It's a magical world

Hopkinson, Nalo. Midnight Robber. New York: Warner Books, 2000.

Dedicated to the memory of Pete Hudson.

Nalo Hopkinson was the Guest of Honor at two cons I attended last year; I read this book after Sirens. I liked it better than the other book of hers that I've read, The Chaos, though this novel, Hopkinson's second, is way heavier and much darker.

Midnight Robber tells the story of Tan Tan, whose father Antonio abducts her to an alternate prison-world (dimension?) after he commits a crime that Granny Nanny, the AI web into which almost everyone is linked and which helps govern society, cannot abide. Tan Tan grows up quickly on the criminal world, and at the age of sixteen she commits a crime her settlement can't forgive and runs off into the bush, where she lives in trees with the planet's native dominant species and begins to remake herself to match the legend of the Robber Queen.

( Spoilers contain discussions of sexual abuse, rape, and incest )

But Tan Tan's journey from self-loathing to self-confidence is unforgettable, as is the setting, and Hopkinson's language, which is wondrous. Both planets are Afro-Caribbean, and the telling of the SF story in another English--Caribbean Creole--using that to describe and map futuristic concepts, is really cool, as are the interpolated folk tales about Tan Tan as the Robber Queen. In a way, the book is a rebuke and a reminder to mainstream SFF that (and here I'm quoting a Margaret Weis/Tracy Hickman novel) there are other worlds out there, and other suns.

Really cool, and pretty: Nalo Hopkinson talks to the New Yorker's Book Bench blog about her fabric designs and her writing, with pictures.

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Peterfreund, Diana. Rampant. New York: Harper Teen, 2009.

What a strange book. I really don't know how else to describe it. Rampant is set in our world, essentially, except that unicorns have come back, and they're not nice sparkly creatures; they're bloodthirsty, ravenous beasts, and only virgin girls can take them down. The main character, Astrid Llewelyn, is doubly a scion of the strongest of the old hunter bloodlines; as the book begins her boyfriend is mauled by a unicorn, and after she saves him, he dumps her (supposedly because she attacked him because she wouldn't have sex with him), and Astrid's mother, who's been obsessed with their family's hunter heritage all her life, sends Astrid off to the convent in Rome where hunters used to train, and are starting to do so again. When Astrid's cousin Phil, who's just completed her first year in college, joins her, things get...interesting.

( Lots of spoilers, but you don't care. Trust me.  )