It's a magical world

What I'm Reading
Silver Spoon vol 4 by Arakawa Hiromu - It's still great. Also I'm really jealous of all their fresh vegetables.

The Maker's Mask by Ankaret Wells - After the disaster of The Three-Body Problem I wanted some sci-fi that was about as different as possible. I've only just started, but I'm quite enjoying the book so far. Ladies! Pseudo-medieval post-planetfall politics! Genderqueerness! Assassins!

Razorhurst by Justline Larbalestier - I bought this while I was in Australia, and it's just been short-listed for an Australian literary award, so I'm hoping to finish it soon!

What I've Read
Clariel by Garth Nix - I think the best thing to say is, it was worth the wait. I'm really impressed at how many writerly tricks Nix pulled off here, and how a book written 11 years after its predecessor but set 600 years before can so effortlessly set up the next book in the series. I also was impressed at how suspenseful I found the book to be, given that I knew the ending going in. MORE OLD KINGDOM NOW PLEASE.

Stranger by Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown - At long last the #YesGayYA book is available in the world, and I quite enjoyed it, which to be honest is no less than I expected. The book is set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, but it's a very animanga kind of livable, quotidian postapocalypse, and the society it portrays is interesting and believable, with just enough vampiric plantlife thrown in to keep things interesting. Honestly I think this book may appeal to fans of X-Treme X-Men, as it really is "the X-Men in the Old West" in some ways, even as it's also one of the most LA books I've read--not Hollywood, but actual LA with actual people. The food descriptions alone nearly made me want to book a flight back to California; I did go out to the best Mexican restaurant in Tokyo because of it. And, of course, I also found the characters interesting, and wasn't fussed by the switching between multiple protagonists, or by what happens to them.

Essentially, I disagreed with the ladybusiness review on basically all points, and in particular, I wanted to mention that I don't think that queer characters in books should be treated like they're made of glass. A story in which being gay and suffering for it in whatever way is not the only story that should be told about gay characters, but at the same time, it's not like nothing bad that isn't about being gay ever happens to gay people, and what some of the gay characters in this book have to deal with in terms of parents and family is stuff that everyone has to deal with. I think it's just as important to represent those kinds of things in fiction because they are universal, or the next best thing to it, and gay readers deserve to have that chance just as much as straight audiences. (I also appreciated that gayness isn't just for white boys. Indeed, most of the protagonists are people of color, which was refreshingly realistic for a book set in future!Los Angeles.) I will say, however, that if you haven't liked Sherwood Smith's other books, I don't think you'll like this one. She has a very distinctive close third person POV style that, quite frankly, took me a while to get used to when I first started reading her books, and though obviously this is a co-written book and the style isn't "strictly Sherwood," if you will, there's enough of it in the prose that I'm confident in this prediction. All that having been said, I loved it, and I'm very excited to hear that Hostage, the sequel, is coming very soon!

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison - I was not expecting to sit down and devour this book in less than a day but readers, I did. IT'S SO GOOD. It follows Maia, the despised youngest son of the elf emperor who unexpectedly inherits the throne after most of the rest of his family die in a suspicious airship accident. I'm still bitter about The Mirror Empire and grimdark, and I really appreciated a fantasy novel with goblins and elves and airships and bridges in which the struggles are about how to overcome one's own ignorance and how to enact good policy for one's realm. Maia is deeply sympathetic, and his relationship with his mother's family--he is essentially biracial, being half-goblin and and half-elf--was particularly interesting. I'm not sure I should even mention that Katherine Addison formerly wrote books under the name Sarah Monette, but I do think that assertions that this book is totally out of character with her previous work is somewhat wrong. It's true that this book is in many ways the polar opposite of something like Melusine and those books, but in some ways Maia's struggles to figure out how to interact with the world reminded me very much of my absolute favorite of Monette's works, namely the Kyle Murchison Booth stories. I do think there are subtle continuities between this book and Monette's earlier work, but I would also say that if you bounced off any aspect of the Melusine novels, I would heartily recommend giving this one a try. Her prose is a delight in and of itself.

Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones - I read this because littlebutfierce mentioned it in a December meme post, and I devoured it. It's a masterpiece and if you haven't read it you must do so now--I especially recommend it to those of you who, like me, are rather over the whole Tam Lin thing or never even got into it in the first place. (Ironically, I've read a lot of Tam Lin books and will read more. But as Jones herself says in this book, if you can't find things worth reading in fairy tales that is your problem.) It is not very Tam Lin-ish even though it's a Tam Lin novel; there's far more of T.S. Eliot in here, which makes me happy because Four Quartets is my absolute favorite Eliot. That said, I am not ashamed to admit that I relied quite heavily on rushthatspeaks' two essays explicating the ending to understand what happened, and to those who may have found it confusing, I highly recommend those posts: We only live, only suspire/Consumed by either fire or fire and The way upward and the way downward are the same.

Silver Spoon vol. 3 by Arakawa Hiromu - Still excellent. I appreciate the peeks into Arakawa's philosophy, which was an aspect of FMA that was de-emphasized as things went on, understandably.

What I'll Read Next
Probably the book after the Wells one, since I'm given to understand that they're a very tightly knitted duology. Also more Diana Wynne Jones! And more Silver Spoon of course.

Smith, Sherwood. Inda. New York: DAW Books, 2006.
-------. The Fox. New York: DAW Books, 2007.

I've been thinking for a while that, if I'm going to extol epic fantasy written by women as so much more awesome and less problematic than the doorstops written by men, that I should actually read more epic fantasy written by women than just Michelle West's books, awesome as she is. So here is the first part of my ongoing effort to do just that.

I've read one of Sherwood Smith's books before, the Firebird Books edition of Crown Duel, which collected two earlier YA books she had written into one and also restored the setting to its original location, that of her epic world of Sartorias-Deles, which she has been working on since she was in her teens. There are other books in the world that she has written, over a vast sweep of its history; the Inda books take place many centuries before the time of Crown Duel, in a different part of the world, mostly the country of Iasca Leror and then the seas surrounding its continent.

The books mostly follow one Indevan-Dal (Inda for short), who is the second son of a prince in a very martial country and who is, quite early on in his academy training, disgraced and sent off to sea to avoid a potentially kingdom-destroying conflict between his word and that of the king's brother. Inda and his friends, both those he leaves behind and those he makes on the sea, grow up and grow into their own in a world that is becoming steadily less easy to live in - the Venn Empire on the northern continent are making their play to conquer the south, and that encroaching threat shapes all of their lives.

metaphortunate posted a review of these books in which she very helpfully characterized them as "Inda's Game," and now that I think about it even Inda's name seems rather suspiciously close to that of Ender Wiggin. Most of the rest of that review I find analogous to someone who's eaten at a five-star restaurant only wanting to talk about the decor, and though I read Ender's Game in high school I wasn't particularly impressed, although the effusive blurb from Orson Scott Card on the first book makes a lot more sense now. Let that hatemonger be; although Inda and Ender do share some traits, Inda is far less innocent - and far more damaged, in some ways - than Ender could ever be. Also, his story is far more interesting.

It seems that, if male writers can't get over Star Trek, female writers can't get over Narnia, and if you page through the information about Smith's worldbuilding on her website you are left with the unmistakable feeling that Sartorias-Deles is what might happen if Narnia didn't have Aslan and were left on its own for, oh, seven thousand years or so. It's only partly for that reason that I realized, at some point in The Fox, that the books reminded me strongly of the works of one of my favorite Narnia fanfic writers, bedlamsbard. She and Smith both share an eye for cultures and the details by which they are built, as well as a strong sense for history and language. And, also, good and bad characters trying to get what they want out of the world with mixed success.

The world-building in particular is fascinating, featuring very defined but different gender roles in Marlovan society (hint: both genders take military training very seriously), pirates, secret societies, and many other awesome things. I would recommend these books very highly. And as a bonus, I can guarantee, because this is a fact of the worldbuilding, that there is absolutely no rape!