out-of-water misadventures, plus sapphic romance, keep reading. Anna-Marie, the pirate captain who raised her, confesses on her deathbed that she had stolen Morgane from her real mother, whom she calls a monster. But Morgane finds a letter from her birth mother begging for her return and hinting at her own safety concerns. There are various other puzzlements, such as why Anna-Marie had exclusively attacked one trading company’s ships (beyond saying that the owner had ruined her life). However, since Morgane has never run into any situation she can’t handle (albeit with the backing of her fellow pirates), she decides to go and rescue her birth mother. By Chapter Five, Morgane is on her way to France. Once she gets there, she runs into trouble almost immediately; she doesn’t have any idea how many people are going to want to use her, and she knows nothing of how feudalism works. She doesn’t understand why the peasants don’t just vote out their tyrannical lords, the way a pirate crew would reject any pirate captain who wasn’t fair to them. She’s very worldly in some ways, but very naive in others. Note: Morgane tells this story (first person past tense), and she is almost entirely uncritical of the pirate code and lifestyle throughout. She’s rightly proud of how capable it’s made her, but she only feels mild regret for the deaths she’s caused after someone whose lover was killed berates her, and that’s brief. After seeing the vast inequality of wealth in France, she’s sure that trading ships just make rich people richer, so they’re legitimate targets. Anyway, Morgane eventually finds a few people who will help her navigate the treacherous tides of French society, and makes her way toward the estate where she believes her mother is being held. Things turn out very differently from how she had thought, with some shocking scenes and revelations, but with her pistols, sword, dagger, fierce will, and the power of love, Morgane achieves a happy ending. The publisher lists The Vengeance, which comes out May 6, as Book #1 of The Vampires of Dumas, but it works perfectly well as a standalone novel. There are one or two minor dangling plot threads I can think of, plus the likelihood that Morgane will encounter more supernatural and worldly threats in the future, but all the current major perils have been vanquished and the emotional arcs resolved satisfactorily by the end of this book. Content warnings: Piracy, deaths, bloody violence, long-told lies, vampires and other supernatural stuff. Comps: Scarlet, by Genevieve Cogman. Disclaimers: I received a free eARC for review from the publisher via NetGalley.
Comics Review: Looking at the 2024 Lammy Award Finalists for Best LGBTQ+ Comics
Happy Pride Month, everyone! Thinking about Pride of course got me thinking about the Lambda Literary Awards, and more specifically its Best LGBTQ+ Comics category. One good thing to come out of the (cursed) (seemingly never-ending) (and yet here I go talking about it) (Stephen Geigen-Miller: part of the problem) SFFnal Awards Discourse is the reminder that there are many awards out there that are worthy of our attention – awards that, because of their mission, focus, and audience, can help bring works to our attention that we otherwise might have missed. For 35 years, the Lambda Literary Awards (the Lammys!) have honored excellence in LGBTQ+ writers and writing, as part of Lambda Literary’s overall mission. “Lambda Literary nurtures and advocates for LGBTQ writers, elevating the impact of their words to create community, preserve our legacies, and affirm the value of our stories and our lives.” ( – from the Lambda Literary website) It’s always a good time to lift up and center LGBTQ+ comics and LGBTQ+ creators, and this feels like an especially good time – and not, sadly, just because it’s Pride Month. But let’s not dwell on that, just now. Let’s celebrate works and creators that deserve to have their impact elevated, by taking a closer look at the 2024 Lammy Award finalists for Best LGBTQ+ Comics. A quick reminder that, as usual, these reviews contain spoilers. Also, I was shooting for capsule reviews, but there was so much to say about each of these graphic novels that they ended up being pretty big capsules. The books appear alphabetically by title, as they do on the Lambda Literary website, and aren’t ranked in any other way. A Guest in the House Emily Carroll Published by First Second A dark, genuinely unsettling small-town Canadian gothic – none of which describes my usual reading. Indeed, I’m still not sure if I exactly liked this new original graphic novel from acclaimed webcomic creator Emily Carroll – but I do know that I’m still thinking about it. Abby is a woman who’s drifting – not aimlessly, more like a detached observer – through life in a cottage-country Ontario town. Recently married to David, a dentist who just moved to town with his young daughter Crystal after the death of his first wife Sheila, Abby becomes convinced that their beautiful lakefront home is haunted by Sheila’s ghost – and that David may not be as innocent in her death as he says. But Abby’s grasp on reality is fluid at best and it’s unnervingly unclear whether she’s seeing ghosts and revelatory visions or the products of her own unquiet mind. One thing that is clear is that Abby is falling in obsessive love with her husband’s dead wife – or the person she imagines Sheila to have been. Increasingly unmoored, Abby and the story careen towards a bloody conclusion. Carroll contrasts Abby’s mundane, even banal everyday life, depicted in clear lines in black and white with light grey shading interspersed with pooled shadow, with sudden shocks of vivid color in Abby’s dreams, fantasies, and violent intrusive thoughts. It’s a brilliant use of the storytelling potential of color in comics, and it’s seductively appealing. It’s no wonder that Abby is drawn more and more to the pull of her internal life. This is, obviously, a deeply ambiguous story. Who is the guest in the house? Is it Sheila, haunting a home she never lived in? Is it Abby, who feels like a guest in Sheila’s life, and in her own life? Heck, I’m still only about 80% sure what happened at the end, given how consumed Abby is by either Sheila’s ghost or her own fractured relationship with reality. Genre readers (like me) will especially be primed to believe in Sheila’s ghost and David’s villainy, but the violent and obsessive intensity of Abby’s visions and dreams belie those comforting assumptions. This is an intense graphic novel, and an ambitious one. My ambivalence about it is entirely down to the ambiguous ending, which is a device that I usually dislike. But I can’t deny how apt, well-crafted, and effectively employed it is here. This is a powerful long-form debut for Emily Carroll, and I recommend it. Belle of the Ball Mari Costa Published by First Second Without a doubt the lightest work among the nominees, this YA high-school romance about a love triangle between a popular cheerleader, her jock girlfriend, and the nerdy girl with a crush, who the cheerleader manipulates into tutoring the jock in English to bring her grades up – only to have feelings between jock and nerd ensue – is sweet, frothy, and effervescent. Basically, it’s ginger ale as a graphic novel. But light doesn’t mean insubstantial. While it’s a confection, Belle of the Ball manages to avoid being slight by eschewing easy expectations. The cheerleader, Regina, is manipulative, yes – but she’s not a mean girl, she’s smart and sometimes kind, and mostly it’s just really important to her that everything in her life go to plan, including her girlfriend having good enough grades that they can both go to an Ivy League school. Chloe isn’t a dim jock; she excels at computer science but has trouble understanding the point of analyzing English literature on a deeper level – and just really wishes her girlfriend would relax. Hawkins, the shy, seemingly introverted nerd, has a crush on Regina, but she’s not creepy about it, and she has an expressive, exuberant, assertive, deeply femme side that she locked away to cope with high school (it’s not really a spoiler that she’s, in name and in role, the titular Belle). There are no direct SFFnal elements in the story, but it’s charmingly fandom-adjacent. Hawkins writes fan fiction, she and Chloe share a love of JRPGs, and there’s a very sweet – goofy, but adorable – scene between them at a Ren Faire with Hawkins dressed as an Elf Princess. It is, however, very strongly within the contemporary romance genre,
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year to all our followers from the Skiffy & Fanty blog team! … Please let us know if there are things in 2024 that you are particularly looking forward to, or if there are any topics or features you’d like to see here on Skiffy & Fanty.
Book Review: Rosalind’s Siblings, edited by Bogi Takács
If you missed Rosalind’s Siblings when it was published in September 2023, please consider adding it to your reading list for the new year. It’s a very interesting anthology of speculative fiction and poems, containing some fascinating ideas and characters and some really beautiful language.
Book Review: A Death at the Dionysus Club, by Amy Griswold and Melissa Scott
I really enjoy how A Death at the Dionysus Club builds out from Death by Silver, expanding the lives of the protagonists and connected characters as well as the worldbuilding. … the puzzles are intriguing, the perils are exciting, and it’s great how the lovers end up standing for and standing by each other.
Book Review: Atoms Never Touch by micha cárdenas
The latest title in this collection, Atoms Never Touch by multidisciplinary artist, poet, filmmaker, and professor micha cárdenas, takes these foundational concepts of activism and applies them through fiction to tell a story of relationships and autonomous agency.
